I believe Path Of Exile offers less build diversity than it advertises.
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Not every skill is meant to be used as a "main" skill, there are tons of skills though, that can be very well utilised. The fun part for me is to set up automatic mechanics, that factor in CWDT, CoC etc.
This league, I used ice spear totems, so I built a defensive CWDT Frostwall with "Cast on skill use", vortex and frostbolt to perma chill and lock in the syndicate. A perma phaserun lets me pass through my own frostwalls. Is this meta? Probably not. Did I kill uber elder with it? Several times. I once made a "Flame Dash Spelltotems" character just for fun and giggled like a little girl while my totems dashed through T15 bosses, killing them eventually. Is this a clever build to use? NO! But heck, it was fun for a while. Editado por útlima vez por IamLoco#3766 en 23 ene. 2019 3:06:07
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" Why, you're completely right. The gap between various skills had grown way too wide. You dont need to have a math degree to calculate, that some skills are strictly BETTER than others, as well as some mechanics. For example, a huge factor, that makes many self-cast spells feel awful, is mana cost. To sustain them, you need to invest tons of nodes/items into mana regen or leech. But with Poet's Pen/CWC/CoC/totems you dont care about such "trivialities", while those option dont even have lower DPS... IGN: MortalKombat
Molten Strike build guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1346504 There is no knowledge That is not power |
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" I was fixing to make this exact post. Most of the passives are just useless/no good, and you pretty much follow the same path on nearly every build, with little deviation. Its a huge smoke and mirror's job to make new players feel overwhelmed. When the truth is, most builds in the game are going to follow the same exact paths, and the vast majority of the tree isn't worth putting a point into. Also, to Xavderion's point. Yep, too many skills play exactly alike. Blade Flurry, Cyclone, RF. Whats the real difference in those? They just look different. They are still a circle around your character that you run around with. A ton of skills are that way, and honestly just remind me of a different skill rune in D3. I feel like they also prop up the "diversity" by making monsters so easy to kill. This is something I realized a long, long time ago when I had built my character and realized that my leap slam, my travel skill, was nearly 1 shotting the packs of mobs. This is with zero damage support gems. Just your typical Fort/Faster/leap. Jump into a pack of mobs and they are either dead or at 15% life. At that point you mash your 1 button, and blow them all up. That fact alone makes it feel like there is more diversity than there really is, simply because the mobs die so easily of course any skill you decide to use is going to work at killing the monsters. You can use any skill in the game, because they die so easily. Why worry about min/maxing my main skill when my travel skill is nearly killing everything on the screen? That fact that the act of playing the game is so overall easy, really over-estimates the build diversity. Yes, some of the bosses can be hard. Bullet-hell dodge moments. But your day to day mapping, what people spend 95% of their time doing, isn't. Doesnt matter what tier of map it is. Everything but the boss is just weeds in your way as you mow them down. So then people make wonky ass builds with terrible skills, and are like, "This is viable! I can do all this content." Of course you can. My travel skill with nothing added to it can do all the content. That is fake diversity. |
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" Mathil is very good at two things: 1. "dancing around" He can get away with 5k life and basically no defenses because he just knows how to not die. He can put way more skillpoints into damage, use jewels without life, wear an abyssus etc. When I make a similar build, I will quickly realize I want more life and defense. I will drop DpS for life nodes. I will drop triple crit multi jewels for life + 1-2 damage stat jewels. -> I already deal half the damage he deals. 2. "making it look easy" Mathil puts a lot of effort into micromanagement. He swaps gems and jewels before bossfights, he manually casts golems, blood rage, support totems, all sorts of vaal skills like lightning trap. He will play a melee skill without multistrike because he knows where to click. He will have 100% flask uptime. He will manually curse monsters, drop his orb of storms on every pack... and it still looks "smooth". When I play, I will have some of this, but on CWDT (so I don't have to click it). I will sometimes walk into a boss not having any buffs at all. -> I now deal a quarter of his damage or less. That said, I can still "make it work", but I will spend a lot more currency than he does. 3.5 build: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2299519
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" EVERY aRPG in the history of time encourages speed and efficiency. It's nothing new. It didn't come with PoE. Hell, Diablo 2 had (and still has) a huge community built around speed runs, world records and so on. EVERY game in this genre encourages speed, because more speed = more dice rolls = more loot. The game doesn't force you into anything. You choose. No matter how you look at it, it's a choice. A LOT of players have tried the Uber Atziri fight with "underperforming specs". I have. Most of my friends have. Because we like pushing our builds. See how far we can take them. What they are made of. There's nothing wrong with having a "normal" build, that doesn't "over focus" on speed. You CAN do anything in the game with A LOT of skills. And there are TONS of players playing this way, even in the highest red maps tiers. I am. Every league. I don't care that much about speed. Am I trying to make my builds as fast as I can? Sure. Am I picking builds based on clear speed? Never. There are exactly 39483776 different ways of playing this game. And the META, even if it's directly created (read: pushed) by GGG, or evolved by player knowledge, is based off of the desire to be as powerful as possible. You can't get rid of this desire, and there will ALWAYS be a META, no matter how balanced a game is. But the META doesn't define the game. The META is the tip of the sword. There will always be a tip of the sword. Always. I have this impression that (most) people whining about "diversity", are the people most caught up in the META, following it blindly - like they "have to". They feel the game forces them. Nothing wrong with that. They always choose the most powerful path, because - being powerful is the key (for many players) in game like this. But a lot (most?) players don't have to be fastest. Don't have to be best. They want to do everything the game has to offer with their own builds. And that is VERY possible. THAT is diversity. Again: There will always be a tip of the sword. There will ALWAYS be builds/skills/classes that are better than others. The best/most knowledgeable players will always find this tip of the sword. They will choose it. Share it. And other players looking for this tip of the sword will copy it. And you know what? They will whine about other builds/skills/classes can't "keep up". Lastly; this wasn't directed at you 100%, as much as it was just an answer in the thread. Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile.
