Where is the PvP?

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MrEnzyme wrote:

Ok, I could probably write a lot more about character building but I'll try to just summarize the most important stuff.

To start, you have to be able to deal damage on pretty much any character you make, and there are 3 types of damage that you can do: physical, chaos, and elemental. Physical is the best, then chaos, then elemental is the worst. Physical is generally the hardest to mitigate, since the amount of armor you can get in LLD won't really reduce physical hits at all. So the only good options are granite flasks and immortal call, both of which are very limited. Chaos can be resisted, but its a rare stat on gear and used by very few characters so people generally have 0-20 chaos resist. The chaos skills also aren't very good for the most part (viper gets downscaled, poison arrow plain sucks for its low damage).

Elemental is a distant third because achieving 75 in cold/fire/lightning resist is pretty easy for most characters, which means you're effectively doing 25% damage (42% with penetration gem). In order for an elemental char to be good, you need to be doing waaay more than the equivalent in physical damage would be. There are some bonuses to elemental though, like the shock or chill effects, but they're situational (chill is by far the best though).

So with that in mind, you have to think of how to do damage most effectively to players in PvP. A fire/burning build might deal huge damage in PvE but will get its damage reduced massively by max fire resist players in PvP. On top of this is the spell vs attack dichotomy. Spells can't really be blocked or dodged in LLD, so their damage is much more reliable (though it turns out to be far lower than attacks), and attacks can be evaded, blocked, and dodged making them potentially much tougher to land. Despite this, the only spells worth much for damage in LLD are cold snap, EK, molten, and various traps (because trap scaling boosts their damage enough to make them relevant).

The result of all this is that you want to have a consistent way to deal damage while having a plan to mitigate the enemy's damage, whatever it is. Against a melee char, you can sit in a smoke mine cloud to blind them and get an advantage (unless they're RT). For attacks in general you want block if possible (mainly just a good block chance shield, like crest of perandus) and maybe a jade flask for evasion too (again if theyre not RT). Using the blind support gem or applying the chill effect through cold damage also lowers the damage you can take. I see a lot of people make the mistake of looking at their dps in isolation when what's really important is how your offense matches up against their defense, and vice versa. You could have a 4k dps skill, but if its purely elemental then it's effectively worse than someone else's 2k dps physical skill.

The good builds I've seen reflect this by all having solid offense and defense components. All except the trapper can get a solid life total, and the trapper compensates by having very dangerous traps to sit on, though I feel any ranged character needs strong traps to prevent melee from jumping on them easily. They all have consistent, good damage vs most characters as well. This isn't an exhaustive list and it's just my opinion but these are 4 of the top builds I know of (for 1v1):

-sword/shield ranger - gets block penetration nodes, good balance of life and damage (and attack speed). This is a pretty aggressive char that wants to kill the opponent asap. Vulnerable to smoke mine/blind
-low-life trapper - has extremely hard hitting traps, strong cold snap, dangerous to approach. A defensive build that has problems vs ranged characters but can use cold snap/curses to somewhat mitigate that
-puncture bow - very high damage physical ranged attack, also has traps that can nearly one-shot most characters. Bleed removal flasks are good against it but the damage is still high
-viper/puncture char - I'm currently playing this character, it's well rounded and has a lot of options vs any build (long curses, traps, immortal call)

I didn't include facebreaker (which might be a surprise to some), but I don't think it's that good, even in 1v1. It has great damage, but all of these builds have ways to kite and beat it. It lacks options and can't really ever guarantee damage, so until someone makes a facebreaker char with a good ranged option as well, I'll be of the opinion its not a top build.

For 3v3 a lot of what's important changes. There are lots more traps and much more damage flying around making getting into melee range very dangerous. If I made a ranking of important character attributes for 3v3 it'd go like this:

1. Ranged damage/threat - being able to do high, reliable damage at range is the most important thing you can bring to 3v3
2. Dangerous traps - combined with #1, keeps you safe and makes approaching a nightmare for melee. Bow puncture is a strong build for teams because it has both 1 and 2.
3. Long lasting/permanent curses - curses are strong when used correctly, and not having to repeatedly apply them can be used to an advantage - the enemies will need to burn curse flasks just to be on equal footing temporarily
4. Survivability - being squishy makes you a liability, especially when high ranged damage is so good. Low life means you can die to stray ranged damage and have to play timidly
5. Mobility - being able to use whirling blades or having high movespeed is nice, and lets you outmaneuver people for the win.
6. Inevitability - this isn't as specific as the other ones, but its more of a concept. If you have something like good life regen or permanent curses, then the game favors you if it goes long. You get more regen, or run out their flasks and stick curses on them and they slowly lose control. If you are favored to slowly win a long game, then the enemy is forced to come to you and that's an advantage because approaching is hard through traps and ranged damage.

So as you can probably tell 3v3 is a different ball game and kind of the reverse of 1v1. While melee is somewhat dominant 1v1, pure melee have been pretty bad in 3v3 in my experience.

And that's probably a good intro to LLD, I might update this with some more info as time passes.

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GrindcoreTHRALL wrote:

I agree with alot of this. But I do think there is exceptions for some build at really high ceiling gear such as ele. I agree phys generally smashes it though. I think chaos damage is alot easier to mitigate then lead to believe in this post as well but generally speaking it can be a bitch.

Anyone seen a better crit punc bow?

gonna eternal exalt for 3rd phys yay!

o ya and my offhand for ele sword char I built