Self Cast Spells, Slams and Balance vs. Fun

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Romanesca#7384 wrote:

Self cast spells have been sub-par since DD and divine blessing were nerfed. Divine blessing enabled having an extra aura, such as haste, to help mediate the cast speed required to play self cast. DD was a top tier spell because it had % damage instead of flat.

There are multiple avenues for playing spells at the moment other than self-cast that are far superior; proxies, triggers and totems. Arcanist brand sabo rolling magma, flameblast hiero totems, poet's pen + whatever or cast on crit or cast when stunned.

There's a niche community of life stacking rath pith inquisitor enjoyers, and it's the only archetype available with a lower cost investment, with archmage being the other option, or some kind of stat stacker. stat stacker and archmage require a decent amount of investment, and there isn't really an easy transition from mid-game to this end-game kind of setup other than just having a separate character to farm the gear for either of these setups.

The problems that stuck out to me: spells need gem levels and cast speed. Spell echo is mandatory, as is spell cascade for clearing maps. Righteous fire of arcane devotion is mandatory for extra cast speed. Anathema feels like a gimmicky mandatory unique for a massive damage boost for bossing.


Potential solutions:

-Reduce cast time across all spells or add more cast speed to the tree
-Add additional tiers to +spell skill gems, scaling up to +3 or +4 on 1h weapons and +6 or +8 on staves.
-Remove damage penalty on spell cascade
-Let us move while casting so spell echo feels less dog shit, and this will enable more channeling builds. Stand still and do damage worked in 2013, but doesn't work in 2025.

Some other miscellaneous notes:

-Don't nerf slams. Yes, they're strong league starters, but I'd rather other skill and other archetypes be brought up to the slam baseline. Earthshatter maybe needs a small nerf to the shotgunning, but other than that, slams are fine and fun. You can compensate with this buff by adding t18 maps so that you can't just steamroll the game with zero investment.

-Let us run t17s white / magic. This is the first league I even tried t17s and they were fine half of the time, but the other half of the time there'd be some mod that makes the map unplayable. This usually occurred on Abomination the most and wasn't as noticeable on Fortress. I want to be able to try Ubers, and slogging through t17s made me quit due to the massive range in difficulty potentiality.

-Keep the genesis tree. Having a means of throwing some currency to get some early-mid game gear felt great, as well as ease of access to getting some fractured bases felt really nice and encouraged me to try to actually craft for once.

-Bring POE2s regal + exalt crafting to POE1, there's no reason we can't have higher drop-rates which would allow for more ease of access to crafting other than harvest reforging or essences, and wouldn't affect the economy.

-Bring a hybrid life and armor base to the game. If you're not going to nerf hybrid evasion/ES, bring the same power to armor bases by making an equivalent armor and life hybrid base. This will help builds transition to end-game without needing a character just farm all hybrid ev/es gear.

https://pobb.in/nCdABHl8apYs

This is the build I played this league for reference. I'm a casual player, usually finishing the atlas and doing 4 stones, killing all bosses and going for as many challenges until I get bored. The game hasn't been fun for me for experimenting and trying different skills for a long time now, it feels like something was lost defensively and offensively around the time archnemesis came out that hasn't been fixed, and we're cucked into playing the same shit every league because only certain ascendancies and builds have the defense and offense capable of enjoying the game.

Suffering isn't fun, and not everything needs to be a souls-like. Souls-likes have been outdated for a decade. I know this is probably a hot take, but I've been playing souls games since the OG Demon's Souls and having a decade+ of bashing my head into souls bosses has gotten tiring. I want to mash buttons and kill things and get more powerful, not get bent over and off-screened by some bullshit mob that's 10x faster than me. (This is more-so POE2 feedback, sorry)