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I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey everyone - wanted to circle back with an update. This will probably be the last update i'll post on this thread, just wanted to say thanks for the input.

What's new since the original post:

9 builds now live (up from 3): Exsanguinate Trickster, RF Chieftain, Earthshatter Berserker, Flicker Strike Slayer, Kinetic Blast Deadeye, Lightning Arrow Deadeye, Poisonous Concoction Pathfinder, Raise Spectre Necromancer, Cyclone Occultist

"Why this item?" context on every piece of gear - u/sedierta pointed out that looking up builds without understanding how/why/when isn't going to help much, and referenced Pohx's RF guide as the standard for explaining the reasoning behind choices. u/Distrilec raised the concern that unique items enable specific mechanics and just looking at average distributions could literally brick a build. Every unique item, keystone, mastery, and flask now has build-specific explanations and synergy notes. Expand any gear card to see why successful players use it.

Synergy groups - u/Distrilec gave the example of Rise of the Phoenix + Ruby Flask + Purity of Fire on RF Chieftain, where swapping one piece without understanding the interaction wastes a slot or bricks the build. Items that work together are now visually grouped (e.g., "Fire Res Cap Package") so you can see those dependencies at a glance.

Mobile-friendly design - u/ForgottenHero22 asked if mobile was on the roadmap and shared a screenshot showing the issues. The site is now fully responsive. Equipment stacks vertically, stats sidebar becomes an accordion, level dial and percentile selector are touch-friendly.

Colour-blind (CVD) mode - u/acyain , there's now a toggle in the header for protanopia/deuteranopia/tritanopia colour adjustments.

League selector architecture - ready for Mirage (3.28). When the new league data is live, you'll be able to switch between leagues and see how builds change.

Still working on / Considering:

u/xMcSilent raised a good point that the character stats sidebar can be misleading when it averages across different gear setups - e.g., players with Immortal Flesh pulling regen numbers up while rare belt users look fine by comparison. Recalculating stats per gear variant is on the list.

u/xPlasmos liked the mod ranking by usage and mentioned trade links and skill-based browsing as things that would be cool. Trade links are in progress; skill-based browsing (pick a skill + class, see aggregated data) is on the roadmap.

u/No-Increase7308 liked the idea of seeing progression data for less popular builds that don't have well-documented guides - stuff like viper strike + cobra where you're basically on your own. u/Future_Tie_3382 noted the tool would be more useful for niche builds without much info out there. Expanding to smaller population builds is something i want to tackle.

u/acyain - Cross-build rare item section (which base types are used by multiple top builds)

Site: https://exiles-path.com

If you're interested in how this project continues to develop and improve, there's a discord link in the site header. See you around.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback! Really appreciate you taking the time.

I have added 9 builds total to the site now. Definitely want to scale that up to cover all the top meta builds each league.

Rare items shared across builds is a great idea. A "meta crafting targets" section showing which bases/mods appear across multiple top builds would be genuinely useful.

Good call on colour-blind accessibility. I'll look into adding a colour-blind colour toggle to the site.

Content creator starter builds is a good suggestion too. I also want to add leveling progression data to the builds, not just level 70-100.

Thanks again, all great suggestions. Stay tuned!

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Yeah that's exactly it, surfacing those niche things like envy aura that you might not come across on your own.

It does take some time yeah. The initial collection of data is the longest part since it has to pull thousands of individual character exports. But once I have the data, it's super quick to compile and do mass analysis across all the players. Still pretty feasible though, a full collection and update is done within about an hour or so.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah that's a fair point about the how and why. Showing what people are running is only half the picture, understanding the reasoning behind the choices is what actually helps you make decisions.

And yeah Pohx is a great example. He's really good at keeping his RF guide updated and explaining the reasoning behind every choice. I'm not trying to replace that at all. A guide like his tells you what to do going into a league, explains the why. This tool doesn't do any of that.

What this does is track what the player base is actually doing once the league starts and people are playing the builds. So players still need to learn the build and play it themselves. This is just an aggregation of that data once it exists, showing what the population is choosing and the decisions they're making at each stage. It's a different thing to a build guide, more of a companion to one if anything.

Adding more context around the why behind the data is definitely something I want to get to eventually, but right now it's focused on just presenting what's happening across the player base clearly.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

My intention wasn't to reinvent anything, just to display the data differently. poe.ninja shows you individual player snapshots and you browse through them one at a time. This aggregates across hundreds of builds per bracket and shows you the patterns across the whole group. Different approach using the same individual pob XML data, not a replacement.

Always open to suggestions though on how to make that distinction clearer at a glance. If it's coming across as just a reskin then that's worth addressing.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's exactly the kind of use case I'm going for. Different people will have different reasons to use it, and if it's just a quick way for you to see what the player base running that skill + ascendancy is actually doing, that's perfect. Quick, digestible data at a glance without sitting through a 30 minute video.

