Skills viability
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+1 the changes they made in 0.3 to skills/ supports is in the right direction, but spells and melee still have limited options.
If you go warstave skills early there is basically no good options for a main clear skill or a single target skill until the level 7 gems. You may as well whack everything with your stick. If you go mace/hammer, early there are no good options for single target apart from basic attack, and some things like Eruption are fairly useless, the setups and payoffs are also useless unless under perfect conditions, so again you just end up whacking rares/uniques with a basic attack for a lot of the campaign. The best early build (rolling slam/ boneshatter) is disabled in multiplayer unless everyone is building around stun. If you go spells, you just pick contagion no matter what. Even if you start the game with something else, you just go "what if I just used contagion on packs though" and then it feels infinitely better and now you are a contagion build. Most of the other skills available just do not feel good at a baseline until invested into which makes them pretty useless for characters that are barely formed and still progressing. Even at the top end, there are a lot that are basically unusable (things with insane charge times or base attack times and no way to reduce them/ things with awkward interactions that don't really work on packs). Last edited by AverBeg7#1689 on Sep 29, 2025, 10:13:10 AM
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How are people loving contagion this much??? Usually I drop contagion on my bonestorm witch (fav build) at the start of act 2, but I am doing my first ever chaos build rn and just reached the middle of act 3 with it. It sure is fun to watch an abyss quickly drop dead because of mass spread, but besides that it feels like such a slog D: don't get me started on killing bosses...
I easily take 3 times as long on a chaos witch then I do with any other build I tried this season (Bonestorm/ pure minion/ minion hybrid). I actually had the most fun this season with a multi-elemental sorceress build where I had 2x different 3+ button combos for either waveclear or boss fights. Currently in the middle of the interlude with her and I am starting to only spam frostorb and ice nova because I got to many +cold spell level mods on gear now, but early campaign felt like peak gaming. I'll never understand how people can enjoy zoom-zoom... Last edited by HTlYr6APGC#5834 on Sep 29, 2025, 11:09:25 AM
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" Cont just has high base damage when it spreads. It doesnt help the game holds your hand by giving you access to that much damage at the start and then ED not long after. It stays at that power through end game and you can just scale it like crazy. ED is what youll use for single target. Which it is also silly high as well for base damage. Its kind of the lazy/low effort build that takes no real innovation and makes play very easy to approach for newer players. And of course being at the top of the tree makes it that much more attractive with the current state of ES. Mash the clean
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yeah hopefully they get to making all the skills good in the campaign one day
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Yeah, low skill usage on poe ninja doesn't mean they aren't viable. I can kill pinnacle with Hailstorm Rounds with no Weapon Set II points invested into AoE in addition to the Concentrated Area support gem so there's less spread. It was nerfed in 0.3 so the rounds no longer overlap but it can be made to boss and clear well. It has a 0.2% usage rate last time I checked lol. I think it's pretty clear by now that the vast majority do not care if something is still viable. They will choose the strongest options. Literally anything can be made viable, even Rapid Shot with Incendiary Shot if you focus on making Ignite as big as possible or even Ice Shards.
