What POE 2 can take from POE 1 without making the game POE 1.5

Focusing only on the campaign, I played POE 1 for the first time to see what could be added to POE 2 without making the game feel like POE 1.5. Many of these topics will probably be looked at during the early access period, but I thought it would be fun to create some constructive discourse. If any of my info is wrong or you disagree, please comment below. Thanks.

1)Crafting Bench:
If I recall correctly, runes were supposed to replace the need for the crafting bench. There is also the fear that the crafting bench would be too powerful or a necessity, especially during the campaign. The major problem with runes at the moment is that it can be difficult to find resistance runes during the campaign, especially on a league starter. POE 2 currently has a reforge and salvage bench. Instead of multiple benches, combine them into one crafting bench with multiple uses. The rune issue can then be solved by allowing this new bench to change one rune into another, either for free or at a cost.

2) Mana reservation vs Spirit:
While playing the POE 1 campaign, I quickly saw how good the Mana reservation system is. I understand that GGG wanted to make the abilities within this system have their own resource pool through the new spirit system. Right now the Spirit system feels clunky, and there is very little room to combine abilities due to the cost. My only opinion is that the cost of all spirit abilities should be cut in half, which would allow 1 ability from each tier to be used at the same time.

3) Mana Cost:
Along with looking at mana reservation, I also noticed that mana costs were reasonable in POE 1. I only used a handful of abilities, so some abilities might cost more. For POE2, despite the mana reductions that have already occurred, I believe that an extra 20-25% reduction across all gem levels would be extremely helpful in making mana feel less annoying to deal with. That and more mana related clusters on the tree.

4) Early Leveling Skills:
POE 2’s early leveling is bad. There are very few abilities that are both useful and have good damage for the early game. Before I did my campaign run, I tested various abilities through Acts 1-3 in POE1. What I noticed is two-fold: many of the early leveling abilities had either a healthy amount of AOE or were able to multi-target the enemies. I understand that GGG wants to develop combo gameplay, but that should develop as you progress through the game. I believe that the first 5-8 abilities unlocked per weapon should be able to work by themselves. A good example already in game is lightning arrow. By itself, it has good clear and damage; combining it with lightning rod allows it to be stronger and more effective. A bad example is falling thunder and killing palm. Without generating the power charges from killing palm, falling thunder feels useless, but generating charges from killing palm is both slow and clunky.

5) Skill Tree:
The skill tree will get better, but here are three things I noticed about the POE 1 tree that can make the POE 2 tree better. First, the density. The POE 2 tree is too spread out and takes too many travel nodes to travel the tree. Each travel node should lead to a minimum of two clusters each time. Shrinking the size of the tree down by about 15-20% should help with the density. Second, gem locations. Regular gems do not suffer, but gems with a radius are not allowed to maximize their impact on a build. Third, more useful nodes. Three things I noticed I really liked on the POE 1 tree were the vast amount of life nodes, nodes that helped with automating charge generation, and the masteries. Generating charges in POE 2, for the most part, is a convoluted nightmare. Nodes on the tree that help with automated charge generation would go a long way. I know GGG said they do not want to include masteries, but masteries placed into various spots on the tree would greatly help build diversity in the long run.

6) Base Movement Speed:
Zoom gameplay I find boring, and I hope we never reach speeds that can be achieved in POE 1. Saying this, I believe that an extra 15% base movement speed would go a long way, especially for the campaign. Sprint is really nice, but it is not always viable to sprint.

7) Minimap:
I noticed during the POE 1 campaign that the entrance to a new location would be spotted from quite a distance away. I assume this is due to how light radius works between the 2 games, but I could be wrong. Being able to spot items of interest from further away would be great in POE 2 and would help reduce the need to backtrack if one does miss the entrance to a new location.

8) Personal Wishes:
I really liked using the Kinetic abilities, and golems were also fun. A kinetic ascendancy for the Sorceress would be fun to see.

You make some good points and i do agree with several of them, especially (leveling) skills and spirit.

Auras don't really exist in PoE2 so being hard limited to one spirit reserver for most of the story is.. well it's a drag cos if you want some actual utility in your choise then best magic spirit affix gear from somewhere which is, imo, poor design but very on brand with the sacred vision of the sequel.

Also, skills.. there needs to be more of them available earlier than there currently are, PoE has gems tiers but here the gaps are too huge and contain too few gems so if you don't like the small handful of options then good luck slumming it through who knows how many levels till you finally are able to unlock something that you actually wanna play with which is, again, poor design imo but maybe they'll eventually expand the tiers enough for there to be something for everyone.

Nothing. It took way too much already.

While we could of course disagree about some of the minutia, I think this post is pretty good.

