Rising awareness about Path of Building unintended negative consequences.

POB is just a tool. And as any tool, it can help or hinder you; depending on your experience.
Most of the time, people that do not try to pay attention and learn the game will fail regardless of using POB or not. Most new players that follow a build guide, pob or not, will fail.
You might not agree, but POB is completely meaningless unless you know how to play the game. After you know how to play the game, using POB is just a way to save some time.

Personally I don't like using it heavily, because I prefer playing the actual game. Number "games" and spread sheets are highly unappealing to me. But it is a useful tool, only because GGG failed to explain certain things properly. For example, you cannot accurately and easily see what your DPS is; the tooltip of the skill is simply incomplete (to put it mildly).

If you really understand the game. You can make come up with a build within seconds. Therefore I can not agree that PoB save you anytime. Actually the opposite. Everyone who used PoB knows it. It takes multiple hours and attempts to make a build. You wasting your time instead of playing the game and learning actual mechanics. Most of you don't have 2 years of experience playing the game without PoB. Surely you don't even understand what fundamental mechanics I am talking about. The game explain to you everything you need in a indirect way. All you need to do is to pay attention and connect the dots.

You clearly haven't tried to play a minion build without POB.
In-game, you no idea how much dps they do, how much health or resistances they have. No in-game tooltip or tutorial will actually give you any insightful information regarding minions.

Without pob do you calculate what 12% of this or 12% of that provides you?
The end result of either increasing the item level of a gem or increasing it's quality?
If the in-game tooltips were actually semi-accurate, I wouldn't need to use POB to perform the algorithmic mathematically functions required to understand what a better skill gem combination is.

how do you even know the possible mods on clusters or items or anything in the game ?
for instance i was looking basic jewels. viridian has a mana leech mod with physical tag and no life leech. crimson has life leech but not mana leech.

both mods have 2.7% chance as prefix. how without pob or craftofexile would you even waste god knows how many currencies to discover that ? poe drops "0" currency for new players, no way you ll even roll stuff in game and even do your own craftofexile on a spreadsheet, let alone learn it.

now if you reroll phys , well you have a very high chance to roll it.

and now you can think of the opportunity cost of mana leech between jewel or tree or glove or ring etc.

you must really know a loooot about the game to do it like that

What I am saying is true. But you will not understand until you try to learn. There is already a better metric in game to understand then calculations and numbers. Go ask Hillock. That's how far you need to make it in the game to understand the system. Numbers are misleading. You guys look in PoB and all you see are numbers. Everything looks same to you. But that is not the case and you end up compering apples to oranges, thinking you are doing the right thing. Numbers don't give you complete information. It's the same reason why your math teacher in school told you not to just write the solution on your exams. Because you can not comprehend how you solved it just by looking at a number and by using a calculator you can not see in depth the fundamentals.
You are supposed to look at patterns, use your brain and critical thinking. It's in the game. Go out and find it, as I did. Expecting to being told everything by GGG is unrealistic. You supposed to play a game after all and part of it is learning.

People follow a guide to help them learn faster. Good and effective learning practices helps you pick it up a little quicker. Playing it blind is often deterrent to learning.

Some People don't care about learning. They don't care. They just want something that work without spending the time to figuring it out. Learn how to develop better coping strategies and avoid wasting time learning. That would be fine too.

Too dumb to learn a game, too stupid to grasp the mechanics for it to be fun... why learn when you can copy? OR On the contrary, plagiarism could be a sign of a truly sharp mind. Copying is a way of how we learn.

People like to give silly advice like this, but more often than not their advice isn't wanted. LIKE I wanted a car, I got a car but I don't care how it work.

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LIKE I wanted a car, I got a car but I don't care how it work

The difference between a car and PoE is that car is complicated machine, but real PoE is not. In it's core is actually so simple that I could teach a kid how to play a build without PoB or guide. I agree thou with you that players need to copy to learn. Just the right kind of coping. Organic PoE (no PoB or guide) is not different then following a cooking recipe. Here are your indigence just mix them in the right way. I think sure, there people who don't care about my advice. That's ok. My goal was to let people know that there is an better alternative to play the game the follow guide or PoB link. So that they have a choice. Because right now PoE players don't have a choice. You want to play the game you need to "make a build" or download a PoB. And then what do you do if you want to play a build there is no guide on? Currently there is nothing that can explain you how to do that step by step and make it fun. PoB is limiting. So I want at least people know, analyze the campaign. It teaches you all you need to know about gear, gems and skill tree.

Man, I'm late to the party. Why did no one ping and tell me about this treasure trove of a thread. :D

I think most of the issues you describe OP aren't really related to POB but to people copying builds from other people. If you just take the POB someone else created without any effort to understand the reason behind the decisions that went into it then you won't learn a thing and will stay ignorant forever. And sadly, that's what the vast majority of the POE community is doing. POB isn't the sickness in this case, just a symptom.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

I think most of the issues you describe OP aren't really related to POB but to people copying builds from other people. If you just take the POB someone else created without any effort to understand the reason behind the decisions that went into it then you won't learn a thing and will stay ignorant forever. And sadly, that's what the vast majority of the POE community is doing. POB isn't the sickness in this case, just a symptom.

Yeah, you can notice similar trends in other games. People copy builds in any game they play, because power-gaming is the meta. The optimization of gaming is killing a lot of the fun that could be had experiencing and learning it yourself. Basically, you cut the journey short.

That's why people enjoy watching blind playthroughs. We remember being stuck in a spot and the relief and joy we felt when we succeeded. It's why I avoid spoilers.

But that mostly relates to single player games. In competitive games like e.g. League of Legends it is seen as bad to pick 'poor' choices that might just be different from the meta.

And as you rightly put it, PoB is a symptom and not the reason. And that's why this thread and the answers from OP are so damn funny