Is versatility dead as a concept?

Honestly, even the length of the post suggest your thesis "path of exile has a narrow path of builds" is not correct.

See reddit (www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile), builds on forum, browse characters in top 15,000 in each league (ladders dropdown on this forum), standard (same, but these characters are longer term and may have very unusual gear), and that will reinforce that there's a billion ways to do things; not all optimal, but don't be reductive; characters have a crapload of aspects that can be min-maxed. I challenge you to find a game with nearly as many. I will prospectively say you can't. I'm confident.

But to answer one of your questions - can people be battlemages almost as/as effective as pure spell caster, ranged, melee? Not generally. But interestingly, you can melee monsters and cast spells at them as a result. Or cast spells as a result of a critical strike. There's a LOT of variance - that you can basically only experience to appreciate. Not to mention over 15 trillion (exaggeration, but it feels like it sometimes) unique items which can add mods which rare items can't get which make your build do weird things.

Here's a tip: search for abberath's hooves on youtube. Once you watch whatever video comes up, you've experienced 1 thousandth of the possibility of truly good builds.

Clicking the title I expected you are going to talk about how hard it is to make a build, that is good at doing all the avaliable content in the game.

High tier maps and bosses.

There are certain items in the game that allow for a true hybrid approach of "caster+melee". Crown of Eyes was mentioned above (though I think it's not good enough, instead of stacking "spell damage", better stack elemental damage).

Here's two more:
http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Doryani%27s_Catalyst
Good DpS, but also high roll of elemental damage, cast speed and global crit

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Cospri%27s_Malice
A pure cold damage sword that also buffs and casts spells

Both could be used to attack and to cast spells, i.e. use a single target melee skill on bosses, and cast flameblasts or another AoE spell for mob clearing.

The real issue however is gem links: You'll only have one 6L. And your 6L AoE will most likely do enough damage that you won't need a 4L Single Target attack.

"

adghar wrote:

... the most prominent of these that come to mind are Lightning Strike and Spectral Throw.

There are plenty of short-ranged Spells or Spells that you can make into short-ranged. Blade Vortex, unmodified, is rather melee-range.

Ok thanks for that (and for all the rest of the effort you took to answer) I'll check those out.

"

adghar wrote:

"with X" is always Attack, never Spell, so Blunt Trauma is Attack builds only.

I know what "with" means. The idea was about abusing the knock back.

"

adghar wrote:

If you've played Final Fantasy...

The big nasty difference is that FFs wouldn't make me re-play the whole game for the sake of something like dark aeons. Also it's generally not so much a difficult task as it's a grindy task out there. But enough side-tracking... Point is I'm kinda not on board with the idea of top-difficulty content being equated to optional. But, whatever, I'll climb there when I climb there. If can't make it on the first try that just mean there's more to it then trying, which is generally a good thing.

"

adghar wrote:

This was probably true 3-4 years ago...

"

adghar wrote:

This used to be a very effective tactic 3 years ago or so...

Ouch... now I get to "miss the good old times" ... without actually experiencing them.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

the game is about specialisation to some extent, you cant completely shurg off that aspect otherwise all the passives and items become slightly pointless. If you could make a build that can use any form of defense, any skill, any damage type, any weapon type and be as efficient as any build that has some kind of specialization why would u ever specialize? why have different weapons and different skills when this 1 completely optimal build allows you to just bypass all choices without any drawbacks?

Nobody said anything about not having any drawbacks, the difference here is about the types of drawbacks and about drawback equality.

For example trying to hybridize types through crits means you have to be able to deal with evasion, it also means you don't work well with dots.

Compared to let's say a fire damage attack build a crit damage attack build would have easier time dealing with fire resistant enemies but harder time dealing with evasive enemies.

Of cause that kind of gameplay requires extra effort on the side of the developers and a community that is willing to play adaptively.

The problem with this game is that [type of damage] crit attack build more or less outshines a general crit attack build by default. Where's the drawback of specialisation for crying out loud?

There's a old problem plaguing modern games. It's the costless specialisation. If a game nowadays has a wizard class and a fighter class it gets universalised to a point were it doesn't matter much if you use a wizard or a fighter. Can't blame games for that, it'd be pretty uncomfortable to run into something your class is not designed to handle but the end result is that in single character games no class is an actual specialist. At which point IMHO it makes sense to start to wonder why aren't they all jacks of all trades? Where's the point of you specialising in ranged weapons if everything that can be taken out by a ranged weapon can just as easily be taken out by a spell or a melee weapon? Where's the point at which you'd tell your party "ok, people, make way, this one is MY speciality"?

Of cause a situation where only one character in a party is supposed to matter would be a dumb one, but a situation where one shines because it's his speciality and the others don't because they have to resort to methods they didn't focus on would IMHO be a welcome change of pace.

But enough fantasies, we get what we get.

"

davidnn5 wrote:

Honestly, even the length of the post suggest your thesis "path of exile has a narrow path of builds" is not correct.

See reddit (www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile), builds on forum, browse characters in top 15,000 in each league (ladders dropdown on this forum), standard (same, but these characters are longer term and may have very unusual gear), and that will reinforce that there's a billion ways to do things; not all optimal, but don't be reductive; characters have a crapload of aspects that can be min-maxed. I challenge you to find a game with nearly as many. I will prospectively say you can't. I'm confident.

But to answer one of your questions - can people be battlemages almost as/as effective as pure spell caster, ranged, melee? Not generally. But interestingly, you can melee monsters and cast spells at them as a result. Or cast spells as a result of a critical strike. There's a LOT of variance - that you can basically only experience to appreciate. Not to mention over 15 trillion (exaggeration, but it feels like it sometimes) unique items which can add mods which rare items can't get which make your build do weird things.

