"A build is successful if it can do 300c"

General
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That is the viewpoint of a competitive player. I’ll even say further that the majority of players doesn’t even craft. The majority of players play 10-20-40h and are done with the game until the next cycle, if they even return next cycle instead of next year.
The majority of players are casuals and just want to have fun for a while, nothing more.

It’s true, though. Every build works with 0LP. It might not push past 300c, or 1k when you want it to push 5k, but it will still work. Not even the frost claw build needs LP. If you’re a competitive player, yes, you need LP for every build. Because you need to push to the max.

I should clarify that a competitive player doesn’t mean that you need to top leaderboards or anything like that. A competitive player is simply someone that wants to push the absolute max, preferably close to the limit of what is achievable.
A casual player, on the other hand, just wants to play to have fun and probably won’t even finish the game. It’s the player that when given difficulty options will choose the easiest one.

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You are just wrong and I could have a better conversation with the wall at this point. Not gonna waste anymore time on you if you are going to be wildly inaccurate and just so far off base.

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You can absolutely finish the campaign and quit the game without ever knowing what Temporal Sanctum is.

You have a pretty narrow perspective and very little concept of what the casual gamer experience is typically like and the fact that casual gamers make up the majority of the player count.

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Fine, in that case, show me a build that absolutely requires LP gear.

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If you quit the game after the campaign you never actually played the game. The campaign is like 2% of the game. You never made, finished a build or done any of the content. The game starts after the campaign. So gonna hard disagree there.

I actually have an ARPG perspective. So my views are based on ARPG players. If you quit after the campaign in PoE or LE you never played the game. You didn’t actually get into the core game.

Anyway I’ve proven my points, this thread has run it’s course.

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I know a lot of people who play this game. Exactly one of them gave a crap about whether their build is S tier. (and he got bored pretty quickly) Particularly the more casual of them just care about getting to maybe 200 or 300 corruption, and that’s only because they want a higher chance of some uniques dropping. Looking through a couple of their profiles now, and the most casual ones only have WW gear as their legendaries, didn’t bother converting other uniques, one is a level 98 warlock who still has a yellow and a green item. They are all having tonnes of fun. I have legendaries, but while I have a warlock and a runemaster, I also have a swipe wolf beastmaster, who is so much fun to play. On the other hand, I tried a falconer, and abandoned her fairly early, because despite the damage, she’s not really my style. I have one friend who picked a class that he felt RP wise most aligned with his personality, and was okay with that being a primalist. Another friend who’s doing a void knight entirely because she wanted the spinny style. I believe that even those who didn’t start off with a build ended up following one, and actually didn’t care about what tier it was, regardless of how much time they had.

Some of us just like making builds using skills that appeal to us. Some of us want to use some cool piece of gear that dropped on another character. Some care about making the character better, but just for personal satisfaction, not to beat out the other builds in the game. These are people of ages spanning 20s to 50s. I doubt that somehow I managed to only meet people who fit in with the 0.01% of people who play how @AbombDaChamp feels players should and do play.

Also, one person I know absolutely did stop playing shortly after campaign, during normal monos. And doesn’t care that it’s not “the core game.”

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You did play the game though. You just didn’t finish it. Which is what the majority of players do. Again, go check the achievements for PoE and see how many people reached level 60.
Most players don’t finish most games. They play them for a few hours and then move on.

Your point of view is of an ARPG fan that plays the game for hundreds of hours. Which is a minority of the playerbase. Even in PoE which is clearly targetted towards more hardcore players.

Again, you’re a competitive player. Everything you say shows that. Even if you don’t compete with other players, you’re competing with yourself to push the most you can.
But the majority of players aren’t competitive. In any game genre, even in ARPGs. Even in multiplayer FPSs.

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That’s exactly my point. You think that grants you a superior perspective, that you don’t take other perspectives seriously because you think your experience gives you credibility.

But in actuality, your closed-mindedness makes you unable to see anything from another perspective.

You’re not the only one here who has played an ARPG in their life lol. They just have broader perspectives than yours.

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I think we’ve already established that he doesn’t think that non-competitive players are actually players, they’re just wallpaper.

I understand ranks, it seems that you don’t understand that anything below S-tier is objectivelybadscrub-tierandshouldbedeletedfromthegamesoitdoesn’truinthepurityofthegamefortheuber-menchcompetitivegamers.

A-tier isn’t competitive with S-tier, otherwise it’d be S-tier, but since it’s self-evidently not S-tier (by definition), that means it’s worse & since it’s worse then S-tier it’s garbage (by your own definition/evident viewpoint).

Dude, “most players” don’t go to forums, and given the apparent ability for a worrying number of forum users to do such a simple thing as “search before posting”, I think it’s a pretty reasonable assumption to make that “most players” don’t know what a meta is. Or search apparently.

Yeah, somehow, I have no idea when, “people” appear to have decided that they are only allowed to play “the best” build, rather than a build that’s fun (whatever that is for “people”, yes, it’s going to be different for different people, just accept that & move on).

