Shouldn't build DPS relate to skill ceiling and cooldown management?

I see people seeing motar builds with under 5min crucible clearing time and immediately want them nerfed, but the problem i see with such mentality is that they see one aspect of the build only. Some builds like auromancer or motar needs INSANE amount of button and cooldown management to get to that DPS, while also require some form of set up by placing a few mortars first. They are also not completely safe either, often require careful kiting or cooldown management on circuit breakers.

Compare that to say physical EOR build, wouldn’t it be fair that these builds that need huge amount of management to do abit more DPS than usual?

I don’t want them nerfed, but there are very few drawbacks to a cast & kite build. These type of builds are low risk, high reward. In short it’s pretty much a pet build.

Since FG, it got some huge buffs which I personally didn’t think were required.

I’ll also mention that Mortars favour small rooms in which enemies constantly respawn such as the death rooms in the rogue dungeons or crucible. In main campaign you have to restart your setup on every encounter.

Pyran is a fringe case and there really isn’t any cooldown management. Drop Mortar Traps when it’s off cooldown, run around avoiding stuff, profit.

You still need to manage blast shield cooldown, debuff timing with Demolist skills while also spamming righous fevor for armor/da buff while also need to stack some dot with Korvaak relics active. It is one of the most hectic build i’ve ever seen compared to Dervish or Belgoth build which has like 4 buttons.

Not to mention with motar build you are quite squishy, run into a gravathul or Koba in SR and it hurts alot.

I disagree on the amount of skill you seem to think is required.

Before the Pyran set existed, people were using Mortar Trap Purifiers very effectively. All you did was drop your Mortars and Flashbang and you had enough points to max both easily. This led to orange crits filling the screen (add % crit damage and the rest is history). Against tough enemies you then dropped your thermite mines, used word of renewal, dropped your seal etc.

What you seem to be forgetting is that Mortars can permastun dangerous enemies and whipe them out before they become a threat eg Arcane herores, Rage Hulks etc.

Awareness is still required from the player (like not stand on crap that’s killing you) but let’s not act like you need Uber skills on a Mortar build

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When something puts out enough damage that you only have to deal with a fraction of a fraction of mechanics I think it’s safe to say this isn’t a matter of skill so much as raw numbers. A lazily piloted Pyrans that focuses on survival will match or beat numerous other shake and bake builds played at their absolute best.

Mortars and other totem skills are ideal for crucible, being immortal and immune to all debuffs. Of course I expect them to perform well in a small arena, but not to such a grand extent.

The main thing we have seen in all the recent balance passes is that builds will be tuned towards the dev’s desired average based on the accessibility of the items that compose the build. Shake and bake being “grab set add blues/legendaries done” a majority of builds are all on equal rarity footing. Of course this means they all get tuned towards the same benchmark.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my 25+ years of gaming, is that aggressive normalization of builds almost always results in sterilization of fun. Imagine if you had a perfect balance across the board. How long would you enjoy your setup knowing that every other possible setup would always be about the same, at least performance wise?
On the other hand, having a single class destroying the content at 5x speed is also bad, especially so for build diversity. Would you still play the game then?

where do you draw the line, so that you don’t frustrate players who spend a lot of time making their builds, while, at the same time, not letting obvious game breaking mechanics taint the pool. Better testing before updates? More frequent updates with mild tuning? No updates at all?

I’ve watched a few D3 and PoE channels to get the vibe. There’s a lot of action. There are obviously super strong builds each season. The players are hyped and excited to play those. There are major balance issues for sure. But given the amount of positive vs negative feedback, is it possible that these builds are made much stronger on purpose? To drive the excitement? Is that what the majority of players want? Can we make a poll about it? What if most players vote against GD balance?

One thing you have to understand about the builds typically seen on the forums is that they are exceptionally accessible for the average player who is going to commit time to pushing a build to the perceived endgame.

Monster Infrequents exist as a way to invest time and effort into pursuing something above the baseline provided by the rain of legendaries. This simply isn’t widely acknowledged on the forums because most builds using MIs have been whined off to the sidelines because of a combined perception that such things are impossible to obtain and the inability of new players to think for themselves when puzzling over the guides wherein they are expecting spoonfeeding.

The number one rule of ARPGs is gear = power. If every posted build just uses easy to find gear what degree of variance do you really expect in build performance? Players wanting an easy OP option where they don’t have to farm gear proportional to the power gain?

I totally agree that a build’s performance should be proportional to the effort it takes to assemble and pilot it. And please correct me if I’m wrong, but what I seeing here is a trend to bring everything down/up to the same baseline regardless of those considerations. I actually love the idea of mega powerful builds based on extremely rare items, that’s what kept me in D2 for ages!

So this mostly boils down to an opinion that totem based builds are hard to pilot?