After taking estrogen for three months!

You know, the definition of a bad build has always been a bit funny to me. I've played some bad builds, and I enjoyed them thoroughly. They were slow and clunky, map bosses were a challenge, they didn't progress at the swiftest pace, they were entirely my own from the time I didn't have all that metagame knowledge in my head, and now that I think about it, it was great fun. Trite but true.

I remember one of these builds. It was a challenge to just make it work at low-level maps. I didn't have a five-link for the longest time. I was spamming fusings on a goddamned Voll's Protector, what felt like a million of them (over a hundred!), and one day it gave me the coveted five-link, and I felt like a kid with a new Christmas present. I wrote about my shitty build in the forum, showed it to other players and helped them make it work too, and we all squirmed and crawled through the mud of low-to-mid-tier maps, and it was all great fun. Trite but true. I quit the build when it finally started working well and I was oneshotting the entire screen with a click.

I've also played overpowered builds. I played a CI coc cyclone assassin when the Ascendancy classes started and I knew what I was doing, and he was like a bulldozer. He didn't need voll's devotion, didn't need to sack the chest slot for the other voll's, and he made the coc dischargers everyone was whining about look like a shitty secondrate build. Also, everything was automated. Whatever buffs or power charges I needed, they worked with CWdT and Herald + CoH setups. I simply had to run through the map, press a key for flickerstrike + fortify which teleported me with autoaim on a target, then mow the screen down in a second. I didn't need to think about buffs, juggle flasks or kite. He didn't exactly facetank stuff, because stuff died too quickly, he facesmashed it.

It was fun to make the build work, it was a thing of my own and certain parts were squeaky, there were issues to solve and some basic gear and levels to obtain, then one day I solved the equation. I had what I needed, and everything clicked. My assassin was steamrolling maps like a well-oiled machine. I was a god. What's more, I only had the most basic gear - a 550 ES six-link chest, semi-decent CI gear in the other slots, a barely passable Vagan dagger. There was a lot of room for improvement. I could become... even more of a god, I guess? God-emperor of the universe?

I played one day more and quit the league.

Was this build better?

Why did I play PoE for so long? To compete with the digital zombies? To climb the ladder? To have the shiniest stuff?

Pffft.

I played to pass away time in a pleasing manner. I knew the ladder and wealth rat race for what it is, and yet with time and knowledge about the game I was competing against no one. I was trying to make my builds as powerful as possible. They had to be automated, no unnecessary and annoying clicking, no timings and flask/buff management, they had to kill everything quickly, efficiently and without flinching - and they did, and I was bored out of my mind. Were my builds getting better over time?

I think they were getting worse. I was playing the game for some stupid arbitrary goal, not for the process itself. Trite, but true - and we keep forgetting that, over and over.

It's a bit counter-intuitive that things have to be difficult, and a bit frustrating at times, and the outcome has to be unsure, or we don't appreciate it. We have a natural tendency to look for the shortest path, and we forget the path leads to nothing. In fact, there's no path.

What's my point with all this?

Your build isn't bad. It's all in your head. You think the game will become fun if only you change your build, if you make it powerful, if you get what you always knew what you wanted, and I can't shake the feeling that's all a load of crap. Even if you get the shiny new gear and the powerful new build, it will still be you who is playing.

And there will be no respec points.