Seems like the vast majority of players just follow whatever build a youtuber or guide told them to use.
Ive found games like this, most of the fun comes from making your OWN thing. Not trying to find that one unique that fits your OP meta build, but using the items that you are given to experiment with interesting and new builds. Thats the whole point of skill trees, it is so YOU can customize it how YOU want. If you are just gonna follow some meta FOTM build, why even have skill trees?
This game has no depth with which to make your own builds. It’s so simple the 1-2 good builds are obvious, and playing other things will make you vastly weaker. You can do that for memes or whatever, but you’re not really making real builds.
This isn’t PoE from 4 years ago. These games are for whatever reason balanced around people who play 18 hours a day for a living, so even PoE has gone meta or bust. D4 has absolutely no customization or advanced interactions waiting to be discovered. It’s phone game levels of simple and casual.
Picking one of the other 4 core skills instead of the most popular one isn’t edgy or special. From the skill tree to item affixes, this game is just simple af, and there isn’t a lot to explore.
It’s envitable. The games a mess because of how scaling with crit/vunerability works. Dialing back the numbers will only frustrate players and make them feel weaker.
i agree here all dmg affixes should have meaning instead of half of them being skiped because of diminishing returns compared to close - vuln - crit being there own buckets or some reason multiplying themselves
if every skill but one or two legit suck, what do you want people to play? I didn’t watch any guides or something like that and I ended up at the Arc Lash build just by picking the best skills, at WT3 that one wasn’t good enough, I rebuild and I ended up with the Ice Shards build naturally after trying things out and learning how damage buckets work (vulnerable). The game basically forces you into one of the meta builds, who’s gonna be able to clear NM dungeons with Incinerate lmao
If I’m building ANYTHING I don’t typically just hop into it dry. I’ll find an example of at least a framework of what I’m trying to build. Then I can customize it as I see fit, or use that knowledge in future builds now that I’ve got a foundation and a general idea of what a proper build looks like.
So it is here. Between skill points, affixes, paragon points, paragon boards, glyphs, uniques, legendaries, gems etc etc… there is a fair amount of depth which can be overwhelming, particularly to a new player. But by first copying, emulating, and then just using guides as a foundation, players can learn what a good build looks like without having to start out just fumbling around blindly trying to discover what are often obscure and/or poorly explained mechanics.
Not that D4 is deep or anything, but many people (“casuals”) simply don’t get fun from game mechanics exploration, build planning and optimization. They see it as “work”, not as “entertainment”.
People following build guides bothers you so much that you had to rant about it on the forums?
Wow.
Off-meta builds are laughably weak and spend more time face-first down on the floor than killing demons
Yup, there are not enough skills/aspects/boards to come up with synergistic combinations to create a viable much less original build.
By viable, I mean push NM 70+ dungeons with relative comfort.
Even if viable meant to farm just hell tides, there still are not that many combos of skills to be original.
Skill trees are really shrubberies at this point and have been since the first development reveal.
Paragon boards with only one legendary node to choose is a head scratcher. Either we need more boards or more interesting nodes on those boards.
Aspects and uniques are mostly boring and too many aspects are universally usable by effecting conditions rather than skills or skill types.
D4 is a child’s puzzle for ages 6 and up. If that is what the game makers want they succeeded.
what, you don’t like dealing 1000% less damage because you picked Blood Nova instead of Bone Spear?
All builds are off-meta before they become meta…
Weekend Warrior Andy is not going to be able to theorycraft a build better than what the combined mind of Discords and Maxroll can
Preach
From 20 altars of Lilith
Says who rofl? And they may not find the absolute most optimized version of the build, but what usually happens is someone will discover the basic framework for a new build and give proof of concept showing it’s actually stronger than people realized, and then the hordes will go at it and find the most optimal version.
Acting like experimentation will never yield anything new is as defeatist as it is naive.
Barb has literally one Core skill and one final Perk right now. No recovery outside Shouts, Limited Fury generation and laughable CC. Good luck making builds with that.
if all build are equally good , no one will go and look at those meta build, unfortunately , for those who wan to compete in hard content , there is very limited build can do that
problem for most people in this game is… making your own builds is only fun to do when you dont have to farm hours just to test it, if you want to try out a new build, it will cost about 15-20mil gold each time you respec fully. considering the average player makes about 5 mil per hour, its going to take hours to respec once, then decided if they like it or not, then farm hours again to respec back if they dont. Loadouts are needed and reduced respec costs, I would try different builds then, its just not affordable with how its setup and thats why most people choose cookie cutter builds.
Also how damage buckets work, just stupid how some damage is additive with others and some are multiplicative which really really hurts build diversity as well.
Peak arrogance when you think some random is smarter than tens of thousands of users spending hours theorycrafting builds every day on Discords and Maxroll