I generally try to avoid the meta builds in D4 because I like experimenting and seeing how much I can squeeze out of non-meta builds, mostly looking for builds with explicit Unique items and aspects that don’t fall into the meta.
With VOH I decided to play around with a Spiritborn Poison/Thorns build and I had a lot of success within what I assume is the expected difficultly scaling of VOH… by about halfway through optimization I was doing up to 4M per tick in white damage and clearing Pit 50… but there was a problem.
The problem with this build and any such white build is that damage scales linearly while enemy health scales geometrically. You hit a wall with a white damage build around T3 that gets very hard to overcome.
Of course, the biggest issue, especially with thorns, is that they don’t benefit from the late game scalers, Overpower and Crit. You are a slave to Vulnerable and Aspects which, in theory, seems easier… but in practice you hit a wall because only Vulnerable has a high scalable upside.
If you want to widen the meta, I have a fairly simple suggestion tat pretty much everyone will hate:
- Remove Vulnerable Damage from attacks that can Crit
- Make Overpower universal by applying its effect to DOT and Thorns.
That way all skills will either be Vulnerable+Overpower or Critical+Overpower which will make the real late game stat Overpower and be gated through Unique and Aspect mechanics that trigger overpower.
As it is now, any skill that relies entirely on Vulnerable damage will lose to any skill that scales on Vulnerable+Crit+Overpower… which narrows the meta considerably, even without the bugs.
Overpower is the end game stat for overpower builds. This is because it has the highest line value of any modifier you can invest in (unless you get special crit or vulnerable scaling), and you want to boost your big overpower hits with a big modifier.
The big power of overpower is that it let’s you weaponize your health (2% “all damage” for every 4 health and fortify) and many effects that trigger overpowers let you weaponize your sustain pattern too (banished lord, xan runewords).
There are already endgame specs that focus on overpower like other builds focus on crit or vuln (pulverize druid, blood necro) and that get insane scaling off of it because of the huge line values of overpower damage.
Outside of those specs, overpower can have a different function. It can give a spec access to big burst damage hits without compromising on tankiness. This won’t push pit’s or burn T4 bosses, but it’s awesome in the fields of hatred PvP zone. Because in PvP burst is king, and surviving burst is queen. An overpower focused build can get the burst necessary to make kills happen, while having the tankiness to survive builds that do way more DPS. It doesn’t take much to boost overpowers into the low end of the blaster builds, but those overpowers won’t happen enough for PvE. In PvP you just need to land a good one, and most overpower effects let you plan for it to line up hard guaranteed burst.
Basically Overpower means “tanky DPS/Bruiser”. This is pointless in PvE outside of some builds that are intended to build into it. Where it really shines is PvP, which no one else cares about, because it let’s you weaponize things that don’t usually contribute to damage at no cost to survivability or sustain…
Right, but I think you miss my point. Overpower is not in any thorns builds because thorns can’t overpower, so they’ll never have a hope of S tier.
The fact that “white damage” builds like thorns don’t get overpower and are stuck with Vulnerability only is why they are non-competitive and why they are never in the meta. Allowing overpower to apply to thorns, for instance, and denying vulnerable to crit-able skills would help balance the scalability of skills.
At the moment the meta is
overpower crit damage >> crit damage >> dot damage
I tried a extreme dot Necro with Shadowblight crits, but even with a 1300% bonus to a 44 % weapon damage, you cannot overpower and thus it is not a valid build yet.
There are very few good builds that don’t overpower like a minion necro, but it is sad to see that dot builds are dead and even crit builds without overpower cannot compete most of the time.
And having 100% overpower and having the biggest multipliers at the same time is bad gamedesign.
The problem lies in how they balance the system. Instead of identifying outliers and eliminating them, they should establish a standard and test against it. For example, if the standard is Pit 100 in 10 minutes, they could take five builds from each class and test them against that standard. Overperforming builds should be adjusted downward, while underperforming builds should be adjusted upward.
I don’t think they can even test this, because they first need players to test new builds to see what damage numbers are possible.
Most builds are based on huge scaling factors.
You take some effect you can proc easily, that is doing huge damage and that you can then scale with crit and overpower. And you need some really big damage multipliers on paragon and gear.
But you cannot use the fun stuff.
- I like ‘Howl from Below’ (running and detonating corpses), but unique gloves need to do extra damage and I only get a 50%x multiplier for the Corpse Explosion itself. So the Corse Explosion itself needs to do the damage, not a secondary effect.
- ‘Heir of Perdition’ is a 60%x damage multiplier for your helm. Helmets should not get a damage multiplier, nor should they give a huge buff in crit chance, lucky hit chance and movement speed.
Such Mythic Uniques are destroing the game, because they give too much stats, making it a BIS item.
In Germany this is called Eierlegende Wollmilchsau (which directly translates into ‘egg-laying wool-milk-pig’ or just ‘jack of all trades’).
If every build is about how I can overpower all the time and get all huge damage multipliers, the builds are getting boring.
The developers told us that they want every build to have two or three build defining uniques and legendary aspects around that.
But for most classes they killed most uniques and made us use mythic uniques instead.