Why there is NO Build Diversity

General
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Because the phrase ‘build diversity’ in the conversations I’ve been in, has always meant, “number of good builds, with a special focus on character types”. Because ‘not your favorite archetype having 20 good builds, and your favorite archetype having only one, and you hate it’s playstyle’, is the opposite of build diversity.

It’s only just meant, “number of good builds”, when I have had conversations about it. Maybe the PoE community talked about it differently? Clearly that is where our disconnect has been. Sorry!

I don’t really spend enough time on these boards to want to get involved in personalities (except I like to talk to you, tease Heavy for being a masochist, and spar with Llama).

There are always going to be blowhards. There are always going to be trolls. But, more gently, there is always going to be someone having a bad day, taking something the wrong way… and often that person is me. :frowning: I just try to do better myself, rather than hold a grudge against someone else. I frequently fail to be kind, and that bothers me.

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That’s fine. I don’t think it’s your fault and it’s probably partly mine as well. I have never really engaged in community discussions in PoE, despite playing it for a long time, so I wouldn’t know their context for it.
But I’ve been on these forums for almost 2 years now and when people refer to build diversity here they mean the total amount of playable (meaning both good, viable and even bad) builds.

Because one of the strongest points that is often highlighted about LE is the way they allow you to customize your skills and use them in different ways, originating in many different builds.
Them being crappy is mostly a balance discussion.

And I will admit that I can get very heated sometimes as well, especially when following discussions about players like Abomb that are completely dismissive of anyone that doesn’t agree with them and aren’t actually looking for a legitimate discussion but just an echo chamber to inflate their ego.
And sometimes that “bleeds over” to replies to other people as well.

So let’s just say that we were both wrong/right, it was just miscommunication. :slight_smile:

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nah, it’s just the season of the tank is all. want the loot? play the tank. want to make a goofy alt and twink em out with abberoth gear? make a tank, hehe :smiley:

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Unfortunately, if you cap the Corruption ceiling, streamers and sweaty players will cry that there’s “no more content to do,” complain, and quit the game noisily - which drives away potential players who only see “game has no content” and “game is dead” complaints from vocal community members. It sucks, but that’s how modern gaming is.

I just find it weird that so many people in this thread call you out for forcing a narrow vision of the game on other players, when all you’re doing is pointing out that OTHER people (mostly streamers and content creators) do that, and that devs like EHG cater to those players because they’re the most vocal community members + they do marketing for the game by streaming and posting their high-end content. A lot of people in this thread actually seem to agree with you that this is a toxic outlook on playing the game. Even if most of the playerbase never actually clears (or even sees) aspirational content like Uberroth or high corruption Fading Brink, many of those players will adopt the views pushed by content creators who farm hype moments and outrage for clicks. Like I said, it sucks. But that’s how modern gaming is.

For a non-Last Epoch example, there’s a ton of outrage in the Warframe community right now over the Valkyr frame getting reworked. The rework seems to realign her with a modern vision of the game, where you have to work for your powerful moments. But it’s also removing her near-permanent invulnerability. This is technically a nerf, and content creators (plus vocal Valkyr players) have been screaming nonstop for the past few weeks about how Digital Extremes is out of touch with its playerbase. While yes, the Valkyr rework technically nerfs her survivability while giving her even more damage (which was not her problem), these nerfs really only affect a tiny minority of the playerbase who does endurance runs to level cap. Yet hordes of players are complaining as if the reworks have ruined the game for them, despite many of them never running content where the rework’s negatives actually matter. Even then, I’m sure the quieter level cap players will make her work. The complaints have highlighted problems with enemy damage scaling (too steep) and with player armor/health scaling (has been crap for over a decade), though. And Warframe’s devs have said that they’ll look into health/armor scaling in the near future. So some good is coming out of the vitriol.

Grinding Gear Games also added Tier 17 maps to Path of Exile 1 last year, allegedly in an attempt to create a bridge between ‘regular’ content and ubers for the majority of the playerbase. The problem is that loot drops in T17 maps are massively better than those in T16 and below. They’re much harder than your average map, too, given that you often can’t reroll all of the bad affixes off of those maps without spending lots of Chaos orbs rerolling them. That compounds with the problem that T17s drop far less than any other map in the game. In the end, T17 maps really just favor the top end players while alienating players who only get to run them every so often (or not at all). Players get discouraged and leave because they want to at least experience the full breadth of PoE1’s content, but can’t.

