Lets be real, being a content creator is a job and a job is to make money, that’s it, which gives CCs a vested interest in being as clickbaity and bombastic as possible. There’s a reason someone like Quin who’s just mindlessly yelling all day gets more views than Kripparian for example.
So what does it has to do with buildcrafting? Everything pretty much. Big numbers make easy thumbnails for easy clicks, doesn’t matter if the builds only works in very niche scenarios or require you to fish for keys all day (which only a streamer can afford to do or have his simps do for him). So you end up in a situation where the builds being pushed by them and forming the meta are mindless “stack 1 modifier of 1 skill to Jupiter”.
Every thought maybe that’s not how the game was intended to be played?
Like, i was guilty until recently of just following build guides as well as i haven’t had access to 5 previous betas to fully understand the game before its even out (and honestly the deeper i dig the more it seems even big creators still don’t grasp everything about their class, at least its really obvious when it comes to both Necros and Druids).
But playing HC forced me to start really digging into buildcrafting myself and boy is the game both more fun and my character more sensible now.
Is the game perfectly balanced? Absolutely not.
But i feel CCs are hurting the balance even more by promoting a very single-minded approach towards playing it and building characters.
So yeah, if you bored or frustrated, make a character without looking at Maxroll or watching a youtube guide and just read your skills and nodes, you might be surprised what you can come up with yourself.
I get what you mean but i feel the game design is kinda culprit with this “deep mechanics but not so much” and the lower skill variety because a lot of them doesnt work when you jump in higher difficulties (tier 4) in lower tiers yeah, you can use whatever you want and it will work but in the end you will come up to the same skills and gear that the CC did because others stuff dont work aspect doesnt scale etc. at least that’s my experience im not theory crafter and i dont calculate all stuff, I stack as much damage reduction/damage as possible the rest is utility for cc or movement or both. when i come up with different approach in my character is possibly just 1 skill that doesnt make almost no difference for example I like conceilment in my rogue, that’s it and guess what i was using wind shear in my druid since it got buffed, but im going back to storm strike for the damage reduction
Problem is that seemingly scaling is only judged based on one metric : kill time.
Necro is a really good example of that. The current necro meta build is a version of Bonespear that just stacks every damage modifier possible and die the second anything sneezes on it. Don’t believe me? Join any pug NM 50s farm groups. Is downtime ever accounted for when these builds are made? Cause yeah getting rezzed or running back slows down farming a lot.
Yet i’m figuring out ways to make a very sustainable Bone Necro build (not just Bone Spear). Sure i’ll never spam 7M+ Spears but i don’t need to if i have other damage sources.
Its because many people are sheep and want to be told what to do. We have less and less people that can think for themselves. Thats why they feel the need to “follow” others on social media.
The current issue is the total inhability in D4 to easily adjust/re-spec.
I, like you, made a pretty unique build, that workED very well… until lvl 75, where it’s harder to push NM dungeons. So… i would need to make some changes.
But just changing a few things, means so much ressources and grind, it’s ridiculous.
I think a build that worked for many levels should not just stop working. But it does, because monsters keep scaling, but not the gear.
So… since it’s close to impossible, cost wise, to “test builds”, well, we are kind off forced to see what pro-testers came up with.
I really miss D3 for that, you could try every powers and runes as you unlocked them.
but that’s the point, killing stuff, when i was playing druid i really really loved the lightning storm skill, but guess what it didnt work as good as tornado does the problem is maybe one skill works later and you finish a nm dungeon tier whatever but why should i stick to that if the other skill does the same thing as i do, but better? and the rest of the skill tree for me is not a big deal, most of them are utility/cooldowns and imo doesnt make any difference to consider a build different
When Classic WoW first launched I wanted to do everything right. I said to myself, “This time I’m going to play the end game and clear all the raids, I’m going to kill it in PvP” so what did I do? I followed youtubers and guides. I dutifully followed meta builds and BiS lists. How did it turn out? It made the game feel like doing homework. I realized around the time of BWL that I wasn’t enjoying the game. Since then I’ve avoided youtubers and guides and any meta chasing. I have been enjoying video games so much more! I’ve been having a blast in D4 because I am experimenting with different builds. I refuse to play the meta way, I will play my way. I highly recommend it.
Hate to break it to you, but devs also wanted people to rely on content creators as evidenced by them giving content creators “review copies” so that they could come out with build/guide videos just before the release and right on release. Whether you like it or not, this is a game for content creators more or less.
Expensive respec, rerolls also reinforce this because there’s no way you can have enough gold to really experiment to find a build that is fun for you and viable to push harder contents higher than before. Where as career gamers like content creators have all the time and support to achieve this times over within a season’s time frame.
One more thing: When I was chasing the meta, I was one of the forum complainers. I was miserable following meta spreadsheets and I vented my frustrations on the Classic WoW forum. It wasn’t till I followed some good advice from voices like Glinda that I stopped chasing the meta and found my love for the game again. I believe it is meta chasing that makes so many modern gamers unhappy and turns them into cry babies.
whenever i see people refer to them as “content creators” i cringe so hard…what are they creating? nothing
they’re not artists, poets, mathematicians, scientists…they mainly just regurgitate data from each other’s mouths like seagulls (and some even sound like them like that pdophile looking azmodan)
Bro people just lack imagination and copies everyone else. It’s just like that. I’m also quite disappointed by such. But such is how 95 percent of the people are.
This isn’t a “bash creators” thread. Its just a job, i don’t see how they’re any different than talk show or radio hosts, who also primarily exist to generate ad revenue for the tv/radio stations they work for.
My point is just to remind people that their primary interest is their own success first, which is very normal but might not completely align with making sure you fully enjoy the game if you copy what they do.
This game just doesn’t have enough depth to theorycraft new builds. The 1-2 good builds are obvious and have better aspect, unique, paragon, etc. support. It doesn’t matter how much you theorycraft incinerate is never going to do anything, and ice shards will always do 1000x more damage.
I do agree that at least through the campaign you can mostly play what you want and it’ll be fine until WT3. They seem to have done some minimal effort balancing that part of the game.
