Our author Schuhmann has played through the Steam hit Wolcen and ruthlessly stole a build for mages, as he admits now.
I must confess: I am the worst kind of MMO player. I steal builds.
In the past, when I was still young and inexperienced, I mocked players in Dark Age of Camelot as miserable “flavor of the month” losers when they switched to a newly trendy class.
Back in the DAOC days, any class that came out was way too strong, making everyone have to buy the new expansion pack. Those who were disloyal to their own class to switch to the new stronger one were dishonorable.
Back then, I was still a PvP player who roamed the borderlands with my 8-man group. That was teamwork: As a Fian, I was the anchor of the team, protecting my teammates with a shield and stunning opponents without dealing much damage myself.
But a few years later, already with WoW, I fell to the dark side of the Force: PvE and the fascination of the damage meter and the thrill of being at the top.
When a new patch came out, I would look at the relevant DPS rankings and sometimes switched my hunter from Survival to Beast Master, when it was clear: This would allow me to put the know-it-all Warlock back in second place on the DPS meter who had been annoying me all the time. It was worth it.
I kept the attitude from the WoW days. Later, when a new expansion of Hearthstone came out and it was time for new decks, I immediately went to Tempo Storm, looked at tier lists there, and built what was on top and looked good at first glance.
Cortyn despises this. The nose is wrinkled, and it’s said that it’s much more fun to figure out builds on your own than to mindlessly copy something.
I fear Cortyn is right. But I did it again.
How I played through Wolcen with a stolen build
In Wolcen, I played an offline character as an archer, got really annoyed, then switched to mage and skillfully leveled it to realize that I simply died too often.
So I pulled the “Psylocke” build of a YouTuber for mages, which our new author Sascha had introduced on MeinMMO shortly before, and replicated it.
With this build, you use the “Infinity Blades” in close combat, which look like the telekinetic blades of the mutant Psylocke from X-Men.
Additionally, there are 2 strong AE spells that you can cast on the ground and super cool corpses explode around you.
With this build, I could properly play through Act 1 in Wolcen until I came to the boss Edric, but with this build, it was the end of the line. Edric’s damage was too high for my glass cannon, and my own damage output was too low.
Cortyn would surely have started to tinker with the build independently, but as an experienced build thief, I immediately recognized my mistake: I hadn’t copied the build closely enough.
How I played through Wolcen by precise copying
Because in Wolcen, it’s not enough to “roughly” copy the builds; you have to meticulously note the details: I had the ice comet still as a normal AE ability. However, you need to modify the spell through the runes so that it causes a “damage over time” effect.
Furthermore, the Psylocke blades in Wolcen require specific runes to function, because correctly modified, they generate willpower, which you need for the spell. If you don’t have these runes, your mana constantly runs out, and you are forced to conduct incredibly slow wand attacks to regenerate the mana.
Also, by distributing skill points more precisely into the mage talents rather than first going for HP, which was planned for later, I was able to pull out some more damage points. Additionally, I redistributed the stat points.
In Wolcen, you must steal correctly
In Wolcen, it’s not enough to “roughly” copy like in school; you have to do it professionally like politicians with their doctoral theses.
With this perfectly copied build, I was able to play through the story without major problems and then discovered with surprise: Hey, this thing has a solid endgame.
I must confess: For me, it makes no difference whether I play through the game with a “stolen build” or with my own.
I understand the joy some have in tinkering a build themselves and spending hours maximizing it. I now rely on collective intelligence in such matters and trust that the community finds the “best builds” and figures out all the clever synergies that I then only need to copy correctly and, at best, understand.
However, I now have a problem: The skill distribution in the stolen build only went up to about level 35, and I will probably have to distribute the next 25 points independently, or I will just steal another build.
