Do we need cooldowns, spirit, ammunition, charges, rage, glory, fuel, infusions, combo, and energy?

Its the side-effect of GGG wanting you to play with a combo of skills instead of one button builds. If you can get all effects at all times in every skill, then everyone will just go back to playing one button builds.

A lot of the extra resource bar mechanics only exist because of how GGG handled damage over time in this game.

No DoTs stack anymore and magnitude is based on the damage of the hit so skills like Hammer of the Gods with bleed were fundamentally broken, hence glory was added so you'd have to at least briefly pretend to fight a boss before super nuking it.

Ignite was too easy to proc on one big hit with any fire damage so flammability had to be added, but then Incinerate didn't make sense as a skill so it needed a rework to stack its ignites without being a horribly overpowered DoT multiplier.

Some of these "extra resource bar" mechanics are fun and good (ammo, rage, cooldowns) but adding more and more as a Band-Aid to some core issues with damage interactions in the game is unhealthy and increasingly contrived.

The real fix here is to handle damage over time, and more generally address the problems that initially brought about the design of the extra resource mechanics. This would be a difficult thing to change at this point and it feels like the game has taken on some irrecoverable technical debt. Hopefully at least going forward GGG doesn't plan to add any further new resource bars the next time skills have a cracked interaction.

I'm out if I ever see a "Land Fertility" bar with all these plant skills.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

Its the side-effect of GGG wanting you to play with a combo of skills instead of one button builds. If you can get all effects at all times in every skill, then everyone will just go back to playing one button builds.

The issue is, large combo based gameplay does not work well at all with ARPG style games in general. 2 or 3 skills comboing can work, but when you need 5 or 6 skills to make the combo work as intended it is to much. Let us look at the werewolf skills for proof of this. As near as I can tell, the way they want the combo to go at end game is Lunar Blessing to open, followed by a Pounce to mark the biggest target in the pack. This is then followed by 2-3 Lunar assaults to build freeze, at which point you use Arctic Howl to buff your attacks and then basic attack the frozen mobs to generate ice shards. You finish it off with a cross slash to blow up the shards. This is literally 6 skills to use, all while packs are zerging you down. 2 of the skills require multiple hits to actually get the effects off, so you are in fact having to hit upwards of 10 times just to get one combo rotation off. If your build is at all decent, you are never completing the full combo because the enemy will DIE before you hit 10 attacks, or they will stun you and kill you first.

Lets take a look at plant druid by comparison. Cast entangle followed by thunderstorm. Damage done. Thunderstorm can be automated with cast on crit, so you literally are only pressing one button and getting the full effect of the combo. Clears whole screens, with a fraction of the effort.

Yea the suffering belongs to Crossbow players. Don't try steal our honour please. +Reloading -Bolt sack!!! +Ton of investments.

So far I'm okay with all others listed, but infusions are truly bad, as they slow the gameplay in two annoying ways:

1) wait for them to spawn

2) go pick them up when they do

This makes infusion reliant builds unnecessary tedious.

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Aya#9380 wrote:

GGG is slowly killing freedom of experimenting and build diversity (well kinda pretty much is at this point), everything is railroaded to a specific playstyle that THEY want YOU to play. And i doubt it will get better, PoE2 is just something else, honestly an abomination of a game that tries so hard to be a successor to PoE1. Everything this game offers, skills, supports, "complexity" it just falls off short and there is a very loud majority that don't like what is happening with this game.

very loud MINORITY.

the majority like POE2 more than POE1

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davieboy1228#6473 wrote:

"

MEITTI#3999 wrote:

Its the side-effect of GGG wanting you to play with a combo of skills instead of one button builds. If you can get all effects at all times in every skill, then everyone will just go back to playing one button builds.

The issue is, large combo based gameplay does not work well at all with ARPG style games in general. 2 or 3 skills comboing can work, but when you need 5 or 6 skills to make the combo work as intended it is to much. Let us look at the werewolf skills for proof of this. As near as I can tell, the way they want the combo to go at end game is Lunar Blessing to open, followed by a Pounce to mark the biggest target in the pack. This is then followed by 2-3 Lunar assaults to build freeze, at which point you use Arctic Howl to buff your attacks and then basic attack the frozen mobs to generate ice shards. You finish it off with a cross slash to blow up the shards. This is literally 6 skills to use, all while packs are zerging you down. 2 of the skills require multiple hits to actually get the effects off, so you are in fact having to hit upwards of 10 times just to get one combo rotation off. If your build is at all decent, you are never completing the full combo because the enemy will DIE before you hit 10 attacks, or they will stun you and kill you first.

Lets take a look at plant druid by comparison. Cast entangle followed by thunderstorm. Damage done. Thunderstorm can be automated with cast on crit, so you literally are only pressing one button and getting the full effect of the combo. Clears whole screens, with a fraction of the effort.

I think there are a lot of good points in this thread. On this though, playing my wolf is a one button build on endgame other than bosses. Even during campaign Lunar Swipe and a couple Shreds was killing pretty much everything I came across. Lunar Blessing has been a permanent uptime buff since the campaign with the right supports. So the only time I use all 6 buttons is during bosses.

In reality there's nothing wrong with those mechanics. All of those things exist in many other games and work just fine. Problem with POE 2 is that they took POE 1 style of gameplay with POE 1 monster behavior and tried to force those mechanics in. They do not work in that context. GGG fails to understand that you need to rebuild the game from 0 to make those types of mechanics work. You can't just take your old game and stitch some new things on, it'll look and feel awful.

Here's hoping they will wake up at some point and choose a direction: new game with these mechanics functioning, or old game without these mechanics.

Generator/Spender mechanics are very Diablo 4 - a core tenet of a lot of builds in that game. Closer than what a lot of people here would like to admit. Some of the druid skills could easily come from D4 tbh.

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nagisanzeninzz#2697 wrote:

How else can you achive "Meaningful Combat" if not for the things you said?

Without the constraints (Do A before do B), everything would devolve into 1 button skill again.

And we don't want that in our modern and meaningful game, don't we?

nope. Look at some other classic rpg where character use different skills in different situations - they are not forced to predetermined rotations/resources.

It just ggg design enemies as canon fodder who players are killing screen-wise. And density is extremely high also.

Imagine:
1. enemy have a channeling ability to regenerate fast? And you can use stun/heal-preventing ability to stop him. But overwise this skill is dps-bad an single-target also. But you will use it if you cant out-dps enemy heal with you default 1-button aoe skill. No forced resource on player, no forced couple with other skills - yet, there is unique situation and skill solves it.
2. enemy have a giant shield, providing him and nearby minions very strong defence bonus. And you can use some "shieldbreaking" ability. It has slower attack speed for sure and you need to use it once-twice-thrice to break giant shield and then you can return to your dps skill. It already much more engaging combat than mindless rotations and doesnt require adding extra resource to manage.
3. get more to imagination.

All it will work if the packsizes are lowered and encounters themselves are more diversive: 1v1 vs elite (with pack of abilities and proper animations to react)? 1v3 vs veteran-monsters (with a 1-2 mechanics to interact)? 1v1+minions (commander type enemy)? 1v100 swarm type (current poe1-poe2 all enemies belong to) - so you can rest with 1 button screen-clear aoe skill.