You guys want skills to synergize, but penalize players fort trying them

I am sick to death of going down these rabbit holes trying to get stacking bonuses for diversifying my build and stat loadouts.

It legit feels like this game is some kind of prank sometimes. "Damage against burning enemies does 30% more damage".

Ok cool let me skill my attack so it does a little fire and they'll burn and I can get that damage boost.

Nope, doesn't trigger. Ok, let me try this, let me try that.

Oh ok, so turns out for whatever weird reason Firewall just ignores all the other rules and can ignite enemies, neat.

Wait the ignite only lasts 8 seconds, so I need to find some talents to improve the duration so it's actually worth it.

Next thing you know by the time you skill all this endless crap it's not even worth it, and you've wasted all your gold, tried a bunch of skill gems, and you're just burned out as hell trying to figure out this overly complex, game with endless unique rulesets per skill.

Meanwhile I have a bracer that adds 5 cold damage and literally every single enemy I hit with the stupid thing gets chill applied to it so I can get 30% damage bonus to chilled enemies.

The entire Warrior skill tree revolves around extra damage from ignite and it's like some kind of sick joke that you have to go deep into fire to get it to proc.

This is just the tip of the iceberg but the logic and edge cases and finnickyness of all these bonuses and balancing is really just so frustrating.

And then you look over and people are just copying builds and doing easy mode right clicks and it really just feels like a gut punch.

You're trying to enjoy the game, you're trying to play it the "right way", but everyone else churns through content, and you're left feeling like some kind of gimp because of the terribly broken nature of these skills being short duration, impossible to trigger, and just all around a total pain to make even usable.

The game is ALMOST there, but there are just so many mechanics and features that are so oddly janky and don't behave how you think they will.

I just spent a damned hour socketing everything I could possibly think of into my mace to get it to proc ignite and it was a total waste of time.

Now i'm broke, used up all my support gems, have a huge mess of an inventory, and kinda just over the whole notion of trying to create an actually intersting build with lots of neat abilities to use.

If I'm throwing away 10 skill points for a measly 30% damage bonus and the duration is only 8 seconds, what's the point? And it's like this for EVERYTHING. Curses, ailments, stun durations, and on and on and on.

There are just so many layers of 30% this, 30% that, you just get lost in it all. Skill duration, ailment duration. Does that shield AOE thing have a chance to hit? Does this do this?

Nothing makes sense.

So people make the cookie cutter builds, they churn through the content and you have two options right now:

1. You can feel like an idiot gimp, where the game beats you over the head with annoying edge case restrictions that make your every attempt to become more powerful futile as you watch all the streamers and build guide enjoyers just one button click their way thgrough the entire game in a week because they can just buy whatever the heck they need on the auction house.

2. Or you turn your brain off, ignore all the bullshit and just follow a guide. And the game is stale as hell and there's no adventure.

Pick your poison

Probably droning on here too, but builds are only as powerful as their weakest link. Like what's the point of even skilling things that help you mow through trash mobs? Or things that take a while to generate and get up and running.

The only thing that matters is eventually being able to solo those lone bosses, or tank that one huge single attack, invalidating the whole of 90% of the game.

What if hordes of enemies shared a "Pool" of life, and when you killed the swarm, they all died at one time. They would give players a huge incentive to skill abilities that can hit many enemies and kinda change the lay of the game.

Or maybe bosses had multiple target points and you could hit them simultaneously at certain times to help give AOE a home during boss battles.

There are just so many systems at odds with one another.

Probably not saying anything anyone isn't aware of, but so frustrated with the bloated rulesets and the gimped abilities that are so painful to tool around with.

The game could have just as much depth if a lot of the "Noise" was removed and the rulesets and secondary mechanics were greatly toned down and simplified.

These small bonuses cost a ton of skill points / jewel socket / item slot / slice of build real estate for a reason - they're balanced around people doing the most sweaty, efficient, optimized, trade-league-y stuff with them. They're balanced so that the people pushing edge interactions to their limit don't get too far ahead of the curve. The result is that Joe Schmoe cooking up random routes with peasant gear is going to pay an enormous amount of build real estate in exchange for a paltry amount of power.

Right, and it's bad design.

There could be an extensive and deep talent tree that doesn't coax players into crappy builds endlessly.

It's almost as if the games purposely is meant to piss off new players.

I understand the sentiment. Everyone else is a nub and their opinion doesn't matter, "Get good and enjoy the game".

Not a good take from a design standpoint though. If your game drives off all your new players before they figure it out, it's poor design.

You can rationalize it all you want but the bloat of skills, and the overall gimpiness of everything in the game out of the gate isn't necessary for late game players to feel they have carrots to chase after.

Things not working due to bad coding but still being in the game is killing hype for me every time.

I wouldn't call it bad coding, the game they have here is a miracle, it's relatively stable and far more advanced than any ARPG ever made.

We should be celebrating it.

But It's a fine line between complex and interesting, and complex and bloated.

The absolute best games are simple but have depth.

Good design is coming up with rulesets that you can spell out in one sentence, but just inherently work well and feel fun and balanced.

That's the holy grail of game design.

