why caster buffs failed i think

looking at poe ninja the highest played spell is penance brand at 2%, rolling magma at 1% and then nothing much of anything for a while, its all just bow and melee builds.

I think this is a problem that comes down to scaling, and the lack of without some pain or alot of currency when it comes to casters.
melee and bows have it fairly easy, you craft a half decent weapon fairly easily and you can do most content for more things to keep on progressing.

Casters on the other hand dont seem to work that way for example, archmage the only popular caster in some time was popular because you could scale defence which casters lack while also scaling damage, from a source that is somewhat easy to comeby (mana), with an acendancy that supports the arcetype well (hiero).
Almost all of the other spells suffer from the same scaling suck, u get through the campain and now you are in maps and outside of some fluff from the passive tree you have no way to scale your damage outside of stacking gem levels which is hard and costly to do especially at the start of a league, or you power charge stack which is even harder and more costly to do, leaving casters especially those new to the game in a large flux of no scaling progression compared to melee and bows that can just smash a weapon with essences, get some good rolls and its gg.

I think some options to help improve caster scaling would be to have int scales spell damage the way str scales melee which but turns off with archmage supported spells to prevent double dips, some kind of spell scaling options from energy shield, spell damage multiplyer based on character level, higher added damage effectiveness ramp on gem levels 17-21 then dropping off after that to get that higher base damage like you have higher gem levels and allow scaling in other areas earlier, and witch acendencies that dont feel like second class citizens to a paladin when it comes to being a caster.

Dunno just some ideas.

I have come to this conclusion by playing ssf and always quiting caster which includes minion builds because its to slow and hard to scale compared to the other types that progress so easily. I think ssf highlights the flaws in the game much more then trade and is more relatable to what new players experiences since when you are new you are basically playing ssf since you dont know what or how things work.

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iamtogoodlooking#2096 wrote:

looking at poe ninja the highest played spell is penance brand at 2%, rolling magma at 1% and then nothing much of anything for a while, its all just bow and melee builds.

PoE Ninja just shows what’s popular and spoonfed by big streamers, not what’s actually objectively "good" or bad.

You can already see more people picking up self-caster spells as league starters this week than what players touched months into Settlers. That alone shows the buffs did their job, cause most caster builds got a solid damage bump.

If anything, the numbers will only rise as people move on to their second or third characters instead of sticking to the same comfy copy-paste starter. So claiming the buffs “failed” is just nonsense lol.

I honestly find this hilarious. For years this community has been whining about how casters have it so much easier, just get a few gem levels and do a bazillion + infinity damage while melee needs mirror tier weapons to do 5 mio dps and now we get the exact opposite statement.

And if by some chance we get a caster skill on top of the POE ninja rankings next league because some streamer came up with a good idea for one, we'll have the exact opposite statments, AGAIN.

Collective learning capability? Absolute zero. People really need to learn the difference between popularity and power, it's just embarrassing at this point.

Spells are in a pretty good spot tbh but they aren't outliers by default so the community ignores them because it has a collective feeding frenzy/power obsession about the few builds with enough power to make everything zzzzzzz.

Honestly i think diversity is decent right now if your playing the middle tier skills (my home), stop judging success or failure by player numbers OP. Play the skills yourself find out and don't compare them to some bullshit propped up by a doryani's merc and nimis etc.

I mean you can make a spell build which can clear T16 reliably on a 10-20c budget, so that's something. I feel like the worst part is sitting still to cast spells, it just doesn't work in today's PoE

Casters have one problem and one problem only. They have to stand still to cast and they don't blow up the whole screen when they do. The game has moved away from anyone being able to plant in one spot and fire off slow ass casts. On every build that works well we zoom and run in circles around mobs to break AA and avoid shit on the ground.

You can't fix casters without giving them absurd tank or screen-wide damage, including the rares, unless GGG decides to nuke pack size from orbit and rescale rewards. Which will never happen.