Over 60% of players are playing "Lightning Spear". Where is the build diversity?

As the title suggests, and I guess the number will only go up to 70 or even more percentage.

I understand everyone gravitates towards the OP builds, but the build diversity in 0.2 seems even lesser than the "broken" builds we had in 0.1.

And from my understanding in the Q/A and their recent patch update preview, it will not get nerfed.

Almost every streamer in SC is playing this build. After trying multiple builds over the past few days with Lich / monk / warrior and even bleed amazon, nothing in the game can match this, like not even close.

The build costs just 2-3 divine as of now to get started to blast tier 15-16 maps easily. If you want to do damage or clear thats even 1/5th as good as this on other classes, you need very expensive gear and jewels. What's the point in even trying to do other stuff?

I'm not asking for this to get nerfed, but could we perhaps have more SIGNIFICANT buffs on other weapons / skills? It's very demotivating to try and play any other build when we have the Spark/Herald screen blow-up back in a stronger form, which is also very cheap to get started.

Side note: Most of my friends who tried other builds like lich etc. already quit the game, the ones that are still playing and enjoying are playing LS, obviously.

Also, since everything else got nerfed to the ground, the difference between this build and almost every other build is EXTREME. I hope 0.3 atleast has some better build diversity. For now, I'm just going to wait as investing time to grind with any other build seems really boring, knowing you can just invest a few divines and reach god-tier abilities which you never would with other builds.

Edit: When I mean build diversity, I'm not expecting equal number of monk and huntress players. The issue is the gap in this specific build and 99 % of other builds. It's too wide and de-incentivizes most other playstyles. Cost to effectiveness ratio is unbeaten, and probably will be for the rest of the league.

It really is a shame they didn't push their balance patch separately from the new content.

Sorc and Monk are in the doldrums at the moment, with 1.1% and 2.2% representation respectively, and while some of that is potentially due to being overnerfed, it's hard to know where the pain points are exactly since the new class and new Ascendancies (Mainly Lich and Smith) are currently being played by 72% of the SC ladder.

The changes announced yesterday sound like a good start, but there needs to be some severe numerical changes for Non-Lightning Spear/Essence Brain/Boneshatter abilities.

Spells appear to be in an especially bad place atm. Opening up Mana Tempest to Non-Lightning abilities sounds cool, but there are a total of seven projectile spells, and more than half of them gain nothing from it.

I wasn't aware of it being that bad. I picked LS because I enjoy this same thing in Diablo 2 and wanted to see what it'd be like in PoE2. But I do agree, the damage I am putting out on a SSF character is incredible.

The other problem is that the whirlwind and parry stuff doesn't feel very good, or at least not as rewarding in terms of damage for all the effort. I never looked into the bleed build stuff or trying an ice focused build (although the ice stuff looks appealing to me)

It's definitely a case of the LS stuff being a bit too strong and the other stuff being a bit too weak, making the gap between them significant. I am sure this will be balanced out in time and that's when we'll see more build diversity for sure.

Why do you care so much what everyone else is doing? And if it's so OP, you know it will be nerfed sooner or later.

What other choices are there Apart from Lighting spear, Twisters for ranged skill

Explosive arrow sucks as you can't sustain Frenzy charges easily enough.

Glacial lance has poor damage compared to LS

whirlwind lance is a joke of a skill

Spear of Solaris takes forever to build up as it requires heavy stuns and drains almost instantly, takes for ever to use the skill and by the time the skill hits, the mob/boss has either moved recovered from heavy stun or killed you while you was using the skill

Storm lance requires a detonator skill like "thunderous leap (slow and often misses) or Explosive shot which is also slow to go off

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darkdan#5425 เขียน:

What other choices are there Apart from Lighting spear, Twisters for ranged skill

Explosive arrow sucks as you can't sustain Frenzy charges easily enough.

Glacial lance has poor damage compared to LS

whirlwind lance is a joke of a skill

Spear of Solaris takes forever to build up as it requires heavy stuns and drains almost instantly, takes for ever to use the skill and by the time the skill hits, the mob/boss has either moved recovered from heavy stun or killed you while you was using the skill

Storm lance requires a detonator skill like "thunderous leap (slow and often misses) or Explosive shot which is also slow to go off

Yep, and if you look at spells / other things like quarterstaff, its just as bad or even worse than the huntress abilities. I'm glad people are enjoying LS, but it almost feels like you have to play that build if you want to have fun, or struggle with others for a long time before you get expensive gear to do 1/5th of the LS clears.

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Where is the build diversity?

I can't tell you where to find it, but I can definitely tell you where no reasonable person would expect to: in the first few days of a League which introduced an entirely new class. Like, come on, surely we're not going to act shocked that there's an imbalance in favor of Huntress at the moment.

Also, 41% of of the Top 1000 is Amazon and the #3 and #4 are Lich and SoK both in the double digits. Overall it looks like a more even spread than we had last league so I feel like maybe we're being a little dramatic.

Build diversity doesn't exist because GGG nerfed almost everything viable in high end content to the point of not being playable.
The game is trying to move in two completely different directions.


If 1000 builds are super strong NOTHING is stopping people who prefer slower gameplay from playing the way they prefer.
If almost nothing is super strong then almost everything is trying to stop people from playing the way they prefer.

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I can't tell you where to find it, but I can definitely tell you where no reasonable person would expect to: in the first few days of a League which introduced an entirely new class. Like, come on, surely we're not going to act shocked that there's an imbalance in favor of Huntress at the moment.

I don't disagree that players will mostly try the new class. That's alright with me. My issue is that most other classes/skills are almost useless compared to LS clear. There is no monk or sorc build for example that even comes close, and I've played 500+ hours of those 2 before. Seeing the extreme gap in the skill effectveness will push players to use LS even further as being one of the only viable skills to breeze through endgame. That's the main issue I have as it's heavily de-incentivizing to try anything else seeing LS in action.

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zeddy123#4861 เขียน:

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darkdan#5425 เขียน:

What other choices are there Apart from Lighting spear, Twisters for ranged skill

Explosive arrow sucks as you can't sustain Frenzy charges easily enough.

Glacial lance has poor damage compared to LS

whirlwind lance is a joke of a skill

Spear of Solaris takes forever to build up as it requires heavy stuns and drains almost instantly, takes for ever to use the skill and by the time the skill hits, the mob/boss has either moved recovered from heavy stun or killed you while you was using the skill

Storm lance requires a detonator skill like "thunderous leap (slow and often misses) or Explosive shot which is also slow to go off

Yep, and if you look at spells / other things like quarterstaff, its just as bad or even worse than the huntress abilities. I'm glad people are enjoying LS, but it almost feels like you have to play that build if you want to have fun, or struggle with others for a long time before you get expensive gear to do 1/5th of the LS clears.

Oh, I didn't know that was how people were playing LS. My build is explosive spear x2, into storm lance that has scatter shot, by the time I throw that storm lance out, the two explosive spear explode and detonate the storm lance which one shots everything except maybe a rare which needs this same combo cast at it a second time. LS is the filler I use. I also generate frenzy charges from storm lance's electrocution kills. Honestly, really enjoying this build. But I don't look up builds so I don't know if this is meta or not