I agree that the game has been focusing a lot on sets and that the power of the custom greens seems to have shifted over to purples every now and then (like how Pyran has recently made custom Mortar Trap kinda redundant), but I can’t say overall that the set design in GD is bad. If a set locks 4 parts of your inventory away, taking away some options and flexibility, likely also necessitating other item pieces along the way to make up for whatever the set pieces are lacking (like CC res or full conversion) you should be getting some extra power along with that to make it worth your while. If you could make a 1:1 exact same build in terms of power with 4 greens instead of 4 purples, why in the world would you ever go for the purples? Unless they provide literally everything your build could ever hope for, you’re gonna be better off getting the greens and fishing for the right affixes to get even more power that way. Which is only going to get easier with the next expansion due to rerolls. The purples take away flexibility and customisation, so they make up for it with some extra bonuses. They definitely shouldn’t be the only option and I do hope some greens that compete with sets get some of their power back that they’ve lost over the years, but I wouldn’t say the game is quite yet at the point where you’re just building by the numbers by just grabbing the one logical set for your skill or mastery combo and building around that at all times. But that might just be me cause I like to build weird.
There’s still many ways a build can come together. You can just see a combo of skills or masteries that appeals/makes sense to you and then you try to see if there’s item support to make that viable. Or you can look at a set or an item that promotes a certain skill/playstyle and try to build entirely around that set/item, at any cost. Or you simply decide you really like a skill and you want to juice it to the stratosphere with every possible bonus you can slap onto it.
Sets and custom builds can slot into that in a variety of ways depending on what setup you’re working with from the get go and any of these 4 listed set options can be the right design for the situation. If there are even really 4 categories, cause category 3 could just as easily fall within category 1, I mean how is Bloodrager any different from Ultos? Logical support within the predicted damage type? Check. Extra procs to make that a little more interesting to play? Check.
You could say that these “obvious choice” sets are kinda boring design but who gives two shits if they at least enable a playstyle that logically should be a thing but wouldn’t be without proper support. Let me put it this way, if every set were to be revolutionary, completely changing how a skill plays, then where exactly would the game’s baseline even be? If you start playing the game and you see lightning Primal Strike, the logical conclusion that you’d expect to arrive at at endgame shouldn’t be “we have Acid Primal Strike that’s enabled by a caster offhand, Aether Primal Strike with a gun, and jellybean Primal Strike that only damages enemies that are not on your screen, and you need to do a handstand to enable it”. You want there to be some basic bitch support for Primal Strike so that you can play it the way it was originally designed. With a chonky two-handed weapon, and lightning. Sure Ultos is dull but at least it’s there to let Lightning PS be a thing (almost all Lightning PS custom items compete for the weapon slot with most other slots having nothing to build with), and it spices things up a little more than an MI would by bringing in a few big procs along the way. You couldn’t just slap that massive lightning storm on a single MI item. You need some inventory commitment, otherwise any build that even slightly smells of Primal Strike would use that massive lightning storm MI. So yeah, sure Ultos isn’t revolutionary. But at least it’s there for those who liked that core playstyle during levelling, and brings in some extra flavour to boot to make you feel like a thunder god. As much as you may scoff at how basic the design of the set it, what would some skills give to at least have that. Like 2H ranged Fire Fire Strike, for example, one of the most basic and logical options for Fire Strike, that has support all the way through levelling through stuff like Flame Keeper or Brimstone and then exactly zero support in lategame. That build would give anything to at least have a basic bitch set, cause the MIs for it aren’t there either. And it would probably prefer a set over MIs because of the aforementioned ability to add cool procs to spice up a potentially dull playstyle.
As others have mentioned and you yourself said, the game is all about the ability to combine things together in different ways, so I really don’t understand the reason to complain about skill conversion sets. That’s no fucking glorified recolouring, what the hell are you on about? Are you actually trying to tell me that EoR in Chaos and EoR in Fire are the exact same thing? Why? Cause both times you’re just holding a button to channel? So is FoI only ever allowed to have one build because they play the same? Should we get rid of the transmuter on AAR, cause you’re still just holding one button? Cool, that’s some lovely build variety we’re promoting. Do we really need a set to put a cooldown on Cadence with every other Cadence-related set so that the gameplay experience is sufficiently transformative for you? You need basic bitch gear support, conversions or not, else the endgame devolves into a slew of funky, illogical playstyles, and every core playstyle the game has been promoting during levelling ends up dead in the water come lategame. And if you want to argue that wacky conversion for skills is fine, it just shouldn’t eat up an entire set, I would encourage you to find custom item support for Aether Blitz if you delete the entirety of Krieg. That’s how it would go for set-supported conversion builds if you just slapped that conversion on one MI instead and threw the build into the wild. They’d essentially just turn into Conduit builds, with little to no hope of actually making something viable. Either you have to make it a conversion set, or you need to create so many MIs supporting that conversion that they might as well be in a set, cause they’ll only ever be used together.
And as Protoss said, yeah, people will post more feedback about sets so sets will get more balancing. It’s logical. If you post a custom Fire FoI build and complain that it’s underpowered, within 60 minutes you’ll have 4 people picking apart your setup and suggesting you try that MI and that MI instead or that you really should be using a different pair of pants or whatever. Every single aspect of that build will be questioned, because with more customisation come more points to potentially criticise, and since there is no “one true undisputable setup” for greens, the devs will be more reluctant to balance around your setup when there are half a dozen other setups that may possibly perform better. It’s just too fucking time consuming to test them all. If a set-based build sucks, it’s much easier to attribute it to the weakness of the set, because it takes up such a big portion of the inventory and is thus responsible for a lot of those weaknesses. It was no wonder Ultos was/is hell to build around when it provided the second worst resistance lineup in all 5pc sets. Pretty much the only thing you can balance in custom setups is damage output, because survivability can be so massively variable based entirely on your affix rolls. So you’ll have, say DEE MIs quietly getting some extra damage or RatA or lifesteal patch after patch with little fanfare cause they’re just one piece of a bigger puzzle.
TLDR: all design variants of sets are fine and have their place. Not everything should be transformative, else the game loses its foundation. It’s true sets are getting a lot of the attention, but that’s kinda logical. The one thing I’d keep an eye on is when sets for a specific skill are getting buffed, are the MIs getting buffed similarly alongside that so that they retain their relative power. Not all burden can be put on devs, if the community doesn’t provide feedback for custom builds for fear of getting their setup criticised on every aspect, relevant or not. I’m sure if I had raised my voice about custom Mortars getting punted into obscurity by Pyran CDR buffs, Zantai would do something about it.
ts, not for a) spam casters; b) melees; Whats the point of having EoR, DE or SS in 4 colours and they all play the same is unclear to me.
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