I’m playing a FOH Paladin this ladder. Bout level 44…
The holy shock synergy for FOH…is SO tempting, to do some kinds melee hybrid…because I have to build it anyway.
It actually does pretty good damage, and it’s been great with like level 4 zeal to take out the beast class critters…
Now that I’m into nightmare difficulty… the game is pigeon holing me into one play style or the other, messin up my good time.
Allllllll because of how attack rating and defence works.
If you swing, you should hit, essentially every time, unless it’s blocked. Defense should translate into damage reduction… and attack rating should be chance to bypass the damage reduction.
And then we could actually have some fun hybrid build stuff going on.
Remember normal difficulty? When you could actually use your sword as a sword when you needed to? That was fun
DISCLAIMER: not pushing for any change, as it won’t happen anyways. This is just a “wouldn’t it be nice?” Post lol
If your focus is on Zeal, Fanactism should the aura that you’re going after unless you are doing some type of auradin setup. I have both, my tesladin is more fun to play due to the holy shock pulses but my zealot is an absolute tank, never dies and deals consistently while albeit relatively low damage in particular since it is all single target.
Foh + melee can be done, it really is a gimped tesladin but it sure won’t be super fast unless you’re using Foh at flayer jungle…
I KNOWW haha. Sometimes I don’t feel like playing Harry Potter simulator every season.
Yeah I’m really looking forward to having a new chaos farmer. I’ve never made a FOH Paladin before. I’ve only done normal chaos so far with him, and I didn’t have FOH at that point lol.
He’s great at keeping the merc alive too. Really cool character so far.
Didn’t realize how many beast class mobs there are until playing this guy tho. There’s quite a few lol
Oh sorry, i should clarify, when I play a character in diablo 2, I start as that character. No respecs.
So I am building a FOH Paladin from the ground up, (sitting at level 44 now) but you know how normal difficulty is… everything works decently, even if you aren’t spec’d toward it,
So I was just lamenting about how I was able to use holy shock and low level zeal from my +skills to work down the beast class mobs, but as I get into nightmare, attack rating is preventing me from using my holy shock to do this.
It’s too bad because it was fun doing both.
And then I thought what If attack rating and defence interacted differently, and I made this post.
Attack rating is actually a good thing, only the values should be adjusted and higher Atr should also reduce block chance on enemies. This would be good for PvM and PvP.
Yes mechanic should not be changed after 20 years to damage reduction. But to be honest I hate the “chance to hit” idea as well as it make your fights a lottery.
Monsters block chances should be lower, dexterity point should give 10 attack rating instead of 5 and level should not be a thing to determine chance to hit or should have low influence.
Casters have always hit, not affected slow and frozen, fight from range, dmg from skills and stronk syn, fcr is com with teleport, need only +sks fcr and mana pots
Melee need tons of ar, ias, tons dmg from wep, cbf, ds, cb, ow, life, ll, ml, res, dr, frw, fhr, mb, fcr… and etc.
…. We’re not supposed to put points into the holy shock lightning damage synergy?
Lol that would be fair, but how annoying would that be to play. We’d never tolerate that on spells, but we’re okay with watching our sword go right through an enemy, with a big X popping up 50% of the time
It’s like the diablo version of Happy Gilmore… where he’s putting the ball into the clowns mouth, but it keeps spitting it out at him and laughing.
Where’s @TheDarkJedi when you need a good meme or GIF lol
Yeah if you want to incorporate melee, use smite. No attack rating needed and it destroys beasts and bosses once you flesh it out with some attack speed and crushing blow. Plus low FCR is fine for FOH as the casts are delayed anyway and holy bolts don’t need it so you have room to add some AS and CB. 1 point in smite and 1 in fanatacism will smoke anything in game that FoH won’t.
Also, if you use Bodach’s prayer build from pally forum you can just let stuff beat on you till the merc gets around to it and still have room for smite if you want for ubers.
The reason a lot of people don’t bother with the Holy shock synergy is that it’s single target, weak, and requires the conviction at higher levels. If you don’t bother beefing up the electric portion you can put the conviction and holy shock points into being indestructible instead or fana for your merc.
I get he doesn’t respec, but if I were playing that way I’d have done a lot more research. At lvl 44 all is probably not lost though.
Interesting build strategy, I appreciate that. I’ll check out the Paladin forum and see what I can find.
Losing holy shock would open up a lot of opportunities here.
And no worries, I’m not against redistributing skill points if I messed up somewhere, I just enjoy playing one build from start to finish, to see where it shines, where it struggles.
Instead of extremely optimized playthroughs I.E. “fireball til level 24 then respec into blizzard, then respec into lightning after hell Baal”. Etc
For people who think casters should miss sometimes too.
Most people would be furious about it
And just think about it. How unsatysfying is every miss when you play melee. Game experience would be awful like playing melee. Constant lack of knowledge if your next landed shot hits the target.
Just a thought, not recommending it, not like it’d happen anyway… This thought draws from my experience playing a few games from the Ultima series. If your magic ability wasn’t trained well enough for the circle of magic you were trying to cast from, the incantation would sometimes fail, and you’d still spend the mana for that spell cast, and in some games the reagents.
To make the Energy stat more useful;
All classes have a base % chance for magic abilities to fail casting, and the failed cast consumes half of the mana. The higher the energy (intelligence) stat is, not only would you get more mana, but it would also reduce the chance of a failed cast.