If they’re enjoying it, they didn’t waste the time (ignoring the view that playing games is a waste of time, obvs).

Apart from a phenomenally small number of potential builds that might “require” a particular build-enabling unique but also require the +4 levels to a particular skill that’s on that slot, no, he’s not. You’re just been conditioned by godknows what to think that anything less than S-tier is garbage & that everybody else things like you do despite the mountains of evidence in this conversation to the contrary. Hell, even the fact that we’re having this conversation should show you that your viewpoint is not the only possible one, but for some reason you’ve learned the wrong lesson here… :person_shrugging:

Edit: Come back to us when you’ve grown up a bit & learned that a)there are other viewpoints & b)they’re just as valid as yours (or just as invalid).

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253

You are definitely wrong here Champ, people have pushed to 700c with just 0LP gear and idols less than 50k

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I think there’s a few problems. First, infinite corruption is just that, infinite. That gives players the license to push things beyond what was planned. Second, corruption pushing after a certain point sucks. It’s repetitive and boring to infinitely push corruption until you hit a wall. Combine this with my first point along with my third point, which is devs foresaw players hitting a wall at less than 1k corruption. In their ideal scenario, players are capped out at around 900 corruption for the best builds and therefore, move on to a new build or reach a point where they move on and wait for the next cycle. Instead, we have people literally pushing 4k corruption. Honest to god, no one should feel the need to be decked out in 3 LP BIS gear to push past a certain point. But people are. And it’s insane. The best builds have insane synergy that allows the build to scale better with better gear. An S-tier build with the equivalent level of gear as a B-tier build can take advantage of the gear better and push farther. That discrepancy should have been limited to roughly 900 corruption, but instead that is at the thousands, plural.

But we come to a crucial point: why? Why is this such a major sticking point for a lot of people? I would be worried if people found the majority of builds not fun. But there are so many fun builds to play that can reasonably push. Even the guy playing a melee, non-ward build with shitty items pushed to around 700 corruption. So why can’t you, if it matters to you, push to something equivalent with another build with better gear that is reasonable to achieve? There’s multiple problems and they are all being grouped together as one big problem. There’s a problem from people who want complete balance because they do not find joy in playing anything but the most busted builds. There’s a problem from people who find the endgame monotonous because it boils down to monolith pushing. The first set of people require a specific solution: nerf overpowered builds and bring up underpowered builds. The second set of people require a different solution: iterate on the endgame by adding more complexity or adding additional activities. Then there are people who are sick of the LP system which requires EHG to fix that specific system.

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Clearly the game has seen a lot of powercreep and, to some extent, that was inevitable. Show me one ARPG that managed to maintain interesting or relevant (or both) for years on end without at least some measure of powercreep. You won’t find any. Not even D2. Which constantly saw the introduction of new runewords and what not, back in the day.

Now, having said that… the powercreep did happen a bit too quickly in LE. This, to a very large extent, is actually because the power always was there. In the form of bugs and/or unintended interactions which never were properly tested and ironed out. And, one key mechanic, Ward… which ulimately just is far too powerful in its current state. If you build it up quickly enough (and there’s lots of builds that can generate insane amounts of ward very quickly), you effectively have infinite health. I can’t imagine this ever having been EHG’s intent for the mechanic. Given how health/life has no such luxury, at all. There are no builds that build into the dozens of thousands of health. And even health regen is, well, quite limited. Best I’ve seen so far is maybe 1600 - 2000 health regen per second. Which is a lot. But, it’s nowhere near the absolute insanity that is Ward.

Once they iron out the bugs that the game does still have, tune out the weird, unexpected interactions which clearly are too strong to be sustainable and also deal with Ward in a way that does not nerf it to the ground while still making it less extreme than it is today, people should indeed expect to hit considerably lower Corruption levels. Which is fine.

As it stands, the absolutely nutty difference in max attainable Corruption level from one build to the next is… well… ridiculous. There’s builds in the game that if we were to list them on an actual tier list would make them sit in S-tier with everything else being in F-tier. The gap is just that much for some builds. That… is unsustainable in the long run. Eventually, everyone would just end up playing those cookiecutter builds, nothing else. Making the game… boring, bland, uninspiring and, well… not something worthwhile to spend a lot of time on. Since there really would not be anything to spend a lot of time on.

So, yeah… personally, I would be perfectly fine with seeing solid nerfs across the board to the powercreep the game has seen in its relatively short lifespan since launch. If EHG start working towards aiming for a C300 mark across the board being the benchmark, I’d be fine with that. As long as it doesn’t mean that literally everything will be hit with the ban hammer. Since, well… there’s plenty of builds which are… just fine as-is. In no need of nerfs. Heck, maybe in need of some buffs, if anything.

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This is one of my friends. He has a hard job and a family with multiple sports obligations. He doesn’t want to read, he wants to play. He sits down, hits play, and gets an hour in before some other life interrupting event happens. He doesn’t read forums, doesn’t want to lookup guides, just wants to escape for an hour and kill stuff lol.

