ohioastro wrote:
I really do respect that people like to play games in different ways, and that the vets here really are focused on high difficulty builds. The dismissal of any guides for any normal-ish difficulty,
however, really does highlight a problem with this approach.
The obsession with "best builds" just ends up restricting the diversity of things that people do in the game. Undead builds are a lot of fun, for example - but, horror of horrors, they can't use infusions! So we end up with no guides describing a perfectly viable and fun normal game approach. And, if some talents are objectively "too strong"....explore builds that don't use them, at lower difficulty levels. There is more than one way to add challenge. What's really striking about reading guides at high difficulty levels is how monotonous and narrow the options are. Same inscriptions. Same races. Same talents, in many cases, even for different classes. Cookie-cutter. It's perfectly OK to note that some options in the game are generically stronger than others. It's quite different to write guides that omit large fractions of the class talents in a misguided optimization exercise.
I'll also flat out say that this game *needs* classes with a variety of difficulties. There should be simple classes for beginners - not every class should be the complexity of a Mindslayer or Temporal Warden. And, of course, complex classes for advanced players. There should be some classes that are easier to win with - most players don't win this game at any difficulty level! "Balancing" classes is therefore not the same as a MMO to me. (It is true that you don't want a single ability that is so much better than anything else that you just need to repeatedly mash a single button, especially if this is true at normal. I want interesting options, not one true path.)
And, if a feature is "too powerful" if used in some complex and unanticipated way, you shouldn't change the game in ways that harm the large majority of the player base that don't do those things.
I'm a bit tired of repeating these things, but the reason normal guides are dismissed is because they're usually written by inexperienced players with one or a few wins in it, and anything that wins a higher difficulty can win a lower difficulty. Normal has been proved time and again to be not a test of how good your build is (you can probably beat it without talents, antimagic archmage can beat nightmare for example) but of your understanding of mechanics and decision-making as a player.
There's simply no need for any kind of build to beat normal, a build for normal can literally boil down to "do whatever you want". Beating normal or not is entirely reliant on you, as a player, understanding basic concepts and gameplay such as important stats, cleansing, debuffs, risks, positioning, etc, as long as you're
semi-competent in these things, you'll be able to win normal regardless of your build, at some point you might even start realizing things just from playtime alone. So... a guide made around normal has no relevance whatsoever in how to play a class or not to play it, high level guides do just that, they tell you what to do and not to do and point out the strengths of the class, there's definitely a lot of optional things and builds beyond being purely efficient, race is entirely up to you and the better you play the more freedom you can have with your builds.
You can easily take a high level guide and play it in a lower difficulty, and modify talents as much as you want, and it'll probably work if you know what you're doing.
I'm a player that plays Yeek on Insane exclusively (of course I have quite a few lower difficulty wins) and believe people should do what they find more fun, I pretty much never care about making my runs optimal, and what optimal is will vary from person to person, but what I care about is giving good advice, something low level guides do not. Bad advice breeds misinformation and misinformation helps noone win in the long run, so it's something I try to dispel. I know bpat is the same in this case, and a lot of people who play higher difficulties usually are as well.
Think of it as a tutorial, tutorials shouldn't "kind of/maybe" work, or "sometimes" work, they should definitely work and give good advice. A beginner artist should most definitely not write a tutorial in hopes for it to be useful, they can and usually do it anyways, but it probably won't be very helpful or insightful, or it will be shoddy at best. In which case it's totally okay if a more experienced artist gives them tips and corrects their mistakes, that's more or less what we do, it's up to you to take the tips or not, but we do it out of goodwill and experience.
These kind of rants are getting off-topic and really add nothing to the discussion, you're not the first or last person to put these points forward, it'd be nice if they stopped. I think it all stems from a misunderstanding and thinking people are being "elitist", while a few may indeed be, most of these people are either banned or not active anymore, and on the other end we have people who simply don't like accepting the fact that someone might be better or more experienced than them at a game, it's all nonsense. So my advice is to try to think of it all as good advice most of the time and feel free to use guides to figure things out and branch out as much as you want in lower difficulties, following it more closely if you're playing in the intended difficulty or having a hard time.
At the end of the day, keep in mind that following a guide doesn't always mean you'll win or do well, and not all classes are for everyone.