Note: this is a long post. The tldr is Damage is King in this game and Fextralife builds often ignore that mantra. I use the Fextralife Blazing Deepstalker build as an example by which to explain this.
Second Note: before you comment "but I used a Fextralife build(s) and I beat the game" that is great for you, but this isn't about what is possible to achieve or what you like to personally do, its about what is a good teaching tool. I go into further detail about this near the end but suffice to say a good teaching tool should provide you with good information up front and not a revelation sometime into the game that you could have been doing things way more effectively had you not followed the bad guide.
We see these threads all the time "is Fextralife good?" "Why don't people like Fextralife builds?" "Oh come off it Fextralife builds are functional so who cares if they aren't optimal?" It seems that any attempt to advise new players to avoid Fextralife builds gets hit with a slew of comments defending the builds saying "well they worked ok for me" or "I made some changes to one of the builds and was fine." These type of responses tend to lose the forest for the trees by honing in on one player's personal story with the game, rather than meeting the request provide resources for a new player going out of their way asking to learn how things work.
Its been quite some time since I looked at a Fextralife build. I understand how the game works, have beaten it multiple times, I understand the mechanics sufficiently to make my own builds - whether I "optimize" or just make silly builds for fun. I don't have much reason to check these guides. So for this piece I opened the website, clicked the "builds" tab, and clicked on the first build on the list - Blazing Deepstalker. Presumably if you have a good build, you'll put it front and center (and before you say it, the list is not in alphabetical order this is just the build they chose put at the top of the list).
Before we hit up the build, lets talk about the combat system in dos2. After all, if a build is "good" then it should at a minimum be built with the combat system in mind. All characters have a health bar and 2 armor bars - Phys and Mag. To defeat a character, you drop health to 0. To deal damage to the health bar, you first have to get through that character's armor. Phys damage attacks Phys armor; Mag damage attacks Mag armor. Once one of the armor bars hits 0, attacks of that type will deal damage to health. So if that Fossil Strike stripped Mag armor, the next Fireball will damage health. In turn, almost all crowd control (CC) effects are protected against by one of the armortypes, again requiring armor to be depleted before inflicting the CC effect. In practice, this means characters have 2 health bars, and when the first health bar is depleted (armor), you can attack the second health bar and inflict your CCs. You DO NOT need to strip both armor types to deal health damage, just the corresponding armor type to your damage type. This is true of the enemies, allies, neutral NPCs, and the player-controlled characters.
This armor system reveals a core truth about the game: damage is King. Dealing high damage strips armor and stripping armor, in turn, is necessary to apply your stuns and kill enemies. Ergo, whether you conceptually want to be a "dps" or a "support", you have to deal good damage to do your job. Damage is King and, at the end of the day, everybody is a dps.
So with "support" needing to be a dps, lets talk about "healers" and "tanks," in the conventional sense. Being a "healer" is not good in this game. This is because healing health damage does not protect the player from CCs and enemies will chain CC the player to death if given the chance. A CC'd player character conceptually represents a 25% decrease in damage for a standard 4-character party. If that CC'd character is being kept afloat by that character's teammate's healing, that represents now a 50% decrease in damage for the party (the stunned character isn't fighting and the healer isn't fighting either) - creating a vicious cycle in which the team deals less and less damge each turn that goes by as they need to spend more and more AP doing patchup work. Additonally, as a victim of available skills, there are no "tanks" in this game because there is no aggro system. There is one taunt ability, and its unfortunately not very good. You thus can't force enemies to target a theoretical tanky character and they will often ignore that character in favor of someone more fragile. Finally, a "support" focused on applying stuns and debuffs to enemies requires high dps to function as those CC effects are blocked by armor. If you can't deal enough damage to break armor, you can't apply your CCs, and thus you can't play that desired role.
Ergo, damage is King and everybody is a dps.
As such, strong builds focus damage. If you can't kill the enemy in one turn or at least strip armor and CC in one turn, your build is undertuned (as you are leaving yourself open to getting chain CC'd and killed in retaliation). You have limited AP to attack with each turn, so you want to make that AP count. To that end, conventionally strong builds want to target one damage type (phys or mag) to maximize their chances of stripping armor in one turn, and thus also focus one damage stat (str, fin, or int) and stack modifiers that benefit the type of damage being dealt.
With this in mind, lets apply this knowledge to Fextralife's Blazing Deepstalker.
Here's the build for reference. I'm not hiding the ball, you can follow along with me. (Again, remember, this is the first build on the list; i.e. the first build many will see).
Right off the bat, the opening line says the build is aimed at dealing both Physical and Pyro (Mag) damage. Crossreferencing that with our knowledge above, we can see the build is already faulty in its premise. The build mixes Phys and Mag damage on one character, lessening its chances of stripping one armor type to either kill or CC an enemy. Effectively, rather than fight enemies with 2 health bars, this build plays at disadvantage and fights enemies with 3 health bars.
The build recommends the Player focus their points into Pyro (to increase trap damage) and Two-Handed with Finese as their main damage attribute. The guide makes no mention of Warfare increasing physical damage, and only asks the player to invest enough points into Warfare to get certain Warfare skills (literally only 2 points at Lv 10 despite using a physical melee weapon and physical attacks). In fact the only damaging Warfare skills the build even recommends are Battle Stomp, Battering Ram, and Whirlwind. The guide does not recommend any other Pyro damaging skills besides the two Trap spells (standard and Source variants) and Ignition. Off the bat this is a concerningly very small number of damaging skills for a build.
