Build Diversity

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exsea#1724 wrote:

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

It’s actually quite the opposite. If Path of Exile were properly balanced, the difficulty ceiling would be far higher, and power creep would be kept firmly in check. We would see patch notes akin to those in Expedition every couple of leagues, carefully tuning player power to remain in step with the content’s intended difficulty. Instead, what we have now is a system where player power increasingly outpaces the content with every new patch, widening the gap more and more.

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

It’s actually quite the opposite. If Path of Exile were properly balanced, the difficulty ceiling would be far higher, and power creep would be kept firmly in check. We would see patch notes akin to those in Expedition every couple of leagues, carefully tuning player power to remain in step with the content’s intended difficulty. Instead, what we have now is a system where player power increasingly outpaces the content with every new patch, widening the gap more and more.

i would argue, widening the gap is exactly the opposite of balance. but thats my highly subjective opinion.

to me in a balanced game, players with decent gear and decent build should be able to clear all content.

having godly gear and hyperoptimized gear should make players more effective at clearing content.

currently, being meta/hyperoptimized is the bare minimum to actually play the game at higher levels.

when the gap is so big, all it does is push players to follow a build guide.

if you dont, well... theres a high chance of spending hours and tons of currency making a build that cant do shit. you feel punished for playing organically.

reminds me. back in the day when shaper was the hardest content. me and my guildies never managed to kill him. we mostly did our own thing, own builds. and we played the game on std for really a long time. for sure we sucked ass admittedly. then one of our newer guildies just followed a cyclone build guide and became the first person to kill shaper in our guild.

one thing i would say is its ironic. people bitch about d4 for having a skill twig while poe has a skill forest. yet the best way to play is not engage with it and just follow a guide. i respect people who make their own build on d4's skill twig more than poe guide followers. but that said i dont look down on any build followers to begin with. time is precious. time to game is even more precious as we grow older. i cant fault anyone for wanting to optimize their time.

The best way to play, exsea, is to have fun. Whether you follow a build guide or not doesn't matter if you are enjoying what you are doing. As someone who does make their builds from scratch, I can attest to how much time & effort it can take to flesh out a concept and get it running.

This forum especially likes to set astounding standards for how the game should be balanced and all too willingly forgets how perfect balance is simply an impossible task.

1) there are contradictory goals: who do you balance for? Competitive racers? Casual players? Endgame-focused vets? I.e. a skill that helps a racer get through content quickly (such as old Smoke Mine) may be overtuned for the casual player. Nerf it for racers, and you nerf leveling for everyone else as well. To GGG's credit, they added more other leveling stuff such as Momentum support, but the point remains

2) some builds will always be better at one task than another, simply because its mechanics fit better for what needs to be done, or because it has an immunity that makes it a lot easier, or because it has the better single target. An ice trap assassin will delete an uber boss in a second, but die to a single hit in a regular map. How do you want to balance for that? spoiler: you can't

3) there are millions of possible combinations of skills, passive trees, ascendancies and gear. just this league you have Kinetic Blast and Kinetic Blast of Clustering, and for each of these top of the meta skills you still have differences in how it's being built and used and we see a wide variance in ascendancies. How do you want to make all these equally good?

4) lastly, while yall like to say imbalance is a bad thing, it actually creates more variety for the game between leagues as meta shifts occur and people discover skills they previously never played before. GGG adding more uniques or support gems enables older builds to find new niches they can tap into and improve. I.e. this league I have POBd 4 different versions of Flamewood Totems before settling on building around the new Foulborn Formless Flame. Started running Simulacrums at level 77. Should your Deadeye Wander be able to clear Simulacrum at level 77? Again, perfect balance is not possible

It's important to understand that for a live service game like PoE, longevity has to be the focus. Balance is a moving target. Every patch shifts the landscape. Broken today may be mediocre tomorrow, and that's fine unless you exclusively play Standard and play 1 build for 2 years. But again, the game isn't balanced for that type of player.

At the end of the day, it's a disagreement on philosophy. Personally, I engage more with games that have shifting balance because I can discover what's hot the next time. And sometimes I play what becomes a meta pick before it becomes a meta pick (cough cough, Deaths Oath) ;-)

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exsea#1724 wrote:

i would argue, widening the gap is exactly the opposite of balance. but thats my highly subjective opinion.

to me in a balanced game, players with decent gear and decent build should be able to clear all content.

having godly gear and hyperoptimized gear should make players more effective at clearing content.

currently, being meta/hyperoptimized is the bare minimum to actually play the game at higher levels.

