Hey man, you’re talking to a guy who used to write combat simulators for the MMOs I played. We are both of us preacher and choir.
Sure, and that’s totally cool! People should feel free to dick around in spreadsheets as much as they want if that’s how they like to engage with the game. But nobody should feel like the risk of making a build that’s garbage is so high that they have to become a spreadsheet lord just to enjoy the game.
But that is exactly what I want to avoid, people calling certain skills “viable” and other not based of some arbitrary number thresholds.
I totally get the idea of wanting to min-max a build and without such tools it sometimes is a lot trickier to figure out if setup/item A or setup/item B is better.
But the potential negative effects outweight the positive effects IMO.
If you want to know if a certain skill is good or bad, just play it and test it.
You think that doesn’t happen already? That horse has already bolted, won the Grand National, sired many equally exceptional horses & been made into glue & Findus hamburgers.
Only to a certain extend.
Right now its very ambiguous (in a good way) if you compare different builds with each other, because there are very few good metrics to measure performances.
Once we get a couple more things that can be used as metrics (more pinnacle bosses with fixed scaling), that will be enough to serve how good or bad a build is IMO.
No clue what the rest of your post means 
I agree with everyone, including the op.
I like POB, I don’t have a problem with it but now I just want a sheet to save my char offline, without needing to save a url on a internet favorites
There is a lot of assumptions that PoB is the reason that “Minmax” is so sought after and that people just use it and dont play builds if a build isnt up to snuff.
And while thats true, even I do it. I wont play a build if its PoB numbers are bad. but the caveat is how you use the tool. I look at the build with no gear on, if it can reach acceptable damage before I put on gear, then it means I have a starting point. I also plan my builds only up to say level 80, which is 1-2 days of play.
After that, the real fun of PoB starts. Where you are level 94, import and start looking at how you can respec to get some damage or defense etc. Pulling items from trade to go “oh if I get this ring I get 10% dps AND can respec 5 points out of health while keeping the same hp” etc.
I think if someone boots up pob, creates a level 97 minmaxed character with all gear and goes “oh yikes only X dps” they are using the tool wrong and getting jebaited by the numbers.
A lot of the problem is as arpgs age and there is more minmax/content its not really as simple as “just try out skill X to see if it works” because then you get players who try skill X have a terrible time, and just give up after 50 hours of floundering. if they can see how to make skill X atleast viable to start with at a ground level, they are more likely to try and stick with it to make it work.
Tools dont have to be the be all end all of builds, as tbh its already for LE really easy to calculate the dps of a given skill, or EHP without the tools. And build makers already use catchy thumbnails and “le gasp 2mill dps!!!” etc.
Tldr; A tool is what you make of it, and more tools never hurt.
This is the point entirely and seemingly contradicting yourself, if you looked at my Lake of Kalandra Inquisitor on poeninja you would say my DPS was extremely low (500k) but im using Blazing Salvo which damage is per projectile and shoots 9 and also isnt taking into account other calcs like Brittle/Sap
So while it says 500k its more like 8-10M DPS.
yeah this is the only reason for PoB to exist
The first part you took it out of context. I plan my builds with no gear, if my character cant scale with basically just life res gear damage wise out of the gate, or with a cheap unique weapon, that means I as a player most likely wont find it fun. for example if I boot up a self cast arc character who with two crafted +1 lightning wands and no influenced gear or big purchase uniques has like 200k dps, its probably not gonna be a fun build to play.
This is significantly different then booting up a min maxed 97 arc self caster with 50 divines of investment, seeing it has 3m dps and going “disgusting my explosive trapper would have 500m dps, why would I play this trash?”
I want atleast 500k with league start gear, if not its just gonna be wayyyy too hard to league start that. I mostly play one character a league now, so I really dont wanna have to be stuck or god forbid be forced to reroll because im getting owned in white maps cause I picked a dog water starter.
As for the second part, thats just people not knowing how to use the tool, just like how some people go “look at my 500m dps build” and tick a bunch of random shit they dont have or is situational at best like turning on all your 5 unique flasks 24/7 with pinnacle boss tagged.
I guess if it was that easy, then in-game DPS would be 100% correct for any given skill in any situation… So this is just a completely baseless statement.
Machines have to make certain assumptions, but those assumptions are easier to make by hand.
obviously this gets a bit more sketch when we talk about ailments, but for hit based skills? its pretty straight forward.
DPS is a generic value even under the best of math because that does not account for dps uptime.
if you can do basic math, you can get into a ball park of what the dps of a skill given standing there and casting it is.
Tooltip dps also does not account for “debuffs” which is usually why its lower then real dps. because again, the game has no idea what debuffs are at any given time, but we as humans can assume conditions.
Which is why something like PoB can give you nearly perfect values, because we are able to insert all the conditions we can feasible get.
if you were not aware, @Dammitt is the developer of lastepochtools so i am willing to bet he knows all of this intimately.
Yeah I know, thats why its a weird statement, his own build website is able to calculate the simple things like meteor dps. Because its a really simple function. 
Whats most important to dps a lot of the time is things that just cant be easily assumed automatically, take a skill that overlaps like say meteor with multiple meteors, assuming its dps on say a random skeleton is probably hard, its a very small target. But on something like abomination its much easier for us to assume its dps because we can more easily account for multiple meteors hitting, in some cases even being sure X will hit assuming you aim correctly. Which again, a generic dps machine cant assume player skill or positioning.
Im not saying everyone is out here doing napkin math to prove their dps, but as a math nerd I know ive done dps math by hand for games with more complex formulas then LE or PoE.
