No it doesn’t, the core mechanic behind Shadow daggers is that it doesn’t scale off modifiers to the skill proccing it but has high damage effectiveness and auto crit to compensate. To essentially sum it up SD is a sub-skill triggered by an ailment and hence does not inherit skill modifiers. Spark Charges and Flame burst in Mage follow a similar mechanic.
This comment gives a better overview. https://old.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/xpuwff/do_shadow_dagger_damage_scaling_from_skills_or/iqdre7a/
You can test it yourself but otherwise SD would be extremely busted (even more than it already is). I think my other Trigger examples are a better comparison to SD Puncture.
However, regular ailments like Bleed, poison and Frostbite do scale off the non-hit nodes in Puncture so I would count them as a puncture build (unless they are only using puncture for the bleeding fury buff and another skill deals the actual damage).
Looks great! I had planned something similar too kinda like the old Roman gladiators with a Net and Trident. Although I would def pick Huntress Advantage (global 10% more damage).
It was, if you ignored all the totally underperforming builds they had. One year into launch PoE was in Rampage/Beyond and not only was balance a mess (especially for melee), but there were lots of skills that could barely be used to level.
It continues to be 300c. Killing Aby unlocks nothing. You unlock the last thing when you kill the last harbinger at 300c.
Except for the totally overlooked skills. Even today PoE has skills that no one uses because they’re simply not good and are vastly underperforming.
Yes, there is. It’s a lack of engaging endgame content which they want to address in season 2. It has little to do with which builds are viable.
Also, to get back to the original point:
Not once has GGG ever said anything about what is a viable build. Not even when their balance was all over the place (especially for melee where most builds were pure crap) have they ever issued a statement on it nor were they asked to do so.
Not once has Blizzard ever said anything about what is a viable build. Not even when their balance is all over the place have they issued a statement on it nor were they asked to do so.
Same for Crate, Runic and pretty much every other ARPG in the genre. No one ever asked them to define what is a viable build nor has anyone asked them to do so.
So why would EHG be any different and why should they be forced to issue a statement on this?
There are plenty of players that require builds to do 2k+ corruption for it to be viable as well, much like there are players that require builds to do wave 1.5k+ on arena. That doesn’t mean that builds that don’t do that aren’t viable.
Viable builds are builds that allow you to do the basic farming loop in the game. Anything past that and you’re entering the specialized build territory. Of which PoE has a lot more, but LE already has some, namely boss killing for Aby/Julra and arena.
But those sub 2k builds wouldn’t “be viable” to a player who has their threshold at 2k. Viability is an arbitrary standard. The devs have it at 300c but individual players or the wider community are entirely free to say that its a different number. Neither would be “wrong”.
That was exactly my point. It’s not on the devs to define what is a viable build. It’s on the players, like in every other game. And the general consensus over the years is that, for the majority of players, a build is viable if it can unlock everything and do the endgame farming loop successfully. Which is red maps in PoE, 300c monos in LE, in TLI it’s NetherRealm, etc.
And then you get the outliers: the extremely competitive ones that consider only the top 1% meta builds as viable, the extremely casual that consider any build that does the basic game (campaign) as viable, etc.
This whole thing only came up because Mike issued a statement on this issue (which I’m betting he regrets sorely by now), so now everyone expects EHG to be the ones that define when a build is viable, when it is upon the players to do so.
Also, a very important distinction: Mike never said that a build that did 300c is viable. He said it’s successful. It’s an important distinction.
He also specifically said: “WE consider a build that can do 300c as successful”. Which means that it’s their internal guideline, much like every player might have a different one. They’re not forcing it on the players.
That’s a fair point, however, I think most reasonable people would take successful as a synonym for viable. So IMO, it doesn’t really change anything unless one believes that a build could be “successful” (can do 300c) but not be “viable”.
If he regretted it, why does he keep on saying it? He never said it once, which is what you’re implying (issued a statement).
Which brings me back to my previous comment as to why some people want EHG to draw the arbrtrary line in the sand when they’ve been doing this for months/years.
Some “successful” (in 1.0) builds, were ruined by 1.1 as EHG nerfed ward and permafreeze mage w/o any compensation for nonmeta builds like: void Archer (nightbringer quiver and lowhp) dropped from c300 to c150 https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/ALZyLbxB
or freeze minigun totems prime(beastmaster) dropped from c325 to c250 https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/BZ7yaXro
Now they are deadend. And if you can call 2nd one a nonoptimal and weird, 1st one is only lowhp-ward playable and lost both ward(formula+shackles) and dmg/cc (flurry-multishot interaction)
That is how the current gaming landscape works unfortunately. People always want to put things into categories. Black and white. And for that they very often want clear cut statements from devs, because they want to know if they have the right to complain about build X not being able to do content Y.
