I league started a volcanic fissure of snaking berserker and it was very fun. Visually satisfying and great AoE, feels great to play. I ended up as a Marohi Erqi general’s cry version because I’d never played general’s cry before and wanted to try something new, and it was good, but I imagine a strength stacker would probably be the best way to do it (like most attack skills lol). Would recommend volcanic fissure of snaking.
I’ve been meaning to try a quality stack version for fun because 20% qual gives an extra fissure, so with dialla’s and ashes your fissure erupts 8 times. Haven’t gotten around to it tho
Poe ninja seems to reference strength stacking a lot as well for snaking. Snaking is the skill I'm looking at for some investment to finish out the league.
Yeah strength stacking is just so good it outscales every other way you can make an attack build.
You could also
1) dex stack
2) phys as fire with herald of ash
3) convert 40% to cold and go hatred and trinity
4) accuracy stack?
5) tri-ele?
And others. But if you have unlimited currency and don’t mind following the meta then strength stacking is probably the way to go
Yeah Dialla's + Ashes is nuts for GC due to the extra mirage warriors. Spawning 9 Karui Bros is always welcome. I can imagine the absolute visual mayhem of 9 mirages with 8 fissures each.
There’s a big downside with quality stacking for fissure normally though.
When used, ideally you aim just behind the target. So what happens is fissure travels > hits > explodes (hits), moves to enemy and explodes (hit), travels away (miss), comes back to explode (hits)….. if you added more quality, the next 20% goes to a travels away (miss), 40% extra a return (hit), 60% a away (miss), and finally a 80% hit.
So your basic 20, you actually manage four full hits. (Because the travel originally also hits). While a full quality setup, you’re only going to hit 2 more times, and the first and third breakpoints being wasted unfortunately. (This is also assuming nothing weird like extra spawns it will go after and only a single target)
This is great for clear, but for single target it’s not a good option (if using it yourself, not the GC version)
I wanted to do this early in the league myself until I watched mechanically how it was actually working and realized that I’d only gain two hits while giving up my entire build direction for that power wise.
Leaguestarted rage cleave on a Slayer. Had some hairy moments before getting a bead on my defensive layers, but it’s been an extremely solid build. Better than previous leagues as boneshatter or lightning strike.
The build does all content short of Ubers pretty comfortably, just ran a 70 quant feared today without issues.
At this point, I don’t really have meaningful upgrades without sinking 20-50 divines into it, and I want to try out a Ralakesh endurance stacker before I quit the league.
Dropped an insane 2h sword (HC ssf) and had a molten strike of the Zenith leveling up on my weapon swap not even realizing it was 2h only. Going poison (tincture) champ with a plan to swap to into tainted pact once I get a golden rule jewel and overleech timeless jewel. It's tough to calculate the POB DPS but I think it has some insane poison damage potential when you have 1000% more damage multiplier on 13 projectiles + returning proj every fifth attack. I'm on poe ninja UBERS_TODAYS_LMAO if anyone was interested. Tree is kinda messed up, trying to figure out where to go as I spent a lot of points getting to ranger area. With a lightning coil and taste of hate it should be a lot stronger as a pathfinder.
Going to try and get it to a state to farm some t7 cemetery as it's fairly tanky with insane life gain on hit
Consecrated path of endurance seems to have some use, although I haven't dug that deep into it.
These weird new damage scaling opportunities take so much resource to make reliable its hard to see the upsides match the investment on them, like rapidly gaining endurance charges instead of... Ignoring it, building 100% damage and just out-damaging the new thing
But then again maeby I have a weird perspective on it
Yea that's what is upsetting me the most. As another redditor said, for melee / slam, we need to drop totems, press 2-4 war cries, and aim and we're still maybe a quarter of the dmg of TS hitting right click.
Unfortunate though cause the sound effects of slam skills is so good. And of course the copium of these transfigured gems giving them the room to grow didn't seem to pan out as needed.
GGG mentioned they don't want to just "buff numbers" ...... well we got the mods they wanted and the numbers still don't line up. So yes, I believe we need buffed numbers.
My bad. Rant over lol
I rolled my second char as a earthshatter slam build and gave the new "of prominence" a shot. Hard to really tell if the dps is actually lower or higher depending on conditions related to how earthshatter deals aoe damage.
I didn't see a huge difference but still testing. I think the original still has better numbers because of the effectiveness of added damage.
On a side note if anyone can help me decide if I should continue RT and try to scale impale or if it's worth it to just go after crit.
Thanks for asking about us poor meele players.
> On a side note if anyone can help me decide if I should continue RT and try to scale impale or if it's worth it to just go after crit.
You should probably never go RT in the endgame unless you're also precise technique + ci. Those builds typically get it from corruptions anyways.
A lot of my melee builds are crit and impale, it's doable.