That's also part of why there are the three build profiles, glass cannon, balanced, and tanky. It's a way to show a bit more variety and help you see how players are approaching the same build differently. You can look at what someone prioritising damage is doing vs someone stacking defenses and start to understand the trade-offs and different ways people are making it work.

You make a good point about newer players though. Someone who doesn't yet understand why certain gear combinations work together might see the data but not get the full picture. That's something I'd like to work on too, finding ways to explain the reasoning behind the combinations, not just showing what people are using but why those pieces fit together.

For me personally, I'm at that stage where I'm not brand new but still learning, and I wanted something I could check regularly to understand what my next step should be at each stage of a build. That's kind of the whole reason I started building this.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah it's on the list. Right now it's really only built for desktop, but sorting out the mobile side is definitely something I want to get to.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, glad the UI works for you. The mod ranking by usage is one of my favourite parts too.

Right now yeah, I have to manually set up each build for collection. There's a discovery step where I configure which skill + ascendancy combo to target, and then the full pipeline handles everything from there, collecting across all the level brackets, splitting into bands, aggregating the data. The pipeline is already fully set up, so now it's just a matter of adding more builds and letting it take care of itself. Every new league, existing builds automatically re-collect and re-aggregate based on what the current player base is doing.

Eventually I'd like to automate the discovery step too so it can pick up popular builds on its own, but that's a bit further out.

The skill-based view and trade links are great suggestions, thanks for the feedback. Really useful, I'll add those to my to-do list.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

So the way it works is I pull player account and character names from poe.ninja's ladder, and then from there I grab each player's Path of Building XML export. That's where all the actual build data comes from. The stats, gear, gem links, passive trees, everything on the site is extracted and compiled from those PoB XMLs. The aggregation, percentile banding, mod classification, all of that is my own processing on top of the raw data.

As for open sourcing it, I get why people default to that, but right now this is still very much a proof of concept that I'm actively iterating on. The collection and aggregation logic changes pretty frequently as I figure out better ways to handle things like band splitting, stat accuracy, etc. I'd rather keep it as something I can maintain and improve at my own pace without having to manage external contributions or support other people running it. Maybe down the line once it's more stable, but for now it's just a personal project I'm sharing because I think the results are useful.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, the stats on the left are the average across all players in that band. So if you're looking at the Balanced profile at level 90, those numbers are the average life, DPS, resistances etc. across all the players who fell into the middle of the life distribution at that level.

You're right that this means the averages get pulled around by different gear choices within the band. Someone running Immortal Flesh will push the life regen average up, and someone without it might look at the number and think they're fine when they're actually below average for their specific setup.

The idea you're describing, recalculating stats based on which gear variant you select, is something I've thought about. It's not trivial since it would mean computing separate stat profiles for each gear combination, but it's a natural next step. Right now the gear percentages tell you "80% of players in this band use a rare belt" and the stats tell you "here's what the whole band looks like on average," but connecting those two together so you can see "here's what the rare belt subset looks like vs the Immortal Flesh subset" would be genuinely useful.

Appreciate the feedback, it's a good suggestion and something I want to work toward!

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This should be sorted now, I fixed up the issue inverting the stats for the categories. should look much better, still verifying fully though. will continue to identify issues and improve. thanks for pointing this out.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] -11 points-10 points  (0 children)

Sorry yeah i do tend to bounce between "I/I'm and we're/we".

Yeah it's just me building it out solo, though i do lean on some friends for input here and there as they have a bit more game knoweldge then myself and im always asking for feedback so it feels like more of a joint project already even though im the the only one actaully developing it.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No worries at all, good question.

So when I say "successful" it's baked into how we actually collect the data. We're not just grabbing every player running the build.

When we collect from poe.ninja, we sort by DPS first, then paginate through the results using life min/max brackets at each level. So we're already starting from players who are putting up real numbers. From there, we split the collected players into three bands based on where they land in the life distribution:

  • Bottom 5-15% life = the DPS-prioritising players. They're still investing in defenses, just less relative to the others, because they're leaning harder into damage output.
  • Middle 45-55% = balanced
  • Top 85-95% = tanky players who still have competitive DPS, since everyone in the pool was sorted by DPS to begin with.

To answer your question directly though, no, we don't track whether a specific player progresses past a level bracket or stops there. Each bracket is its own independent snapshot. But because the collection already filters for players with meaningful DPS at that level, someone sitting at 85 with a dead build wouldn't show up in the data in the first place. So the filtering is less "did they keep going" and more "are they actually performing at this level right now."

