Utility Flasks > Charms

Hi,

I would like to brings again some attention to the matter of Charms versus Utility Flasks.
I'm of the opinion that Utility flaks, the way they are implemented in PoE1 at the moment, are a nearly perfect addition to the game and way better than the Charms we have in PoE2 right now.

The reasons be:

1. Character Progression: During the campaign you will manually use utility flasks every now and than when you need them. You will continue to increase the potency of the utility flasks together with your character and than opt in into either automate them or make them stronger and keep them manually.

2. Versatility: The Utility flasks are more versatile. You can use them manually in preparation of a situation, you can run them automatically, you can give them situational usefull properties. You can make them run longer for better update, but be weaker in return - or the other way around. Charms can exclusively be triggered and are in practice only used against stun or freeze.

3. All the "During Flask duration" nodes and flask investment nodes on the passive tree are now only and exclusively usefull to exactly one ascendency, the pathfinder. No other ascendency does benefit from flask durations, as no one really cares about life and mana flask duration. No other ascendency is able to reliably have a flask running at all times.

The hastily last minute additon of charms was a mistake in my humble opinion and should be considered to be reversed. The given reason that "pressing additonal buttons" with either gamepad or WASD is not strong enough of a reason i think, if you can still automate them in the endgame. Also i played PoE1 on PS4 long enough before flasks could be automated to say that this is a non issue on gamepad.

Kind Regards

I think the reason for the switch to charms was to remove player control. It is something that has been removed from many aspects of the game, the most notable being crafting. But if you have a flask of thawing and you are making your way to a boss that freezes, you likely won't use it if a mob happens to freeze you. Instead you just tank a hit or two, unfreeze, and enter the boss arena. With the charm it is automatically used for you but then you have less charges with the boss.

Player choice is important, and it does feel like charms take that away despite it being nice to "auto-trigger" sometimes. The auto-trigger is faster than player reactions.

I don't really like the charm system, but to be fair i didn't like the flask system either.

Charms have potential and just need a rework