How is ruthless ssf going for u guys/girls? ^^

Just finished leveling my third - EA champ, the strongest one yet, feels tankier than the juggg and damage is great. Steamed rolled the campaign. It's also better than the Jugg and my summoner for running sanctum if I feel like wasting my time

This helped:


Back to grinding maps....shish, somebody shoot me

Still lagging behind.
Just started Act V.



I did find a Maim support that helps my Viper Strike a bit - however, since I convert all damage to Chaos, I think, I can't inflict Maimed. But 12% more is 12% more.

Currently playing Pathfinder (weak, build dont make much sense) without proper plan. And at last it dropped:
Now waiting for inspiration as to what to do with it. Luckily 'Inspiration Support' dropped right next to it:

Ripped my first Hierophant in Act IX. The second attempt is now at level 54, and, both characters combined, I haven't yet found a usable support gem. Fortunately, over-leveling with Holy Flame Totem provides manageable DPS.

I reached maps on my third character. Campaign was always really fun and I love having to drop skill gems.

Maps are another story though and it's quite rough. I don't mind (and like) having to "grind" gears and gems, but really hate being map starved. IMO, my gear should limit my progression, not map drops. Getting 1 T3 map out of 10 T4 maps felt really awful. Hopefully, my set of a dozen T3 map will go better, else it'll be back to T1 and crossing fingers then.

All in all I enjoy Ruthless up to now and I think it fits an SSF style really well. I'm even considering making a trapper and/or minion builds as I dropped quite a few support gems for these. This never crossed my mind in "normal" PoE, and I really like this style of building on a set of constraints.

And I don't think that it's 100% tied to the Ruthless SSF experience, but I really don't like how high and random mob damage can be, and some rare mob are just a joke. Mob tankiness also feels really random, with some lasting less than a second, and other taking forever with no clear explanation (no resist to my dmg in the affixes shown - so I guess due to an implicit mod). I think that Ruthless puts a magnifying glass on these things by forcing you to really fight through all the mechanics - and this reinforced my opinions on what I like and hate in these.

I try to build some defenses, but it's always the same story : all goes fine, until I get bursted down in a fraction of a second.

It has always been so in PoE (and I always hated that), the difference is that here I get demolished in white maps where I thought that 3.2K life + capped res + 1k armor&evasion + 60% block (glancing blows) would make my trip quite safe. But nope, not safe at all. I guess I'll have to drop a Determination gem and see if that fixes my issue. But I find it a bit ridiculous that to not feel super squishy, you have to have ALL defensive layers (and I have no clue how I'll build suppression up).

Anyway, I'm playing on Xbox One X...so the ultra end game is in late yellow maps / early red maps as that's where the FPS begins to drop in an unplayable territory. I still have plenty of room for improvement until then. That's a plus for Ruthless SSF on (previous gen) console I guess.

Running a new Character, a Deadeye Lightning Arrow, and I had a very lucky drop in Act 8


I also had a very useful support gem dropped not long before the amulet


This is the rest of my gear so far

I already had the bow and body armour from my first run.

I will probably get bored, frustrated when I reach maps as I did in my first run. I just cannot sustain maps, but it's OK as I already have another character planned.

So I dropped this:

Now if I would drop another one I could maybe make a build that wouldnt be bad on Pathfinder... Or if I drop an 'Unleash'(RIP) and a 'Fork' I may try with just one of them.

--

"

Lawlyer9014 wrote:

Mob tankiness also feels really random

Also noticed that. And than there are the all-but-invulnerable 'cycling damage resistance' mobs...

"

Lawlyer9014 wrote:

I get demolished in white maps where I thought that 3.2K life + capped res + 1k armor&evasion + 60% block (glancing blows) would make my trip quite safe. But nope, not safe at all.

Low life, low evasion and almost no phys mitigation. And 'Glancing Blows' probably increases the damage you take. It would be surprising if you could tank (random white) mobs with that. With more life and some (maybe 4-5k for white maps) armour it would be much better.

"

Lawlyer9014 wrote:

so the ultra end game is in late yellow maps / early red maps as that's where the FPS begins to drop in an unplayable territory.

No packsize mods on maps in Ruthless so this may work in your favor.

"

Zrevnur wrote:

"

Lawlyer9014 wrote:

I get demolished in white maps where I thought that 3.2K life + capped res + 1k armor&evasion + 60% block (glancing blows) would make my trip quite safe. But nope, not safe at all.

Low life, low evasion and almost no phys mitigation. And 'Glancing Blows' probably increases the damage you take. It would be surprising if you could tank (random white) mobs with that. With more life and some (maybe 4-5k for white maps) armour it would be much better.

Haha, yeah I realize I was being too optimistic (but still, the amount of defenses needed is higher than I thought) and had a depression moment not seeing how I could improve from there to not being insta-gibbed by leapers, flickers, multi-shotters...while still maintaining enough DPS

Actually, Glancing Blows helped a lot to prevent spike damage. My sustain is good so I don't care if I take more damage on average, I just need to prevent huge spikes (the goal is to drop that later once I either improve block chance or other defenses through gear).

I also improved my flask setup, adding two Granite Flasks : one automated for hits on rare or unique, and the other after a savage hit. I also have the chaos golem with Liege of the Primordial from Elemantalist for 8% Phys mitigation.

Added also a Quartz flask for phasing just in case + a Life flask with instant health on low life.

And it now feels pretty good now on white maps :)

Pathfinder RIP @87. T8 map without damage mods. Dont know what to. Was instagibbed - it at least showed like that on my screen. There was some severe desync going on probably. Char was showing up moving after RIP and far away from the (probable) location of the RIP. Its not the first time I noticed this. Somehow they messed up the synchronization between client and server. (Using lockstep obvsiously but not sure this works properly anymore.)

And Pathfinder very weak in Ruthless.

So I played Elementalist to act 10 / lvl 72. Hybrid build with Golems + minions + selfcast. First time playing minions and first time playing Elementalist. It works and has strong single target. Build is clearly on the strong side overall. Probably particularly good for Sanctum but havent tried so far. But its also clunky and slow. And unfortunately I RIPped the 'Empower' (on weapon switch) which would have been good here maybe.
And I partially figured out how to build Hierophant (Templar for now still) without having 'Multiple Totems Support' (also RIP). But that would also be a slow build.
So its time to try for an actually properly working build. First time playing Raider I guess. Unfortunately there seem to be only 3 kinds of builds that kind of work in Ruthless. One of them is Raider.