When people say something is not viable, it means it takes too long to kill something for their taste or that they lack knowledge on how to scale it effectively. I am a proponent of keeping weak things weak so that I can change the pace of the game and tune its difficulty at will. Others complain that there is no build diversity. What they really mean is that they find the majority of build options nonviable. You can't satisfy everyone but this is EA so eventually there will be enough broken stuff for them to try. I only play SSF and it is my duty as one to inform you of my status. Last edited by SoFaux#7759 on Oct 11, 2025, 9:41:19 PM
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" That argument kind of falls apart when you consider you can make anything scale with insane generic damage in the late game, the point is skills are not great when progressing. It is not a "difficulty tuner" they are legitimately unplayable just mechanically before you can scale them. I would rather skills feel good to pickup and be tuned around the first campaign experience so people can at least see the potential of their builds and so progression is an overall more intentionally paced experience for a wider variety of skills. I think having more options to play at more stages of the game just leads to more fun. I am not asking for everything to be S tier, but when you think about just running a character through for fun and don't want to use a guide you should be able to pick whatever skill tickles your brain out of those offered at the skill gem level you can cut, without being punished. In progression when cutting skills you are railroaded by class, then by archetype, and further by just what works and what doesn't without good investment. If you ignore what works and what doesn't then you are just railroaded into defeat and it feels awful. The skills should just work as soon as you can get them, and then fall off without investment. If something is meant to be scaled then it should require a higher tier uncut skill gem. |
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" 100% agree. People speak of viability like it's some universally accepted and quantified thing. " 100% disagree. You're entirely free to change the pace and difficulty of the game at will by removing gear or imposing restrictions on the quality of gear you can wear and what affixes. You're advocating for intentionally unbalanced skills, essentially bad game design. This funnels the vast majority of players into single digit builds just so they can complete the game at what is accepted to be a reasonable pace by todays standards. " My opinion on the reason for the vast majority of "no build diversity" complaints is this. I'm going to pull some percentages out of my ass, so prepare yourself: There really are only a couple "builds" per weapon type. Sure, there are a lot of skills. But 25% of those are setup skills and thus not viable except for their expressly designed purpose. 25% of those require a setup skill to function and aren't worth using without the setup. 25% of them are weird charge or support attacks. And the remaining 25% are universally decent attacks that can be used as the player wishes. So really you get like 2-3 builds reasonably supported by the game per weapon type. And if you assume that most people have a moderate to strong preference on their playstyle, you can reduce that amount to 1-2 builds per weapon type. You can claim all day that you only play bespoke hipster builds and you push them to end game and thus prove their viability, but the truth is that the vast majority of players have zero interest in playing that way. Add on to that the game developers have made statements explicitly to the contrary, that they want lots of build diversity and that builds should perform at similar though different power levels, and you really have no reasonable to claim to the "build diversity is there the players are just too stubborn" argument. |
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" If you can only nerf yourself through gear, how else do you experience progression? This is a loot game. You can have a skill like Hailstorm Rounds, a skill used by only 0.1% of recorded trade league players, clear at a high speed and boss well if you allocate weapon set points to something other than AoE and use the Concentrated Area support gem. Same goes for Ice Shards (only 14 recorded characters have been seen using it this league) and Glacial Bolt. Both can be used to kill endgame bosses in a couple of seconds yet nobody even bothers with them. I really don't think that this community, in particular, has the time or will to experiment. I mean c'mon, it's a glorified inventory management simulator. Worse skills than the aforementioned even have higher usage rates like Incendiary Shot and I put more time playing with that than with hazards. There are some bad skills, don't get me wrong. Gemini Surge, a skill that comes on the Double Vision Dyad Crossbow which was introduced in 0.3, is used by literally 6 people in the entire community at endgame and there is not a single piece of feedback on the forums about it. You can still wipe screens with it in juiced content with Armour Piercing Rounds, Armour Explosion, Exploit Weakness, Fork, Trinity, etc. I only play SSF and it is my duty as one to inform you of my status. Last edited by SoFaux#7759 on Oct 21, 2025, 3:04:57 AM
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" Why tout that the community does not experiment? Players do crazy things in both PoE games, they make builds even the devs do not expect consistently. Are you not quoting experimentation done by the community as ways to make skills work in the same paragraph? The problem is those ways are too highly invested to be true customization for progression. So you can make a skill work with generic scalars late game, the same is true for everything. The point is more the amount it takes to make them work because they are just so mechanically lackluster at the point they are given. You would want to be able to just realistically use the skill and feel good about it at the point you can cut it right? The problem is also not with a few skills or a single skill but many have mechanically awkward aspects that just make them feel unplayable until you solve the problems with the skill much later. More skills have this problem than don't in my eyes, and the skills that are obviously better are mostly just mechanically nicer with less prerequisites and better targeting etc Last edited by AverBeg7#1689 on Oct 21, 2025, 5:23:43 AM
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" i dont think ed/contagion was very good in 0.2 - my partner tried running that at the start of 0.2 and switched to minions eventually. it seems much stronger after 0.3. im trying a physical damage witch now after having spent most of 0.3 on a bow monk doing physical + poison + herald of blood that could set off a chain reaction to clear abyss pits. we'll see if i can get similar clear with the witch, probably not |
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