As the title boldly states “best builds”, you can always object both the list and the criterias.
The system we went by accounts for the needs of the majority of the playerbase in terms of performance: stable, reliable, efficient and forgiving farming. Just to be clear, all top20 builds can pass SR90 and pass select SR100 with pharma.
If some virtual tin can with a shield or pet build can pass SR120 in half an hour, and is slow, sluggish and clunky to play otherwise, can you really, honestly say deep SR crawling alone warrants a “top” label. I think we can all agree it doesn’t.
I really want to be done with this particular convo. Neither of people participated in making the list has any personal disdain towards pet builds. Either suggest a concrete up to date build with results it has or make a sound proposition in the criterias for determining top builds.
I’m totally on board with you here, no argument.
I’m not pushing for pet builds to be included at all if they don’t deserve to be.
In fact, if you read back, I’m defending your position and your list. I’m thankful for you guys making this list, and I’m happy with the set of benchmarks you chose for it.
Tbh i’m not sure pet builds would make it into Grim Sheet based top either. Grim Sheet was exploitable in a way that if you have a glasscannon with an active fail-safe ability (perferably MoT) you could score a huge amount of points with cherry-picked Crucible runs, superboss kills with kiting and monotonous grind through SR95-100 by pulling bosses 1 by 1 and fighting them with MoT - cluster - MoT rotation.
Example - Morgo Reaper. It was one of the highest scoring builds on Grim Sheet. In this list, however, it barely made honorable mentions, and only because it’s a Nery’s personal favourite. And it was buffed since Grim Sheet.
Oathkeeper is actually the most common mastery here by far.
I wanted to do a proper breakdown of this, so that comment is a great diving board.
oathkeeper features 11 times in the list, more than half the builds … If you include the 15 Honorable mentions, 8 or 9 are also Oathkeeper, increasing its lead even more.
This is followed by Shaman at 8
and then Soldier at 7. Of those 7, 4 are warlords. Without Oathkeeper, Soldier is middle of the pack.
Necro is there 5 times, 4 of those being reaper and oppressor, who seem to have a great synergy.
Arcanist and Nightblade 3 times each
Occultist twice
and Inquisitor only once.
You need to go down to the second-to-last honorable mention to see the first (and only) demolitionist.
When it comes to damage type, Physical is indeed the most common at 9 builds out of 20, almost half. Then it dramatically drops off to 3 for both Retal (as a whole) and Vitality.
Lightning gets between 3 and 1 1/2 depending on how you count lightning retal and trozan.
The other spots are shared one each with bleed, Aether, Chaos, and 1/2 cold.
No Fire or pierce builds and no Acid build if you exclude Retal.
So, the 2 things that actually shamelessly dominate here are Oathkeeper and Physical damage. Oathkeeper, especially covers over half the entries, no matter how you slice the list, or if you include honorable mentions or not.
well, pierce was decimated in the past and didn’t recover at all, as I only remember some Belgo and hybrid Pierce/Bleed Goredrinker builds. many useful conversions were gutted or removed, BS nerfed, same for some procs, etc etc, so it has now 1,5 melee builds and 0 casters.
Fire also has fallen from grace because of burn nerfs (like IK SB was once a strong build, now it’s just meh cuz set is poop and fire is poop), also Grava still exists
Acid I think was never too strong but now it has 4 resistant Nemesis and probably the most obnoxious ones
So maybe we should look at this side of the coin more … attentively.
Also, Considering that the 3 top masteries (Oathkeeper, Shaman and Soldier) all have support for Physical damage, and 2 of them for vitality, that they also happen to have the most physique built-in and that they all have skill nods for extra health on top of that physique (in short, they are all built for sturdiness) might also play a role.
The 4th most common class (Necro) has …support for Physical and vitality damage, a lot of physique built-in, and a skill nod to increase health as well…
no, most of them don’t for imo obv. reasons.
a lot of the builds in this list are meme builds made for the sake of shit’s & giggles & to have them exist.
there is no way to make a acid death knight perform as good as a acid dervish 4 example simply cuz of the lack of item supporting acid dk & the lack of % RR & racial.
The two dmg types that felt inherently worse than the others were cold and pierce - good paper stats and properties resulted in subpar performance. Even after 9.7 monster cold res nerf.
For other dmg types it mostly comes down to particular gear synergy and how much were established best options for dmg type nerfed in the past, like IK, Pyran, Blightlord for fire, for example.
Phys is indeed still ahead of other dmg types. But the edge is very minor and physical is 1) much more punishing for making any mistakes in building 2) on average harder to level through campaign.
Bleeding(with some acid) Beastcaller Conjurer for instance is somewhat of a decent all-arounder build. I did 5:15 Crucible, 12 minutes SR 75/76 Crucible and 2:50 Ravager. Speed was lacking compared to my usual attempts. Build was tanky but Ravager managed to kill 2 pets, so had to respawn them. I also lost 2x pets in SR run. With little bit of better piloting perhaps is avoidable. Also when you have dead pet, you need to switch bars to summon new one and in Crucible new pet don’t get benefit of the buffs. So lower QoL and few quirks. Also I used double rare MI.
Cold Beastcaller and elemental Bysmiel Conjurer are way off from being competitive. I even noticed no one tried before mixing fire Skeletons with Shaman pets. Now I know why.
Anyway my point is lot of different pet builds were tested and I already laid my statements.
Some fire firestrike setups came in late and were about on tier with the honorable mentions, but purifier/fire gear can make it very tough to hit the same standards as the top of the list. Selling out for damage still doesn’t quite hit the peaks and then you are glass. Iirc stronghold actually faired the best, darkblaze is too glassy and no longer a damage peak, dagallon has always been too glassy and is awkward to build around. Some desolater setups can get close to the honorable mention at best
Fire RF is no where close, you can’t stack RF+multiple wps % mods and damage conversion to have enough damage on fire
Edit: to be clear, the above after still perfectly playable, they just don’t make the top
I can’t provide one, sorry. Apparently my SSD died and all of my builds were stored locally. Anyway it’s not that much different from Alkamos’s which is posted in the forum.
