Skills system and gems are shit

Skills feel locked into pre-built combos, gear progression is super narrow, and pretty much every build ends up needing the same small pool of affixes. Every build feels like youre slotting into a dev-approved layout.

Give me back some screen breaking greater multiple proj builds with weird interactions and scaling. The current builds that seem viable are bland and boring. The skill mechanics are bland and boring.

I like seeing visual progression of the skills as well as damage speed etc. You dont get this in POE2.

It feels like the gem system removes build identity with the ability to have multiple six links, which would be more of a problem if support gems where impactful enough to be fun to use.

Passive tree is the least impactful its ever been. Affixes and damage scaling are simple and watered down, effectivily a couple of different attack and defence types.

The weaspon system sucks. Gated dev locked builds - if support gems were interesting and fun would be more of an issue. Regardless shit mechanic.

The weapon swap sucks. Bait to feel like you have more freedom in builds. Also shit mechanic.

I dont think any amount 'balance' (panicked buffs and arrogant nerfs) can fix this.

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hellodAdDy#7003 wrote:

Every build feels like youre slotting into a dev-approved layout.

Yes, this exactly.

I think nerfing so many skills and some uniques brought down damage stats a crazy lot. This had a huge effect on the passive tree then, because the tree consists of many % buffs, not pure number increases.

I very much disagree with them nerfing presence, attributes, and even Acrobatics. I would explain why if someone wants to know, but I think those nerfs had a devastating impact for many players, and does not make the game experience better.

Even the whole way we level gems...Its so shitty to know that jon said before EA's release that they didn't find it fun that people were clicking to level up gems so it was one of the reasons for them to get rid of exp for gems to level...so now we have to rely on RNG (shocker) to allow us to level our gems up. on top of navigating through a menu and actually clicking more? This game is satire.

+1

There's hardly any build freedom. I wanted to make a Bow-user with minions to tank for me when I first started, and quickly realized you can't unless you want to make your character useless.

Same with a fighter-caster hybrid.

Same with a warrior who melee's for single target then throws Grenades for AoE.

Same with a Frost Nova Sorc, useless.

You can't just pick an ability you like and roll with it. Some abilities are designated as main abilities and others aren't. In PoE1 I feel like I could just pick any ability and make it work.

You pretty much have to play builds pre-determined for you. If you try to do anything but hyper-specialize into a single mechanic, your character ends up useless.

You simply don't have the attributes to make a hybrid class, hell, or even to use different weapon types most of the time.

That's why basically every build is a one button build.

The "combos" are effectively one-button builds because the abilities need to be used in conjunction to be useful.

The itemization and passive aren't there to make hybrid classes or anything remotely unique.

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SpaceFoxyFū#3839 wrote:

I would explain why if someone wants to know

I mean, at a minimum I think the developers do. That's why they released in EA and that's what this forum is for. I'm sure they would find it to be more useful feedback than pointless abuse like "this game is satire."