The thing is, infinite scaling allows players to project their own vision of ‘proper difficulty’ onto the game. You see it happening in this very thread. Plenty of people seem to think 300c is appropriate difficulty. Some people say 500c. Some say 600c. A few say 1000c and Uberroth. Naturally, players will assume that builds which handle the hardest content in the game are the most viable. Because any build that can handle Uberroth can easily do everything else in the game (farming echoes, farming the non-pinnacle bosses), Uberroth-viable builds are the best in the game period. That’s just how tier lists work.

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Sure, any build can do Uberroth mechanically. But it’s going to take ages on an underperforming build (see: Harvest Lich) compared to a meta build that can flatten the boss in 5-6 minutes with decent gear, and under a minute with cracked gear. Lower-tier builds are also heavily punished in Uberroth because less damage means more hazards will build up over time, which means you’ll have a much harder time clearing each phase (let alone clearing the final phase, if you’ve let lots of puddles build up).

Regarding Uberroth’s design, the way I’d characterize the fight is that it has plenty of good ideas going on - but that these good ideas are hampered by poor execution and a janky game engine. Players having full control over where to bait beams, as well as when to phase the boss to maximize damage and to force good fire black hole timing? Mechanics that reward players for phasing the boss in certain quadrants of the arena to maximize Harbinger uptime and to dodge attacks like the phase 2 fire comets and phase 4 necrotic waves? Great! Those are really creative ideas that reward player skill. Bad hitboxes, being rubberbanded back into AoEs after Uberroth charges you, low server tick, super high scaling that favors a select few builds? Practically no startup animation on some of the most dangerous attacks (Ground of Destruction, phase 4 necrotic waves)? Eh, not so great.

For what it’s worth, I’ve cleared all PoE1 ubers. Many of those clears were with distinctly non-meta skills (strike skills like Infernal Blow, Sunder, etc.). I know what pain is. Uberroth, to me, ranks just a little below Uber Sirus and Uber Maven in terms of screen vomit. In terms of sheer fight length, Uberroth is more on the level of Uber Maven, which means it’s exhausting. But Uberroth earns points for giving players far more agency in resolving the various screen vomit mechanics. PoE1 does have the upside, meanwhile, of giving players so many sources of damage and defense scaling that you can take a mediocre or even bad build to most of the Ubers and still clear… with lots of investment, of course. In Last Epoch, you’re usually pigeonholed into a select set of BiS items for specific builds because builds in this game are confined within their classes.

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I have 157 characters. No two are the same build.

I will have to disagree with this thread…

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Pinnacle Content is not intended for the majority of players.

What reward do you get for Uber Abbeorth, that is exclusive to clearing him? Nothing? Bragging Rights? An Achievement once they are implemented?

Cool. You managed to push your build that far, into something that cannot be done by every build idea.

It doesn’t matter WHAT game, or even genre of game, you play, there are always tiers to builds, loadouts, etc.

Elden Ring and other Souls-likes? Yup.
CoD or some other FPS game with loadouts? Entirely!
Monster Hunter? Yeah, entirely.

If what YOU find fun is pushing to 1000c and Uber Abberoth downed in 6min or less, great, have at it.
The devs have clearly stated that their intended balance is around the 300c mark. Why? Because that is where most builds CAN reach. Pinnacle content is never “most builds”.

If your viewpoint doesn’t match the devs, and the majority of the playerbase do like what is presented, maybe you need to find another game. In the end, the devs make the decision, not you as a vocal minority.

You make the choice that going so far into Corruption is the “endgame”, that a bragging-rights-only boss is the “endgame”. The devs don’t. Line up your viewpoint with the devs viewpoint, and stop worrying.

The fact you care so much about external sites providing hyper-optimal builds for the mega-high Corruption, and wax poetically over D2 being “the best ARPG still”. It isn’t. It is static, slow, clunky, and entirely representative of it’s era, which is 25 years ago. Many others have done the genre better, people just refuse to acknowledge it, because heaven forbid their memory be tainted, because the game is too popular/not popular enough, because the company monetizes it poorly, etc. You might think it is the “best”, but that is subjective, and if it was still the best, the playerbase on both legacy and D2R (which is nothing more than a pretty skin and UI improvements generally), would be FAR bigger than it is.

Even nowadays, Blizzard has acknowledged that some content is for the smaller tier of optimal players. I know this will catch hell for mentioned, but Diablo 4 is right now designed to ensure every class has a few builds that can handle Torment 4 (highest difficulty setting). Most builds cannot, at least not at a sufficient kill speed to be worth doing. And that is the INTENT. They even moved the pet Seasonal Reward in the current Season off of the final Journey Chapter (requiring T4) down to the 2nd last chapter (T3), based on feedback from last season.

