Something off(or about?) this topic:
When can we fight Mogdrogen multiple times so that Mogdrogen fight can be part of build test?
I have an idea of the pretext——friendly competition or friendly sparring. 
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for vast majority of people, including reddit browsers, something getting nerfed/getting put way off its initial top20 spot wont really impact them that much, and post2 tweaked Korba was still fine imo
(i also think part of the issue back then was post 1 was made so early there was a bunch of stuff that wasn’t ironed out, like enemy whiffing certain attacks making stuff seem stronger and sunder values not dialed in)
After patch 1.2.1.3? and Zantai had “slain” mighty Korba it was still plenty decent to my scrub player controls 
- and didn’t feel unworthy to recommend, even if others were better
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I doubt your average GD player (redditor) could tell the difference anyway. How much did the Korba nerf realistically affect anything? A few seconds off the Ravager kill time at most? And even that depends more on the player than the items.
I remember when I spent my heart and soul farming the Morgoneth set for the Soulrend Reaper build by Rekt(?) and was devastated when a couple weeks later they changed the set to support Vitality instead. But I actually couldn’t tell the difference lol. The character still clears 99% of content just fine.
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that’s what i mean
Banana/Nofika/Roman/Lee etc etc “toxic gang” operate on a high attention/skill plane where they can tell a bunch of stuff in a build and changes(or nerfs) feels as XY difference.
Stuff i might think/feel seems outright OP they’d even ask for buffs to in a later PTR, but that also makes more sense if the baseline is vastly different, facetanking 3 bosses on the regular, distinguishing boss cues, avg clear time being 4min instead of 6, so +15sec difference becomes more huge.
Even something like dodging ravager Sunder i know inherently i can’t rely 100% on, so my default position would be to stack pharma as safety regardless of the otherwise “celestial safety rating” of the build. And when/if i then do get stupidly punished, eating 3 swipes to the face +an orb or two, i then don’t even begin to question the build’s balancing/updates first or seond, but my own casul scrub pilot reaction
I think it was… Aegis nerf?, back when, where initially my position was it was still stupid strong because of how tanky it was (could casually ignore benji stab+clusters and even eat Grava orb), so it being a bit slower didn’t really seem that big of a deal to me at first.
Lee gave me a couple of comparisons and then it sorta makes more sense, that reduced dmg doesn’t just equal slower time for me, but less tank for them/vs other builds, because a casual 1v1 vs benji isn’t really representative of much, when literally all toppest Toxic builds could do that baseline (while not losing healing/aoe/multi fight tankiness)
Question for the testers & builders:
The current lineup looks very different from the previous one. So I’m wondering.
How much of the change is patches changing balance, and how much is new ideas being tested?
Like, the changes to physical damage and resistance obviously had a huge impact, as did stuff like DE and AAR buffing. I expect those builds just would not have made the cut last go around. And RoS for dual wield just didn’t make sense before it was changed.
But was bleeding and super high OA also enabled by patches, or did nobody think to test what having 4.8K OA would do before our Chinese colleagues came up with it? Same question for the retal stuff on that warden in top spot, balance change or new idea?
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What if I told you the Top 21 are mere decoys to distract the 
from the REAL builds just before the playtest?
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Added (most) celestials kills to the post as well as links to corresponing forum posts for certain builds.
Might remove all ravager videos to lower the link limit.
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could merge the celestials/ravager vids into a custom YT playlist, that way it gets counted as a single link 
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What link limit? I have million links in the beginner compendium
Another thing, if someone was looking at my crit calc for example, is that it works for non-DoT damage. Bleed benefits from OA and Crit way more because it has higher effective Crit chance. Since after you crit once, it’s a crit for the whole duration or in other words every tick has multiple chances to become a crit in contrast to normal damage which has only a single chance.
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Its the mixture of both usually.
You can see however that stuff that got recently buffed (DE, PB, Blightlord, Deathguard, etc) made it into the top. Next patch something also gonna get buffed and like 30% of the buffed stuff will make it to the top. It’s like recency power-bias.
Edit: That being said, new ideas still play a huge role. Blightlord, for instance was tried right after all the buffs but w/o DE and was very mid. Nofika’s addition of DE as a main damage skill is what propelled the build into greatness.
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I can no longer change any links or hyperlinks in last post, only text. No idea why.
If you’re getting some weird error then it happens to me sometimes. I just cannot update the compendium. Then I usually try to make an update some another time. Or it works after multiple attempts. Although I don’t know if my errors were links related but maybe I didn’t notice.
Thanks for the answers, all. Interesting to see your thoughts.
Yeah, I’ve noticed this too.
One of my personal top 3 fun builds is a very basic righteous-fervor-and-aegis fire templar that I mostly made for aesthetics reasons. I thought it was going to suck because I split my focus between auto-attacking with not-so-great WPS and throwing Aegis with not-so-great cooldown.
But in practice the character just performs solidly (not amazingly, but solidly) and kill speed is pretty nice… because I get 3800+ OA and high crit damage, especially on Aegis. I’m fighting bosses in shattered realm and noticing them dying from the DoT while I’m waiting for ascension to recharge. And I never even planned to build this character around crits or high OA or DoTs. Just happened.
Doing it on purpose seems like it would get even better results. 
Is that why the Hyrian Bulwark wielding, gun toting Mage Hunter wasn’t there? I knew it.
(…It’s actually not as bad as it sounds…)
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Speaking of the Ravager, did you only test against the Flesh variant?
I think new ideas unrelated to balance are a much bigger factor than we would want to believe. The reality is there are too few of us to test everything, simply not enough manpower to cover all possible builds. The game has thousands of endgame viable builds, hundreds of highly competitive ones, and the chance of smth escaping our lense is very high, unfortunately. Blightlord was basically a last week on a whim testing that got into top15. And just a day after the patch we found out smth about another build that was untested but might’ve gotten it into top20.
A lot of phys builds have lost the edge of being strong vs enemy phys hits. Nothing about the dmg was nerfed, some builds were even buffed, it’s more about how everything else received much bigger buffs.
About OA - again, partially we didn’t realise the potential before but more than that the general power creep now allows to stack OA and crit on a much bigger variety of builds while keeping the tank at SR30-31 in check. Chinese were doing it for quite some time because they specialised in speedrunning that requires expert SR knowledge and skills. Now it’s available for more casual players.
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Hm, I’m kind of the opposite: I DO want to believe this is a bigger factor.
Because… why would we all still be playing this game if it was “solved” and we already knew all the best answers barring balance patches?
I honestly think it’s great people are coming up with these new ideas this late in the game.
I think you two are on a same side , not an opposite site. You both think new ideas of builds are more important than buffing and nerfing. Am I right or wrong?
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Yeah, you are right.
I meant that it’s a shame we weren’t able to discover some important stuff before (and likely didn’t discover everything now) simply because there’s not enough people to test everything. So from the tester’s PoV it’s a little bittersweet. It’s cool in itself to discover some stuff that was there before but at the same time you think “why didn’t i think of this before”.
Still the vast majority of new power comes from balance updates and new skill mod / conversion additions.
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When you are done building “everything”, another idea or build pops up on the surface…