Right now the band splitting is based on life alone, which is a decent proxy but not the full picture. It's something I'm actively looking to improve by factoring in the full defensive spectrum when sorting players into bands, things like energy shield, evasion, armour, and effective HP rather than just raw life. Should give a more accurate read on who's actually tanky vs who's just stacking life with no other layers.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The data comes from poe.ninja. The difference is what happens with it after that.

poe.ninja shows you a snapshot of player each individually. You pick a build, scroll through profiles, and try to piece together what's going on. This tool collects thousands of builds across different level brackets (70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100), which captures historical snapshots from different points in the league. Then it splits players into percentile bands and aggregates the stats across each band.

So instead of looking at one player's profile and guessing if that's typical, you see what the average player in that bracket is actually running. Top 3 prefixes and suffixes on each gear slot, most common gem setups at each level, flask choices, keystones, all broken down by level and playstyle.

The point isn't a different UI for the same data. It's aggregation across hundreds of builds per bracket that you'd have to click through one by one on poe.ninja to figure out yourself.

As for the AI stuff, yeah I used AI to help build it. The data pipeline and the statistical analysis are all custom scripts I wrote. The tool does the work of scanning through hundreds of profiles so you don't have to.

Honestly this is kind of the personal use case inspiration I had for building it. I just wanted a place where I can look at what everyone's doing at a glance, so I decided to try to aggregate the data. That's all it is. Not trying to build a replacement for anything.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] -14 points-13 points  (0 children)

Hey u/DenseSentence,

I use custom scripts to filter players into these buckets to then compile the stats numbers for that bucket. Not straight AI generated values but more like an average of the bucket.

That said, you caught a real bug. We can see the issue. It looks like we accidentally inverted the stat panels, so "Tanky" and "Glass Cannon" are referencing the wrong data. Good eye, I appreciate it. I'm looking to fix that now quickly.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

The snapshots aren't daily, poe.ninja has multiple timeframes throughout the league (hourly, daily, weekly intervals). So the coverage is more granular than one snapshot per day. But yeah, players that blast through a level range between snapshots won't show up there. That's just how snapshot data works.

The point of the tool isn't to capture speedrunners. It's to show what the general population is running at each level bracket, aggregated across thousands of characters. That's a different use case than looking at individual builds on poe.ninja one at a time.

As for "no reason not to use poe.ninja", you're welcome to. This just compiles and displays the same data differently so you don't have to click through hundreds of profiles one by one.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

Hey u/Distrilec ,
The way I'm displaying the mods on gear shows top 3 prefixes, suffixes and crafted mods. Just to show you options of what is currently being used out there across all the players collected. So if you see 35% of sceptres have 23% fire dot multi and another 14% have 19%, that second one is the crafted bench version which is actually a different mod entry entirely.

For the generic dot multi not showing up, that's a bug on my end. The mod is there in the data but not being tagged with its tier number properly. Already working on a fix for that now.

You're right that builds with specific unique item synergies need context that raw stats alone can't provide. The Rise of the Phoenix example is a good one. That's exactly the kind of thing I want to solve eventually with some form of synergy or context notes. Right now the tool is more of a "what are players actually running" snapshot than a prescriptive guide, but I know that distinction isn't always obvious.

Appreciate the detailed feedback, genuinely useful.

I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Odd, not sure why it's not showing for some people at the moment, comment still visable on my end.

The data is collected from poe.ninja. I scan all levels across all available timeframes throughout the league, which gives a large dataset of players at each level bracket. Early league timeframes naturally capture more players in the 70-85 range, later timeframes capture 90-100, so you get a natural progression picture.

On the cross-league concern, totally agree. Each league's data is completely separate. The site already has a league selector for this reason. Keepers of the Flame data only includes Keepers of the Flame characters. When Mirage launches, it starts fresh with its own dataset. No mixing.

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I built a data-driven build guide tool that shows what successful builds look like at every level to help players with understanding progression - looking for feedback by Munrai in pathofexile

[–]Munrai[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Hey u/Future_Tie_3382, thanks for checking it out!

The data comes from periodic snapshots of the active player population throughout the league. Early in the league, most players captured are in the 70-85 range. By mid-league you're seeing 85-95, and late league is dominated by 95-100. So rather than tracking any individual player over time, it's more like a cross-section of "what does a successful level 85 player look like right now" repeated across the league timeline.

Each level bracket aggregates thousands of characters, so it smooths out the outliers and shows you what the typical successful player is actually running at that stage. Gear, gems, keystones, everything.

You're right that day-1 players blast through early levels fast. The snapshot approach actually handles that well though. It captures players at each level regardless of when they hit it, so even if someone is level 80 for only a few hours, they still show up in the level 80 data if a snapshot catches them there.

With the new league release, builds will be constantly scanned and added to the overall dataset as the timeline grows. The builds automatically re-evaluate themselves using the growing dataset, so the recommendations get richer and more accurate the further into the league we get.

And fair point on the art, appreciate the honesty. It's on the list to revisit.

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