Reactive Gameplay (and the lack of it)

This game needs to set itself further apart from competition and especially POE1. My suggestion is making use of the added mobility and other features to introduce more reactive gameplay oriented skills. (this is going to be a fairly long post)

TL;DR: Game is still spam focused. All the changes and improvements made over the old game and engine finally allow them to truly and meaningfully change that and add real gameplay complexity beyond character building, but for now they still fail to do so.


Throughout most of its time PoE1 builds have generally consisted of 1 skill spam, used for every possible encounter and enemy, with everything else focused on buffing said skill or passive defense, along a few occasional active buffs. The most complex builds you can find simply have a skill rotation (1 skill spam with extra steps) or having a dedicated bossing skill and one for mapping. At least for me that has been getting awfully boring, regardless of how flashy they can make those skills and however many mobs pop instantly accross the screen. All the real complexity of the game is instead in the build planning process.

Given the improvements made to controls and basic mechanics, (more control over movement and direction and generally increased mobility on skills, being able to cancel skills and simpler swapping, skill tree swap etc) i believe that PoE2 is more than capable of vastly improving upon the active gameplay side of things without sacrificing any of the build-making complexity and it needs to take advantage of this as much as possible in order to differentiate itself from other games. Even the PoE fanbase can't remain interested for that long in a game that is essentially the same thing and lacking 10+ years' worth of extra content. But for the most part, despite showcasing various skill interactions and combos and such, the game very rarely offers anything other than just more skill spam and rotations. This is in part due to more obvious and simpler to address things, such as the current game balance (like mapping enemy hp bloat), available types and number of skills, lack of melee mobility etc. but also some more fundamental design issues.

My suggestion is a shift in focus onto the things that would encourage more active and diverse skill usage rather than spam, like more specialized skills and active defense skills (Bone Cage is an excellent example of a good one that is already in the game). All this as opposed to trying to make every single possible skill work on its own (which even PoE1 failed at after all those years).
Alternating skills and even weapon switching is not just not clunky anymore, but simpler than in virtually any other game i can think of. Skill built-in mobility and basic always available dodge means you no longer have to tank everything or completely stop everything else just to move an inch to avoid an attack. Most of the things that might have discouraged players from using more skills and doing so reactively have now been fixed. All that is left is for the developers to actually build and balance PoE2 around those ideas, the potential is near limitless.

Take the concept of mana efficiency based balancing alongside specialized skills: they are still trying to find a place for mana as an actual resource, but in its current state it is just binary. You either have enough for the spam or you don't and you're dead, there is nothing of any real interest to it. It simply becomes yet another checkbox on the build planning stage. So what if, instead, you could insert multiple skills into a build, all built and customized around various roles (bossing, basic mob clearing, nuke etc)? A clearing skill doesn't require much damage and could be appropriately much more efficient in terms of mana usage, allowing the players to save their mana pool for much more powerful skills meant to be used on tough targets, with potions for emergency use.

This is all part of the basic design theory of video games as old as Doom and it surprises me that even after so many years there are action RPGs like this that don't make more use of it.

In before the forum trolls arrive to declare that "it's good, akshually, to have a non-interactive game where you don't need to respond to what the enemies are doing."

That just makes the game mindless. Just plug your brain in and mash a button, watch the colored lights, reap your "rewards," reset and do it all again. You don't even have to care what type of mob you're fighting most of the time, it's just spam spam spam.