Help me define build archetypes for some stats work?

Last month I put together some stats for a meta report that went a bit more in-depth than GGG's news posts. In the wake of that, rasmuskl has shown me how to download all the data from poe.ninja/builds for my own purposes, which lets me look at a lot more things.

One of the things I'd really like to do is look at builds in a more nuanced way than purely individual skills. Basically, I'd like to try and define every major build archetype by some distinguishing features that are visible in poe.ninja's data. For example:

Wander = a build that wields wand + shield or dual wands AND has a 5L Kinetic Blast and/or Barrage.

Aurabot = a build that has Guardian's Harmony of Purpose node, Necromancer's Commander of Darkness node or Scion's Guardian node AND has no 5L skills aside from auras (need the first criterion to exclude builds that have just been stripped of gems).

RF = a build that has 5L RF OR uses all of Witchfire Brew, Elemental Equilibrium and Elemental Overload (this should pick up ~90% of the builds that only use a 4L RF).

You get the idea, I hope. What I would love some community input on is...what are the others? Can we possibly come up with a list of these sort of descriptors that includes the vast majority of builds but has minimal overlap? Throw some suggestions at me!

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viperesque wrote:

Aurabot = a build that has Guardian's Harmony of Purpose node or Scion's Guardian node AND has no 5L skills aside from auras (need the first criterion to exclude builds that have just been stripped of gems).

Or Necro's Commander of Darkness.

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RF = a build that has 5L RF OR uses all of Witchfire Brew, Elemental Equilibrium and Elemental Overload (this should pick up ~90% of the builds that only use a 4L RF).

It isn't possible to see 4L RF in a helmet with burning damage/conc. effect supports in-built?

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Towlg wrote:

Or Necro's Commander of Darkness.

Oh wow, completely forgot people still go necro supp. How did I manage that? Thank you for the catch.

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It isn't possible to see 4L RF in a helmet with burning damage/conc. effect supports in-built?

It is possible. Even counting that, about 1/3 of RF builds I can see don't have it 5Led.

Golemancer: Primordial Might, Clayshaper

Not sure if this fits with your idea since it's mostly just essence drain trickster, but:

ED: Essence Drain, Contagion, Spell totem, Wither.

ES Regeneration Tank

Indicators:

• High total regeneration% from skills, items, boot enchant, and pantheon
• Chaos Inoculation and Zealot's Oath (from skilltree or Geofri's Sanctuary)
• Extreme maxES
• NO Righteous Fire slotted
• optional: increased ES recovery rate from gear
• optional but likely: CWDT 1 - Blood Rage 1-7 - Immortal Call 3 slotted (i.e. using Soul of Arakaali pantheon)
• optional but likely: Access to Consecrated Ground from sulphur flask, glove enchant, and/or Inquisitor/ScionInquisitor ascendancy

...I'm not sure there are other current builds than my own Scionic Flametank that qualify as an ES Regeneration tank, though I certainly wouldn't be surprised if there were as the general concept has remained popular as a niche build since Dy'Ness popularized it three years ago.

Oooo, science!


I'd love to help, but what questions are you trying to answer exactly?

This might not be what you're looking for, but for my money, it would be interesting to break things down not necessarily according to the game's mechanics, but the general user experience of playing the build. For instance:

Getting up in monsters' faces:
- Namelock melee (without Ancestral call)
- Close-range spells such as BV, Lightning Tendrils, etc
- Self-use Chin Sol/Singularity

Pewpewing things from afar:
- Long-range melee skills like Sunder
- Self-cast projectile/AoE spells and attacks

Standing around while others do the work:
- Totems
- Summoners
- Trappers?

Walk around while everything automatically dies:
- RF
- Death's Oath
- Autobomber
- Abberath's Hooves


You get the idea. Another interesting dimension would be purely along damage types, regardless of everything else:

- Pure phys
- Phys base with "added as" stacking*
- Single element
- Multiple elements
- Chaos
- Other

*Possibly excluding Hatred/HoA/Added Fire if there's no other source of conversion, since those are quite common in most builds.


Also, I'm not familiar with poe.ninja, can you give a quick rundown of what exactly you can and cannot do? E.g. can you group builds by account? Can you account for active/support gems that come from shaper/elder/unique items?

It would be interesting to see if we can identify poison builds somehow...
For starters, every build that uses Vokuur's Guidance can be considered a poison build. Pretty much the same for the fenumus helmet, dendrobate, coralito's signature, viper strike, poison support and lesser poison support.
Other than that, 5l or 6l with at least two out of vile toxins, melee phys/phys proj attack damage and deadly ailments.
Not sure if that's accurate enough though. Still, I would love to see how many poison builds there actually are these days, poison supposedly being dead and all that (not that it is. it really isn't).

I'm not sure how best to tease apart the data, but for attack builds, there needs to be a way to define those that scale off physical damage, vs those that use flat elemental damage.

So the ones that scale off physical take %physical nodes and use shaper stat sticks and hatred/herald of ash, those that scale off flat elemental stack abyss jewels and prioritize EDWA on tree and gear.

It's just hard to discriminate between the two, because of the commonalities. Maybe the best way is to examine that they don't use: ele builds don't use melee physical damage nor physical projectile attack damage support.

If you were writing a program to do this I would advise you to shove the data into some sort of database engine and have it group skills together with uniques. A fire flicker build uses that unique sword that gives frenzy charges and ignites, whereas a physical flicker uses Terminus Est.

If you group skills and uniques together above a certain threshold, you should be able to (roughly) create all common archetypes as a list and then go from there.

Also, is there a way to distinguish between a weapon being used as a stat stick, vs it being used for its primary damage stat?

For instance, it would be worth grouping attack skills into "both hands always", "both hands if both qualify for skill", and "main hand only". Cyclone/Molten Strike/Dual Strike/Cleave falls into the first, Blade Flurry/Reave for the second, Sunder/EQ/Tec slam for third. DW the third means that it falls into a stat stick category. DW the second would only be a stat stick if one hand has a significantly higher DPS than the other. The first is really only used when you have two good weapons, or is used sword-and-board.