Path of Exile

You're potentially fixing the single target damage with currency. I haven't run it through what I call budget to make a fair comparison.

That's the "issue", you call 5D a budget, I stop investing into certain slots around 1D. 10s of chaos per slot is budget to me.

Note that issue is quotations, I'm not faulting anyone for what they call budget.


Just to give you a better idea, this is the hack job I did to your build to make it what I call "budget". It's rough, some stuff still needs fixing like flask sustain, resists, and a bit of stats.

To be completely fair, 6.6M DPS without accounting for overlaps is quite good. It's definitely a number I was looking for when considering a build. I don't think I left anything in there that would that heavily fudge the numbers, but who knows. I need a few hours at some point to cook up a proper PoB(for me) from scratch.

You clearly don't understand what "normalizing" and "hack job" means.

I don't think it's ridiculous to want to normalize a build so as to make comparison easier. Without it, you're left wasting tens of hours leveling through the campaign, buying gear from a dying market, leveling through maps, just to make the same judgment call you *might* be able to make in PoB. Admittedly, a lot cannot be represented in PoB. But I think single target benchmarks are one of the easier things to gauge.

As for your example, what I try to avoid is a build at a high entry point, liking it, and then wanting to play it at a lower entry point next league and being disappointed. "Fixing with currency" can give a skewed perspective on a build.

And yes, ~1D per slot. There's always exceptions, especially when it comes to functionality. This game is not interesting enough to play(as in actually play, grind maps) to justify going beyond that. I know it's a core tenet of the genre. Doesn't justify it being boring.

See previous paragraph on the 5D weapon question. Very few builds fundamentally, or even incrementally, change with that type of "upgrade". It's just more betterer. It can be an interesting more better, they've certainly done a better job at hiding it than Diablo 4. But it can also be very frustrating as their complexity inherently encourages gear lock. All the same, it's still just more betterer and if it's not going to change how your build plays, 5D can be a significant purchase.

I farmed up a 100D mageblood last league because the QoL was worth it. You're never going to see me spending 2D on a multimod craft just so I can toss that shit in the recombinator.