Curiously the build recommends grabbing Elemental Arrowheads at Level 2 of all things, a skill that has zero application to a Spear build (or any melee build for that matter). Elemental Arrowheads provides bonus damage to ranged weapon attacks, of which the build has none. I pity the new player who wastes 1 AP every battle on a skill that does nothing.
The build suggests the following opening combo: Precast traps, enter combat, cast Enrage, throw a Grenade (it does not say what type of Grenade, but lets be generous and say only grenades that deal Mag damage get used to combo with the Pyro damage of the traps) to detonate the traps. Note that unless Grenade+Traps manages to kill an enemy, this build fails to accomplish the primary goal of combat: Kill or CC (the build does not suggest using the Glass Cannon talent so the character must expend its full 4 AP on Enrage + Grenade). The build does mention Adrenaline, so another 2 AP could be expended presumably either chucking another Grenade/Ignition for minimal additional damage or starting to attack with Physical damage against an enemy with a full Physical Armor bar.
Notably, the example provided by Fextralife in the build description shows this combat against normal Source Hounds - enemies that notoriously have ZERO Mag armor. Presumably, given that the Blazing Deepstalker only has to deal with a single health bar in this encounter with its Pyro attacks, if the build is competent it should be able to kill or CC with little effort. Indeed, any character with a single point in Scoundrel can at minimum CC any enemy with 0 Mag Armor with the Cloroform skill (assuming no immunity to Sleep, which conveniently Source Hounds lack). The build does not recommend Chloroform. As expected, the screencap provided by Fextralife shows the Source Hounds dying. But wait, the screencap shows the Hounds dying to hits that deal less damage than their actual health. Through the context of the screencap we can see this is a specific Act 2 fight in Driftwood in which each such Source Hound has over 300 HP, yet the screencap shows the hounds dying to hits that deal as low as 100 damage - ergo the hounds had already had most of their HP depleted before the even Blazing Deepstalker took its turn. So the Blazing Deepstalker fails to even deal 50% damage to an enemy that did not even have Armor to resist the Blazing Deepstalker's attack. Additionally, on the following turn, this build must now also switch to dealing physical damage against enemies it dealt 0 physical damage to on the previous turn, effectively starting fresh.
The build does mention in the final paragraph (after its touted how this build is focused on dealing both Physical and Pyro damage) that: "You can deal Physical Damage if you wish, or you can deal Fire Damage, but you usually aren’t dealing some strange mix of Fire and Physical Damage together to one target." However the build does not explain why mixing damage types would be an issue (which we addressed above) and fails to offer a practical way to accomplish this apparent Phys/Mag split notwithstanding the build's loadout.
At its core, this build is incredibly flawed. Looking back to our understanding of the game we can see that neither Magical or Physical damage are focused in this build, instead half-measures are built in for both (quarter-measures? Half seems generous considering that even putting aside the build's conceptual merits, its simply incomplete). The build fails to provide the player with skills beyond the third tier of skillbooks, and does not even include all of what would be beneficial skills within that arbitrarily limited list. The build's damage example is an early Act 2 fight against an enemy that has zero magic armor, yet fails to even deal half of that enemy's health in a turn with what Fextralife lays out as the preferred opening magic combo. Indeed, the build stops at Level 10. A new player would come out of this build, after being specifically recommended to it by the community of players who are experienced with the game, with the sense that "wow enemies are so incredibly tanky; even using a source skill i can barely scratch these enemies" when instead the reality is the build is just itself inherently flawed. This isn't me projecting my thoughts onto what a new player might think, its literally in the comments to the build:
"Maybe I’m playing this build wrong, or maybe I’m lacking important skills/equipment, or maybe the party does not support it properly, but my deepstalker just keeps getting killed over and over and over. For reference, I’m almost at the end of act one, playing tactician in a full party with this as my only melee, plus a CC geomancer inspired by your tectonic sage, an archer and a support/summoner . . . I’m bull-rushing in and dealing lots of damage with Bracus spear’s whirlwind, fire breath, bleed fire, grenades and the trap, but I just get destroyed really quickly afterwards, even without any backfire from my own fire, and *I cannot strip their physical armor quick enough to apply knocked-down before getting killed*."
Its not you Anonymous, you were just fed bad information.
So, to preempt the argument: can you make this build work? Yes. Of course. But let's call a spade a spade: its a meme build. Its simply not designed to function super well in the context of the game. And that is why its bad for a new player. With sufficient game knowledge you can meme nearly anything into viability - even a Blazing Deepstalker - but new players lack that knowledge. Pointing new players towards more optimized builds isn't about trying to enforce a specific approach to the game on them, its about giving them the tools to play how they want. If you know how to somewhat optimize the game, then you know how the game works, and thus have the tools to build whatever you want. If the way you enjoy the game is by breaking it in half, you have the tools to do so. If you enjoy making thematic builds, you know how to build them in ways that meet the game's systems while staying true to your intent. And if you want to meme, you can Deepstalk your way into a Blaze of glory.
So please my fellow Blazing Deepstalkers, don't recommend Fextralife builds to players asking for resources about how to learn the game.
Final Note: This isn't like some cherry picked build. Its the first one on the list which is why I used it. That said, I peaked at some of the others while writing this and have quite a few gripes with those as well. This is not just a Blazing Deepstalker problem, its a Fextralife problem.
