Seems the new Retaliation Skills were only a Pipe Dream after all...

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I don't understand what you're on about. Thematically the new skills fill the same niche but they're powerful enough to warrant building around them while creating a new archetype in the process. Them being "irrelevant" is your opinion but data suggests otherwise.

I challenge you to do the comparison, pull up the data and show us how often the old ones were actually used vs the new ones right now.

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BaumisMagicalWorld wrote:

How could they not foresee that a skill that has a "when you block" condition with a duration component on top is a really bad idea? (Edit: Don't forget they also have a cooldown.) PoE's gameplay loop is already "pay attention or die", and now they added gems you have to constantly check for cooldowns if you want to use them. It just makes no sense.

Define the term bad a bit more cause the players using it don't have any issues with it whatsoever. GGG just wanted to do something different with it and not have another auto walk self trigger skill like it used to be before the change.

Looking at the damage numbers it was obvious that they did had to put a cooldown on it along with the on block condition. The on block condition isn't really much of a problem here as you get to stack enough to proc your skill at all times while the cd is up.

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BaumisMagicalWorld wrote:

I don't disagree, however, it doesn't warrant the changes they made. There was no reason to remove those 3 gems, like, at all. And the end result is that the skills are still irrelevant.

You mean that there is no reason that you will agree with. Which is very different from "there was no reason".

Probable reasons:
1) Block is crazy strong now, with people reaching 94/94 lucky block on a lot of builds, even non-Gladiators, and 2974 times that amount is reaching 88/88 block.

2) They want PoE 1 to have a more active playstyle. Like they did with procs and CoC; cooldowns, mana cost and whatnot, "forcing" you to really invest for the comfort of automation. They also did this with bind to left click, warcries, CWDT and countless of other examples. They even said as much in the Settlers trailer; "We want melee players to deal damage THEMSELVES, and be rewarded for doing so" (or something like that).

Did they have to remove the old skills? No, they didn't - and it is kind of strange, as they have said before that taking something away from players will always leave someone sad (read: you), so they usually just add new stuff instead. But this time around, they had an idea: Active block skills. Leaving in the automated ones would just be... Strange.

And the new skills aren't bad. They just not what YOU want. Maybe you wanted something that you JUST slap on, without real investment - and that does damage for you while you just move. Maybe. Which clearly isn't what they want.

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Phrazz wrote:

1) Block is crazy strong now, with people reaching 94/94 lucky block on a lot of builds, even non-Gladiators, and 2974 times that amount is reaching 88/88 block.

That's irrelevant. Like, it actually is. Riposte required dual-wielding and a blocked hit. Reckoning required a shield and a blocked hit. Vengeance required being hit. Out of all three, Vengeance hit the hardest and also had the longest cooldown. None of them had particularly great damage or a high flat damage multiplier. And all of them had a cooldown, of which Vengeance was the one that benefitted the most from Cooldown Recovery Speed. They were already so much worse after they removed Lab helmet enchants.

Edit: In case it's not clear what I mean by that: Whether or not you have higher Block chance now is irrelevant. You were already proccing these left and right on a Block build. You just didn't use them for damage, that wasn't their main purpose.

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Phrazz wrote:

2) They want PoE 1 to have a more active playstyle.

That's what PoE 2 is for. Trying to shape PoE 1 into a different game than what made it successful is just a dumb thing to do. They could have added these gems and not remove the other three. Damage-wise, they are not even on the same playing field.

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BaumisMagicalWorld wrote:

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Phrazz wrote:

1) Block is crazy strong now, with people reaching 94/94 lucky block on a lot of builds, even non-Gladiators, and 2974 times that amount is reaching 88/88 block.

That's irrelevant. Like, it actually is. Riposte required dual-wielding and a blocked hit. Reckoning required a shield and a blocked hit. Vengeance required being hit. Out of all three, Vengeance hit the hardest and also had the longest cooldown. None of them had particularly great damage or a high flat damage multiplier. And all of them had a cooldown, of which Vengeance was the one that benefitted the most from Cooldown Recovery Speed. They were already so much worse after they removed Lab helmet enchants.

