I don’t think you understand the implication behind crutches.
A crutch is a mechanics that turbo charges a skill to make it usable. The skill is really bad on its own. Anyone not using the crutch will have an awful time and everyone using the crutch will build their characters the same way.
Crutches completely destroy build variety.
Just to counter point, flame reave is most definitely not unusable without firebrand. I’ve used a mix of flame reave as my primary attack and the cooldown variant of mana strike to regain massive amounts of mana together to good effect. While the firebrand variant is stronger I am able to reach empowered monoliths with the other version.
You can reach empowered monoliths doing basic attacks with a white weapon from the vendor.
If so then there are no crutches just bossters becasue you can get there with enough gear to max your resis and even this is debateable. So after all the texting about crutches you dismantle the crutch thematic yourself by saying this. I’m confused do I missunderstand something or are you talking on hand about crutches (aka items that make skill op) and on the other hand you say “You only need white gear” (while some people played the game mostly naked just for the lulz).
The point about white gear was that un-empowered monos are very very easy, thus any skill will work with any gear.
You need crutches to push corruption and end game content, where stuff gets more difficult and you need the extra damage. For the campaign and early monos it doesn’t matter if your skill does 1000 or 500 000 dmg when enemies have 1000hp.
If as you claim anyone can make it to empowered timelines with white gear and some resistances then they’re already at end game.
I feel like there’s a large misconception that because you can make corruption go past 200 that end game only begins once you reach an arbitrary point of corruption. There’s nothing out there but more corruption… End game has started as you acquire your last blessing or even before that.
The game currently has a major amount of build variety. It’s only inevitable that as you increase corruption certain builds fall off faster than others. Your measuring the viability of a build too far out.
Oh, I think I understand it very well. Maybe you don’t understand my response.
There will always be bad skills. Why not implement an item that propels the skill into usefulness? Skill X is bad. But if you are lucky and find item Y, you can make a viable build.
Why not?
I don’t say that this should be the goal for all skills. But having this kind of build enabling stuff in the game makes it more interesting.
When they are bad skills in the game they need to be fixed so they are no longer bad.
Adding crutches is not a solution. Crutches kill build variety.
If a skill is bad and you add a crutch to it then everyone will use the skill in exactly the same way… If you don’t see this as an issue i got nothing more.
People use Crutches because the alternatives are weak and there is not enough opportunity cost to the Crutch.
An example of something that has opportunity cost is most of the stuff in the warpath tree, due to limited points, the fact that a lot of nodes require certain weapon types and most of the powerful nodes occur require taking a conversion node.
However there are still nodes that are essentially mandatory, even in warpath builds - 10 points get used for Whirling steel and Cyclone of war for almost every build, and you need to take some of the reduced cost nodes to use cyclone frequently(due to the fact that sentinel lacks efficient mana generation to be able to sustain cyclone at its base mana cost).
Fact is that most of the “good” skills in LE have something specific propping them up preventing them from being absolute trash.
You could have infinite mana regeneration and it still wouldn’t help. You don’t regen mana when channeling.
Unless you mean a way to instantly cast something that gives you mana. Not sure I would like that much.
Pics or it didn’t happen (not counting minion builds).
IMO, skills shouldn’t require a specific item to not suck. That way lies D3 itemisation.
I play emp monos in t20 gear just fine and was never in need of a crutch outside of build enabeling items if i needed these O.o. Is it easier to play with imba op items? Yes! Is it impossible without them? LoL hell no ^^.
Isn’t that the basic of every loot driven game? More and better loot that makes you go brrrrrrrrr?
If you don’t add a crutch, nobody will use that skill. So by adding an item that boost a skill, you add +1 build variant.
Not every single skill in this game is meant to be the endgame viable splatter machine.
Yeah. I understand this. This is literally the only message that hides behind the wall of text of the op:
This exactly! What are you guys playing these games for 
Is that white gear? No? What tier is white gear again?
And @azmodael is talking about special OP imba uber items. What are these items again? Everything alright with you pal? Your smartbuttydom today is a bit on the lower end of the spectrum that’s very suprising. Everyone well and sound?
Is what I was replying to.
Surprisingly no, but never mind…
Ah i was talking about emp(owered) monos in the part you quoted originaly ^^.
Yess fixes and balances are happening, slowly but sure they are. I’m just not happy the way its done.
Instead of fixing skills the approach seems to be “Lets add unique X to make skill Y playable”.
Also with skill trees this big you’d expect to have multiple ways to build every skill. This is not the case for a great number abilities.
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