What We're Working On

Splitting steel and Shattering steel seems good (after proper tags start working ), but Lancing steel is poorly designed, clanky and not fun at all.
Firestorm need serious buff to numbers to work like it supposed to.
Keep up good work guys.

No alert for killing... really? It's not funny anymore :( It's like guards are stupid dummies now...
Perhaps it was necessary to lower the level of the generated alarm, but not remove at all.

For all Steel skills:

The overall concept on most of the skills feels okay, but the fact that call of steel has a base use of .5s time only alterable by a single jewel to bring it .25s really holds back the options of play. I feel like it is the same problem with Hexblast where at some point attack speed becomes a nonfactor and you are forced into a slow hitting playstyle that overall feels bad.

Depending on the skill after 3-6 hits you need to activate call of steel and then wait 1.5s or else you'll have to repeat the process sooner. For Lancing and Shattering steel this really hurts the pseudo melee playstyle as you may miss out on your dps window on bosses.

I feel if you are to dedicate a gem to the problem then instead of .25s it might as well be instant as you this at least lets you weave calls in-between attacks to generate shards for that attack, or perhaps make shards not stop generating for a certain time instead of stopping on attack.

If this current problem of clunk is removed, then I think steel skills (well maybe lancing has other issues) are close to being a in good spot.

I played a bit with firestorm, and the duration feels a bit short for a skill that can only have 3 firestorms at a time.

As for Heist, it feels really good and enjoyable to play. It still uses the core of poe gameplay basics while feeling fresh and new. It's also really sweet that we can go heist whenever we want to instead of being forced to do it on the spot. Good job GGG.

I would like to give feedback on the steel skills.

The shard mechanic that was introduced, while interesting, effectively forces the use of Call of Steel. I do not have an issue with that in itself.

In my personal opinion however, the fact that the only way to modify the behavior of the skill is a set of unique jewels isn't ideal. Its use time, while short, is a notable interruption of otherwise smooth flowing gameplay

I'd like to compare it to warcries, because in doing so, I can highlight my main issue with the current state of Call of Steel.

A build invested into warcries is, as apparent from the skilltree, absolutely not expected to actually have to deal with their 0.8 second use time - given that there are nodes that increase warcry speed, with 12% on minor nodes, 30% on a notable, then there's an actual support gem specifically for the purpose of increasing use speed (with the trade of being an increased cooldown), a Keystone that actually makes them instant, and, additionally, they get use speed as they level. All of this to say that there are many, many easily accessible ways to pay an opportunity cost - be it an increase in cooldown, cooldowns being shared, skillpoints that could otherwise have been used for life or damage, etc... to modify the behavior of warcries.

Call of Steel, an integral and core part to the functioning of the skills it is tied to, has a choice between 1 of 3 unique items.

Thumbs up! man really need a add chaos mod ex..! lol. Think you over adjusted though went from too hard to too easy..

Feedback on some of the new skills (and reworked Firestorm). A note here is I did not get to maps with these and the only good gear I had was a Tabula Rasa and a decent wand.

Crackling Lance:
I feel that Crackling Lance has 2 main problems with it: Damage and Cast Speed. Both are pretty low. Crackling Lance feels AWFUL to use without cast speed investment, which is exacerbated by the fact that I was under the impression that Spell Echo would give 2 stacks of Intensity with the repeated cast as shown in the skill reveal trailer, but apparently that was a bug that was not supposed to happen. Regardless, once I get enough cast speed, it starts to feel usable. However, then I run into the next problem... damage. There simply isn't enough of it early on, even on a Tabula with 6-links and investment on cast speed (To help with the clunky feeling early on). I'm sure if you throw a couple of Exalts it'll feel decent, but when compared to something like Archmage Arc which can deal more damage on literally nothing but sticking mana on crap gear, it feels pretty bad. I feel that fixing either of these things will help greatly (my preference is more damage) will make Crackling Lance worthy of the hype it received in the reveal.

Blazing Salvo:
I'll reserve judgement on this until the gem is looked more at. I'm pretty sure something is broken with its interaction with support gems. Some of them feel like they're doing nothing. A friend of mine is using it with mines and it feels great to him, but self-casting it with the bugs feels like I'm hitting things with a wet noodle.

Firestorm:
This skill needs more damage honestly. The gem reveal just before launch gave some pretty disappointing numbers and in practice it feels like all the damage is coming only from the big meteor itself. The secondary meteors feels like they do nothing but tickle the enemies, assuming they even hit them and don't land somewhere in Narnia, but even the big meteor itself has problems. It really struggles against beefier rare mobs and bosses as you have to cast that big meteor like 4-5 times on rares before they go down which just feels awful.

Overall, the Heist league itself looks fun, and with the new changes, I won't have to run in circles like a chicken trying not to kill things so that makes me much happier. :D

I started out using crackling lance - it felt decent in early/mid acts but didn't really scale as well as I was hoping. In early maps, I switched to Divine Ire with minimal changes, and it felt like it performed as well as crackling lance, even within the first few gem levels. The damage for crackling lance did not feel good enough to justify standing still, in particular when many bosses encourage you to dodge more frequently than intensity can be built up.

From a presentation perspective, crackling lance looks gorgeous, but the audio was a bit disappointing. The early casts basically just felt like arc, and the big beam had slightly different audio, but it really didn't feel very impactful.

On the new hex system. The problem isn't the lack of choices, they are there. The problem is making sure your build can actually function.

Right now everyone is running the new hex stuff with Occultist because it is the main reliable way to bypass hexproof. Hexproof being locked to a single ascendancy makes everything so much more clunky and un-fun. Almost no choices in this regard that feel good.

I would love to play Trickster or Elementalist or something like that with the new stuff, but I am locked to Occultist just to make sure I can hex and build doom.

Please consider changing hexproof, removing it from the game (immunities have been bad since diablo 2), or putting something to bypass hexproof on the passive tree.

Thanks.

Was Bane intended to be a casualty of the curse changes? I am a new player and was inspired by the curse changes to go with a curse build, but opted to go with an occultist Bane build since there weren't any guides for the new curse stuff. I figured out pretty quickly that Vixen's no longer works, but I only just realized that a bunch of the passive tree nodes that used to benefit Bane no longer do, which seems like a big hit.

Any chance of a tuning pass to Bane to compensate for the loss of Vixen's and the passive tree curse nodes? Or am I rerolling?