Huh? What the hell are you talking about? He asked the question, then proceeded to give an answer himself. I gave an alternate anwer. There was nothing stated other than:
Which is subjective. So I provided my point of view and what appears to be the point of view of Mike/EHG.
Where’s your evidence for this though? The Arena is an endurance test more than it is a test of skill and outside of that there’s no real Leaderboard/Rankings.
For example, in FFXIV I mained Bard. I considered myself an ok-ish player but I consistently parsed in the top 25% (depending on the fight) of all Bards who ever attempted that same fight in the same patch and had their logs uploaded. I had a few Orange parses (95-98 percentile, top 2-5%) and I definitely had runs where I Blue parsed (50-74 percentile, top 26-50%) but the majority of my clears were Purple parses (75-94 percentile, top 6-25%), this means that most of the time I was better than at least 75% of all Bard players (again, who had logs uploaded) on that fight. But I have evidence for this, it wasn’t just a feeling that I had.
So, I ask again, how could you possibly know, for sure, that you’re in the top 10-20% of all players?
I had this idea of a “Herald of the Spicy Curry”-Meme-Build with fire earthquake and squirrels for melee fire damage. I didn’t look deep into the idea yet, though.
While there are no synergies with fire damage on the primalist’s passive tree, there is melee damage, shared damage, and minion damage, attack speed, crit and crit multiplier, the aspects…
LOL, you need to read and retain more if you are going to give Kulze so much attitude.
So Kulze was talking about this part
So I ask and answer because I don’t want Llama to think I’m trying to trick him into some answer. I’m trying to define for myself, and see if Llama agrees, that ‘can clear all 300c bosses’ is a reasonable metric for ‘decent build’.
Then, it occurs to me that the driver of the build matters a fair amount. So I say,
Which is what Kulze is responding to.
Then, you respond,
Even though I’ve already said we’re considering in terms of an average player. I know! I know! Usually I type too much, but this one is on you.
Then you sass Kulze something fierce with
Are you having a rough week?
I don’t care if this is decent or not, it’s awesome! 
I literally quoted just the “So what’s the bar for a ‘decent’ build?”.
But even if you were to consider in terms of an “average player”, the answer still won’t change. It depends on the player. Whether he’s an altoholic or someone that focuses on a couple of builds. There is no “average player” for that metric. You’re either one or the other. And each will have different goals and objectives. Especially regarding what is a decent build, since both have very different metrics for that.
So, to summarize, I was giving my opinion on a decent build. You’re the one that went into detail giving your opinion and saying that it should consider the player skill (which I personally don’t agree with). But even considering player skill, my answer is still valid.
blah blah blah, you aren’t going to apologize to Kulze for your tude, are you?
Actually, this is tude to me as well. I explained why I asked the question, and then why I was answering. Twice. You are having a bad week, aren’t you?
I honestly don’t see why both of you want to escalate this. You asked a question. You gave your own opinion on that answer, which is perfectly valid. I also gave my opinion on the question, which didn’t take into account the parameters you set for yours, because it’s my opinion and my opinion doesn’t have those parameters.
I simply expected more people to also give their opinions on the question. You know? The one that had a prominent position by being at the top of the post and being it’s own paragraph?
Seriously, I don’t see how you think I’ve been rude to you by answering your question. I mean, you literally say “I’d say that…”, meaning it’s your opinion (one I don’t share).
You really need to re-read what was posted. You’re just flat out wrong here. Or don’t. It’s all good.
That said, I’m starting to feel more and more like you are just completely unable to admit you’re wrong, so I’ll probably be reducing my interaction with you. I have tried to make light of it, but when you just completely ignore what I type, and when I call you out on it you tell me how that doesn’t matter because you’re really right. Ooookay.
I think there’s a misunderstanding from my part, yours, or, more likely, both. So I’ll explain how I’m vieweing the whole thing (bolded parts for relevance):
You started with:
Then on the next paragraph you start with:
Which, to me, means you’re giving your opinion on the question you posed.
And in the next paragraph you state:
Which to me indicates you’re just continuing your opinion.
So I read the post, I read your opinion on the question you posed and then I posted my point of view on that question. Which you’ll note is the only part of your post I quoted. Because I was just giving my opinion on what is a decent build.