Pinnacle Content exists to test and push limits, not to BE the ceiling.

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I’m sorry but that just isn’t the case with D2. Which has a ceiling, there are as many people watching D2 right now as Last Epoch. One game is over 20 years old. There is always something to do in D2 because it’s just that incredible of a designed game.

Infinite scaling is poor design that is bad for every game. Trying to cator to the 1% means only the 1% stay. The 1% will always be there whether you put in place a ceilign or not. They will find something else fun to do in the game. Like MEME build content, speed running, beat the game using X ability only. The players get to create new challenges.

If corruption was capped Last Epoch would have more players and it would keep more players. Devs just got to realize what made games so special decades ago and why new games don’t come close.

  • Removing the elitist environment from ARPGs will only create a healthier player base with a far greater retention because the game is good. People will want to play it! Having some aritificial infinite scaling is a copout in place of making a great game.
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Oh, yeah, I totally get you. Even David Brevik himself feels that ARPGs have strayed too far from their roots because they’re so concerned with rapid, constant progression:

Though I will admit that, back in 2001-02, a vocal section of the RPG community thought that Diablo 2 strayed too much from Diablo 1’s roots (and from the genre in general) by making combat faster.

I think a lot of older players (of which, D2R probably has many) are fine with a difficulty cap and working within those confines. It’s most of the new school players I’ve talked to (younger people who started ARPGs with PoE in 2018 or so) who are under the impression that ARPGs are nothing more than glorified cookie clickers.

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I never talked about Uber Aberroth.

Uber Aberroth cannot be done by any build. There is too much going on and the room for error is so much smaller that low dps builds will not be able to do him pratically speaking, because when the fight takes too long the amount of non-optimal placements and sometimes unfortunate overlap will lead to too much bad placed things.

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Oh, you were talking about regular Abby. My mistake. I think regular Abby is designed quite well, but it’s pretty easy to outscale him and trivialize the fight (even with mediocre builds).

I think what you mentioned is why I’m confused as to where EHG wants to take this game’s power ceiling. I don’t think they intend for lots of builds to ever be able to do Uber Abby, which is… fine, I guess. Can’t balance every build, especially for what is essentially bonus content. The problem is that the gap between the haves and the have-nots in that fight is so huge that you’re basically pigeonholed into 3-4 different builds (plus whatever wacky builds with hypespecific rolls and weird system interactions like that Swarmblade Druid kill). Even using a top tier build, the amount of hitbox jank and highly punishing yet FAST attacks makes that fight miserable unless you can kill in under a minute. For example, the Ground of Destruction slam and the Necrotic Waves (helpfully named “Bolt”) are way too fast for how badly they can screw over your entire run if you get bait them in the wrong direction. You have to assume he’s going to do those attacks after every other attack he does. And why does the boss get to turn mid-cast sometimes? It defeats the entire point of baiting the attack.

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You can kull uber abby on any build. If you can’t then you haven’t farmed enough.

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The thing is - if we use that definition, then we have to ask - good builds, according to whom?

EHG have given us their answer - to them, a successful build is one that clears 300 corruption, and quite a few builds can do that.

Some say that what matters is what the community thinks, not what the developers think. But then we would have the follow up question - who in the community? The majority of players likely doesn’t even reach empowered monoliths. Some people think the definition of EHG is good enough. Then you have the edge lords who think a build can only be called “good” if it can kill Uber Aberroth. And then there are youtubers, who get their money from selling fake outrage.

There is no clear definition of what a “good” build is.

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The problem is, one camp hurts no one, the other is going to turn the game into a snooze fest for tons of people because they will be ass blasting until they hit 1000c and wont get there and be bored.

I think 1000c as the “minimum” for a good build is way to high. I think 300-600c would make way more sense as a community.

I think the real problem is content creators drive discussion and they are out of touch as fuck. I love dr3ad he makes good builds and is a cool guy. But his take on 1000c being minimum is cooked, he was there on day 1.5 on his first build of patch 1.2, this is NOT a normal experience, and is NOT how 99% of players play but his take will get parroted around because thats what people these days do. They just parrot the content creators.

Thats the issue, the “Community” sentiment is actually the sentiment of the top players, and has nothing to do with whats actually happening in the game. Social media drives conversation into echo chambers and false realities way too easily.

