The Problem With Build Diversity
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I believe PoE2 in it's current, as well as future state, will always suffer from a lack of build diversity for one main reason:
Despite having a massive amount of choice(s) which at first glance appears to allow flexibility in how we build our characters, the gameplay ultimately requires the player to hyper-specialize. What I mean by this more specifically, is that the player is given a massive passive tree and the freedom to build it however they like, hundreds of ability and support gem options, the ability to use multiple different weapons, and item modifiers that suggest that hybrid playstyles are possible, sometimes even promoted as valid options, but ultimately, none of that actually works in practice when it comes to build creativity in the end game (which is majority of the game). Virtually every build only works when focusing specifically on maximizing one thing because the game punishes you for not doing so. For example: • Seeing the item modifier "X% increased melee damage if you've dealt a projectile attack hit in the past 8 seconds." leads the player to assume that using a combination of melee and projectile attacks in a build is a viable build strategy; it is not. Splitting your build between both projectile and melee attacks leads to a character that isn't capable of doing either very well at all. • Seeing the interaction between Volcano and slam attacks leads the player to assume that perhaps using slam attacks with Volcano as an attack and spellcaster hybrid is a viable build strategy; it is not. Again, splitting your build between both spells and attack leads to a character that isn't capable of doing either very well at all. • Seeing a support gems like "Living Lightning" and "Skittering Stone" give the player the impression that hybrid spell or attack-based minion builds are a viable build strategy; they are not. Again, attempting to split your build into both spells and/or attacks, as well as minions, results in your character being bad at both. • Having the ability to weapon swap leads the player to assume that maybe they could use abilities from different weapon types in some kind of synergistic way; perhaps stunning enemies with their mace, then switching to crossbow to finish things off with grenades. This doesn't work out very well in practice. Not only will their character suffer through having attribute requirements met on both their weapons and skill gems, again, splitting their build between two different mechanics, even with weapon passive skills, will lead to the character being unplayable. There are countless other scenarios where this happens, many of which are, but also aren't necessarily written out so plainly by the game itself, but through false assumption through the illusion of choice. When the PoE2 first came out, I invited a friend who had never played PoE to try the game. They had the idea to create a bow character who used minions as a way to "tank" for their character, while they did damage from afar. This theoretically makes a lot of sense, why wouldn't it? This archetype of a "dark ranger" with undead minions, or the classic ranger with a beast companion is a classic fantasy trope and the game leads the player to believe that this is something they can do. The problem is that it just doesn't work; again, because splitting the build into two parts results in the character being incapable of doing either. This ultimately ended up with them quitting and never playing again. They were presented with seemingly endless possibilities for creating the character they imagined, only for it to be an illusion of choice, which is a terrible gameplay experience. I've played thousands of hours of both PoE1 and PoE2 and I regularly experience this. I get excited to see new spells and abilities, new support gems, new passive nodes, and I generally always try to make them work. The problem is that they just don't the overwhelming majority of the time - most experimental builds end up just turning into time and currency sinks that ultimately don't perform well and just turn into generic meta or meta-adjacent builds. If combo-centric gameplay is what the goal is, why aren't players actually rewarded, or at least not punished, for attempting this style of play? If we're given the option, and sometimes even promoted to attempt hybrid styles of play, why is the player so heavily punished for doing so? What is the point of having this level of customization available when it comes to character building if there's very seldomly good reason(s) to build outside of the conventional? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ So, what is the solution(s) to this? ~~~~ 1. In my opinion, the primary issue is that there's too much emphasis is put on BALANCE. It is applied in the wrong places consistently. This is not a directly competitive game where characters are directly pitted against one another; it is an indirectly competitive game, where players independently compete against one another on the same, but separate playing fields. So, what does it matter that things are balanced? Clearly things are not balanced in practice anyway (despite semi-efforts to do so) as we see three or four dominant builds each league. If various spells, abilities, ascendancies, etc. see little to no play each league, wouldn't that be an obvious sign that something is wrong with those abilities, whether they're just too weak, too clunky, or are just not fun to use, and perhaps need some kind of improvement? Instead, we see the opposite happen, where