Nice in theory, awkward in practice. I have some pics (on PC) where all place is covered after avoiding Aby’s big beams. Also sometimes he prefer a center to stand before bam… 
It’s been a year I blocked abomb, So all I can see is the thread title, in which he says there is NO build diversity.
And judging by everyone’s responses to him, the rest of the thread is the same babbling all over, a year later:
- “A build is only good if it can kill the pinnacle boss, because the game starts at 1000c, and everyone who disagrees shall be blocked” - AbombDaChamp
So, even after a whole year, he’s still wrong. Guess blocking him was the right call…
I honestly don’t even know why people keep engaging again and again… We all know what he has to say, and what he will respond to us if we interact… So, why bother?
This is the second most interacted with post this week, and it’s only a day old… Don’t give him his Pearls of the Swine.
TBF, it’s been a while they last talked about this… this was way before they even announced 1.2 release.
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No, Mike was asked about it in the hype streams before release (about 2-3 weeks before season 2 started) and he said the same thing again.
Although, as I mentioned, he did say, as he always says, that 300c is what they consider a successful build. Which means any below 300c isn’t successful, so 300c is the minimum all builds should achieve.
In 1.0 they said that builds doing 1k+ meant they made a mistake, which meant 1k was the maximum they should do, but they’ve since dropped it. Or, at least, I haven’t seen anything regarding that.
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Both the Cone Shaped Vaccum and the Laser can also be controlled where they go.
It is all about positioning the boss and yourself relative to the boss.
I have done hundreds of Aberroth and I can comfortable tell you, you can have very clean last phases. I personally think the last phase is perfectly desgined.
If you don’t do the fight properly it is increbily hard, but once you understood and did the fight very well the last phase is actually the most easy phase out of all.
Also to keep all of this on topic: Any build can do the fight mechanically. it is all about player skill not the build iteself.
Tbh that sorta tracks actually. 300c being minimum feels right, if your build cant even do normal aberroth its kinda cooked frankly.
And plenty of builds the majority id say with enough juice can probably make it from anywhere from 600c to 1000c. And anything past 1000c is kinda extreme. A build doing 2k is something id sorta go “oh thats kinda crazy” 1000c is when it starts to be where builds hit a limit on tank or damage and cant really solve a way to keep going. its only a few outliers that climb well past 1000c.
But then again corruption scaling is… not linear in how hard it is to achieve so it also makes things… weird.
like going from 100c to 200c is going from 60% more damage to 169% more damage, that means monsters do 68% more damage. if you are getting 1 shot, you need to get 68% more ehp to survive or something similar, where as going from 1000 to 1200 is 1079% more to 1314% more, is only 19% more damage, you gain 200 corruption while only needing to improve ability to take a hit 19%
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There’s a lot of build diversity in LE, once you get the super dooper drops at least. I take the Aberroth items I get from paladin and use them on C tier builds and they do great. The kicker is you need a meta build to start, then you can do just about anything you want to.
Yeah, we disagree.
I understand your perspective. Really, I get it. And I agree with a lot of your points.
But I think the very concept of what a ‘good builds’ is, is either a collective decision (which is, yes, often just what is popular) or is a bar the game set itself via a max-difficulty.
In a game with infinite scaling, it’s always just a collective decision. And, invariably, folks start talking about how other people find their fun/like to think of the game as being wrong, and I just tune out. It just becomes different versions, “I like playing this way, and viewing the game this way, and if you view it differently you are doing it wrong”.
Do I like a somewhat arbitrary decision to redefine what ‘good’ is? Well, I did say;
Lowering the cap, aka redefining what ‘good’ means to be ‘good enough’, does bother me. It frees the developer to get a build ‘good enough’, and stop. But then I think, "shouldn’t that be ok? Shouldn’t ‘good enough’ be ok? How much do we require of the developer in revisiting old builds? Don’t we want the developer to be free to spend more time on content and less time on balance? Part of me says NO, because MY class isn’t most powerful yet (and I roll my eyes at myself).
The really weird thing is that both camps are kind of saying that in different ways.
You are saying, “it’s good enough already, players just suck”. But then you also say, ‘munchkin gamers’, and that turns me off. I just find players making judgements about how other players play, or what they find fun, … pointless.