What PoB/LEtools are best for is getting your values sorted so you dont have to tally them by hand 
i think you missed the sarcasm in his relpy
no problem myself with tools like PoB or lastepochtools. i use them because i like theorycrafting in arpgs.
dont think that they need to get to PoB levels tho… thats excessive and begs the question… are you playing the game or stuck in the build design process…
i would guess theres no fun in that for most people
“Simple function”? You are just rumbling complete nonsense and apparently have zero idea what is needed and how much time it might take to provide DPS calculations.
I mean I spent several hours to recheck all the nodes in each skill tree (that has DPS support in LE Tools) and how they affect dps, some skills have procs which may be unnamed and without game code (which only devs have) it can be really difficult to determine their actual refs in game.
The main point is - you have to recheck every node of given skill tree, hardcode its data, then adjust DPS calculation depending on what each node does. That’s like couple days of work for a single skill, multiply it by 120 (that’s current number of skill, right?) and then don’t forget to redo most of this for a number of skills each time new major patch is released, because there’s still a lot of balancing changes until 1.0 is released.
The skills I chose are rather simple ones that just do damage, not fake-DoT skills like Disintegrate, multi-proc skills like Tempest Strike, 3-part skills like Umbral Blades or Flurry (which also differs for melee/bows and also has a channelled version as well), I won’t even start describing the issues that you can come up with when trying to determine DPS for transform or minion skills…
Are you assuming my comment was directed at how easy it is to automate it into a tool?
That was not my intent.
im saying if I am playing X skill, I myself can find its dps, or a very close ball park of it. So I can compare that dps to another builds dps.
My line of discussion is around the concept of “once the genie is out of the bottle you cant put it back, and every build will devolve to more dps more better”
Which very much already happens with content creators and people who do math or test on the dummy in game.
Obviously compiling a list of all the builds at once or creating perfect replicas in a tool is a totally different beast, but thats not really what im talking about.
Which feels like our conversation is talking about two different things
A permanent abomination build or a MA build you can get a reasonable ball park of its dps and compare the two builds without the need of a tool, but that does not mean that a tool or one of the builds is unplayable or has no place in the game or even needs to be buffed etc.
tdlr; my only point is that if you wanted to compared the e-peen of dps of builds, there is already so much content out there doing just that, having a tool that does it does not break the illusion or create a rift in community cause anyone who wanted that information can get it already.
It also opens the door for people to create bait builds, by tweaking numbers and calculations that are not realistic with game play.
People pushing builds that are MILLIONS of dps and impossible to kill, only to find out later that its because you have unrealistic modifiers checked in the config options.
Right now LE is pretty easy for me because I’ve seen everything and I’ve beaten everything. There is no need to show any kind of dps for a skill right now because you can play up to empowered timelines in all T3 gear and have an easy time. The game get’s a bit harder on empowered timelines but you can still handle it. Minmaxing takes place if you push corruption and you can still go to 100-300 corruption with not minmaxed skill without one unique and without higher then T5 affixes.
This might change if there will ever be a realy hard endgame but I think LE will stay in it’s tracks and cater the skill middleground rather then the minmaxers.
This discussion is so funny to me, that’s totally PoE mindset. This is a tank game, the worst skills DPS wise can still get the job done, because the best setups do 10x more damage than needed.
In the reality your end up squeezing every affix to a more defensive setup if possible, same with blessings.
Playing cold DoT werebear right now, tops 80-90k ticks, not the best DPS, but tanks everything.
Yes you could do/can still do this with PoE but what the developers have done over the years is add ‘games’ or stupid mechanics to their boss fights which eventually become a ‘hard enrage’ timer so eventually the low DPS characters arena becomes a death trap or they wear you down with games until you fk up
There isnt any of this that I know of in LE but its only a matter of time. Maybe Chronomancer degens stacks but honestly cant remember
I’m no PoE expert but in my experience (played 6 weeks heavily on scourge league and went through most of the content), DPS in very important in that game, you want to keep momentum going so your flasks and buffs have full uptime, also many bosses have DPS check-like mechanics, plus so many normal/rare monsters may have cheap strong attacks, the best answer is to erase them before they can even attack. And so many league mechanics are on timers or build up as time goes, the faster you clear, the better you perform. Also defenses/immunities are very important, but DPS and speed take priority.
In last epoch you can clear most of the game with hit damage (example) doing fast 20k attacks, or fast 100k attacks, clearing mobs won’t make much of a difference in say, 200 corruption, you will notice with beefy elite and rare mobs, but the experience stays mostly the same. Bosses have a DR system the more damage you dish out quickly, more DR they stack, so, while you still clear faster with high DPS, you are soft-discouraged to build high DPS to try to skip boss mechanics. Many skills do build up, but usually build up and wear off quickly, you don’t need to keep de buffs from pack to pack, more DPS is always better, and feels better, but you don’t have a game that screams you to get more DPS in every way possible.
On the other side, what keeps you from going higher corruptions to farm items with better quantity drops, are defenses. Once you get the basics sorted (a healthy HP/ward pool, crit avoid, block/glancing, etc), you will push up for better armor, more HP, better Endurance, more evasion, armour, you will cut from offense to get more defenses in passives, and sometimes skills. You will optimize suffixes with blessings, and better bases, so you can fit in more HP suffixes and idols, you will double/check any source of DR, etc. This is because in monos, while you push corruption past 250-300, you start seeing mods like “enemies have 150% increased elemental/void/physical damage”, and those go through the roof as you climb corruption, if you can’t manage a few offensive mods, your experience will be miserable.