I started a new game and picked the abilities that I liked more or less. Then I was given a choice of specializations. But I don’t know what to choose, because just reading the descriptions of the top-tier abilities isn’t enough to tell if you’ll actually enjoy playing with them. I know I can just respec… whatever. Long story short, I kept tweaking my skills and trying to optimize this build, but it was all for nothing. Some things worked, and they did give more damage, but they completely changed the gameplay I actually wanted. I’m so tired of dealing with this crap. I looked at other players’ builds, but they use completely different skills and gear. Long story short, the game gives you an illusion of choice with tons of options, but in reality, nothing is balanced. To keep any interest in the endless grind, you just have to pick a meta build and forget about your own experiments. Is this really how it’s supposed to be? Even in an older game like Grim Dawn, I put together three characters completely on my own and cleared all the content. Man, I don’t know. It’s cool that the devs are adding new stuff, but I feel like they should fix the base game first. t’s like if everyone in Diablo 3 was having fun farming Torment 16, while I was stuck chipping away at mobs on Torment 8. Of course not. I would just grab any optimized build, grind some paragon levels, and then switch back to the skills I actually enjoy farming with, while playing on the max difficulty with other players.
Well, i can’t really think of any game where this doesn’t happen. There is always going to be a “best” build no matter what game you play. That’s just the nature of how math works. Unless you just want to make everything deal the exact same damage, then classes, skills, uniques, and basically everything and anything that makes a game a game would be pointless.
You are free to play this game with whatever skills you want, but if you want to go into the endgame with an unoptimized build and just thrown together with whatever you like without taking into account synergies, then you are going to struggle.
When I reached the point where the only option left was to equip a two-ring set for a mage, the gameplay shifted from a classic fireball style to a simplified version resembling a spinning barbarian. The damage went up, and all that was left to do was to masterwork all the gear in an endless grind. And that’s when I realized it was no coincidence. A viable build simply has to meet the requirements of controller gameplay and have AOE. It felt depressing. Why not just implement skill selection like in D3 and stop messing around with the illusion of choice?!
Yeah, D3 is very different. It’s had 14 years of balance/development from a company that damn near invented the genre. D3 is also entirely about the gear.
Sadly yes.
That you’d pick up from reading the text of the nodes. It’s not like Diablo where there’s relatively small mechanical differences between the 4-5 choices per skill.
This is mosly a balance issue, of which LE has been suffering from the start, but especially since 1.0 (became a bit better in 1.1, but has since gone downhill again). It’s not that you don’t have options, because they’re there, it’s just that some options are just so weak that they might as well not be there until they’re rebalanced.
You mention Fireball and that is one of the weakest skills for mage. It’s very hard to scale it into endgame. It’s ok for early campaign but quickly falls off. If you had taken lightning blast, for example, there you’d have more viable options within the skill, since LB is a very good skill. Many other skills work this way, but sadly you still have too many skills that are badly balanced and will only work with a certain setup, if at all.
GD has had 10 years to balance their skills properly (much like PoE1 did) and that makes it so that most skills are viable (also, there aren’t that many transformation options for each). Not to mention that GD is a single player game, that changed very little outside of expansions every few years, so it’s easier to balance.
LE will still need a few years before they get there. And they’re currently not doing a good job of it, leaving weak underpowered skills like fireball unchanged for a long time and strong broken builds like ballista mostly unchanged as well.
Yeah. I watch some gameplay videos of different builds. Despite their power, there’s not much in them that appeals to me.
I partly agree regarding GD. They initially chose a simple and logical formula. However, with the release of the expansion, many veteran players discovered that the whole game had changed significantly and old builds would no longer work.
Ok that is weird. I think LE was and still is the single best ARPG of all for “just go in blind and do whatever you want” and still have acceptable levels of success.
If some stuff you put together “didn’t work”, what do you mean by that? They were completely non functional or just didn’t clear as efficient/fast as you would want?
LE is still to this day the game for me personally where I feel the least pressure to play “meta”.
It is really hard to explain how you have to much trouble with finding decently performing builds.
The only explanation I have would be that your bar of “good enough” is extremly high and thus most stuff you do on your own just doesn’t work good enough for you, but I don’t wanna speculate on that.
Could you give more specific details about some setupts that you tested and were nto statisfied with? Was it a pure numbers thing or what was the main issues? damage? survivability? Did you just tweak skill spec trees or passives?
It’s always about the scale.
You cannot avoit it without causing a game to feel ‘generic’ through and through.
But you can cull it to a reasonable amount, which is not the case simply.
This is not an objective measure. Do you mean complete the campaign? Normal monos? 100c? 300c? 500c? 1,000c? “Acceptable levels of success” is going to differ for different people & given his comments about D3, I suspect he’s going to view higher corruption as “acceptable”.
Did you even read the rest of my post… sometimes I really think you just want to comment for the sake of commenting
Please share your build or describe your situation more.
Personally, I think LE is amazing for just going in blindly and still having decent levels of success (I personally defeated Aberroth on one of my first homebrewed builds, I just had to grind a lot and try a few times - defeating THE endgame story boss is to me at least an amazing success!).
What content do you expect to clear?
How long have you experimented and refined your build?
What items do you have? What type of damage are you trying to scale and how do you go about it?
Without details, your post is sadly just an opinionated rant.
No way. It will force me to delete this game 
I’m not denying sloppy work parts. This game gives many options to step over dead ends like underpowered skill/node, bugged unique affix etc
For the record in season 4 I have dumped at least 5 builds on in-game prototype stage because of bugs/synergy issues. But 18 homebrew offmeta(more ot less) builds successfully reached 1000+ corruption (boss+harbinger and omen window requirements)
So, lets say 75-80% chance of success, good, not brilliant. But it is fun in process. Process that doesn’t really exist in D3-like simplified skill system
But look, this is a game about farming, and you, as the player, should be the one choosing what your gameplay looks like. Or have you still not realized that what you are allegedly striving for is just padding out the game with the illusion of choice? I just don’t understand your brain chemistry—your serotonin and dopamine levels—to look past the main issues instead of helping developers by pointing them out. Instead, you’re blindly grasping at straws.
The game does give you choices. Most skills work fine for endgame (ignoring Ubby) and allow you to customize them in several different ways. You picked Fireball which is one of the few that are currently so underpowered that there are no ways to scale it into endgame, and you’re judging the whole game by it.
You are not familiar with me, my numerous bugreports, my unanswered questions to devs, my complains in 400ppl TG ru chat and - for shure - with my brain chemistry
You sound like you’re not smart enough to figure that stuff out buddy. Do as 50% of the others do which is follow a build guide. Then you can shut your little brain off and just enjoy the game. Some people arnt leaders they are followers little bro 
.
Leaders need followers just as much. If everyone were a “leader” then who would they lead?
. That’s something a follower would say.
Are you an alpha bro? Do you keep track of Tate? Cause you sound like it.
To put it in a way that maybe you’ll understand: If no used guides ever, no one would write guides ever.