See Hades, I already mentioned it.
The whole idea there is that you don’t have complete control over what happens to you regarding skills and drops during their runs (mini-Seasons). This drastically raises the skill cap since the player decisions start to matter a lot more, and is basically the reason why the people that love aRPGs enjoyed Hades so much.
Not always. Only when the game is too complex for them.
You are not fully seeing the great potential of AI allowing the players to enjoy the build creation process.
We all agreed character development and build creation are of fundamental importance to aRPGs, and copy/pasting isn’t equal build creation.
Copy/pasting builds is like botting - it is the follow-up of a more bigger problem, either with the fixed complexity of your game or with the inability your game to teach the new players how to play it properly. The AI solves these issues allowing the players to fully enjoy the build creation process.
The AI I described would allow the player to enjoy his homebrew builds, just like Harvest allowed the PoE players to achieve this. Since GGG announced the nerfs to Harvest a week ago there are more than 13k posts of people that disagree with the decision. That is your data - go and read it.
For those that have no idea what Harvest is: It is crafting that allows the player to have higher control over the affixes of the items. It’s pretty much like the AI I am suggesting here - it gives the players the ability to enjoy the build creation process without relying on meta builds from Internet guides.
For example, with Harvest you could change one type of resistance mod/affix to any other type of resistance (Fire → Cold). The AI I am suggesting would do the same (distribute your points among the respective resistances depending on what’s optimal for you), but automatically (for those that want to use it).
When you read the comments, you’ll understand that people love to make their own builds in aRPGs more than anything. You’ll also understand why having a flexible complexity scale is much better than having a fixed degree of complexity, which would always create problems for some group of players.
If a game isn’t competitive it is a kid’s game, which is fine.