Here's a tip: search for abberath's hooves on youtube. Once you watch whatever video comes up, you've experienced 1 thousandth of the possibility of truly good builds.

I guess we use a different definition of narrow.
I'd say that any builds or classes or play styles that focuses on abusing a single skill of over 60% of situations fits the definition of narrow, no matter how many such builds there are and how intricate is the math behind them.

And wherever I look I see builds that do exactly that. Mostly people don't alternate between skills as situation requires, instead they focus on trying to make one skill melt every face out there. Well it's not one skill strictly speaking if there's usually an aura, a curse and a cheer-leading squad of support gems involved, but you get the point - it's all for one button.

I called build making narrow by extension. Sure this game has probably the widest selection of single-button builds I've ever encountered, but it also bottlenecks almost every attempt at build making into that single-skill field.

"

krenderke wrote:

Clicking the title I expected you are going to talk about how hard it is to make a build, that is good at doing all the avaliable content in the game.

High tier maps and bosses.

Sorry about that, I'll rant about it after I get there, for now I'll stick to this, ok? ;)

"

Reianor wrote:

I guess we use a different definition of narrow.
I'd say that any builds or classes or play styles that focuses on abusing a single skill of over 60% of situations fits the definition of narrow, no matter how many such builds there are and how intricate is the math behind them.

And wherever I look I see builds that do exactly that. Mostly people don't alternate between skills as situation requires, instead they focus on trying to make one skill melt every face out there. Well it's not one skill strictly speaking if there's usually an aura, a curse and a cheer-leading squad of support gems involved, but you get the point - it's all for one button.

I called build making narrow by extension. Sure this game has probably the widest selection of single-button builds I've ever encountered, but it also bottlenecks almost every attempt at build making into that single-skill field.

I think you make an implicit assumption here that is not true in POE. If you char does 90% of the damage it deals with a single skill, this does not mean clicking this skill will be 90% of what you do. There are single-button builds in this game where this is approximately true but most builds are not. It's true that practically all POE builds use either 1 or 2 skills (AOE + single target) to deal most of their damage. But there are a whole bunch of other utility skills you need to survive as well.

"

quarague wrote:

I think you make an implicit assumption here that is not true in POE. If you char does 90% of the damage it deals with a single skill, this does not mean clicking this skill will be 90% of what you do. There are single-button builds in this game where this is approximately true but most builds are not. It's true that practically all POE builds use either 1 or 2 skills (AOE + single target) to deal most of their damage. But there are a whole bunch of other utility skills you need to survive as well.

Aye, 1 or 2 main damage skills is nearly always optimal, but that doesn't mean you can't have 6 utility skills to boost your damage, defense, and/or AoE along the way.

"

adghar wrote:

Aye, 1 or 2 main damage skills is nearly always optimal, but that doesn't mean you can't have 6 utility skills to boost your damage, defense, and/or AoE along the way.

Any build I play, I use:
* right mouse button for my 6L main attack
* middle mouse for my 3-4L movement skill (+fortify)
* Q for Enduring Cry (that I never use, but it's nice to have ^^)
* W and E hold stuff like Vaal lightning trap and wither totem (I rarely use those in bossfights)
* ...the rest of my sockets hold auras or CWDT-triggered gems

When you're not playing as a summoner, you barely ever need more than 1-2 button to press.

"

Peterlerock wrote:

Any build I play, I use:
* right mouse button for my 6L main attack
* middle mouse for my 3-4L movement skill (+fortify)
* Q for Enduring Cry (that I never use, but it's nice to have ^^)
* W and E hold stuff like Vaal lightning trap and wither totem (I rarely use those in bossfights)
* ...the rest of my sockets hold auras or CWDT-triggered gems

When you're not playing as a summoner, you barely ever need more than 1-2 button to press.

There's probably some accounting for taste to be had here. I love manual-cursing, so that's usually +1. I like making physical melee builds, so Endurance Charges are frequently powerful, so I actually do use Enduring Cry (I came from SC2, so pressing 1 button every 10 seconds is barely an afterthought to me). Movement skill, like you said. For most of my newer builds at least, I also work in a Totem because that's very big DPS increase against bosses. Golems are nice, and a fair amount of my builds involve resummoning them because I don't have the socket space for tankier/triggered Golems.

Not everything has to be dominated by optimal play, either. At least in the short run, it can be entertaining to use Smoke Mine to play at tactics, for example. On my Flameblast Totem build, I take the very unconventional position of using two different movement skills - Lightning Warp (to gain Fire Penetration) plus Blink Arrow (to create meat shields that confuse enemy AI). It's great fun, and there isn't too much loss of clearspeed as both skills are really fast compared to how slow utility skills were in Open Beta.

I put my golem on CWDT usually, just for the luxury of never having to worry if he's up or not.
If I even use one. In melee builds, golems tend to hurt clearspeed by walking around and keeping monsters out of your AoE. ;-)

---

Point is:
In a usual gem setup, you run out of links pretty fast.
Doing something "hybrid" requires a well-suported spell, a well-supported attack, and then all the rest (auras, movement, golem, CWDT, curse, counterattack gems, totem etc). While it may sound nice in theory, there's no real point in actually doing it.

"

Peterlerock wrote:

While it may sound nice in theory, there's no real point in actually doing it.

Perhaps no min/max point, but you occasionally run into an oddball forum poster like me or raics who like to do proofs of concept or build for "flavour" :P

I personally don't really care terribly much about clear speed, I mean, my standards for clear speed have risen considerably since Open Beta which is actually kind of a bad thing, it's harder for me to get satisfied, damn the hedonic treadmill >:(

One of the reasons I like to resummon my Ice Golem on my melee build is that he's such a cute little buddy :>