Poor rickety old man. Barely had a season of good play at all.
Let us mourn for the Witch Doctor.
LoL!
Be ready to duck, there is a large %age that you will be slapped with a graph any time now! 
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Agreed. The major exception to this might be when the actual top build, in terms of pure potential, is very hard to play, very fishy, or very un-fun. Then, if something else is close to that power, but fun, reliable, and easy to use, it might predominate. But, that doesn’t happen very often (it’s more common on class leaderboards than on the full, all-class leaderboard).
Personally to me its not so much the “top 100” that should be the metric but how each spec’s average GR clear (or time at 150) is a better metric to see. With the way to 100 is and the “supposed” botting and such that involves super inflated paragon, top 100 doesn’t give a good “look”
I’m a little bit unclear on what you mean… but here are some comments on what I think you mean:
In this Era and the previous one (13 + 14) the top 100 is all “time attack”, i.e. the top 100 is all 150 clears, at different times. And of course this changes the way the leaderboard ends up looking.
If, for example, you had a build that could do infinity damage and also had infinite toughness, but couldn’t use movement skills and could only walk at 1% of base movement speed, you would probably expect to see GR 150 clears, but you wouldn’t see them in very good time.
That’s obviously a very extreme and fantastical example, but you see lesser versions of this for real- some builds are very strong but just can’t group enemies very fast, or move very fast.
Another thing to consider is the fishiness (RNG reliance) of some builds vs others. FB Wiz, for instance, doesn’t rely on AD and does good single target damage, meaning you don’t have to fish and fish and fish for a perfect map full of perfect mobs and perfect pylons. Those things will still benefit you, but not as much. At the top end, FB is not as strong as some other builds- the highest FB clear doesn’t show up till #11 on the leaderboard. But, Wiz (mostly FB) is about 540 of the top 1000 clears, despite having 0 of those spots in the top 10.
As for botting, well, unfortunately, that tide lifts all boats- it’s not as though there are some classes that are able to cheat, while others aren’t.
Anyway, I agree that “top 100” should not be THE metric, to the exclusion of everything else. But it should definitely be A metric.
Def ya, good to have multiple metrics. Also while I don’t care “super” much about tier lists, some content creators who use the leaderboard and number values for their “tier” lists are pretty close to what the season and era’s provide.
Id also prob expand from top 100 to the top 1000 instead. Would give a bit more “avgeraged info” But thanks for the work on it.
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I’d probably look at top 100 and top 1000 separately. The first gives a good reading of “super high push potential”, while the second is all about the combination of power + consistency.
As a mostly wizard player this is my problem in a nutshell. Sure, there are builds that sometimes get us to the top of the leader boards but so what? The latest one – Mirrorbird – requires a play style so far removed from what a wizard should be that I refuse to play it. In fact it, and our next top set Typhon’s, basically take the wizard out the equation and turn everything over to pets. I don’t want to manage mirrors or wrangle snakes. I want thunder claps echoing off the walls while eldritch magic flies from my finger tips. I want to be an actual wizard. So I settle for GR90-100 clears with LoD sets. I’d like to have some fantasy in my fantasy RPG if you don’t mind.
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WD will be better this season. Zuni is now 150 capable without the glass cannon stuff. New set rework looks interesting? The final patch notes will be telling. This season best builds…
Barbarian - Rend / low S tier. Then a few A tiers like MOTE and Hota. Nothing crazy. No builds that can kill a 150 guardian (or 140 for that matter) without a stricken gem.
Crusader - 2 maybe 3 s-tier builds. Stricken needed. Good variety.
DH - Several S-tier builds, at least one is S+. Stricken probably not required to kill the RG.
Monk - Super over the top S-tier build with Inna. This is season 2 before it gets nerfed into the ground. Stricken? Nah.
WD - Zuni is more tanky. Already did a lot of damage. Mungu will be good in groups. New reworked set which may or may not be good.
The worst off class will be barbarian.
