So I love the community, and all the guides people are posting… but something I’ve noticed, and it’s really annoying, is that people are making guides for builds that don’t seem very strong, but that are using items that are gated behind Abby…
Like, yea… you found a use for your whatever piece of gear in a spec… but you need a more powerful character to be able to farm that piece of gear to use in that spec in the first place.
Please, put some disclaimers on your guides so people who don’t know the game very well don’t start building using your guide, only to find that they can’t complete it without being able to purchase the item in question from MG.
A good example is the new mana stacker helm that is BIS for some classes…
Don’t take this to mean that you shouldn’t post your ideas or guides… but put in some disclaimers in it first, or post some alternate gear that isn’t gated…
You can usually use a different character to get those items from Aby.
And even then you can usually replace the items with other gear and still have a functional build. It’s not BiS, but as far as I know, none of his uniques are mandatory either.
But to the point, most guide creators don’t really frequent the forums. You would be better off just posting on their videos or their build page (for those that have one).
Preface: I am and always was a very strong adversary of build guides.
I think it is natural, that people will try to do content for “new things” that have been added with a new patch, regardless of if this is objectively good or not.
Just because it is not meta and super hyper strong, doesn’t mean its not fun.
So in that sense I really enjoy when seeing people talk about builds and items that are not really meta.
But also I think often times it is not actually the guides creators fault, when people can’t even read and comprehend what the guides says or tries to achieve.
There will always be bad or unconclusive guides as well as there will always be people utilizing guides in a completely wrong and unintended way. So this goes boths ways.
While I never cared for build guides personally, there were quite a few instances where I also was angry at certain guides, how bad they were or how wrong their information was or the other way around how people critique a guide in a way that doesn’t even make sense, because they didn’t even read into it themselfs.
So I personally prefer a world in which a plethora of build guides for all kinds of things exist and serves as a source of inspiration.
People should never use build guides as the means to all end and rather as a inspiration for their own builds.
On top of that many items that are BiS are not necessarily build enabling, meaning you can totaly do something very similar with rare/exalted gear. Ther are some exceptions to this, but the overall amount of build enabling items that are locked behind very high end content is pretty minimal in LE.
Alongside this, most build guides (at least the written ones) have tags for “leveling” or “beginner” or at least a disclaimer about the required gear before you even get into the meat of the build guide itself.
I use them for GD because that games system just doesn’t click with me, which is ironic because Titan Quests does?, so I make my own builds here and tweak them as I go.
Dr3adful here. I have given up on guiding people a long time ago. Sadly the term guide is required in titles for analytical YouTube nonsense that I will not get into here, but usually when I play a build its to just showcase some aspect of the game. I usually end up doing 600-700c which is around the difficulty of Abberoth. Most of the builds I do end up doing Abberoth but its not like a fast kill or anything and people usually don’t like watching a 3 minute (total) Abberoth kill so I usually don’t post them as often. Also Abberoth is entirely cheeseable with a day 1-2 character if you know what you are doing so its not even a build merit to kill him anymore.
I have had used uniques from him before but that’s because I play Merchants Guild characters, and when you pull up my planners they have Merchant’s Guild tags. So if you pull up one of my characters and see that I have a unique only from Abberoth that means I bought it on the auction house because I am not going to spend all day deleting Abberoth in 0.5 seconds with the same Lethal Mirage build to be able to equip another character. I usually don’t kill Abberoth because of this. I save all my keys for a day and I just spend all day in animation purgatory waiting for Abberoth to get eaten over and over again which can just get mind numbing and boring. So that’s why you usually don’t see Abberoth footage from me, because of how polarizing he can be. Most builds either kill him in 30 seconds or take 2-3 minutes, which is a huge difference. I don’t even like showing off 5 second kills because its kinda…pathetic? For the game to already be at this point and its almost embarrassing to show off that part of the game. So those are a myriad of reasons why I don’t show much Abberoth at all.
Edit : I forgot to mention why I gave up on guiding people, and simply put, its not really worth trying to hand hold people through the game for mental health reasons. I can spend hours upon hours trying to hand hold people through the game which never usually matters as people just ignore the entire video and just go play the game until they mess up, then they come back and complain that I did something wrong in some capacity. So that’s why I don’t really spend much time helping newer players, because they are some of the worst audience you can have.
Nice reply. I understand your points. I wish more youtubers would tell the players that they need to understand why the skills/ points/ gear are chosen and to modify them to their situation/ play style and to not just blindly follow the guides.
Honestly, this is a common issue with build guides in many games, not just LE. You have the same problem with PoE, GD, even games like BG3 or Skyrim.
Many PoE build videos/PoBs have gear in there that cost dozens of exalteds without offering alternatives (although some are done properly with several setups to improve to).
This is because most build creators are very experienced players, that have experimented deeply with the game’s mechanics and:
1-many times have a hard time explaining things they consider basic, and
2-don’t want to spend a lot of time in each video explaining the basics over and over again
This is not to say that, in your specific case, they shouldn’t make a disclaimer about that item. I know that many do. For example, in Aaron’s guides he usually will tell you if a unique or legendary is required or not. I know that Maxroll’s guides also do the same.
Most of the time, though, when you see gear for these builds you should look at it as aspirational gear. Other than build defining uniques (and usually those work with 0LP as well), most items can be replaced with weaker versions and the build will still work as well, even if it doesn’t get to as high corruption.
Same. But from time to time I’m answering here with my build links like in Sword themed sentinel thread or about Necro minion’s survival. Or preventing people from mistakes like attempts to make void marksman (build is dead in 1.1)
This is exactly why I don’t put gear in my build planners. I never know what will drop and if I find something that can modify my build in a unique way, I can always adjust the planner after the fact.