For all the people saying “1000c is a good build” how many of them are actually farming at 1000c.

like then we got this guy, who im 99% sure has not tried uber abby on any of his characters since his highest in tombs of erased is 91. He is speaking about some shit he thinks is the reality, which is just not true lol.

Beating uber abby is a build check, not a gear check.

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/ApE56vxQ I cant even barely get past the first ward bar. I would have to swap to judgement to make any headway because I just simply cant heal enough even with smites going off and healing hands.

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Agree that this is true. But my follow-on is that this is true of any activity that involves some form of financial reward. There are the things that ‘we’ do, and the things the ‘pros’ do.

Full disclosure, I have never gotten to 300c, I get bored after the first corruption pass (150c), it feels like work, I stop.

My participation in this thread is due to my surprise that I agree with the premise that having an artificial difficulty cap actually does increase the space of what could be called a good build. Further, I think that this would have the follow-on effect of reducing the dependency on streamers/guides. And, if that is true, It would make this more of a hobbyists activity than a pro activity.

And that raises all sorts of questions that I don’t know the answer to, chief being, is that actually good for the long-term health of this game?

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Obviously. You could even go to an extreme and remove everything that isn’t the campaign and now every random set of skills is a good build. I don’t think it’s the correct way to go about it, though.

It’s not, really, in my opinion. It’s basically removing content for the sake of artificial balance, which isn’t really balanced anyway because some builds will still destroy content while some will barely do it. But both would be considered “good builds”.

I think this is just a discussion because of a lack of more static endgame content. I feel like this system can work pretty well when you have 4-5 static difficulty endgame mechanics and then corruption scaling is left for when you’re done with that and just want to keep having fun, rather than having “finished” the game.

When that happens, then good builds will be the ones that can do the static content and the high corruption scaling will be a personal goal to achieve. Something like climbing the arena waves. You don’t really get anything from it, it’s just a challenge.

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Personally I’m a bit torn on the topic. In my mind there isn’t really a “right” answer. Just a decision on what kind of game LE is going to be (and the answer is already there given by the devs).

Okay that is a lot of ambiguity so let me explain.

First: We all play games to have fun.
Second: Fun is subjective.

I personally have fun “beating” games. Regardless of genre. Which is also why I avoid most PvP games since they lead me down the rabbit hole of endless self-improvement to finally have fun at the game (i.e. winning).
So in LE I’m not interested in ladders but beating content. This includes Abby and uber-Abby. In Elden Ring this included Malenia and the DLC. In GD this includes all optional superbosses.

I also don’t think this notion of “beating the game is fun” or “winning in the game is fun” is something weird or rare. Most players derive a certain amount of fun from this I would suspect. of course this is not the only way I have fun with games. But it is a major part of it.

So introducing content that may be too hard for me personally to achieve reduces the fun I have with the game. This mostly takes the form of a frustrated rage quit after trying for a certain amount of time (haven’t tried uber Abby yet). For me this is mostly a week, maybe two weeks of trying. Compared to some of my friends I’m a masochist though so I guess the frustration tolerance before quitting is significant lower for most people. But if I manage to beat it? HELL YEAH.

So for me this comes down mostly to the discussion of difficulty. Is difficulty good or bad? Difficult to say. Personally I’m in the camp that values the “HELL YEAH” effect after overcoming a struggle. I love it. I just had that experience in No Rest for the Wicked and it’s just awesome. I must however say that that game is a lot more suited for really hard content just because it heavily leans into the “souls” aspects. But of course there are different kinds of difficulty that work differently. Like being theoretically able to make everything in PoE work as long as the knowledge and investment (money making is a skill) is there.

Still personally I prefer a difficult game over an easy one. Not because I like being part of the “toxic player community” that “gatekeeps” or some shit like that. No, I just have fun beating the hard part. And I tend to get bored after my build in PoE can explode the whole screen and the next one. It’s a short feels good but that is it then for me.

Is LE the right place for the kind of difficulty? The devs obviously think so else they would not have added uber Abby. And this is fine. It means it’s a game for players like me (probably dunno yet if uber Abby is too hard for me :smiley: ). And less for players that want that sweet powerfantasy of being able to stomp absolutely everything with everything. They “just” get a few builds able to do that.
Though I do agree that being able to make “bad” things work and turn them into “good builds” is also a lot of fun. I do however think that those approaches are working against each other. Are they both achievable at the same time? Maybe. I haven’t really seen it yet, but GD does come close I think thanks to an endless scaling game mode, a time attack mode and many optional superbosses that are harder or easier for certain builds.

