Most survival melee build?

[Mailer Daemon]

I've been playing my trapasin and fishymancer for a while now and while they are very strong in killing, I'm finding that if something does manage to hit me, I'm still dying in one or two hits. I blame this mainly on my less than ideal equipment and personal slow reaction time to emergencies. I'm not the strongest player. I'll admit it.

So I was thinking that a strong melee build with good leech, defense and block would help. I'm willing to sacrifice killing speed for survivablity. However, I'm not sure what build would be best for this. Most of the guides really emphasize killing power, so I was looking for recommendations. I'm assuming something along the line of a concentrator barb, shapeshifting druid, or paladin would be among the best.

Forgive me if I'm saying anything that seems ignorant.

[Xdeathfire]

Best in survivability would either be an abbot or a barb that uses war cry.

Basically, the abbot stocks up on Damage reduced by solid #s and pump up prayer so they can use an insight stick to quickly heal any damage they do take. For barbs, War Cry reduces all physical damage by half and then rely on Damage reduced by to make them near invulnerable.

As for non physical attacks, just get good resists and sorb if you really need to and it wouldn't be a prob at all.

As for killing speed, the barb would probably be better since you can just go the standard WW build with 20 War Cry thrown in and gear focused around damage reduction

[sirpoopsalot]

Warcry doesn't reduce the damage that enemies do. It stuns them, and stunned monsters = safe monsters. Battle Cry is the one that reduces a monsters' physical damage (and defense) - by varying amounts - and it's another solid option in the Warcries tree.


I do agree that an abbot (paladin) and a Warcry-using barb would be two of the safest melee builds though. Druids also have Cyclone Armor to tackle elemental damage, so if you slap on some PDR, they can really tank too.

My latest abbot (SpongebobII (http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=668476)) was virtually indestructible... the only thing that really could hurt him were boss-packs with extremely enhanced physical damage (basically pack(s) needed to have at least two of these mods: Extra Strong, Might aura, Fanaticism aura, cursed), and even with some of those mods it was almost required that they were physical-immunes too before SB2 was in any kind of trouble (because LifeTap would usually fire up and he could leech from everything else). If I had spent a few points in Conversion, I think he could've become 100% safe at all times.

Of course, SB2 had some pretty good equipment. And abbots are still moderately slow killers.

[BobCox2]

Stack up some PDR on your fish or trapper - you could be surprised