I spent like 3 hours reading over all these warrior abilities and it's just so convoluted. What's a hit? What attacks have a miss chance? Each ability learning the nuances feels like you have to break out a 2 page manuel and then it's compounded by trying to figure out which bonus skills to socket into them.

The system feels inherently flawed, because the fun comes from the randomness, but you can skill any gem you want, and you can get any item you want on the auction house.

I really wish they would just beef up all the abilities a bit, extend ailments to say 10 seconds, make the threshold to get them to simply proc lower for fire, and cut down on the number of support gems we can add to skills, but make them more usable out of the gate.

It SHOULD be the reverse of what it is right now. As it stands, we have access to everything but it's all trash, and if we get the right items, and set up our build properly, it makes these crappy things usable.

Ideally, everything would be pretty decent, and in speccing and items specific setups becomes better than using the full set of things.

That or there needs to be more investment for unlocking things like curses and elemental vulnerabilities.

Anyway, I realize it's easy for us to stand on the sideline and talk crap about this or that.

I actually LOVE the system them have built, but it's just a bit overload at the start, and it tends to be a bit gimped.

I would love if maybe they somehow made us pick one or two of these mechanics, and not just make them ALL available, because it feels very much like whack a mole, since we can all so easily access a few talents and skills and feel like we SHOULD be getting these damage boosts, but then overlycomplex mechanics thwart us like having to now invest into durations and aoe's and it turns what should be fun into a nightmare.

Absolutely loving the game, but the impact of trade as a whole really brings the mood down, and then for new players thy're just smacked in the head with all the above.

Maybe you guys could add some system where the first play of hte game on the first cahracter enemies do 50% less damage in the first difficulty setting that scales up to like 80% towards the last act. I think that would go a long way to help people acclimate without the game being ocnsidered "easy mode" and maybe that comes with a penalty like you can't find craft items or something as often.

Do you use Path of Building (PoE2 version)? It doesn't calculate every synergy, but it's cheaper than respeccing again and again.

The problem is you THINK the build is going to work... but in practice it doesn't.

POE 2 is very complex in a very awesome way, and that leads to endless theory crafting and nuance. But it also leads to builds that can become horribly broken and people destroying their ability to play if they're not careful early on.

A lot of times it's impossible to tell if sommething is wroking till you test it in the field.

I think the talent is called "close combat", but if you click the ability and check abilities it affects, it doesn't show anything. But it does in fact improve the damage of a slew of abilities.

But in so many areas there are abilities and talents that you're never quite sure if it's going to work until you try it.

Like trying to get ignite to proc. It is such an insanely complex system to try to just get that darned mod to trigger. Monster resistances, how much damage is being converted to fire damage, your elemental amp, your ignite chance bonus, the skill level, the damage on the weapon, if it's two handed, and on and on and on.

It is just SO insantly complex that no one really knows what's going on, they just know sometimes enemies catch fire when they hit them.

It's a bit too complex, and the whole thing could use with some simplifying.

Sometimes mechanics get too tricky for their own good, and in many instances it feels like POE goes down this road, with all these formulas and mechanics that cover all elements globally, but it becomes muddy and convoluted because it's one system covering fire, ice and lighthning with magnitude and penetration, and duration, and the words all get garbled up and you're trying to force this singular solution on all the mehcanics thinking it's going ot harmonize and simplify the systems, but it actually does the opposite because you're trying to create one singular element system to handle all the mechanics and what you end up with is one giant clunky system that's hard to tune because everything is so interconnected.

I REALLY miss the simplicity of duration and slow ammount, and chance to proc. These were simple, easy to understand and itemize.

Anyhow, I get they created this neat system, but it's just really poorly communicated and it's clunky and it makes the whole of understanding magic and procs and all that a real pain in the ass and not very fun to learn.

If instead of having all these nodes that increase magnitude or this and that fueling a complex system that bases proc chances based on damage, if there were just nodes that said things like "Increases Elemental Damage over time by X%" that would be WAY easier to understand.

Anyway, a lot of the problem I legit think is just poor word choices in the descriptions. "Magnitude" could mean anything, and tooltips could REALLY use some sort of generateized descriptor to give you a brief list of the pros and cons of the talent.

Like for Avatar of Fire:
"Give up your physical damage for fire damage. Fire damage is easier to scale, but you will no longer be able to receive physical lifetap, and fire immune enemies will pose problems to you.
It's advised you pair this talent with heavy fire builds emphasizing elemental damage.
Build Options:
Pairs well with shield as you can ramp respectable damage with a single shield with high armor and shield charge and block skills.

Little bits of info like this would go a LONNNNNNNNNG way to teaching new players general thoughts on these mechanics, and how they tie to a larger build.

All that said, I think if even small bits of fire could reliably proc to some degree, that would be nice.

Hahaha.... 10 skill points waste of time?

Come invest points in Crossbow and you will reconsider your thought about wasting time...
There is always something worst than what's you think it's worst.

Noice.

This post is accurate in describing the problem - there is too much stuff for the devs to manually balance, hence there is a ton of stuff which will never be used, as it's just too inefficient.

The easiest way out of this pit is to autobalance the skill tree -> depending on how rarely a node is used by the (active) playerbase, give the node bonuses. (e.g. instead of 30%, give 40%, or even 50% damage increase)