Build Diversity

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trixxar#2360 wrote:

You can't make thousands of builds balanced both offensively, defensively, and speed.

If you want lots of builds, you need difficulty to be low.

As long as difficulty is reasonably high, people must optimize to the few top builds.

You cant have it both ways.

In a purist sense you can't have both but you in practical terms it can be better than it is, primarily because many skills can be given substantial numerical buffs without ever competing with the actual top skills.

I think diversity is pretty good right now but I also don't think T17s or ubers are real content so my measuring stick is shorter so to speak. I still think ubers should only be aspirational I think giving them drops was a mistake, nerfs should have kept power in line with the regular bosses.

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Draegnarrr#2823 wrote:

based

yes giving ubers drops was a mistake

Build diversity was awesome in Mercenaries because they provided the extra curses and auras some weaker gems can't fit inside of a character.

But whatever, at least we have mobile afk mechanic and the new awesome breach without loot inside finally

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You can't make thousands of builds balanced both offensively, defensively, and speed.

If you want lots of builds, you need difficulty to be low.

As long as difficulty is reasonably high, people must optimize to the few top builds.

You cant have it both ways.

Depends what u mean with difficulty, but one problem is that not all skills have a good playability.

You could improve playability and see how it affects diversity.

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Heidern2880#3500 wrote:

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You can't make thousands of builds balanced both offensively, defensively, and speed.

If you want lots of builds, you need difficulty to be low.

As long as difficulty is reasonably high, people must optimize to the few top builds.

You cant have it both ways.

Depends what u mean with difficulty, but one problem is that not all skills have a good playability.

You could improve playability and see how it affects diversity.

i know it's impossible to balance them all but there has to be some baseline like the skill cost being exponentially higher based on its coverage (AOE/hability to spread) to give single target skills some edge or start introducing mechanics that reward other aspect than clearspeed.

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lupasvasile#5385 wrote:

Technically, there are countless builds that work, but only until maps, or early white maps. But once you reach mid to high endgame only a handful work

This is of course painfully wrong, and I'll leave it at that.

But I do agree that the options for the toughest content in the game and/or the strongest characters does indeed funnel you into a few choices. But that happens WAY later than "mid to high endgame". It all depends on your budget.

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H3rB1985#0551 wrote:

Build diversity was awesome in Mercenaries because they provided the extra curses and auras some weaker gems can't fit inside of a character.

Except it wasn't.

At the same timeframe as we are in now with Keepers, Mercenaries was WORSE with build diversity both in terms of "top 10" skill usage, and the disparity between those top 10.


Week 3 Mercenaries had 5 skills accounting for 33% of all higher builds, with Volcanic Fissure of Snaking being over 10% of them.

Week 3 Keepers has 6 skills accounting for the same percentage, and they are all WAY closer together in terms of percentage use.

And that's not counting the variability in the actual builds themselves utilizing these top skills, which is WAY more variable in this league compared to mercenaries.



And as the Mercenary league dragged on, builds become LESS diverse because of Doryani and the other insanely powerful, yet cheap mercenary tech that worked across basically all skills. While more SKILLS maybe became used, the actual DIVERSITY didn't exist. It was merely one-size-fits-all power.

I came to really dislike mercenaries due to the so easy borrowed power. Meh

The grafts are close to that.

This is poe1 now I suppose

YOU always have to stack something in the most efficient way in order to have a decent build, this "stacker complain" is just misunderstanding how arps work, not al builds can be called stackers just because min-maxing is the process of getting more of the biggest dmg-multiplier available that blablabla.. defenses etc.

What is actually bad is the DOUBLE+++ DIPPING stacking builds defense-offense from ONE stat, I.e. life builds that get more damage as the get more life, that is also the main problem of Intelligence and strength in poe, which along with the outrageous numbers hat you can get from ES, it allows scaling to double and even triple dip, this is the reason why dex scaling is bad, it doesn't improve defenses as hard as other stats.

FOR EXAMPLE
I'm currently playing an ACC-INT stacker after playing some niche builds, and this is QUAD-dipping if not more out of int, stacks:

- ATTACK SPEED (Jugger ascendancy node from acc).

- ACCURACY itself, which turns into flat lightning damage via boots and also get flat acc values out of 4x int from the shaper gloves mod, the new claws 5% inc acc per 25 int times two, also the accuracy mastery that turns int into acc. (this is just exponential at this point cuz this is increasing attack speed and flat dmg at the same time).

- ENERGY SHIELD the natural %increase of ES from int

- EVASION increase evasion from int through the es-eva mastery.

So ALL you have to do, is to get int (disregard the basic defense mods), the result is a monster where you only care about a single stat. NGL is fun to obliterate everything, but building it is just a mindless task, face hitting against the rng of getting t1 mods, which is also not bad, but in reality should not be happening.

In any other cases, power charges, damage, DMG over time, crit, and all other damage types HAVE to be stacked, you have to get MORE of that single stat that makes your skill stronger, discounting all the other complexities and synergies with game play mechanics, that's the very basic way to build a character, read tags, add mods that increase those tag numbers, unless you want combo skills xdd, you can also stack multiple single skills as some Unleash builds that have been done this league even some people stack ward.

Build diversity is HUGE this league, the amount of builds enabled by the new mods is fairly high, but most of us just want to blast their way into the game at some point (I cannot be bothered to play slow builds more than couple of times), so the curve will be always skewed around the div/h builds which is also a valid way to play the game.

In my opinion is not a game problem, the builds are available, the items are there, the problem is us the players, so if you want to play and create a niche unique creative amazing build go ahead, there's a ton of things to do, nothing is stopping you. Nonetheless, if 90% of players want to play deadeye that's none of nobody's business, let people be, as they also let us be and play slow weird builds at our will. in my eyes there is not a single bad way to play the game, you fit your likes and proceed to have fun out of it.

balancing the game can be done. it all depends on if the devs want to do so or not.

just need to figure out WHAT is being a huge multiplier and make that number go down, or make soft/hard caps.

the real issue is most of the player base loves zoom zoom content.

whenever people talk about skill in poe, i do acknowledge theres a great deal of skill involved but, the reality is most people just use powerful builds and gear to attack the entire screen to deal with content. most people rather do that than have actual skill.

if poe enjoyers truly loved skill, sanctum would not have been rebalanced to accommodate braindead "let my defences matter" playstyle.

on a similar note if poe enjoyers loved skill based game play more of us would be running sanctum.

now its what? a laughable 1c item.

if poe enjoyers truly were skilled, more people would be getting original sin and the prices would drop.

if we want a proper balanced poe, the game's difficulty ceiling would have to be dropped way down.

the ship has long sailed.