Then Kulze (and then you) started saying my opinion is apparently wrong because I’m not talking about the correct question?
That is my point of view of this whole thing so far. So now I’d like to know yours, so I can understand this better and hopefully clear this misunderstanding.
Just Chiming in as an unbiased third party. I read the thread in this way as well.
Because the average player is not dedicated to gaming. I am an avid gamer though, it is my main hobby at which I pass time when I’m able to since I was a wee little thing and while my reflexes definitely have gone to shit over the course of the years I still remain quite above average in intelligence (luckily or unluckily, it has side effects after all) which means I do learn stuff quick when I want to.
Those things in combination give me an advantage over many other people already. Then you can also consider that I’m generally fairly high in leaderboards in nigh every game I pick up after a short while, LE for example having been a cakewalk overall, experience in diablo-clone games to boot on top and Aberroth killed in 2 tries (with the first dieing from his AoE effect as I had not looked up what he can do).
Not to speak of me keeping track of my own record in general for each genre… for example FPS: 35 percentile roughly. Factory-games 5% or possibly higher (If you beat Factorio with Bob’s + Angel’s mods on expanded science you got to be masochistic enough to stay through it), survival games generally around 15%, Diablo clones usually roughly 20-25%, Metroidvanias around 10-15%.
Playtime, learning time and overall success when comparing myself to streamers, influencers on Youtube, personal social environment and leaderboards put together to get a as comprehensive as possible picture.
I have no possible fixed metric to compare myself to others in LE since it’s fairly much missing… but I would be surprised if it varies substantially from the norm I see otherwise.
The 50% in 3 tries was the depiction of ‘the average gamer overall’ and hence what was described as ‘a decent build’ further to achieve that.
Which limits our options a wee bit I would say, and I have to agree with @TyphonBaan you missed the whole argumentation line quite a bit there 
Since as you said:
as @TyphonBaan states it would be a reasonable suggestion to see it as the 50% of players in 3 tries for non-aspirational content.
Which means:
That it doesn’t anymore.
50% is a quantified thing, it’s the exact middle cut of how successful a player with a specific build generally is. Which means you remove the especially active people (majority of the Forum or Reddit) and add a vast amount of ‘silent players’ at the lower level.
Active representation is vastly skewed and always was since you need to expend energy to engage with something beyond the baseline.
Many people drive cars… not many modify them or talk about them in comparison.
Same situation with gaming.
There is, it’s not statistically quantified yet though, possible fairly easily on the other hand and done in other games (welcome PoE, GGG does keep track of such stuff in the background, based on play-time per league, overall play-time, builds chosen, play-time per build and so on and so forth)
It’s impossible not to consider player-skill.
Human capability is a mandatory measurement to derive a meaningful outcome as… well… hopefully a human is behind that character. Hence it has to be taken into consideration obviously.
You can give a 90 year old granny who’s never held a mouse or controller in her life the best character imaginable with item drops where RNGesus and Lootius shine their blessed gaming-light onto her and she won’t be able to beat the campaign in any reasonable timeframe.
In comparison you can give a crap character into the hands of a 10 year old gamer prodigy and that kid will blow your mind and make anything seem ‘feasable’.
So yes, it’s a mandatory aspect.
I explained what was actually meant since Lama went ahead saying it a arbitrary definition… so a definition was given and then ignored it wholeheartedly. Obviously you’re called out for that
What’s escalating there? You’ve either missed something or you’re hurt in your pride to not be able to admit being wrong, because your argumentation doesn’t uphold at all.
It’s fine, your logic line wasn’t very logical, happens at times. Let it rest, we don’t need a ‘we found a consensus’ situation again despite there being anything but that happening.
Well, it’s not wrong.
It just doesn’t follow the formerly stated logical progression, the definition has been derived from something after all.
So that’s what’s being worked with here.
Now my question is: If that definition is not fitting… which part hence?
That a player-skill level has to be taken into consideration is a must, the 50% range? Not necessarily.
A corruption level as a end-goal also has to be taken into consideration, 300 or something else? Also open.
And also the difficulty the player faces at this stage is another marker which is mandatory… breezing through without issue? Finding it hard and challenging at the time? Being at the limit already? Also up to decide.
