Meaningful Combat: 1-clicks vs combos

Hey everyone, i keep seeing videos rightfully calling out poe 2 for not having actual combat (1-click explodes everything) and not providing any solutions to this.

Even myself i was lured by the part of the poe 2 trailer with the bell and the crossbow, only to find I'm massively penalized if i don't optimize to the extreme (howa + heralds + gs etc) e.g.1 button clicking.

I think with a little motivation you can fix combat and make it more engaging and at the same time elevate melee combat close to the caster/ranged options.

So i decided to write up some ideas to maybe fix this:

Combo mechanic fundamentals

First of all I think combos should be the bread and butter of all melee archetypes. If you want to massively balance melee vs casters/ranged, this is the way to do it. Ill be writing from a melee perspective because I love playing warrior in any rpg and this is where my source of frustration comes from: Warrior does not feel like a melee archetype, it feels like a subpar caster.

First of all let's see if we are all in the same page here that there is NO combo structure at all in this game.

What I mean by this is that stringing together attacks and skills that synergize with others are not the "combos" in a gameplay sense that I'm talking about here, those are lacking 2 fundamental elements that make them "true combos". The 2 fundamental advantages of a combo are:

1. They lock the target in place for the next attack. If successful and within the frame limit timing then it locks it again for the next attack until we reach a combo limit or the player drops it due to execution.

2. Said target is unable to fight back while we're performing a combo.

How can you call anything a combo in this game if most mobs can just move out of range freely or just straight out kill you while you are "comboing" them?

In other games you might call this hyper armor and its a rare thing, but in POE 2 most mobs have it.

The only mechanic that theoretically should enable combos -- STUN -- actually makes it even worse because the stun animations move the target away from the player and are so fast they actually dodge the players attacks.

So how to fix it:

Stagger Mechanic, Animations and UI changes

1. First you need to implement across the board a stagger mechanic. Meaning that when you hit something you have a very small window to hit it again. While in this stagger state the target enemy cannot perform any action.

2. Also while in this stagger state, the target should stay in place unless pushed or thrown by the player. Specific support gems could offer a free dash to the target to keep a combo going (Think dashing in the middle of a combo like the MK series) - but ill talk about supports later.

3. We need a CLEAR indication we are doing a combo. We need a number on the screen like any fighting game saying 2-hit, 3 hits etc. This is a direct confirmation we managed to combo something. This also allows for us to clearly distinguish which skills can combo after each other.

--Flavor Bonus-- Having the Trialmaster VA actually chiming in and making remarks about big combos would be awesome.

Stun mechanic

The stun mechanic should and can be one of the most powerful tools in the game. Essentially Stun should allow you to do your combo all over again (resets the combo limiter).

You make an awesome 5-hit combo, it stuns, you do it all over again. That's how powerful Stun should be.

Combo structure & Limit

Obviously there are some common sense rules to combos e.g. you can't combo 3 times the same small attack, or the same attack multiple times (unless you a support gem for it)

But I want to touch on this point because there is some interesting ramifications inside the combo system:

1. Same weapon combos could be easier to combo repeatedly but to balance it out maybe do less damage in the combo scaling.
2. Combos with weapon swaps imply creativity and should be rewarded for it with more damage. Lore wise this is surprising the enemy somewhat.

Passive nodes

All of this combo talk is great but it will be much better if we get it intrinsically supported in the passive tree. I absolutely hate that the only support for combo play we have are three DEX based support gems that are crappy and no one uses them.

What I propose is that combo nodes should have three tiers:

Tier 1: These are nodes that promote all kinds of combos in general and provide support and damage multipliers
Example: "Stop! Hammer time" - when you finish a combo with a slam it does an extra aftershock

Tier 2: These give better rewards if you are swapping weapons mid combo.
Examples:
Increase the next attack by x% if you swapped weapons + increase swapping speed -- this is very interesting because the swap animation eats a bit of your frames for the allowed time frame for your next attack. So its a natural limiter.

Tier 3: Give massive bonuses to weapon swap combos from weapons that are not adjacent to one another, E.g. A skill that uses a wand and a Mace skill.
The idea here is to reward creativity and the attribute investment needed to pull these off. Essentially these nodes reward the player to think outside the box.

--Crazy idea-- You could have some ascendancy node allow you to have 3 weapon swaps or even a node that does this if you're feeling brave.


Skill gems

In general I have written twice about this and I'll say it again: if you want us to make combos, make the skills more interactive with one another: For example why is the glacial bolt ice wall not interact-able with anything else besides the fragmentation rounds?? Can you imagine if the seismic warcry could explode the ice wall the same way it does the earthshatter spikes?

Skills need more interaction across the board and even inside their respective lanes.

Support Gems

First of all I hate the 1 gem limit. I think it inflates usage of crappy support gems for no purpose.

If you need to limit then it should 1 support gem of each type per skill.

With support gems you can obviously go nuts with this new combo mechanic and have them alter combo limits, damage, animation speeds (to make the skill fit the combo), support gems that make combos affect any mob nearby, etc..

We could even have meta gems that reduce the combo damage but act like a Macro for people not keen on the execution of the combos (like modern commands in newer fighting games).