For me, the biggest change I would like to see eventually, is to have more gem overlap and usage across different weapon types. Having so many gems locked into staff, or mace, is a substantial limiting factor in creativity with builds. Especially when you consider how gems synergize or combo together, we have some pretty real limitations for diversity and creativity. Instant weapon swap is a huge change that helps a lot with this, but it could still be improved.

This is a whole other topic, but imo I think they need to take a good hard look at how scaling works (multiplicative, exponential scaling) and what that does for player power variance, and game balance. Especially with life/mana regeneration, which make monster one-shots basically mandatory to kill the player. There should of course be some measure of regeneration, but probably not to the extent that their life regenerates almost instantly, requiring one-shotting the entire life pool to kill them. There are exceptions to this, but they have to be handled thoughtfully to not create this issue.

To be its own game it needs its own mechanics. Not bringing another thing from POE1 would be the first step to creating something other than POE1.5

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greystorm420#3919 wrote:

To be its own game it needs its own mechanics. Not bringing another thing from POE1 would be the first step to creating something other than POE1.5

And I agree with you. That is why I tried to keep all my talking points, except the personal wishes one, as generic as possible. Masteries and the crafting bench might also be too POE 1 oriented in terms of talking points as well, but the Path of Exile games can never be truly separate from one another, in my opinion. They can each have their own identity while also improving based off what the other one is doing. At the of the day, we will have to wait until the game fully releases before anyone can truly say that the games are uniquely their own thing.

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WhisperSlade#0532 wrote:

While we could of course disagree about some of the minutia, I think this post is pretty good.

For me, the biggest change I would like to see eventually, is to have more gem overlap and usage across different weapon types. Having so many gems locked into staff, or mace, is a substantial limiting factor in creativity with builds. Especially when you consider how gems synergize or combo together, we have some pretty real limitations for diversity and creativity. Instant weapon swap is a huge change that helps a lot with this, but it could still be improved.

This is a whole other topic, but imo I think they need to take a good hard look at how scaling works (multiplicative, exponential scaling) and what that does for player power variance, and game balance. Especially with life/mana regeneration, which make monster one-shots basically mandatory to kill the player. There should of course be some measure of regeneration, but probably not to the extent that their life regenerates almost instantly, requiring one-shotting the entire life pool to kill them. There are exceptions to this, but they have to be handled thoughtfully to not create this issue.

Yah, more gem overlap and overall synergy would help build diversity a ton.
I did not think of scaling, but you make good points. I know one major complaint that people have is that most of our damage/defense comes from gear rather than the tree, which people believe should be the opposite.

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Avatar_Zuko#3317 wrote:

Yah, more gem overlap and overall synergy would help build diversity a ton.
I did not think of scaling, but you make good points. I know one major complaint that people have is that most of our damage/defense comes from gear rather than the tree, which people believe should be the opposite.

Yep. The issue with power disproportionately coming from gear rather than the tree, is the huge amount of variance it creates between characters based on their experience in acquiring gear during the campaign. I'm not 'super' concerned about this issue, but I can see their point.

This is along the similar line of thought regarding exponential scaling. When the game creates a situation where players might have vastly different power levels due to luck in the campaign, or meticulous min/maxing later on, it creates such a gulf in player power across the player-base, that monster balance becomes an impossible task; either the higher end trivializes all content, or the lower-end of builds become non-viable, once the monsters are balanced to provide challenge for the top-end of builds.

I don't see any way to adequately solve that, except to make power scaling linear rather than exponential. Players should be rewarded for thoughtful builds, and min/maxing, but perhaps that reward should not be 50x clear speed.

Mana reservation is a horrible idea that has always made mana pointless in poe1 except for the nichest of builds. Absolutely awful idea trying to bring that back.

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Avatar_Zuko#3317 wrote:

2) Mana reservation vs Spirit:
While playing the POE 1 campaign, I quickly saw how good the Mana reservation system is.

It is not good.

It is absolutely useless. Complete garbage. Non-existent stat.

It doesn't matter if you have 100, 1000, 100000 mana.
This is simply AURA FODDER.

It does nothing. If you get mana on the item it is wasted affix.

All you care about is reservation efficiency and sneak as much auras as possible to your build.

This decision GGG made practically made auras part of every build.
Not only that, people will reserve their HP as well. If they could - they would reserve their ES and go 1/1/1.

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PoE 2 is huge improvement over this.

You can stack it up. The spirit affix is not only useful but also Tier 0 priority in many builds.

Auras reserve flat amount, so you pay exactly what you buy as stat.
You need extra aura - you replace one affix with spirit affix - simple solution.

And there is not much on the tree.
In POE1 you are more or less required to pick "RESERVATION EFF".

In POE2 you have freedom in that matter.