To this very day Last Epoch still has very few meaningful systems/content that is good for gauging how powerful a build is though, which is why all of this makes even less sense as well.
Corruption is very meaningless anyway because ~ +/- 100 corruption can have the same difficulty, it all depends on enemy modifiers, timelines/enemies etc.
That makes no sense. The difference between 325 and 250 corruption is negligible.
I havn’t looked into how you built that particular build, but I have done several iterations of a Void Bow character in the past and 300c was never the top end for me. The character alway could easily handle way higher corruption. So I would think that there are very likely thing you can change and adapt to be able to do much higher corruption anyway.
Builds moving up and down slightly in the powerlevel due to global system changes that affect a plethora of builds is normal though and a build does not become not viable all of the sudden. This is exactly the black/white mentality I was talking about in my first paragraph.
Builds do not move from successful/viable into “deadend” just because of a few numerical changes, that is all in your head.
So funny, still having the same conversation. Still the same fervently held opinions.
If you can’t define what is ‘par’, how can you define what is ‘sub-par’ or ‘over-performing’?
How can a new player know what a decent build is, and should be able to do, if you don’t define, even in the most general terms, what ‘decent’ is.
The “it’s up to the player to decide what is ‘good’” argument makes me laugh.
It’s up the player to decide for themselves whether a build is fun. I find snapshotting intolerable. I find watching a buff cycle to the element I want equally intolerable. Both of those things can make a decent, and often very good, build, but I hate them.
The game itself decides whether a build can clear a certain, arbitrary, goal post. This is offset by player skill. In this game, I’d say it’s offset by player skill to only a small degree. Imo, character skills/passives and synergies are #1, gear is #2, player skill #3.
The point of defining what a ‘decent’ build is, is so that we, players and devs, can talk to each other and have some small chance of understanding what anyone is saying. It’s establishing a baseline.
I think it’s always a good idea to compare what players think is ‘par’ vs what the devs consider the goal line to be.
I think 99% here can agree that a successful build should be able to complete a certain level of corruption, and that level should be somewhere in the 300-1000 range.
300 is theoretical low end of Aberroth, 1000 is the ‘magic number’ a lot of content creators seem to aim for.
Personally, I don’t see the point above 600, because devs have said it’s where they expect to see a drop-off in the loot gain vs difficulty and anything more is bragging rights. So to put it in meta terms, this is my personal ranking assuming seasonal limitations:
S/S+ tier: anything that can do 600+ is, in my opinion, an S Tier build, with S+ being 1000+ with near-BiS gear.
A Tier: would be closer to 400-600. Can do all content with decent gear and advance beyond.
B Tier: The 275-400 range struggling with killing Abby. Takes effort/gear to kill him, but doable with some retries.
C Tier: would be like 200-275 range getting stuck on certain Harbingers, <5% chance they kill Aberroth on a try.
D Tier: Barely makes it into empowered in the 100-200 range, a fun and casual build, but not really meant for the avid ARPG gamer.
F Tier: Not even empowered. Just straight-up a bad build and in need of a rework in next patch.
Now, whether you enjoy playing a certain build is up to you and/or build diversity. But the metric for a successful build regardless if it’s a fun one I think is somewhere in the above mentioned brackets. Ideally, >80% of players can find themselves an A-Tier build or higher each season, and >95% find a B+ build.
In my personal Opinion anything below your ‘B-Tier’ and even partially the ‘B-Tier’ (Below 300 corruption) are all ‘broken’ builds. Non-functioning.
Given we only have a single progression line currently and plainly spoken… not much time to reach that (without speedrunning a full weekend of focused gaming) every build which can’t get to that place is simply broken and needs to be checked out and improved.
Yes, that would make the issue with no existing end-game content worse… but that’s why we need more things on the side to achieve and farm up for so get to an a (when said side-content comes) adjusted end-line to achieve it.
Hence when these things to work up to come the respective End-Boss needs to be barely able to be reached without the extra mechanics and only ‘comfortably’ killed (within reason of a higher-level skilled player) when going the extra mile to progress through that stage.
I picked the lower end of B Tier as 275 because I take those levels as ‘comfort’ levels. Namely, the lowest build in B Tier would need to be careful when getting the last Harbinger & Aberroth down, and would be either rather well geared, or just really planning and optimizing around these boss fights, while it isn’t a corruption level they are comfortable farming on on a friday night. But they can do it at a reasonable success rate if they aim for it.
C Tier (imho) would lack the output or survivability to reliably kill Aberroth even if they got there unless they got atleast 2xT7 in every slot and BiS-rolled uniques etc. But they could still be enjoyable for more casual players as there is still some corruption progress to do on them.
