I seem to come across a lot of stuff that basically tells you which "build" is the best, or how to beat a game quickly or what have you, the best weapons, how to maximize your gains, etc. and I can't help but think that if you want the game to be easier, then you'd just straight dial the difficulty down to easy, right? I find it kind of absurd that the best way to "play" an otherwise difficult game would be to follow (semi-) strict guidelines that exist to make it easier. Isn't the fun of playing a difficult game, at least one with the option of being difficult, to figure out how to overcome it? Might as well just throw on god mode. I know it's just a shortcut and all and I don't have to follow these at all since they're not really directed towards me.

That's why I pretty much ignore all that stuff. Fretting about min-maxing any game just takes the whole fun out of it for me.

They do tend to be builds that make things easier.

However, there are some other types of build recommendations that can serve other purposes:
* Some might expose interesting aspects of the game that one might otherwise ignore.
* Some might actually make the game, or part of the game, more fun.

(My favorite example of the last one is in Final Fantasy 4 DS. If you give Cecil Bless and save a Soma Drop for Tellah on your second playthrough, you can then have Tellah make regular use of a certain spell that's not normally castable at that point.)

Also worth noting that, instead of taking build advice strictly, you could use it to base your own builds off of it.

(Incidentally, I think I prefer it when builds are more fluid; in other words, where the player can easily make changes to their build mid-game. In other words, I prefer something like Final Fantasy 5 over something like Dragon Quest 8.)

Edit: Also, in a well-balanced game, there is no such thing as a "best" build.

Yeah, it's pretty lame to follow a build exactly. Also lame to chart out which unique weapons are where and make a direct run to them. People do it all the time though, and aren't shy about it. I guess they just want that "level up" feeling as easily as possible, get the dopamine flowing.

Yeah, I don't see it as that different to just using a walkthrough. A lot of people play games that way, though.

There may be catharsis for some, in using builds. If you've tried to play and kept dying and failing and losing over and over, you may become so frustrated that you just want to smash your game. Following a build may finally give you the satisfaction of overcoming whatever was blocking you before.

And of course gamers want different things from games. Some like to take their time and explore, some just want to pwn everything and crow about it, and quickly move on to the next game.

Just following someone else's build seems pointless to me. At that point, you are just letting someone else play the game for you.

I will read up on mechanics, how stuff works/interacts or how character progression works in the said game, but I will always play my own way/ theorycraft my own builds.

I have probably thousands of hours on Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, Diablo and Sacred combined and I have not once just found a guide and said "just gonna do this"

The only thing I'm conflicted on are some RPG games, especially those that don't have a respec option. Take Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale for example. There are a ton of weapon specilizations, but you have no idea how supported that weapon type is. An extreme example:

You might end up going flails and only find out after 30 hours that 80% of the weapons are swords and axes and there are barely any flails at all.

This particular example, to me, is something I consider to be a design flaw. What happens here is essentially the following:
* You have to make an irreversible choice, without any knowledge of what's in the game, at level 1.
* At character creation, there isn't any obvious difference between the choices. In other words, there's no basis for picking one choice over the other, so it feels arbitrary, and is a choice the player has to make without any information.
* And then, of course, the choices might very well not be balanced, like in your example.

In fact, there's one other instance of game design where the player has to make an uninformed choice, and is punished for making the wrong one, and that's pick-a-path in things like Mario Maker troll levels. Basically:
* You are presented with multiple ways to go. In the Mario Maker games, this would typically be multiple doors and/or pipes, but it doesn't have to be.
* There isn't anything that would point you toward one particular choice as opposed to the others.
* But if you take the wrong one, you die.

I note that, even in the troll Mario Maker community, pick-a-path is considered bad level design. Hence, for similar reasons, I'd argue that weapon proficiencies and specializations, at least in a Baldur's Gate-like context, is also bad game design.

As for ways this could have been done better:
* Make it reasonable to train a new weapon type later in the game. This is best done by not tying weapon proficiency to level ups. One example of this is Final Fantasy 2 (which doesn't use XP leveling in the first place); if you find that your weapon type isn't that useful, you can switch to another weapon type and eventually become good at it. (FF2 has other issues, including a hidden variable that should not have been hidden plus some "noob traps" that are particularly nasty, but the weapon proficiency system isn't one of them.)
* Distinguish the weapons in a clear and obvious way. Lords of Xulima does this, with the different weapon types having different secondary effects. (Again, there's other issues, namely the fact that one particular ability score is basically mandatory, but at least the game gets this aspect correct.)
* Just not use a weapon proficiency system at all. After all, the Gold Box games (and other SSI games), Dragon Quest 1-7, Final Fantasy games (at least until each character would get only one weapon type, and excluding FF2), Ultima, and Wizardry 1-5 work just fine without any weapon proficiency system. (Wizardry 6-8 are more like FF2 with weapon proficiency, but without the main issues that game had, and with a more conventional approach (including XP based leveling) in most other areas.

