Why are the melee and especially bow archetypes so behind the spellcaster archetype?

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Orbaal wrote:

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Baharoth raises the real point I probably failed to highlight which is 5 skills make ~ 50% of usage, basically impossible to have any meaningful discussion of archetype parity with values like that.

Real question would be how much of those 50% is due to (im)balance and how much is due to people blindy following guides or whatever is popular on poe ninja/YT/Twitch & co.

Id argue not many out of those 50% created the build they are playing themselves, they are simply trying to follow the Path of least Resistence aka playing whats popular. Which obviously leads to rising prices for those builds because supply & demand are out of whack and then having the same people complaining about the game being unplayable unless you are no-lifing to get rich and casuals are suffering consequently.

Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy and downward spiral, that has very little to do with balancing.

Unfortunately, this is the advice that new players are given: don't try to create your own build, just follow a guide. If you ARE a new player who is trying to figure out how to make a build, there's not a lot of help for you. Noob questions go unanswered on the forums regularly and there aren't many guides that get into the basics of how to create a build. There are very few resources for new players to go from "basic" knowledge to "intermediate" knowledge.

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There are very few resources for new players to go from "basic" knowledge to "intermediate" knowledge.

So true! I've been playing for years and despite having a very solid grasp on the mechanics necessary to create my own build (i.e. passive optimisation and itemisiation) but I still feel like I don't have the acumen to actually theorycraft a build that could break into red maps.

The only real place to absorb all that knowledge is simply by playing an absolutely ridiculous amount of the game; This isn't D3 or GD, where items have obvious purposes and simple mod spreads that you can summarise in an article or two.

Cleave needs a big buff!

From your profile, it looked like you hardly play a spell caster at all, so I don't know what made you think they are so OP compared to attack builds. I've played a mix of both, there are pros and cons. One of the most popular HC build is also melee with slam Champ build. Straight up non-archmage caster builds are actually meh right now. In fact, I would say dot builds are overall the strongest in present day PoE. Poison, ignite, chaos dot, cold dot, bleed, just great stuffs.

Edit: Also lmao at thinking miners have great ehp and clear speed. If they're so good as you said, miners wouldn't be sitting at low % uses in poeninja. Miners is good at taking boss down early in league start but they're actually rather poor in clear speed and their playstyle can be risky as well because mines are not instant attacks.

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BioSpec wrote:

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There are very few resources for new players to go from "basic" knowledge to "intermediate" knowledge.

So true! I've been playing for years and despite having a very solid grasp on the mechanics necessary to create my own build (i.e. passive optimisation and itemisiation) but I still feel like I don't have the acumen to actually theorycraft a build that could break into red maps.

The only real place to absorb all that knowledge is simply by playing an absolutely ridiculous amount of the game; This isn't D3 or GD, where items have obvious purposes and simple mod spreads that you can summarise in an article or two.

In fairness, a lot of that is because the low hanging fruit of builds has already been taken & is already in use.

Even if you look at someone who's acknowledged as being a good build designer (e.g. Mathil), most of what they try ends up being just "OK". They work, they're usable, they're interesting, but there's a reason why those builds don't become the new meta.

There are many many thousands of eyes looking over builds & seeing something that everyone else has missed is possible, but unlikely.

Instead we tend to get refining of what's already clearly good. It's a lot more likely that you'll think up (e.g.) a clever use of an alternate cluster jewel rather than a full new build. And that's the sort of thing that gets lost somewhere on page 34 of a forum build thread or halfway down a poe.ninja list of people who have higher dps cos they outgear the innovator.

I do agree with you that genuinely new builds are more likely to come from previously unnoticed interactions of unique items tho... you can really leverage up one or two obscure item affixes into something spectacular in PoE.

And all of that said, anything which doesn't calculate dps easily on poe.ninja can cruise under the radar for a while too (e.g. barrage support, trinity, minion combos, elemental equilibrium, etc)...