I'd like to add that a dash support gem (making the char dash to the nearest target - or combo target before performing the skill) would absolutely be fantastic. All of the sudden you could knock away a target and follow it up with dash + skill, opening up for more combos.

Now back to warrior...and the mace

First of all let me make clear that conceptually I don't like how the Mace-warrior feels in this game.

First of all its ridiculous how slow the moves are and second I really dislike that they take agency away from the warrior with moves like the totem and the hammer of the gods. The best moves in the arsenal are something the warrior is not doing himself...he's asking a patron/some other entity to do it.

In D&D this would feel more like a cleric or a warlock.

The warrior needs an arsenal of moves that befit a man-at-arms / knight / barbarian not a geomancer/earth bender.

Note: The mace is the only weapon that only uses one element, reducing massively synergies with other weapons. If we're taking nordic mythos into account (looking at you hammer of the gods) why not have lightning based attacks (mjolnir) or ice (Jotunheim)?

The warrior should be the battlefield controller. Pushing and incapacitating and having the most dangerous options when up close - think D&D Battlemaster. There is a myriad cool options that are inside the martial prowess sphere. People who pick warrior want to play John "Elden Ring" - or the equivalent for this game -- Insert ESO meme video.

To pull an example out of Elden Ring, Godfrey is a great example: he too causes the earth to shatter but not because of magic, its because he never skips leg day. Godfrey is really fast closing in, has an array of martial moves and hits very very hard. That's how I want to play warriors.

And if the moves are more about martial prowess and less magicky, they naturally lend themselves to be more easy to be integrated in combos

Example: if you had a move the blasts enemies away and maybe they bounce back if they hit something you could follow it up with stampede or shield crash.
Another example: if the warrior had a 2 hit sweep and smash combo that you could immediately follow up with a big slam while they are prone (but i guess that's too much animation work).

So I know this is most likely going to be ignored but these are my two cents and I wish you luck make this game live up to all its potential.

Tldr: We don't have a combo system to support "meaningful combat". These are some ideas to make it work towards that. The combo system would also allow melee classes to be more balanced against ranged and caster types.

Just terrible.
I see no logic in all this.

I vote against it.

I vote against, the game just isn't set up for that, the enemy's swarm and kill you if you don't 1 shot them, and if you limit the packs and slow them down the game would just be a slog fest, and that's not the playerbase for these types of games.

I agree that the promised combo system is lacking, but this is definitely not the answer.

Stun-locking mobs just wouldn't work in this game, it would make melee almost mandatory, and it would break so many of the core mechanics of the game.

The way this game does combos is by having skills that are stronger when used together than they are when using only one of them at a time. That's the idea, and that's the concept they need to improve on.

Right now there are so many of the best builds that work best when you just focus on one skill and one skill only. The best builds should be the ones that use multiple skills in clever and interesting ways. There should be more ways and a better incentive to use multiple skills, one-button builds should not be the norm like it is now, and they should always be a weaker option than builds with multiple buttons. That's the solution here.

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MarsAstro#7928 wrote:

Right now there are so many of the best builds that work best when you just focus on one skill and one skill only. The best builds should be the ones that use multiple skills in clever and interesting ways. There should be more ways and a better incentive to use multiple skills, one-button builds should not be the norm like it is now, and they should always be a weaker option than builds with multiple buttons. That's the solution here.

I agree. There are not enough support gems to actively support more than one skill, unless you're lucky enough that your combo or second skill doesn't use any of the same support gems you would need with your main skill to begin with. A lot of skill gems only work properly with 5-6 support gems, so if you use said support on a skill already, it leaves less of them for the other ones (unless you're a Gemling).

The current state of support gems (and lack of significant choice thereoff) usually promotes using one skill over another. Some skills are better than that for that too.

The thing you're talking about is called hitstun and it exists in pretty much every action game that has melee combat. Without it melee just feels bad.
It kinda exists in poe, but here stun is random, so you can't rely on it.
Adding reliable hitstun (with deterioration) wouldn't change the game too much and could actually save melee.
But I don't think anyone at GGG actually plays action games, otherwise they would have implemented it already.

I would like to have combos in POE 2. As OP said, that would be the only way how to make melee actually meaningful.

But I dont think that will happen.

"

MarsAstro#7928 wrote:

I agree that the promised combo system is lacking, but this is definitely not the answer.

Stun-locking mobs just wouldn't work in this game, it would make melee almost mandatory, and it would break so many of the core mechanics of the game.

The way this game does combos is by having skills that are stronger when used together than they are when using only one of them at a time. That's the idea, and that's the concept they need to improve on.

Right now there are so many of the best builds that work best when you just focus on one skill and one skill only. The best builds should be the ones that use multiple skills in clever and interesting ways. There should be more ways and a better incentive to use multiple skills, one-button builds should not be the norm like it is now, and they should always be a weaker option than builds with multiple buttons. That's the solution here.

I play a DOT Witch (which requires a lot of combo-ing) and I see another problem that lead to this one hit meta is that late game enemies are so overtuned in speed and damage coupled with defense being so weak that the only competitive build is to one shot the entire screen before they one shot you.