If you mean recommendations written by others how to play the game, then indeed it's to make it easier for others.

In that way it's no different from walkthroughs or similar guides.

It can be a lifesaver for those who cannot finish the game without help, but I'd recommend to people that if they find themselves following pre-established builds found online too often then game types featuring extensive char sheets and nested skill trees may not be suited to you.

It's all down to how much you actually enjoy micro-managing a character to finish a game. Its rare I enjoy these game types.

That's precisely why so many players enjoy creating builds for others, because in order to make them, they had to figure it all out by themselves first.

As for the (few?) players who choose to follow a build instead of just trying to play the game, I think you're oversimplifying. Fun can mean different things for different players, it doesn't have to be based on difficulty. But even so, God Mode or even turning difficulty down to Easy would feel significantly different than playing a very effective build within the rules of the game. You can learn from that too, and it's much more satisfying as a power fantasy, compared to being completely invincible or "driving with training wheels".

I often loosely follow a build if there's no in-game way to respec my character's stats or abilities. Because I don't want to waste hours of my limited playtime only to find out much later that "charisma" is a dump stat, or it's useless to make a character proficient in halberd because there's no powerful halberd in the game, or a sleep spell is only useful in the first hour of the game since latter enemies are practically resistant against it.

Yes it makes the game a little bit easier, but 'a little bit' is all I want since the broad difficulty option is often not nuanced or granular enough.

The first purpose for a character builds is.. for its owner to flex lol.
Then it's also useful for other players. ;)

In various games, following builds can be convenient or even mandatory (sadly).
It ruins a bit the fun of experimenting, but in various cases that could just lead up to a dead end and restart.
For example in Diablo 2 a slightly bad build wouldn't reach hell difficulty (at least before the late respec feature).

This is why I strongly prefer it when a game either allows for respec or uses a system that doesn't make it hard to teach a character new skills later in the game.

(Consider: In a d20 system game (like D&D 3.x or Pathfinder 1e) with a level cap of 20, a character who is already level 4 in one class is no longer able to get 9th level spells in any other class, ever. I prefer systems that don't have that sort of issue.)

I guess you guys haven't played Path of Exile much.

Good luck with your own build before you've accumulated 5000 hours in the game.

Build guides, mixed feelings. Some games are rather obtuse and obfuscated (or outright lie!) about what things do, or how things work together, or game mechanics (undocumented 'hard caps' are a common one). Sometimes guides are needed for those. They're often combined into build guides.

Or, some games make respeccing extraordinarily onerous and costly (or even not possible; which is usually combined with 'trap' skills that are not supported by the foes you'll encounter or gear you'll get) where you can be proFanitiED if you don't follow a guide or tread very carefully. Or when games are extra-designed such that only a very, very narrow subset of possible builds -- even among those that are "well optimized" -- have chances of doing much of the content of a game. ("Why have builds if everyone has to play the teleporting lightning warlock?")

The part that really annoys me is how build guides are used or portrayed in the community: When people ask about mechanics, they immediately recommend a build guide. Or suggesting newbies go to guides rather than learning the game. People laugh and joke about Bethesda games being garbage until the community fixes them with mods. "Build guides" are the "mods" that fix many games.

As for making the game easier, sure, sometimes a player might seek out the top builds via guides, true. But that's not always the case. Build guides do fill an important role: Sometimes they highlight hard-to-see combos that work out well, for instance. But, oftentimes they're a sign of developer issues (they're "patches for lacking documentation" often).

Sometimes it is just lazy players. But more often, it's players acclimated to *needing* build guides because of the junk I mentioned above. Grim Dawn is a great example: There are no needs at all for build guides to complete the game, even at higher difficulties. Just a few of the ultra-bosses. But people come in expecting they need one because of other trash games in the genre. Or they don't read the game's well-done mechanics guide (which is even linked to from the main menu!) because most games have useless, if even present, manuals

But sometimes they just don't want to spend the time to think, "I just want to dual wield blazing guns, what's the best way to do that?" And that's OK. But don't go recommending build guides unless someone specifically asked for them! Suggest a class combo and key skills maybe.

Thank you for highlighting a well-known bad actor in the space. There's no way to point at that game without saying, "Here's an example of a game made badly."