Digimonk wrote on May 5
th, 2017 at 12:59pm:
Fastest at what?
You used a wall of text to essentially say "They're terrible group builds but great at soloing (carrying a bot army)." which I had already suggested.
I've watched more videos than I should have trying to figure out what makes trees worthy of a 25 page thread and just don't see it.
Sure, they get big numbers on their hits, but their hit rate is slow. Other builds can hit for similar numbers at a much higher rate. They're good at clearing hordes of trash but so are Warlocks, Shiradis, and several other AE based builds.
Any time I've ever seen them in a group setting, half the mobs die before trees even start attacking. I realize the animations with trees are wonky, but the kill counts at the ends of missions seems to support what I see visually.
They are highly skill cap based builds, so if the kill count is not being lead by a tree in your group he/she is playing it wrong (or not using abudant step correctly and managing alert).
You should play with perma red alert as tree and clear only when you cannot move, which obstructs other builds in your party and makes them a burden, unless they are bots in your inv.
It doesnt matter if they are shiradis or warlocks or whatever, what those builds cannot do is have all those defensive layers that allow them for pure braindead zerging, and most videos people post about tree builds arent really doing it correctly either imho.
Also, most people can excel playing a warlock because the class is easily mastered as it hides no real thinking behind it compared to other builds/classes.
(my main is also a warlock and i found it tedious after 1 or 2 lifes and dont even log in anymore as its extremely boring, effective yes, but extremely boring).
Why trees have so many pages is based on how the build evolved, first we had the old animation resets where most people here didnt know about trees, then we have the new animations and cleaves and further we had also some block animation reseters, couple years after that and some fixes from turbine we got the first tree that was posted here the cleric one, what further happens in this thread are calculations and talks about how weapons transfer, how animations work, and multiple builds that focus on different way of spirit regen.
Imho, tree builds had the most changed, and were evolving so many times, same as throwers, which kinda made them require such a thread.
When you for example make a warlock thread, you basically cant invent anything, you cant figure out anything new, all you can really do is just write bugs with blasts and what items stack incorrectly and how to bug out some items to work in heroic content.
None of those has anything to do with warlock, but with other outside factors intereacting poorly with warlock stuff.
Complicated builds that change entirely with system changes ingame like /i use as example shuri and tree but there are more out there/ require a thread which follows how they evolve.
Il repeat it again, you take it how you want, they are highly skill based builds that hide several layers of mechanical issues and bugs behind their playstyle, thus they are hard to copy and executed correctly, but they, same as any build focusing on epic right now, are dead.
It doesnt matter how good a build is nowadays, it doesnt matter shiradi or whatever, epic just doesnt matter as game shifter toward lv 1-20, and that is why you wont see many builds posted here that focus on epic content.
What we do now is make builds that work from lv 2-18 to gather the most easiest and fastest reaper xp.
And that isnt a hard taske as warlock and some ranged offer the simplest kits to do so.
I suggest that you move on from trees, unless you have finished all racial trs, they just arent viable for usage ingame.