I actually think of Mirrorbird as a very Wizardy wizard build, but I hear what you’re saying- it sounds like you want to feel more like “a direct conduit for the elemental forces of the universe” than “a summoner of other great powers” or “a master of misdirection” or whatever. Makes sense. That said, I thought of Archon/Vyr and Star Pact, in its various forms, as being very Wizardy, also- not sure if you’d agree with that or not.
I think that this is more a problem with overall interior class balance (an issue for every class) than with any particular set or build. It sure would be nice to have multiple competitive options- a long range fighter, a brawler, one that relies on multiple different skills for damage, one that deals huge damage in small increments of time.
You know… options!
I think a lot of it is going to come down to the ability, or inability, of various builds to leverage the “deathblow” effect. Any build that does its damage in huge pops is going to see a lot of benefit. Builds that chip away slowly, not so much.
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Well… StarPact is/was essentially Bazooka and that was one broken crap mechanic for sure. Caused by yours truly Deathwish.
And Vyr’s is not a real wizard… it’s Archon, with own separate skills. I never liked Archon, and never will. Not to mention that Archon itself is completely underpowered, no matter how you look at it. It’s the Wave of Destruction from Chantodo that dishes out damage, which is even more moronic and boring when you compare it to unruly Mirror Images. But let’s leave it at that…
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Yup. Final notes on the shards will tell a lot about the potential results. They need to ditch that pet shard or the bottom on the monk and DH leaderboards will be like 145.
Indeed. Archon isn’t like the other classes transformation skills where it enhances the wizard’s skills. It comes with it’s own set of skills that you have to use (not that I’m complaining, because I love archon, probably to the annoyance of fellow wizards). It’s only via Swami, or reverse archon, that you can use Archon to buff the wizard skills, which goes into the problem where reverse archon being stronger than archon itself (which I won’t elaborate on in this thread).
Nice analysis, Rage. Agreed on all points.
I’d like to add that Barbs–and I say this as a (former) Barb main–are in a very good place: Only one of our sets is fundamentally broken (Raekor), and excellent parity between our other sets/builds can be fixed with one thing: more damage. Increasing the multipliers on build- and skill-specific items would bring all out builds, even outliers like Pro Slam, into greater parity. Even Raekor could be Band-Aided with larger multipliers on Skular’s and 300th Spear.
Of course, I wouldn’t say no to more DR for certain builds–Pro Slam, H90, and IK HOTA–but more damage does a lot to offset this.
I’d never say no to more Barb love from the developers, but ever since we got that Barb-heavy patch with the Rend and Wastes rework a while back, I’ve been confident that other classes–namely WDs, DHs, and Monks–really need more time and attention, and this upcoming Season is no different.
A sensible thing to do. The individual in question had some good opinions when a political argument broke out a few months ago despite constantly reminding everyone that such an argument was off-topic, blah, blah, blah. But nothing good lasts, right? Back to the nonsense.
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Best giggle of the day, this one 
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That is fine. The presented analysis was about solo power. For paragon grinding, leveling gem, and experiencing multiplayer, each class has a different frequency which they were part of the 4 man meta. This old post is out of date but it demonstrates the frequency that classes were part of the 4 man meta in seasons 1-19.
Lexa, how would you describe “good” mechanics? And, is there a build, current or otherwise, that really exemplifies that to you? Doesn’t have to be Wizard, unless you want it to be.
They’ve dominated the META for almost a decade? That’s impressive, because the game was released in May 2012, i.e. less than a decade ago, and the Necromancer DLC was released in June 2017, i.e. 4 years 5 months ago. So, its domination was so strong that half of the decade it was dominating in was before it even existed?
So, because they’ve played support in 4-mans for the past 20 seasons, how is that relevant to their solo clearing ability?
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For this purpose of a solo analysis, the relevance comes in that a couple of classes had regular access to the 4 man meta that meant that these classes could presumably level the legendary gems higher and more easily in groups. In that regard, it actual makes the solo analysis of barbarians and monks worse, since one would anticipate that their legendary gem (and augments) would on average be higher than classes not-part of the 4 man meta.
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We wouldn’t want the actual pet classes to be semi-viable just so the non pet classes don’t get nerfed.