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Phrazz wrote:

2) They want PoE 1 to have a more active playstyle.

That's what PoE 2 is for. Trying to shape PoE 1 into a different game than what made it successful is just a dumb thing to do. They could have added these gems and not remove the other three. Damage-wise, they are not even on the same playing field.

Yeah, those retaliation skills were terrible. The new retaliation skills have actual support through ascendancies and the passive tree. Plenty examples of good builds utilizing those skills. Plus, the new design has more potential for further development.

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Pashid wrote:

Define the term bad a bit more cause the players using it don't have any issues with it whatsoever.

Doesn't matter if that small percentage is "not having any issues whatsoever". They do not define what makes a skill good or bad. From a design perspective, these are terrible because they do not work in the setting that is PoE 1.

The game is not built for this type of gameplay. A "nuke button" type of skill works for slower games where your average power is relatively low by comparison. That's when using these skills feels great because you get to have a moment of "god mode". Look at stuff like God of War's rage mode, Ultimate skills in MOBAs, "burst mode", "berserker mode" etc. that you can find in other games.

PoE is too fast and this will never change; that's something they should have addressed 10 years ago and not with this trickle slow down "fixing" they've been doing for the last couple years.

In PoE, you either pay attention at all times or you die. Making you look down at your skill bar to see which skills you can use is just bad. All of the HC streamers I used to watch back in the day have since shifted over to SC. You may guess why that is.

Player damage is too high, so the game is littered with "gotcha" mechanics to artificially counteract this problem. When they then add skills that require you to be hit, and the skill in itself requires investment into Block to make it even work, it clearly shows, at a design level, that they had to make these skills work with Block because of the fundamental flaw of "getting hit" in PoE being typically a bad thing. The "just don't get hit" meme wasn't born just because. Which Block in itself, as a mechanic, is a remedy for because it negates hit damage.

So, yeah, from a design perspective, these are a total failure for multiple reasons.

Slow builds do just fine even in endgame scenarios. Flamewood totems was my goto for several leagues in HCSSF and I was running ALL content with it.

God forbid some people enjoy other playstyles than you.

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ArtCrusade wrote:

Yeah, those retaliation skills were terrible. The new retaliation skills have actual support through ascendancies and the passive tree.

...which was also the case before. The only reason we have "support on the tree" now is because they actually made the baseline worse. We had masteries and passives that already scaled counterattacks or even were specific to them, i.e. "Your Counterattack Skills debilitate Enemies for 1 second on Hit". And Glad even had a node that gave them 100% chance to deal Double Damage.

IMO there's nothing interesting about adding bloat to the passive tree, let alone adding nodes that you have to SPEND POINTS FOR that give you Rage on hit with Retal skills, or nodes specifically designed to make these bad skills feel better. You'd be so busy building for the "flashy new skills" that you'd forget that you are actively scaling 1 aspect of your build, whereas before, taking generic nodes like "Attack Damage" would scale your entire build without having to invest points into a niche.

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"Theres nothing interesting about adding things to a tree that I dont interact with or an archetype I have never built either. Therefore retaliation skills are bad."

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BaumisMagicalWorld wrote:

Doesn't matter if that small percentage is "not having any issues whatsoever". They do not define what makes a skill good or bad. From a design perspective, these are terrible because they do not work in the setting that is PoE 1.

Neither does your topic in this case as you are also part of a small percentage of players who thinks that the new skills are bad. Could be lack of experience or simply because it's just not your play style.
But in the end numbers do actually show that the new skills perform heavily better than the previous version and those numbers do in fact don't lie and they are also not influenced by biased favoritism of players.

If it was really as bad as you are trying to make it nobody would use it and you would get really laughable numbers just like with the previous version of retaliation skills.

In the end it comes down to what GGG thinks is good for the game and they did pick a good way to salvage the former trash and turned it into something better that is playable and viable in todays PoE. They even did all in and created a new archtype they can build further on in the future with specific unique items and whatnot else.