We are already in that game, the issue is players endlessly compare themselves to each other and SC has become about pointless number farming because nothing else works as a metric anymore.

Basically anything is viable up to ubers, ubers/high delirium/high modded T17s (because they are harder than ubers) are the only area where balance breaks down.

Which is ironic because they were intended to be aspirational content and it wouldn't matter for balance if we couldn't do them if that was the case ^^

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exsea#1724 wrote:

i would argue, widening the gap is exactly the opposite of balance. but thats my highly subjective opinion.

to me in a balanced game, players with decent gear and decent build should be able to clear all content.

having godly gear and hyperoptimized gear should make players more effective at clearing content.

currently, being meta/hyperoptimized is the bare minimum to actually play the game at higher levels.

No, we’re already at a point where you can clear basically all content with any reasonably optimized build. The game does have a lot of build diversity, that part isn’t the issue. The real problem is that the current content doesn’t give you any incentive to push beyond basic min-maxing.

Right now, sure, you can run whatever is popular and gain some speed or convenience, but even so-called “non-viable” skills can still handle every piece of content because the overall power creep is so high. It’s easier than ever to take almost any ability from zero to hero, and there’s nothing that’s actually locked behind meta setups. Thinking otherwise usually just comes from seeing clips of people using popular builds and assuming that’s the only option.

And honestly, in some cases the unpopular builds can even outperform whatever’s trending. Popularity doesn’t automatically mean best, or most efficient, it often just reflects whatever the streamer crowd indirectly pushed their audience into playing, not what’s truly the most efficient.

On top of that, the game doesn’t really offer content that encourages deeper character optimization. T17s and Ubers are supposed to be “aspirational content,” but that label doesn’t mean much when every halfway-decent build can clear them without needing real refinement beyond the bare-bones basics, basics that are practically handed out for free thanks to years of untouched power creep. If anything, a big nerf pass wouldn’t hurt build diversity at all, it would just bring player power back in line with content difficulty and make endgame feel like endgame content again.

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exsea#1724 wrote:

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to me in a balanced game, players with decent gear and decent build should be able to clear all content.

ALL content??? Surely not. What would even be the point of "better" gear then? And what a..........crappy game that would be. You "win" it with decent, and then just putz around for the rest of the building "rpg" process? What a ridiculous statement to make.

That being said, this is ALREADY 99% true in PoE: Players with decent gear and a decent build can clear all but the most difficult of difficult content, and likely with ease. Which is actually kind of a problem: PoE is TOO EASY, it is NOT too hard or demanding on your gear/build. Especially not now.

"Decent" gear being nothing fancy or costing above 10c (of self-crafting, self-found). "Decent" build meaning something that appropriately leverages the gear and the tree in the correct way for what they are intending to accomplish.


The REAL problem with PoE "difficulty", is that it is FAR TOO EASY for FAR TOO LONG. Then, when difficulty finally hits, people feel like its "unfair" because there wasn't a ramp up SOONER to encourage farming at lower levels, getting better gear, running different content, etc.



PROPER balancing would be balancing the difficulty with the "degree from perfection" you currently are with your gearing.

If you have gear thats like 50% less powerful than the BiS gear for your build...you should be completing 50% less content.

It mostly depends on how you want to play the game.
If your goal is solely big numbers, big money and the like, then yeah you are pretty much into a journey where you will play only a handful of builds, created by a handful amount of very dedicated and experienced players, and with some limits.

If you want to just have fun, complete every content into the game, as a pace that you decide on your own, and with whatever skill, then I'm sure you will notice build diversity as being way bigger than what your post suggest here. But keep in mind that it will remain a stacking story, whether if it is attributes, or something else, in 99.9% of cases.

You can also alternate between both, depending on the leagues, I found it to be quite healthy over the years :) Cheers

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Heli0nix#0378 wrote:

It mostly depends on how you want to play the game.
If your goal is solely big numbers, big money and the like, then yeah you are pretty much into a journey where you will play only a handful of builds, created by a handful amount of very dedicated and experienced players, and with some limits.

