The idea of a Developers Build Competition is to broaden the enjoyment for gamers, rather than 1 button/broken meta builds.
The design is that the Development team create a build how they envisaged the class to be played and then the community get to see how far they can push that class. There could be leader boards based on player skill instead of broken mechanics, as the Developers would have chosen the skills and talent tree points, that people would need to follow.
There could even be design competitions later on, whereby people create there own fun builds and the Developers get to choose the top 3 and then the player base get to vote on which to implement for the next DBC?
This would help create meaningful skill based ladders, community engagement and the ability to try new classes you wouldn’t have thought about playing, which may lead some people making a similar build but tinkering with it slightly at other times.
Please feel free to offer your well thought out ideas on this. Try an explain your thoughts rather than yay or nay, as explanations are more meaningful.
While I do like challenges that have a more even playground, this would take nearly everything away that a complex ARPG makes exciting: Creativity.
I would rather see some more diverse leaderboards. Something more than just Arena.
For example a series of fixed-seed Monolith echoes. Make a couple of different ones with different challenges some have long paths, so speed is important, some have many trash mobs, some have very tough rares and bosses).
And then people need to get creative and find builds that excel at the specific challenges.
Marvel Heroes did this very well. They had bi-weekly danger room events with different scenarios. Some even had special modifiers like (all skills of type X share a cooldown, 300qmore dmg but 200% more damage taken) etc.
Sometimes your stereotypical build would work well and you need to get creative and adapt.
Personally I think that the idea of playing a new way to be very creative, as it gives people a foundation understanding of a build in which to build upon. You’re not stuck to just playing that 1 character, you can create other characters to play and build up, so you’re not obligated to play it. In order to be creative, you must have a basic understanding and this allows that by giving you the build. You then go away and do your own thing when you wish. You may hate the build that’s on offer or you may love it but hate 1 skill and wish to create a new character with a similar build. This DBC is designed to be a stepping stone for newer players and a competitive level playing field for older players.
That being said, these are only ideas and what you have suggested would be fun too. Though broken meta builds help hinder creativity as it promotes peer pressure and people just play plug and play builds that people can exploit a mechanic.
It’s not a case of either/or with our suggestions, it’s a case of just sharing ideas. Everyone plays differently so we are bound to hear many suggestions that we ourselves wouldn’t benefit from but the game as a whole would see benefit.
