Features

• Creates a simplified format for the official BL3 build tool data
• Parses complete build JSON representation from on the shared build URL
• Searches Reddit for all the posts and comments containing BL3 character build URLs
• Aggregates and obtains statistics for all of the found builds

Why did you do this?

A few reasons:

• Official BL3 build tool is unwieldy and requires a lot of interactions to understand the shared character build. Having a basic JSON representation allows to create a simpler interface to browse these (in my todo).
• There are many great builds shared by the passionate community on Reddit that get lost in the myriad of posts and comments in the midst of all the pre-release hype.
• Having an aggregated view of all the builds allows to mine cool statistics, for example which tree branches are the most popular or which skills are deemed essential for a given character.

What are the results?

Got 285 raw posts from Reddit.
Got 579 raw comments from Reddit.
Extracted 565 builds (161 from posts, 404 from comments).
---
fl4k: 200 builds
Top branch: Stalker (61% of builds)
---
amara: 128 builds
Top branch: Mystical Assault (35.94% of builds)
---
zane: 117 builds
Top branch: Hitman (47.86% of builds)
---
moze: 120 builds
Top branch: Demolition Woman (89.17% of builds)
---

More insights and hopefully a simple web UI incoming as I continue tinkering with this data in my spare time.

What's in the box?

parse.js

What does this do?

It takes the raw BL3 tree data dumped from the official builds tool and converts it to more friendly format to work with.

Prerequisites

• Node.js (no NPM dependencies)
• Raw BL3 tree data at ./data/bl3-raw.json.

To obtain this data yourself, navigate to https://borderlands.com/en-US/data/index.js?v=12 and search for "abilityTreeData".

main.js

What does this do?

It searches Reddit (using PushShift API) for all the comments and posts within 3 major BL subreddits containing links to the character builds, decodes the parameters from the URL and fills out the relevant details within the tree templates.

Prerequisites:

• Node.js (no NPM dependencies)
• Parsed BL3 tree templates (see above) at ./data/bl3.json.

Notes:

Since verbose builds take quite a bit of space, they are being processed for stats but not included in the final reddit.json output. You can choose to parse the full build object from the URL during the runtime as needed, or uncomment the relevant line to obtain those.

utils.js

What does this do?

Just a bunch of shared helper functions, really :)

Prerequisites:

• Node.js (no NPM dependencies)

Can I contribute?

Sure, just open a pull request and we will take it from there!