How much currency you can make in Path of Exile, or how well a build works, really depends on how much a player understands the game. Playing a “popular” build does not automatically mean you will make the most currency or play the most efficiently. You can use a less common build and still do just as well as someone following what everyone else is playing.

Many people assume that popularity equals efficiency, but that is not true. Builds become popular mostly because streamers play them, and their followers copy them without thinking about whether they are actually the most effective choice. I would bet that if a more known streamer played something considered not viable by some, like Cleave or Sweep, a lot of players would try it just because they saw it being used.

If everyone were chasing only the most efficient way to play the game, everyone would end up sitting in their hideouts, crafting mirror-tier items for services, flipping items all day, or endlessly crafting without actually engaging with the content. Playing the game itself would be less rewarding if pure efficiency were the only goal.

Path of Exile is more about understanding what you are doing and how things work. The players who succeed are the ones who know the mechanics and make informed choices, not those who simply follow the crowd.

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ArtCrusade#4438 wrote:

The best way to play, exsea, is to have fun.

agreed with all you said. ultimately i learned to love the game for what it is. else i wouldnt be playing the game now.

and like you said, who do you balance the game for?

which is why i said its my subjective opionion. if ggg balanced the game around what i prefered. the game would no longer be poe and it would lose most of the playerbase.

so yeah, and i am enjoying myself right now, despite disliking certain features in the game to its core, it nets an overall positive experience.

and when i stop having fun i just quit.

i will not address the other comments as i know how subjective this topic is and i m merely presenting my pov.

ultimately i think all talk of build diversity is pointless. true diversity comes with a low difficulty ceiling. the more harder content thats introduced, players need to hyper optimize.

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

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Heli0nix#0378 wrote:

It mostly depends on how you want to play the game.
If your goal is solely big numbers, big money and the like, then yeah you are pretty much into a journey where you will play only a handful of builds, created by a handful amount of very dedicated and experienced players, and with some limits.

How much currency you can make in Path of Exile, or how well a build works, really depends on how much a player understands the game. Playing a “popular” build does not automatically mean you will make the most currency or play the most efficiently. You can use a less common build and still do just as well as someone following what everyone else is playing.

Many people assume that popularity equals efficiency, but that is not true. Builds become popular mostly because streamers play them, and their followers copy them without thinking about whether they are actually the most effective choice. I would bet that if a more known streamer played something considered not viable by some, like Cleave or Sweep, a lot of players would try it just because they saw it being used.

If everyone were chasing only the most efficient way to play the game, everyone would end up sitting in their hideouts, crafting mirror-tier items for services, flipping items all day, or endlessly crafting without actually engaging with the content. Playing the game itself would be less rewarding if pure efficiency were the only goal.

Path of Exile is more about understanding what you are doing and how things work. The players who succeed are the ones who know the mechanics and make informed choices, not those who simply follow the crowd.

How much currency you can make in Path of Exile, or how well a build works, really depends on how much a player understands the game.

I voluntarily decided to ignore 99% of the knowledges that you were thinking about here, as the current traction is pretty much trade league + mapping currency strategies for most players, in that context clearspeed remain the deciding factor for currencies, followed by knowledges about the market (what has value, and most importantly, when).

I excluded crafting for profit, bossing for profit, challenge assistance for profit, whatever for profit, and the like as they doesn't generate any comparable traction either, else we are in to make a complete whitepaper on that topic, without a doubt :D

My point was rather that if you are ignoring the above way to play, then suddently yes, the build diversity goes from 4 to 500M different builds, which will carry you throughout the exact same content, allow you to complete the exact same content, just in many cases with more struggles, since no one may have done the job before you, not much way to even get a cues out of previous attempts, with a similar setup.
It's always trickier to start from zero, than to start from a basis that was perpetuated over a few leagues, eventually perfected to a point any patchnote will have minor impacts only.

Now, it is clear that it may not be as fast and powerful, some core mechanics of the game definitely allow to reach incredibly high amount of damages and clearspeed, but it's not a majority, many skills are going to sucks super hard no matter how you play them, because they did not receive much love, sometime for years, and/or were initially not designed in a way matching current content of the game, etc.

My conclusion is that "the lack of build diversity" is rather a perspective issue.