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Clearly. But could you elaborate on your point?
You say:
Which is what I disagree with the most.
The game currently has (random made up numbers to make the point) 500 possible builds, of which 400 are viable (meaning 300c+) and 50 are good (meaning 1k+).
If you cap at 500c, you’ll have 500 possible builds, of which 400 are viable and 250 are good.
Build diversity didn’t change, viable builds didn’t change, only the number of good builds changed. Nothing else did.
I think we mostly disagree because you’re sort of on Abomb’s camp where build diversity is only the sum of good builds, not the sum of total builds or even viable ones.
Ya, agree. It’s not about Abomb, it’s about what the community that talk about the game decides is a good build. If the game had a cap, that cap would be the base-level to ‘good’, and then speed to max, speed to clear, all those things would be build differentiators. But dick-measuring conversations are always going to happen, so what?
Players that just want to do their own thing, good on you, I say! You do you, proudly. But if you are that kind of player, I think you are going to be unhappy in a conversation about build power (and what makes a good build).
But, that said, words mean something and words are shaped by a community/society, and for us all to understand each other, what the community says a word means, is what a word means.
In this community, 300c is a crappy build, regardless of what the Devs sort of said a year ago. As power creeps, definitions will creep.
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As a person who plays more casually than the OP, I think build diversity is pretty good. Of course, they’d think I’m not rational, because I’m okay with a build only being able to clear 300C if it looks fun enough. And there are so many people who are far more casual than I am. I am of the view that a build is viable if I’m able to get to empowered monoliths, progress somewhat, and have fun with it. I think it’s fair to even include normal Aberroth into what a successful build should be able to do.
I do understand that there are people who need to clear pinnacle content. But don’t push your narrow view of what’s viable onto the rest of the LE community, please.
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I was brief because I don’t know if a can explain it to you. You are so passionate about this game, and I respect that, that I feel like it’s hard to have a dispassionate conversation with you.
Imagine game X. In game X, there is max difficulty of Insane (say, Easy, Medium, Hard, Hell, Insane). 20% of the builds can do Hell, but only 1% of the builds can do Insane.
If you get rid of Insane difficulty, now 20% of the builds can do max level. Previously, it was 1%.
In both cases the game has defined what a ‘good build’ is - it’s a build that can do max difficulty. When we removed Insane, we simply forced a new definition of what a ‘good build’ is.
I think why this is so difficult for you is because you have a definition of what a ‘good build’ is in LE. … Question I want you to ask yourself; How do you feel about anyone that doesn’t share that same definition?
For me, the definition of a ‘good build’, in a game without it’s own definition of good build, is the community consensus. And it seems to me that that is 1000c.
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I think you’re missing the point. No one was ever arguing about “good builds” here. We’re arguing about “build diversity” and “viable builds”. These are different definitions.
Build diversity is simply the amount of possible builds in the game.
Viable builds are usually player defined and they are currently defined as 300c with possibly also doing normal Aby.
But Abomb always says that if a build isn’t a top tier build, it’s not viable. Like I quoted back there:
He simply dismisses (and insults) people in a discussion and states “facts” that are clearly wrong.
So if he had simply done a thread about how there’s little diversity at the top endgame of content, this thread wouldn’t have happened the way it did. Because most people that are now arguing with him would have agreed with that.
What we all argue about is the statement that “Builds that can’t do all the endgame content (1k+) simply don’t count, are trash and no one wants to play them”.
Because it has been shown time and again that many players (most of them, quite likely) don’t actually care about that and will play a build that can only do 300c.
So those builds are viable and they are part of the build diversity. They’re just not part of the “good endgame builds” diversity. Which is not the same thing.
And we argue passionately about this because any new player that might be looking into LE and sees a statement like this would go “Oh, I’m not going to play this game if I can only play 4 or 5 builds”, when this is clearly untrue.
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I disagree. I think there can’t be a conversation about build diversity without a definition of a good build.
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Again, how can you disagree with that? Build diversity literally means “How many builds there are in a game”. It’s not a subjective fact.
If you review an unbalanced game, you say “It has a lot of build diversity, but only a few of them are good”.