abilities that do see play, often because they're very powerful and/or are very fun to use, get changed, often to the point where they are no longer fun to use. This seems extremely counterproductive when it comes to making a fun game. What is the harm of having everything be good? A character is limited to a handful of mechanics for options anyway; why not just have every option be a good option? Is the player having too much fun using the abilities they like in the manner they like a problem? What harm comes from allowing a bow user to also have strong minions? What harm comes from allowing a character to have both strong melee and spellcasting ability? Does this detract from other player's experiences in a negative way? Oh no, the player is having fun fulfilling their character fantasy, what a travesty. Obviously, a pure bow user should be better at using bows than a character that splits their characters between bows and minions for example, but that doesn't mean the bow and minion character should be functionally useless, because that is an option given to the player by the game. Balance is incorrectly applied to spells and abilities that perform well, where balance really should be applied to those that don't, as well as on the content itself, so specific spells and abilities aren't always the best option over others by default. If the game requires you to kill everything instantly to survive, because of how powerful or fast the enemies are, or how difficult playing slower or more defensively of a playstyle is, of course certain abilities that can handle that environment are always going to be ideal, no matter how the numbers are tuned. Players will find ways to make the numbers viable, because mechanically the spell or ability performs the required task better. ~~~~ 2. A second issue I see deals with the illusion of choice: If players are presented options, they should be viable options, or why are they there in the first place? There are countless mechanics presented to the player with no reason for why the player would ever want to interact with them in practice. Why would the player want to "maim" an enemy if straight up killing the enemy is the better option in practice? There needs to be some kind of upside to interacting with that mechanic. Maim would be a great mechanic IF slower, more methodical gameplay existed, but it does not. Thematically, maiming an enemy leads the player to assume that you've critically wounded your target, maybe resulting in them being more susceptible to bleeding or receiving additional damage or something of that nature... but we don't see that interaction anywhere. Mechanics like Incision and Impale are mechanically confusing and offer little to no upside in practice because the overwhelming majority of targets must die instantly in order for your character to survive. They add little to the game, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I've ever heard of a single build, even off-meta builds, interact with either mechanic in any notable way. Jagged ground, as well as passives focused on that mechanic, lead the player to assume that it might be a mechanic that's useful to build around. It isn't. These are just a few examples... what's the point of a massive passive tree and hundreds of support and skill gem options if the vast majority of choices are just bad choices? ~~~~ 3. The third issue I see is unnecessary downsides and/or pointless complexity. Many options given to the player have downsides that the player must solve to make that option valid. Why? Why would the player want to solve that downside if there's options available that don't require any solutions to be just as valid, if not more valid? Why would I want to generate charges to make a given ability function, when I could just not do that and achieve the same, often better results, by using a different ability that doesn't require charges to function? Why would I want to stack multiple ground effects, which often requires a ton of investment and specific planning, in order to make certain abilities function? I could understand if accessing ground effects wasn't an effort, but currently it is, so what is the upside of doing so? I could just use an ability that doesn't require that and functions well naturally without any setup. Why would I want to generate glory to use certain abilities? If an ability requires that much setup just to use, it's detrimental to my character to make an effort to meet those conditions, and I'm better off not using it. If these abilities are only useful when you go out of your way to completely circumnavigate the artificial impediments to using them, what's the point of them being there in the first place? Why would I want to infuse my spells if I'm better off just not doing that? The upside to infusing spells often isn't worth the effort it takes to perform that mechanic. Why would I want to use a Talisman and a Scepter if my character is going to bad at both attacking and using minions by attempting that playstyle? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ There's many other issues, such as spells just being... boring (looking at you fire spells), itemization and scaling (movement/attack/cast speed/skill levels being absolutely necessary on everything), defenses being wonky (ES > everything else, scarcity of life, etc.), among others, but I think this is a good spot to start. Last bumped on Jan 21, 2026, 6:44:02 PM
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Respectfully, every single item which you concluded that it was not a viable choice to make within the game, I disagree with.