But since the argumentation was deemed beforehand as ‘arbitrary’ the range of the definition was severely limited by @TyphonBaan for a reason… so it can’t be ignored, at best you can argue that the definition should be adjusted to something different… otherwise there is no basis since the need for stricter defined states was stated, accepted and adhered to.
But… None of those genres have metrics to compare you to everyone else either! Maybe some FPS games do that I’m not aware of, I suppose something like Elo in LoL could work if the game implements it. I know for a fact factory games don’t have that and beating a hard modded difficulty isn’t an accurate measurement tool as what constitutes being “good” at factory games? You could have beaten that modded factorio, sure, but did you do it optimally or did you brute force it? (this is rhetorical ), we also know that Diablo-clones don’t typically keep a metric to compare yourself to others, and neither do metroidvanias.
So your “record” is as solid as me saying that I’m in the top 5% of all Kingdom Hearts players and in the top 15% of all Ratchet and Clank players. BTW, I made those numbers up because there’s no possible way for me to know where I rank.
P.S. I hope you know I’m mostly just giving you a hard time.
As I mentioned, and apparently you don’t clear up, the way I read the whole thing (and apparently I wasn’t alone in that) was simply him asking a question and giving his opinion on that question. The whole 50% thing was part of that opinion and not part of the question.
But even if you take the 50% thing, you apparently don’t understand that it still depends on the type of player. A altoholic will have different goals than someone that focuses on a single character. What is 50% average between that? Someone that focuses on 3.5 characters? You’re using the same metric to talk about different things.
So you might use the 50% metric to determine the quality of the build, since you’re both so determined to make it a part of the question, but you still have to separate your metrics into different parts depending on the type of player, so that a decent build for a altoholic would be one where 50% of altoholics can do whichever metric they follow.
Lastly, I’ll also disagree with you that 50% is a quantified thing because you have no way to measure it. Can 50% of the players defeat Aberroth with ballista? Do you have any way of determining that?
As I explained in my previous post, all that was given was an opinion on the question asked. Never was it said something like “so from this point forward, let’s us all consider the 50% metric as a baseline for the question”.
I even broke down his post. After the question he follows with “I think” and “I’d say”. All indicative of providing an opinion. And apparently I’m not the only one interpreting it that way.
So maybe Typhon’s intention was to set the 50% as baseline, but that wasn’t apparent in the way he posted. Much like in the other thread, it looks like it wasn’t apparent what I was trying to say and he interpreted it in a different way.
It’s not about being right or wrong, but of reading something with different interpretations, apparently, or of not expressing that interpretation in a clear way.
With this I just meant that you can’t consider player skill because you can’t quantify what is the “average player skill”. We don’t have data or metrics to quantify this. All we can do is offer what we feel is this average, which is completely subjective.
No offense, but I think looking too closely at the gear is a misunderstanding (that makes a lot of victims), and that’s what leads to frustration.
With the exception of uniques bringing in special mechanics (usually clearly mentionned by the guide creator), the gear is not part of the build. It is an exemple of something to aim for in the very long run, but it is not needed: you can play the same build without it.
Odds are anyway that you will never get exactly the same items as the streamer, with all the same affixes and bases (hence the frustration).
Build guides are here to give you ideas about skills and passives synergy. The vast majority of them CAN be played while levelling, at least something extremely similar that you tweak slowly as you find more powerful gear.
To be fair to Baal, many builds don’t actually mention this. They just present the build as what you should use and don’t even mention either which uniques are mandatory or alternatives for the ones that aren’t.
It would be nice if they all did, but I’d say it’s a 50/50 chance that they do.
The devs would agree. Personally, my “standards” are a bit lower.
I’m not entirely convinced that player skill is too important on where the bar is for what constitutes a “decent” build. It kinda does 'cause a high/average/low skilled player would likely achive higher corruption with a good/op/whatever build than a bad/underpowered/whatever build. But that also feels, to me, like an argument as to why player skill is irrelevant as to what determins a good/bad/indifferent build.