Defining what a good build is is simply shifting builds around from “non viable”, “viable” and “good”. But the build diversity (total number of available builds) doesn’t change.
EDIT: What you are talking about isn’t “build diversity”. It’s simply “build balance”. And yeah, it should be discussed. But using the correct terms matter.
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Came back to add this;
That is your definition. It’s not in a dictionary. Quick glance there is only this reddit post in google; https://www.reddit.com/r/ARPG/comments/vnkucy/what_is_build_diversity_in_your_opinion/
My definition of ‘build diversity’ is the number of good builds across all classes/archetypes/playstyles (of character, not player).
Does anyone spend time talking about how many crappy builds there are in a game? No, because, depending on game complexity, it could be infinite. Does anyone talk about how many ‘meh’ builds there are in a game? I don’t. It’s not what I’m talking about when I’m talking about build diversity.
Do I play non-good builds? Sure, I make them all the time. Do I look down on my nose at people that only play the good builds? No, everyone defines their own fun.
It’s just better we don’t have conversation about this, I think. For me, if I’m talking about build diversity, I’m talking about the number of good builds in the game AND about the number of different classes/archetypes/playstyles that have good builds.
If your definition of build diversity is different than that, of course we’re going to disagree.
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It is in a dictionary, though:
Diversity:
the condition or fact of being different or varied; variety:
So “build diversity” is the condition of having different or varied builds. It has no relation to quality. It’s a numerical objective value.
In LE? A lot, actually. Because a crappy build can still be fun to play. Even when it can’t do endgame. You’ve seen a lot of examples like that already in this thread.
Neither do we look down our nose on them. But Abomb does. As you’ve seen already, dismissing people as being irrational or as not counting as players.
That is why these seasonal discussions with him escalate the way they do (which is, I believe, your initial question on this thread).
Like I said, if he wanted to have a discussion around build balance and the amount of builds available for endgame, this thread would be 10x smaller. Because most people would agree with him.
But it’s not. And becuse he’s an arrogant, self centered and insulting player, it will always keep on escalating.
And also because he doesn’t actually want to discuss anything and refuses to change his mind, but that is already another topic.
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balance issues
We’re not disagreeing about the word ‘diversity’, we’re disagreeing about the phrase ‘build diversity’, specifically in relation to video games.
I already stated what my definition was. I think your definition is more like … build combinations? Mathematically possible number of build combinations? In a game with random loot, that’s pretty large. I just don’t see the value in talking about the design space of builds in a video game. “Large”, I think would be the only thing I had to say about it. Unless it was Super Mario 
Distinct build combinations. Random loot doesn’t matter. If you have 2 characters with the exact same skills, the gear (outside of skill changing uniques) doesn’t matter.
A Hammer Throw build with all exalted gear is the same as a similar one that is using rares. It’s 1 build.
However, a bleed hammer is a different build to a void dot hammer.
So it’s basically the total number of combinations between skills and their variations (including uniques changing skills) that allows you to play the game (meaning that a combination that has only buff skills isn’t a build, since you need to actually kill mobs, and a combination with only 5 DPS skills isn’t a build either because you won’t be using all 5).
But why would you change the meaning of words when words already have meaning attached to them?
Diversity means being different or varied. So “build diversity” already fits well with “How many different builds can I have in the game?”.
Balance (in the context of a game like this) means “offset or compare the value of (one thing) with another.”. So “build balance” already fits with “How many builds are actually good, how many are viable and how many are non-functional?”.
Why would you create ambiguity by using one expression to signify the meaning that is already used by another?
I think this whole argument we had (me and you, personally, not the general overall one with Abomb) was simply because of this semantic ambiguity.
Because if you want to talk about build balance, then yeah, I agree with you. We first need to define what is a good build (since the definition of a viable one seems to be pretty clear to most players).
I would even argue that we need to create a distinction between good builds (which I’d define as being able to do 700c and maybe have a shot at Uby) and elite builds (which I’d define as 1k+ and chain deleting Uby).
And I have no issues discussing that with you because, unlike Abomb, you don’t dismiss the fact (and the people themselves) that plenty of people don’t care about good builds and just want to have fun even if it’s a 300c viable build.