I would rather they first work on everything F Tier, try to get them to roughly around low A (so they don’t become FotM if they overshoot) and work their way up. Any changes there may already push adjacent C builds up, and doing it the other way around makes it harder to balance in the end.
Now to define, ‘build’. I think a build is defined by the ‘hook’. The core skills, passives and uniques that are required to push enough damage to get that build into the tier it’s in. In general there is going to be some damage multiplier or skill effect multiplier that elevates the damage output to the levels required to be effective in endgame.
To say it another way, there is some mechanic a build ‘abuses’ to make things go boom. I’m not saying that the build is exploiting a bug, I’m saying the build found a way to spawn a gazillion tornados, so it’s a tornado build. Or boost a skill with a bunch of damage multipliers. Or stack ignite.
Slapping skill Y onto a build that is spawning dozens of tornado’s isn’t a skill Y build, it’s a tornado build. People should be called out when they say disingenuous shit like that, because it’s distracting from the conversation.
From my perspective, the whole point of this is to help devs determine what skills are underperforming, and what builds people would like to play, but are also similarly underperforming.
And start with all the bread-and-butter builds that should be good, but aren’t because EHG was enamored of the “MOER OBSCURE BULLHIT” that PoE devs think is a great idea.
D4 example; up until this latest league, D4 put a bunch of werewolf skills in the game, but the only way you could actually play werewolf was by finding uniques that enable non-werewolf synergies. Why? Why put all those werewolf skills into the game and spend zero time making a generic werewolf build at least B tier? Because PoE. This shit has gotta end. Deliver on the core fantasies that you, developer, already put into the game first, and then add Fire Torando’s later, after you have the fundamentals down.
To me, a build is any concept in how to deliver damage and survive taking it.
This can be centered around a skill or even a specific node in it, a unique with a special mechanic, or just a more generic combo of tags (e.g. Spell, Damage over Time & Fire)
Similarly, you could build around getting 100% Block chance, or get Endurance Threshold > Health.
As for something like your Tornado example: if skill Y is needed to generate all the tornadoes, then it’s a “skill Y Tornado proc” build, because that’s the core mechanic; create a gazillion tornadoes with Skill Y. DoT vs crit, what type of dmg, that all doesn’t matter for the core functionality; the proccing. Usually, it’ll do something extra (say, proc Storm Bolt per Tornado, so it’s a mix of 3 skills) but yeah, builds are obviously based around something specific.
But that doesn’t stop people being bad at naming things
That’s the build direction it takes, and every build has one unless you try for an allrounder build… which generally sucks as by design you can’t max everything out and hence it causes overall less effect then focusing on a few mechanics which interplay well.
What’s talked about is specific skills as the focus, which is a major important aspect of balancing. A vast amount of players chooses to play for example ‘Acid Flask’. Not ‘A dodge build including Acid Flask’ or a ‘Endurance build including Acid Flask’ but simply… ‘Acid Flask’… and you want to make it work, simple as that, direction be damned.
So for a proper game balancing there needs to be a viable - and straightforward, non-convoluted - measure to scale the respective skill when you put your focus on it. Some skills in LE lack this option to become viable. Some only become viable with obscure combinations, a few are utterly crap even if you try to find available options.
That shouldn’t happen. At least getting to Aberroth and killing him should be doable with each skill, in a reasonable timeframe that’s decided by the devs. Convoluted builds breaking out of the boundaries are a bonus, a thing the player building a character can strive for, but for not a single possible core damage skill it should ever be mandatory to do so.
Guys i understand the standard for what a nice build is are quite subjective, BUT i wrote on the main comment what was my criteria, it must be able to defeat Abberroth in under 10 minutes.
I really think that for a build to be good it needs to be able to kill aberotth in 1 minute with god-level gear and under 10 minutes with pretty god gear. A build is a failure when you cant scale it with good gear, if the game doesnt give you options to scale it, that is a bad build.
But i didnt want to get into this, lets try to not make this topic about this, there are other topics for this.
At this moment we have pages and pages about what makes a build good and 4 or 5 suggestions for builds.
Sorry for my contribution to derailing your thread. The list is a great start, thanks for the effort.
Pedantic nitpick, yes I feel ashamed; In my opinion, for the most part you didn’t list builds, you listed skills (often in a particular role). Examples;
Bear companion.
Shield Throw dmg dealer (same, they added and item… for what)
Detonating arrow as ranged dmg dealer.
Which is fine, and gets to the same point, and hopefully the devs are looking at the list… especially the Maelstrom parts of the list.
We have to recheck Dread’s blender build. Ring of shields + ricochet. This one was invented in release version, not in 1.1+
Also we got a lot of unique items that may lead in a deadend like Void stuff from 1.1
My attempt to make it work on sorc (expensive as it is a manastack mage and it is only c300+ thx to meteors)