Yeah, but speedrunning the basic game is 
Also having an unfair advantage since I’m a electronics engineer and automation and electronics is literally one of the jobs I learned which I still have big interest in. If you build a friggin CPU while condensing signals through multiplexing then I would imagine you’re faaaairly high up in the metrics there if anyone ever provides one
A lot of options to discern your standing compared to others in the other genres as well btw, Metroidvanias also speedrunning and memorization of pathways/item/unlocks, survival games have often public servers or also tournaments, FPS are self-explanatory (And to be fair probably not 35% anymore after how long I haven’t touched a single one and not been in the mood for it either).
But:
I would say the live-service ones actually provide fairly decent ways to compare yourself, especially since quite a few of the top-tier players tend to stream while putting in their unhealthy amount of hours in any tournament or new league/cycle/whatever.
Skill is the metric… what are you even talking about?
Is being a altoholic making you better or worse at the game? 
Playstyle has nothing to do with quality of a build, not a single thing. At best we can differentiate between type of content where a build shines or doesn’t shone.
Hence saying ‘Good for bosses, bad for Arena, mid for monolith’ for example. Not a single person cares about the ‘playstyles’ of people as it’s not a viable metric to use and nonsensical to boot.
No, Aberroth it at best a 5-10% thing overall in the first place. You seem to misunderstand how the metric works.
You take all players which have a minimum play-time (which is up for you to decide to get a as influence-less metric as possible) to remove ‘I tested it’ people.
That provides you hence with a picture of ‘overall level’ of players.
Then you split it up into any other metrics you want to have. Classes, builds, content.
Yes, PoE actually does that internally, it’s known they do all that for quality control and balance of their content. And partially the community has been given information of parts over the years as well, not the full picture though… but more then enough to discern how well people do.
So yes, there’s ways to determine that, even if it’s old data by now.
We don’t have it specifically for LE… but we can draw comparisons from the other game which did provide metrics to the community over the course of the years.
Yep, but otherwise it’s ‘arbitrary’ as Lama created the notion for, hence your argument is by design ‘arbitrary’ if you don’t provide the relevant metrics.
Could be right… could be wrong… but you got no way to know and anyone can simply say ‘Nah, not true’ or ‘I agree’ without a basis.
Hence why it went to be more detailed with the probably metrics in mind, since we lack details about the exact metrics there is no possibility to even discuss that, we can only guess… but the range of outcome gets reduced.
Not in this game.
PoE provides that luckily given the percentile of Steam achievements as well as a lovely one which states how many beat the campaign and how many went through Act 1 even 
So from there… yes… yes we can discern it, and it’s unlikely to be vastly different from any other game of the genre percentile wise. You increase it accordingly the more ‘casual’ the game becomes as it takes less time to achieve the same thing, then adjust that a bit since the attention span of players pulled in my more casual games is also generally a bit less. In other genres we’ve seen this method to hold true and provides at least a rough measurement.
No, but being an altoholic gives you different goals/objectives. Most altoholics consider a decent build is getting to empowered monos. Or low corruption. They don’t care about 300c or Aberroth.
On the other hand, a competitive player will only consider a build decent if it can reach 1k+ (as can be seen by multiple posts on this forum).
So you’re trying to quantify a build to fit into a definition that changes depending on the player.
I will give you that your quantification method can be used to determine the effectiveness of a build. But you can’t ignore playstyle when playstyle is a huge part on what a player will consider “decent”.
Even with your more “detailed metrics” it’s still arbitrary. Not just because the numbers you came up with are themselves arbitrary (why 50% of players in 3 tries? Why not 100% of players in 5? Or 50% in 5? Or 100% in 10 tries, which is the number of Aberroth keys that are guaranteed?), but because you have no way of assessing if any build can complete 300c in 3 tries by 50% of the players.
No it doesn’t. Almost no game gives you metrics for what you’re proposing here.
PoE gives you the metric for how many people completed a certain content with ANY build. So you can’t even use PoE to determine if build X can do Uber Maven in 3 tries by 50% of the players. All you can determine is how many have done Uber Maven as a percentage, nothing else.
Which means that even in PoE you also can’t determine if any single build is “decent” using your metric.
EDIT: This is why I only tried to answer the original question “What makes a build ‘decent’?”. And I tried to provide different points of view according to playstyles. Because it’s a subjective term depending on the player and playstyle and you can’t quantify it, even using arbitrary metrics.