Both are great, but I gotta say what bothered me in the compendium is the quality of the builds that are being added here sometimes. Now before everyone gets their panties up in a bunch, it’s my opinion, okay, I have a warped perfectionist view of GD builds. There is nothing wrong with playing unoptimized specs/builds and doing pet/retal/shadow strike hybrids with faction only gear and classless. But at some point compendium is so flooded with very poorly optimized specs that it loses its point kinda.
But is GT Builds able to evaluate a build’s efficiency?
Maybe builds can be sorted into sub-categories like optimized, challenge, improvable and dated.
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not at all, but they are just easier to access I guess since everyone goes to grimtools anyway.
I honestly don’t have a solution for the problem as it will require a group of people filtering out compendium entries which will definitely create a lot of drama, since some builders can’t handle critisism (but at the same time feel the need to share their sometimes heavily underoptimized specs). And Zantai doesn’t like drama here, this has to be a drama free place, any notion of controversy and mods roll in with mass deletion of the comments and changing thread titles.
The community aspect is the one benefit of the Build Compendium, which Grim Tools does not deliver. But are actual build discussions not better for this?
Questioning the purpose and value of collecting builds: Now I wonder, how much inspiration are top builders like yourself drawing from other people’s builds?
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I am just shamelessly stealing my shit from iMarcus and Chinese builders 
In reality we share and borrow each other ideas a lot within our little toxic builders community
Build Compendium is a collection of… builds 
of every quality, idea, possibility, playstyle. A book of people’s imagination, consider it like this. Your elite community already has its own top 20 best optimized GD builds (and going to have another one?). Maybe it should be pinned in the future. But as another collection, separated from, uh, usual builds from Compendium.
ngl, when i first joined the forum/started browsing the compendiums my impression for a long time was these was sorta “curated” build collections, and mainly only the “good”/well optimized was included (unsure if that was ever the case or just wrong perception), and at a certain point then straight up became include literally anything posted as long as the formatting was right 
Granted that “curation impression” might simply have been because at a time largely only dedicated players and builders actually posted stuff, and it wasn’t so much because curated but the "throw every build at the wall"stage of the game simply hadn’t been reached yet.
That’s why build submission rules and tags like [cr+], [sr] etc. were set. If we going to have another Compendium for next expansion, these criterias may change, sure. Depends on its curator.
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My issue with GT builds is that it seems to require a specific formatting and I have no idea why some of my builds got in there while others did not even though I pretty much do all my posts the same way.
Personally prefer the compendium for that reason since it is a person managing it rather than an automated process, but then again, since someone needs to manually add them I can see that being an issue (for the curator) as well.
Seems like Compendium and GT builds have different purposes 
prefer the compendium currently but i don’t think anyone should have to do all those manual tasks…
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my personal opinion, as an ORDINARY PLAYER (and collector-)): I constantly leaf through the compendium, select builds with the marks “all celestial” and the like (after all, the only thing I haven’t overcome in the game is the crate-), cover every topic, I look for a link to GT, click on it and… discover that I DON’T EVEN HAVE HALF OF THE ITEMS IT NEEDS! -))) (ok, ok, I wiped both the saves and the database with the release of 1.2 and it is clear that for myself I wrote all sorts of things for convenience: my own stasher and an extension for chrome that shows the presence of items in my database.)
and thus I spend a lot of time NOT on the game-)
result: personally, I would REALLY like something like the long-standing GrimSheet (and, again, my attempt to develop it Grim Dawn [Builds] Contest for NTQV project) - a minimum of graphics, all the information on one screen and, the main thing is that all builds are in one table with the ability to filter by build capabilities, type of killing a specific celestial, the speed of clearing the crucible and the achieved shard…
I guess someday I’ll write my own automatic parser for themes from the compendium myself… someday, oh-)
ps. I also remember there was a Russian site with builds (i found! https://grimpendium.net.ru/), it seemed like they also collected builds by hand, but still…
If forum Compendium wins, could we get true “Table” of contents in open post like this:
| Classless | Soldier | Demolitionist | Occultist | Nightblade | Arcanist | Shaman | Inquisitor | Necromancer | Oathkeeper | Berserker |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soldier | - | Commando | Witchblade | Blademaster | Battlemage | Warder | Tactician | Deathknight | Warlord | ??? |
| Demolitionist | Commando | - | Pyromancer | Saboteur | Sorcerer | Elementalist | Purifier | Defiler | Shieldbreaker | ??? |
That will depend on whoever takes it over and what criteria, etc, they decide they want to use for it.
Just add it to curator duties.
Class list is one of things I don’t like both Forum and GT. Even with my game length of service I don’t have a need to remember all classcombos, and search where is my, for example, demo+necro or it listed as necro+demo is boring.
The table in this is case more practical.
I use the Compendium mostly out of habit. I like the formatting, being quickly able to filter for leveling builds, beginner guides, hardcore viable, etc. because after ~1000 hours of (mostly) beginner hardcore builds I still consider myself a mediocre pilot with barely passable knowledge of this game
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We can have a class table in any case. But with ten masteries it might exceed the width of the forum, unless the text size is adjusted in every cell… but that’s a future problem.
(Just the thoughts of a retired guy who just stumbled into the forums)
You’re actually spot on. When I started playing in vanilla, there were like 5 people who posted builds. And not all of them could do crucible (there was no sr at the time so cruci is the hardest content outside mogdrogen). This meant that if you see a build capable of clearing crucible then it pretty much guarantees that the build is well optimized. As time passed, people got better at actually playing the game that meme builds can now clear cruci in decent speeds (or sr 75-76 reliably once that came out). Droprates also went up that people who don’t gdstash can now make builds, and more people just played GD in general, so more people submit builds and the compendium only really had a policy of “as long as it follows the format then it’s good enough”.
I think it is a good time to move onto GT builds. Yes there will probably be more low quality builds put in. But if the compendium is gonna continue to accept bad builds, then that better be automated so we don’t burden one guy to put the builds on manually. If we’re gonna start curating the compendium to only include builds that pass some criteria then it’s gonna be too subjective and it’ll just cause drama. Better go with the easiest solution, imo.
Also this helps Dammitt, who’s been one of the biggest reasons why a lot of these builds exist in the first place, even more.
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how did it end? nothing? -)
neither Dammitt, I see, improves the filters on their site,
neither the compendium is updated?
so maybe there are some nuggets in website construction? I’m ready to give my website (and the Chrome extension for grabbing build data from [GrimTools] Build Calculator) to the craftsmen for rework and improvement.
well, or maybe the main builders will make a general decision and I can modify the site to suit their requirements