Build thoughts - hours required to fulfill & twitch complexity

[JayDubya]

I had a thought on my way home from work yesterday.

Pretty much all builds are described in terms of "perfect gear" - and this is not unreasonable, since that's the only way to get an apples-to-apples comparison.

But what's missing from that is a sense of how much work will be required to get to that perfect gear.

For example, to get 2 cleansed greensteel items would require 40 shroud runs minimum, which would take 120 days. To get a chattering ring would take,(my estimate), 40 Titan runs, which would also take 120 days. of course you can do those cascaded, but there's still significant time associated with both the calendar time associated with filling out a build, as well as the actual hours spent grinding for ingredients, certain armors, favor, etc in order to get to the peak.


My theory is that the 80/20 rule applies- that people can get to 80% of the effectiveness of a given build for 20% of the time - it's those last X items that take forever to get.


Another, similar common habit in build-making is to assume that the player has good swapping skills - that they can properly switch to the right items, quaff the right potions, hit the right skill boosts at the "optimal" time. For example, rage+rage+madstone+madstone+frenzy+etc+etc+etc would require exceptional timing to get them all running together properly.


So what I'm thinking of is that we could grade builds not just on their DPS and their AC and hitpoints, but also on the
a) Calendar and Grind time it takes to complete the build
b) "twitch factor" involved in maintaining buffs and swapping items, etc.


Generally, Shroud-based Calendar time is the easiest and least-controversial to show - if a build has three shroud equipment items, it will take 40*3 days minimum to get the cleansers.

Other calendars are more subjective - how many runs (on average) of Reaver's Fate would it take to get 3 pairs of Madstone boots or a +3 tome? How many hours spent in epic runs to get +4 tome?

If your build requires two TRs, how long will it take you to get to 1750 favor and to 20th level on your second TR?


If we could capture these numbers, we would have a better insight into the time/resource investment for a given build, and some "less equipment heavy" builds that are still effective might be an attractive option for those of us who are not hardcore players.

Thoughts?

[zealous]

My theory is that the 80/20 rule applies- that people can get to 80% of the effectiveness of a given build for 20% of the time - it's those last X items that take forever to get.
...
Thoughts?
Good ideas. I think the efficiency part would be good to highlight for one. I.e. At what efficiency will you be performing without all the twinks, how much of dps/ac etc. is build dependent and how much is twink dependent.

Another aspect often forgotten is how will the build perform at level X and how this will vary depending on how you take your levels/feats etc.

With reincarnation the dogma "You'll spend the majority of your characters life at cap" is becoming somewhat watered down. Some builds might be more or less suited for TR, some might be best to level in one way and then respec through lesser/greater reincarnation once capped and twinked.

Requiring tomes to qualify for critical feats will make for somewhat gimped characters without those tomes. It is one thing if you have a plenthora of unbound tomes in the bank, if you don't it might be cheaper to level differently and put your TP on a lesser reincarnation than on tomes. The drawback to this ofc being that you might not have sufficient familiarity/skill playing the character.

Efficiency might also vary highly during the life of a character, some builds only reach close to full potential once at a quite high level. Additionally, leveling in a way to maximize e.g. skill points can result in getting critical abilities at a later point.

Things like this might be moot if you have a couple of F2P accounts with alternate chars to drag the gimp through quests, are a part of a well established guild or have resources and twink to compensate.

If you're new to the game, don't fancy raiding, like rerolling different chars etc. the journey to the cap might be more important.

[Anderei]

+1 to both of you.

I fully agree, too many builds focus on what it caps off once you finished doing everything the game has to offer to you. Altough at least the trend to include loads of +3 and +4 tomes into builds has faded.

I for one do not include gear in my builds, since well everybody knows what is available and it adds to. Altough some players do keep going like: what you only got 400HP on your build? My barb has 600! (including gear!) Also I do like to tell which levels might be more fun and which might be a little tiredsome. But its against advertising, everybody just wants to make his build look coolest as possible.

And its not only TR that changes things, also LR(+1) is available, its also feasable to make one build to have fun to get to lvl 20 and then LR into another at the cap (or LR+1 your Rogue lvl away in a Wiz/Rogue or get your rogue level on your fighter only once the UMD gets meaningful, make a hagglebot and don't worry about haggling until you are 20 and much more).

[Kriogen]

...My theory is that the 80/20 rule applies- that people can get to 80% of the effectiveness of a given build for 20% of the time - it's those last X items that take forever to get...

1. 80/20 rule works.
Because of 80/20 rule, I multiclass. I don't go 20 Cleric, but Cleric18/Monk2. I go with Wis 16 (-1 DC) and use those 6 build point for better melee. In this case its even 90/10 or 95/5 rule.

Thats the reason why you see so many MC build in this game. And many are even more powerfull then pure. 80/20 rule. Top end power costs so much, you can "buy" half of others class power.

2. But not allways.
Highend items are very powerfull. They can double your effectivness. They are not just +20% better for +80% more grind.

And then theres d20 rule. +1 in something can be just 5% or +50% more effective.


80/20 rule works in DDO. 80% work, 20% does not :)