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" You're right, every game has promoted efficiency. But speaking as a completely average gamer (well, for most things), this is the first ARPG I have ever played where it has had things that basically translate to "your build must be this high to ride the ride". In all other ARPG's it wasn't the content that was difficult, it was the gear grind. And all the gear grind did was help you to grind gear faster. It didn't necessarily enable your build to even attempt the content. This game has RNG on top of RNG to even get to the things you want to do, and some of those things are difficult (as an average gamer). I wasn't meaning I won't fight atziri on a non-efficient build, I meant the average person isn't going to do the long grind to get all the sacrifice fragments, then all the mortal fragments to then have the opportunity to even do her on a non-efficient build. I'm not saying any of this should be changed, as it caters do a lot of people that prefer this game. I was just meaning it's disingenuous to say it's the players fault for not playing all the thousands of sub-optimized builds available because the game does not enable that from an average-player standpoint (compared to other games). As a random aside to my earlier post you quoted. I got the final fragment last night, so now have my first uber-atziri kill :) |
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" Putting a skill on totems and killing uber elder is pretty meta though, totems are very much in there right now as you have to be uninterested in character power to self cast, I love your defensive option though my friend loves frostwall he tries to put it in every build he plays i'll pass your setup over hes gonna love it lol. Can't argue that flamedash totems is epic though, if you killed Uber Elder with those i'd doff my hat in respect |
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" ...And it's perfectly fine for a "completely average gamer" to say to himself that: "Hmmm, maybe beating Uber Atziri is above my paygrade, because it takes too much time/grind. I'm glad people with more available game time have this challenge". Then play on, and maybe next league, that challenge is achievable. For me, it's all about the journey. If my character has done it all, I wouldn't play that character anymore. As a "completely average gamer", I love how there's always challenges around every corner I can look forward to. I've never done Uber Elder. Do I have characters capable of doing so? Sure. In many leagues. Guess I'm saving the moment or something. hard to explain. I seriously don't understand why people are in such a hurry to do everything :P Anyhow, gratz on your Uber Elder kill. Maybe I'll finally see the point in beating him this league. Tell you what, I'll attempt him when I get home from work. Edit: Oh, Uber Atziri. Sorry about that. Haven't beaten her on this account either. I'll try her too :) Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile. Editado por útlima vez por Phrazz#3529 en 23 ene. 2019 10:50:45
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I am an off an on player, but aside from the gaps in skill power (lolArc) a rather huge issue when it comes to build diversity is that you have this large passive tree (which I love), but then you have tons of damage nodes and a few survivability nodes but you need to invest so heavily into the survival nodes that I'm willing to bet much of the passive talent tree is left unused similar to how only a few of all the active skill gems are used.
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The problem is the game has too much exponential scaling.
A main skill has 5 support gems, combined with Crit, Increased modifiers, Auras, ... A meta skill on average has around 8 MORE multipliers. This leads to content being balanced around that fact. There are indeed many, many ways in PoE to fix the clearspeed of a lesser used skill in PoE. I have tried toying with many different mechanics to make a build, but it all comes down to the same bottleneck: DAMAGE. It always lacks 1,2 damage multipliers compared to meta skills to be endgame viable. It might be hard to understand how too much of exponential scaling is a relevant here. Let's look at it like this: Imagine the average number of more multipliers a skill has in PoE is 2: The skill itself and an increased damage multiplier. Then there is a TON of possibilities: let say you need at least 1000% increased damage for a build to be viable, and there are various items that in the game that gives you 100 to 120% average increased damage. Then the number of different combinations of items you can use is the number of ways you can partition 1000 to different buckets of 100 and 120 units, which is very large. The same is not true for exponential scaling: there is only a limited amount of ways to achieve that many more multipliers in a game. So it all comes down to which skill can find another MORE multipliers, which is extremely limited. The higher exponents you go, the less likely addictive scaling can catch up. That's why people only use 1 skill as main skill and scale everything with that skill, not two or three 4 link skills. That's why most of the cast on channeling combinations not viable. That's also part of the reason why stat sticks were so important: you simply can't give up a more multipliers. That's why blood magic builds don't work: Auras are more multipliers. That's also (partly) why totems are mines are popular: they are simply more multipliers, and the equivalent more multipliers for selfcast (spell echo) sucks. That's why DoT builds used to suck: more multipliers. The list goes on, I'm sure you can find another example if you think about it. Editado por útlima vez por xpmrz#7761 en 23 ene. 2019 12:38:32
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