4 Likes
257

I may be in the minority on this, but I don’t see why EHG doesn’t just cap Corruption. If they say a build is successful at xyz, then just cap it at xyz. They obviously can’t balance all the classes in a traditional sense anyway, so cap it. So long as Corruption is being used as a measuring stick for build power, then there will always be an element of “well I like my build, but that one’s just better, and so much better there’s no point in trying really unless I’m that build anyway.”

If I’m playing a build doing 300c and I see someone doing 1500c, sponsored by Torgue, and blowing up the ocean, my first reaction will be to just throw up my hands and ask what’s the point?

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It all comes down to which type of player you are and what your goals for the game are. For example, I only care about having fun with a build. And when I see a build that’s doing 2k+ corruption, I honestly don’t want to play it, because it feels less fun to me. It’s the reason why I haven’t really done a warlock or a falconer.

If you cap corruption, it doesn’t really solve anything anyway. Because you won’t see a build doing 2k corruption but you’ll see a build that kills Julra or Lagon in 1s and yours takes 5 minutes. Build comparisons will always happen and some builds will always be stronger than others.

Bottom line, some players play because they like to watch a number go up. Whether it’s corruption, or arena waves, or simply damage. Their goal is to reach the highest possible number they can. They won’t play the weaker builds and will gravitate towards the broken ones.
Others play because they just want to kill stuff for a while and have fun. They don’t care if they do 300 or 2k. And those don’t care that other builds are vastly overperforming as long as theirs is fun. Most don’t even know that there are overperforming builds out there.

Neither is right or wrong, they’re just different types of players with different goals in the game.

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If this game was capped at 300 corruption or even 1000 Corruption, the level were supposedly not supposed to be able to reach, this game would be instantly dead on arrival.

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I’m interested to see where EHG goes with it, but with only 8k players on steamcharts currently, the argument can be made that we might be close to that point regardless. I believe we’re down to the people that really love it right now or just about are the only ones playing. Although I understand this happens with every game. I’m still waiting to see where it settles for my own knowledge.

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I’m getting ready to hear the crying and name calling once the nerf hammer comes. :rofl:

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For me, a build being overly strong is a reason to avoid it. I can’t easily tell how high of corruption a build can push, but the arena leaderboards are likely to reflect similarly in terms of a build’s strength. I look at the top 50, and I see the following 4 builds making up 42 of them:
Falconer
Warlock
Healing Hands Sentinel (not necessarily Paladin but always Healing Hands)
Frost Claw Runemaster

Rounding out the top 50 we have 3 Liches, 2 Blade Dancers, a Werebear / Spriggan Druid, a Wraithlord Necromancer, and a Shield based Forge Guard.

If we look at the top 100 instead we add in an Explosive Trap Marksman, a couple Runemasters who forego Frost Claw and focus exclusively on Frost Wall, a couple of Beastmasters built like a Werebear but without the Werebear, and otherwise it’s more of the same.

So basically I know that I don’t want to play any of those builds. Even if I forego Frost Claw and stick to Glacier on my Runemaster, if I clear 500 arena waves as Runemaster I’m 32nd on the chart as it sits today and folks would look at my build and see Flame Ward, Runic Invocation, and either Ice Barrage or Frost Wall along with Glacier and Mana Strike and think ‘yep just another busted Runemaster proving you can clear lots of waves even with an inferior build’. Meanwhile if I clear 500 waves with a Meteor based Sorc I’m not only 3rd instead of 32nd, I’m the only Sorc in the top 5 who isn’t using Frost Claw. I see nothing like my build concept for Sorc anywhere in the list, not even at 130 waves. So maybe that’s because the build just won’t work, but fundamentally I take that as a challenge, I want to build it, test it, and prove to myself it won’t work (and why) rather than making yet another OP Runemaster.

BTW for those wondering, from the standpoint of “where would 500 waves land you”, by mastery, you’ve got:
Spellblade - 1st
Sorcerer - 3rd
Druid - 4th
Forge Guard - 4th
Lich - 4th
Beastmaster - 5th
Void Knight - 5th
Marksman - 5th
Shaman - 6th
Blade Dancer - 8th
Necromancer - 19th
Falconer - 30th
Runemaster - 33rd
Paladin - 48th
Warlock - 79th

Oh and in terms of abilities likely to be heavily nerfed which are featured prominently in those Necros / Falconers / Runemasters / Paladins / Warlocks, we’ve got:
Wraithlord (the whole shebang with the helmet)
Everything about the Falconer (with Explosive Trap hitting the Blade Dancers as well)
Frost Claw
Healing Hands
Profane Veil and Cthonic Fissures
With like 10 nerfs 85%+ of the wildly overperforming builds can be brought in line, only a question of whether it can be done without nerfing those builds into the ground.

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Yeah that’s true and honestly I don’t mind it, I mean I play Project Diablo 2 as well and that game only tops at like 2-3k people playing it but it’s fun.

I actually think it’s really fun to play a game that has a dedicated small fan base because you get to really have fun discussions about the game and really learn about it in depth, at least that’s my opinion

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