I don’t follow build guides and prefer to play with what I find and what’s fun. This has basically made all of the game since launch a total slog unless I copy some streamer’s build. The best of the best has always been the domain of theory crafters that basically have a whole job around understanding and playing the game. However, Diablo 2 and 3 were still fun if you didn’t 100% min/max because you could still be viable and have fun clearing 5% slower.
Without looking at any builds, I started Jag but my drops pushed me right into the Soar/Evade build. AND I LOVED IT…until T3 were it became 10 minutes of waiting for HP pools to drain. Even after adding like 100 paragon levels, getting all my gems to 46+, all items 8/12+, my performance still felt like trash.
It feels like the only way to improve the character is to swap aspects and temper but without knowing the actual damage formula, where my current damage comes from, if interactions actually work like they should, everything basically feels like guess work. However, even if you do spend all the resources to change the build you still don’t have any decent way of understanding how anything changed.
The training dummy we have just outputs a sea of numbers. No idea what skill did what or how much it improved from any changes.
This game is seemingly tuned to the half dozen streamers that get invited to look under the hood and do 1 trillion damage while “casual” players get a tedious slog. I even struggle to say casual given the time commitment. It’s just that playing the game is so wholly uninformative about how it works the only way to improve is to spend dozens of hours theory crafting BEFORE playing the character or just copy someone that already has.
I don’t want to effortlessly spank everything with a crap build that doesn’t flow… But when all the gear/skills/aspects converge and performance still sucks after using the explained/provided resources my reaction is to just stop playing a poorly designed game.
Making a competent build in Diablo 4 shouldn’t require a second job researching the game Blizzard didn’t explain.
And what’s the point of execute? It doesn’t work on champions and if you’re not one shotting whites there’s no way you’re taking down the boss in under 10 minutes.