PoE 2 Has Worse Build Diversity Than FFXIV

TL;DR: (1) Rarity is a horrible stat, remove it from gear; (2) all skills are trash compared to quarterstaff; (3) no real build diversity in the game


(1) Many people have talked about it, but rarity does need to go from gear. Anyone who says otherwise can go to the slots at the gambling casino

• Drops on the ground should not be based on a stat that goes on your gear. It’s fine if its on maps, or there is something like charms or another way to have control over increasing rare drops, just not on gear.

• It also should never affect currency, the drop rates in game at level 80+ need to scale to have base drop rates equivalent to someone who has 200%-250% rarity find on gear right now. Exalt/Divine/Vaal/Chaos/etc are all way too rare if you don’t want to put on rarity.

(2) The only real people who disagree with this are people who have never played quarterstaff, even simple ice strike + charged staff can clear T15+ with all blue gear and very minimal passive points (go see snoobae85’s recent video: [PoE2] The Lowest Budget "Attribute Stacking" Flicker Strike Build You've Ever Seen)

• Quarterstaff skills + Bell feel good, visceral hits, good synergy, well done (for Early Access). Everything else is hot garbage in comparison, even amazing totem builds (while fun) are nothing in comparison to quarterstaff and you HAVE TO compare them because rarity is a stat. It is not just about clear speed, quarterstaff can afford the most rarity on gear possible.

•Spells are horrible, make any spell build without Archmage and Cast on X and you’ll suffer. You can’t be any single element spell type, you’d lose almost half your damage potential by not putting up flame wall and shooting spark or frostbolt through it.

• The amount of effort or cost (in trade) to make any other build feel even remotely close to the smoothness of a basic ice strike build is too high.

(3) With the mandatory stacking of max res or max energy shield (armour and evasion suck), and then +rarity if you even want halfway decent currency drop, you have no build diversity left. If you simplify offshoots, there really are only 3-4 real builds overall with a few slight variations, it’s boring as hell. Why is there a huge passive tree if you can’t even choose what you want and still go in T15+ juiced (max mods + vaal) maps (and finish in less than double the clear speed of quarterstaff)

• Why is Cast on X used in 99% of spell builds? And why do you have to suffer insane DPS losses with no way to get similar damage if you don’t take Archmage/Cast on X (or for quarterstaff, the ice/thunder heralds). There are literally dozens of builds that are feasible with the current passive tree (even with all it’s issues), but you can’t build any of them without an insane budget, and sometimes even with an unlimited budget, unless you drop rarity or include the 3-4 OP skills.

BTW, I’m having fun even still at 500+ hrs, but these issues just need to be prioritized ASAP after the exploits, hacks, and major bugs.

Every class I play has mana issues so bad its not even fun to play. Even on my Sorc with 5k mana stacking mana regen like 120% on each ring I still had to watch my mana.

Have a witch hunter with like 100 divs of gear and 1 ability takes half my mana. I gave up.

I can't stack 300% rarity, cap resists, cap chaos, get 3k, life which is not enough, get high defenses. On Merc you need like 160 str, and Dex to use gear and like 60 intel.

Took me 100k divines to achieve this and yet couple shots or ability's and my mana is drained.

This game is worse than a job. I rather work and get paid at least. Takes me 2-3 full days on the AH just to get the top end right kind of gear without over paying.

I don't get why so many things have inconsistencies. Maybe it's the change in mechanics that threw me off, but last time I touched this game (before I uninstalled for good), I got so annoyed by the following:

I was testing Gas Grenade Poison scaling. What really bugged me was how I was able to stack additional Poisons with Comorbity, however, socketing Deadly Poison, you know, *the* Poison Support Gem, actually *reduced* its DPS. Like, what? And there's so many broken things in the game, imo it needs at least another year or two.

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PoE 2 Has Worse Build Diversity Than FFXIV

What are you talking about, lol? FFXIV has zero, absolutely none, build diversity - and that game has a decade+ worth of balancing under its belt. More like homogenization (those poor casuals) but credit where credit is due, for once the early access argument actually has weight in PoE 2's favor.

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Ulsarek#7159 wrote:

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PoE 2 Has Worse Build Diversity Than FFXIV

What are you talking about, lol? FFXIV has zero, absolutely none, build diversity - and that game has a decade+ worth of balancing under its belt. More like homogenization (those poor casuals) but credit where credit is due, for once the early access argument actually has weight in PoE 2's favor.

That's exactly why I used it as an example, the build diversity in PoE 2 at least right now is worse than cookie cutter, vanilla bland FFXIV. There is the illusion of build diversity but if u dont want to get 1 shot on maps there's literally only 4 options: shield/block, ES, Evasion, Max Res + Hp/regen (armour is useless). DPS you choose spell or attack build, and you'll literally lose 50%+ total damage if you don't use HoWA as attack or Archmage as spell build (which requires you to use mana, i.e. no Blood Magic).

Take spark and flame wall out of the game and you just lost more than half of spell builds, take quarterstaff Ice Strike or Flicker Strike out and Mace HotG and you lost basically the rest of the builds. There are a few unique off shoots like totems, poison and crit that do things a little different but even those don't have much variation within them without huge sacrifices.

The main issue of this post is, especially with rarity and required max res or insane HP/ES, you are not viable at endgame. Campaign you can do whatever you want, that's only 7-20 hrs though and this post is about endgame, where the majority of player time will be spent.

cast on X is mandatory, and flamewall too. archmage is not. ES is mandatory with the right class and knowledge. max resists don't matter currently, resists are "easy" to cap if you own the belt.
and lets be frank, after reaching ~300k dps you can kill everything in the game.
Still, still this is POE so the meta is killing fast. And then you're down to screen clearing.

Yes.