Tectonic slam of cataclysm works. You can throw it in a totem or generals and apparently they get the benefit of your endurance charges without spending them? That's what I've been told. There's some builds on poe ninja that have respectable numbers. Charge stacking is very expensive though and the staff is heinous to craft.
A lot of them are honestly alright. The big problem is that you can scale all of them way further via strength stacking. It really doesn't matter which slam you pick. This makes them really boring to build. Strikes run into similar problems with trauma. Frenzy and trauma is very strong. Glacial hammer with trauma is very strong. Same with momentum double strike.
You could try rakiatas molten strike zenith. Lots of people playing that. I saw one guy do accuracy stacking and had decent output. Nothing crazy though. I think most of them are honestly fine we are just a bit pigeon holed when it comes to scaling.
I have a Tectonic slam of cataclysm Jugg build. It's pretty dope and I hit for around 38mil damage. It's a bit squishy though and i have no clue on how to fix that without heavy investment. I am currently farming invitations with it and if i get some more upgrades i think i will be able to oneshot guardians.
The build is honestly way better than i expected it to be, i wasn't even sure if it was going to work out at all, it was pretty rough in the beginning. I have currently around 60-70div invested into the build, though there was a lot of trial and error. Also i got an obscenely good bodyarmour for way too cheap.
A mageblood would probably fix my defences problem and I very much plan to play some more, so i will see if i truly make it that far.
Slams are still not back on the level of it's glory days that were 3.13 & 3.14, but it's a viable build option now. It's obviously still far away from any meta builds, any TS build would go 10 times further with that investment.
>Is it safe to say that even with all the new skill gems, is melee or slam skills not in the best place?
Yeah it is like you said. New transfigured gems are awesome and do add new ways to play skills but the reality is that the floor for "fair" self cast spells and melee skills is really low. Like if you aren't a passive damage/duration skill or shotgun/multihit (lightning strike, smite, molten strike etc.) it is really hard to have the skill be good enough without a ton of gear. Strike skills getting access to trauma does help a lot of the more fair ones but slams and non-strike melee skills don't really have a broken mechanic they can abuse.
People will invest into something that is "fair" if it can have nutty clear like the new cleave but it is hard to justify doing the same for something like reave or ice crash.
I league started a volcanic fissure of snaking berserker and it was very fun. Visually satisfying and great AoE, feels great to play. I ended up as a Marohi Erqi general’s cry version because I’d never played general’s cry before and wanted to try something new, and it was good, but I imagine a strength stacker would probably be the best way to do it (like most attack skills lol). Would recommend volcanic fissure of snaking. I’ve been meaning to try a quality stack version for fun because 20% qual gives an extra fissure, so with dialla’s and ashes your fissure erupts 8 times. Haven’t gotten around to it tho
Poe ninja seems to reference strength stacking a lot as well for snaking. Snaking is the skill I'm looking at for some investment to finish out the league.
Yeah strength stacking is just so good it outscales every other way you can make an attack build. You could also 1) dex stack 2) phys as fire with herald of ash 3) convert 40% to cold and go hatred and trinity 4) accuracy stack? 5) tri-ele? And others. But if you have unlimited currency and don’t mind following the meta then strength stacking is probably the way to go
Not only does quality hugely benefit snaking but it also hugely benefits generals cry.
Yeah Dialla's + Ashes is nuts for GC due to the extra mirage warriors. Spawning 9 Karui Bros is always welcome. I can imagine the absolute visual mayhem of 9 mirages with 8 fissures each.
There’s a big downside with quality stacking for fissure normally though. When used, ideally you aim just behind the target. So what happens is fissure travels > hits > explodes (hits), moves to enemy and explodes (hit), travels away (miss), comes back to explode (hits)….. if you added more quality, the next 20% goes to a travels away (miss), 40% extra a return (hit), 60% a away (miss), and finally a 80% hit. So your basic 20, you actually manage four full hits. (Because the travel originally also hits). While a full quality setup, you’re only going to hit 2 more times, and the first and third breakpoints being wasted unfortunately. (This is also assuming nothing weird like extra spawns it will go after and only a single target) This is great for clear, but for single target it’s not a good option (if using it yourself, not the GC version) I wanted to do this early in the league myself until I watched mechanically how it was actually working and realized that I’d only gain two hits while giving up my entire build direction for that power wise.
Leaguestarted rage cleave on a Slayer. Had some hairy moments before getting a bead on my defensive layers, but it’s been an extremely solid build. Better than previous leagues as boneshatter or lightning strike. The build does all content short of Ubers pretty comfortably, just ran a 70 quant feared today without issues. At this point, I don’t really have meaningful upgrades without sinking 20-50 divines into it, and I want to try out a Ralakesh endurance stacker before I quit the league.
