Comic for Wednesday 4/26 (Early High Res)
Look, I love a system like Diablo 4's Paragon Boards, in a game like Diablo 4, because I'm going to be playing it, I'm going to be grinding in that turn-off-my-brain-and-play sort of way, and I like seeing numbers go up. I like having these little carrots I'm working towards.
I love thinking about all the possibilities for different ways I could build my class... but if I'm being honest with myself, I don't have nearly the time for the theorycrafting side of it that some people do. I play a lot of games, I have a lot of irons in different fires, and I have to admit that I'm never going to have the time to sit down and really map out/compare/calculate my best paths through these boards.
So I get hyped about all of the possibilities and complexity of a system like this, but at the end of the day, brutal self-reflection...I will probably just end up checking to see what people with the time to really dig into the meat of it it suggest.
Comments (6)
And the problem is the incredible gap between an S tier build and a casual "just pick what looks good/fun" build breaks the game to the point it's no fun to play unless you cookie cutter.
Hopefully builds are reasonably balanced, and what you pick is more of a personal style choice.
Exactly my strategy
Me and Path of Exile
Path of Exile actually has better support for in-game discovery than many other high-complexity-customization games, though. The talent web has a search feature that doesn't just search names, it searches descriptions too. So you can search for "energy shield" and it'll highlight every node in the web that affects your energy shield. You do need a decent understanding of where things are laid out in the web (though that's not *too* hard, since it's relatively aligned with the positions of the different class starting nodes in the web), but it's more discoverable than others for sure. Throw in a tool like Path of Building to let you play with various talent setups and see how they affect your stats and ability outputs and such, and it's not terribly tough to generate your own builds. Where it gets really complicated is mostly the interaction with legendaries and gemstones, because there are so damn many of them, and they can drastically alter the way certain builds play, or literally define entire builds. One of the builds I played a few seasons back, a Fire Arrow Elementalist that used a pack of golems for incredibly strong self-buffs, relied on a combination of several gems, some ascended talents, and a couple legendaries to become ridiculously difficult to kill through astronomical health regen, and murder things multiple screens away via spreading fire DoTs. The talents were designed to augment that, but the build was *defined* mostly by a couple legendaries, a couple specific gems, and a couple specific ascendencies. That's where the game really lacks discovery, because there just really isn't a clean way of seeing all the possible item setups, and which combos can define builds to that degree.
Really rich systems that are frankly to rich. Way to easy to trap yourself. Unbalance the game. Force choices to balance fights. Then your pretty much forced to look for the meta online.