I also like static difficulty a lot more than endless scaling difficulty. It simply provides an endpoint to a build for me. I’m not interested in endless improvements that can only be achieved by playing a lifetime. but if there is something like Abby or uber abby I know a build is done when it can beat the “hardest boss”. Personally I see regular Abby as a benchmark for a good build and uber for an awesome trainwrecker build.

GD did this quite well I think. That game also has a endless scaling difficulty mode called Shattered Realms (SR). They changed it in the last patch but before that it was like this: You start at SR1 and clear. The difficulty increases from map to map. Every 5 “levels” you clear you gain the ability to use a waystone (craftable item) to start the SR from that point. So having cleared SR50 you could always start from SR50 again. Rewards heavily scaled up to SR65. SR75 was the last Waypoint and did not give any extra rewards. The loot drops only from chests that spawn after you decide to quit your run. It gives direct visual feedback on how well you did. Kinda like the Lightless Arbor dungeon reward with juiced chests. Everything after was for bragging rights. Though I think they also added Waypoints up to 120 or something for group players (some managed to clear 175 or something which is insane).

It’s not that much different from LE I think. Just that it is communicated a lot more clearly. Chests after SR65 did not increase, which made it very clear where the expected powerlevel is (i.e. being able to do SR65 for effective loot farming).

If they rework corruption a bit more like this, make the feedback more direct, like scaling the loot chest(s) at the end of an echo with corruption instead of regular drops during the map (or something like that). Add more of them, make them drop more. And after a certain point chests just do not increase anymore. What this point is supposed to be I don’t know. Personally I would like something around 600 or 700c.

Would limiting the corruption (and the rewards) this way increase the amount of perceived “good” builds? Well depends on personal definition, but I would suspect for most players yes it would. It would shift the perception to builds that are able to do the content that can give the most rewards. Tough 1000c is just a catchy and nice number.

Also - as seen in GD - the benchmark for what a good build is would only be extended to speed. Cleartimes for SR, times for Crucible, bosskills, etc. are the real differentiators in that game and if you take a look at the forums you will see most guides providing them because players are asking “can it do Gladiator Crucible in 4 minutes?” or “Can it do SR in under 6 minutes?” or “Can it do Superboss XY in under 2 minutes?”

You can’t run from this. This will always be the case. People will find ways to rate their builds. And there will always community members that push for some unreal standard regardless if it is difficulty or time as a benchmark for what makes a good build.

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Not quite true on GD cause there you have also celestial to beat (some similar to uber) .
Build is good if can do Ravager, Calla and some may challenge even Crate.
Build need to complete all content available to to be redeem good.
Yes GD has a good balance and not so many OP builds but with enough gear you can complete all.
Sadly LE isn’t there yet ( waiting to see that AoD build that is competitive with rest of builds on bosses and clear) and this was just an example.

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No, as the crux of the issue is balance.

Right now its just a problem cause some builds/skills/items just suck, and you get trapped if you build around them. or they cant handle higher corruption because of some design flaw like the majority of non snap shotted minions.

Hell uber abberoth introduces a very interesting question, How do you cleanse minions? We see that either cleansing, or not standing in puddles is core to the abberoth fight, neither of which minions are all that good at doing or in the case of cleansing impossible a lot of the time. So the fight is just designed in a way that the majority of minion builds will auto fail it simply because they have no way to deal with the mechanics.

if every class/skill needs to balanced to the level of ES VK, then its cooked, thats going to be extremely boring for 99% of the content and seems like terrible balancing.

They need to nerf ubby, and nerf players and then maybe we can get some sort of progression. Cause right now some builds get a bit of gear and kill ubby, others get 4lp items and fail to do it because they just cant. And others still struggle just to farm empowered because they took bait nodes that either need to be buffed or deleted cause the path they promote is so weak its troll to pick it.

Ideally you should need to improve your character every step of the way as you move up the corruption and boss ladder, currently many builds are able to handle 300c in rare gear and no legendaries out of the gate. They are just that strong baseline. But at the same time, every step of the ladder should feel like you can do it. Currently the builds I played this patch it felt like I rolled over 300c and normal abby with very little work, then maybe had a decent grind to doing 1000c, and ubby is basically not real. there is no amount of grinding that would let my builds take him on, Id simply need to reroll to beat him. Which feels like he isnt providing a final step of content, but as a bait to try and trick you into grinding with no hope of ever actually winning.