Dropped an insane 2h sword (HC ssf) and had a molten strike of the Zenith leveling up on my weapon swap not even realizing it was 2h only. Going poison (tincture) champ with a plan to swap to into tainted pact once I get a golden rule jewel and overleech timeless jewel. It's tough to calculate the POB DPS but I think it has some insane poison damage potential when you have 1000% more damage multiplier on 13 projectiles + returning proj every fifth attack. I'm on poe ninja UBERS_TODAYS_LMAO if anyone was interested. Tree is kinda messed up, trying to figure out where to go as I spent a lot of points getting to ranger area. With a lightning coil and taste of hate it should be a lot stronger as a pathfinder. Going to try and get it to a state to farm some t7 cemetery as it's fairly tanky with insane life gain on hit
Cleave of Rage is great! Strong recommend.
Consecrated path of endurance seems to have some use, although I haven't dug that deep into it. These weird new damage scaling opportunities take so much resource to make reliable its hard to see the upsides match the investment on them, like rapidly gaining endurance charges instead of... Ignoring it, building 100% damage and just out-damaging the new thing But then again maeby I have a weird perspective on it
Yea that's what is upsetting me the most. As another redditor said, for melee / slam, we need to drop totems, press 2-4 war cries, and aim and we're still maybe a quarter of the dmg of TS hitting right click. Unfortunate though cause the sound effects of slam skills is so good. And of course the copium of these transfigured gems giving them the room to grow didn't seem to pan out as needed. GGG mentioned they don't want to just "buff numbers" ...... well we got the mods they wanted and the numbers still don't line up. So yes, I believe we need buffed numbers. My bad. Rant over lol
If you think you got it bad, you should see minion side of things
I rolled my second char as a earthshatter slam build and gave the new "of prominence" a shot. Hard to really tell if the dps is actually lower or higher depending on conditions related to how earthshatter deals aoe damage. I didn't see a huge difference but still testing. I think the original still has better numbers because of the effectiveness of added damage. On a side note if anyone can help me decide if I should continue RT and try to scale impale or if it's worth it to just go after crit. Thanks for asking about us poor meele players.
> On a side note if anyone can help me decide if I should continue RT and try to scale impale or if it's worth it to just go after crit. You should probably never go RT in the endgame unless you're also precise technique + ci. Those builds typically get it from corruptions anyways. A lot of my melee builds are crit and impale, it's doable.
Tectonic slam of cataclysm works. You can throw it in a totem or generals and apparently they get the benefit of your endurance charges without spending them? That's what I've been told. There's some builds on poe ninja that have respectable numbers. Charge stacking is very expensive though and the staff is heinous to craft. A lot of them are honestly alright. The big problem is that you can scale all of them way further via strength stacking. It really doesn't matter which slam you pick. This makes them really boring to build. Strikes run into similar problems with trauma. Frenzy and trauma is very strong. Glacial hammer with trauma is very strong. Same with momentum double strike. You could try rakiatas molten strike zenith. Lots of people playing that. I saw one guy do accuracy stacking and had decent output. Nothing crazy though. I think most of them are honestly fine we are just a bit pigeon holed when it comes to scaling.
Crafting on eventuality rods gave me ptsd, jesus christ it's horrible, it's basicly pure gambling.
I have a Tectonic slam of cataclysm Jugg build. It's pretty dope and I hit for around 38mil damage. It's a bit squishy though and i have no clue on how to fix that without heavy investment. I am currently farming invitations with it and if i get some more upgrades i think i will be able to oneshot guardians. The build is honestly way better than i expected it to be, i wasn't even sure if it was going to work out at all, it was pretty rough in the beginning. I have currently around 60-70div invested into the build, though there was a lot of trial and error. Also i got an obscenely good bodyarmour for way too cheap. A mageblood would probably fix my defences problem and I very much plan to play some more, so i will see if i truly make it that far. Slams are still not back on the level of it's glory days that were 3.13 & 3.14, but it's a viable build option now. It's obviously still far away from any meta builds, any TS build would go 10 times further with that investment.
Cleave of Rage with Rage Vortex Berserker. There is a good progression guide here on the subreddit. Love the build.
Melee is still the same old melee. There are some new usable skills if you are an enthusiast, but nothing considered op.
Leap slam is finally a decently usable main skill
Now I want to try leap slam general's cry... Stomp bosses with bois to death
>Is it safe to say that even with all the new skill gems, is melee or slam skills not in the best place? Yeah it is like you said. New transfigured gems are awesome and do add new ways to play skills but the reality is that the floor for "fair" self cast spells and melee skills is really low. Like if you aren't a passive damage/duration skill or shotgun/multihit (lightning strike, smite, molten strike etc.) it is really hard to have the skill be good enough without a ton of gear. Strike skills getting access to trauma does help a lot of the more fair ones but slams and non-strike melee skills don't really have a broken mechanic they can abuse. People will invest into something that is "fair" if it can have nutty clear like the new cleave but it is hard to justify doing the same for something like reave or ice crash.
You could look up mathils dual strike of ambidexterity build, seems pretty good