You can make hybrid characters work just fine in this game - a minion-tank archer, volcano-slammer, etc. That's basically the whole premise of this game. Making those "off-meta" builds is even where you start to find the value in the affixes that most people forget exist, like reduced attribute requirements. One of my favourite characters I ever made was a Bloodmage that used both a quarterstaff and a crossbow: plasma blast would apply HUGE bleeds against frozen enemies. A huge appeal for me IS making ideas like the ones you've mentioned as being unable to work, work. Maybe we have a different idea of what constitutes "viable" maybe? I'm interested to understand why you think the build constraints are much more narrow than what I've experienced. |
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Def agree that there's work to be done for GGG in enabling more builds - much of that, I think, will come with more ascendancies and more skills and more weapons, as much as it'll come from simply balancing the existing skills.
There's quite many off-meta builds to go for, for relatively cheap, if you wanted to. I run an ice shot snipe blood mage at the moment. There's 3869 HC characters on poeninja, and of them.. 8 are ice shot snipe blood mages. (Ooh, looking at it, seems the two highest level ones have ripped. I'm now second, yaay \o/ ) This build, despite being pretty rare, is honestly the 2nd strongest build for its cost (about 15 div at the moment in gear) that I have ran in this game; the strongest was POTCG Gemling in 0.1 which was hilariously broken. " Yeah, passive tree is a bit.. Yeah. Looking at poeninja: The majority of passives are allocated by less than 2% of players. The majority. And looking at what those passives are - kind of hard to imagine why I'd ever allocate, for example, "Star Aligned: Damage against enemies on low life is lucky". Lucky isn't a particularly large DPS boost, and I'd rather get enemies faster to low life than kill them faster on low life. There's also a large amount of passives that literally zero players have allocated. " This is actually usually allocated by primal strikes/lightning spear builds. Wouldn't go out of my way to get it, but the pathing to it easy. " Not necessarily, no. You essentially want to focus on physical/melee/attack %increased damage when going that route. " There are some experiments for running Volcano with Shockwave Totems. It's viable'ish. " Well neither says anything about attacks tbh. Living Lightning was kinda funny last league with Lightning Rod. This league is mostly used as a random extra damage gem when one doesn't know what else to slot in for their caster. " Yup. There's a few edge cases where this can sort of kinda'ish work but usually no, and it's a bit of a shame indeed. But then, builds do need to have identity, and making this sort of a thing possible for many builds, could reduce the individual identity. " Because then the optimized solutions are obscenely good and coming up with great builds stops being even somewhat challenging as it is now. Creativity needs restrictions. Give a kid 100 toys, and they barely play with any of them (something that has actually been studied) and use less imagination while at it. " I do imagine that one of the goals for GGG indeed is that the majority of skills, supports and passive tree notables have an use-case and that the amount of ones that see zero use, would be limited. I'm not at all surprised that isn't the case right now. Balancing games as complex as this is a huge amount of work. " Maim and blind are among the support gems I've used the most. Granted, not on active skills, but on Wind Dancer. I often run Wind Dancer even without having any EV. It's extremely good on HC. Most SC players are just not going to play slow and methodological. That's fine by me. If you want slower and more methodological - either you need to restrict yourself, or then switch to HC. " Absolutely not true. I've many times played into max level maps while struggling with my build not yet online properly, and having to take +minute to kill deadly map bosses and so on. And I've never died during that. Not once over my 700 hours played. " Yeah, not a fan of the charge stuff either. There's some skills which are superb once you've set up an easy and consistent enough way to generate charges. Like Flicker Strike. " Infusion elemental spells are played atm, with the infusion mechanic included in the build. |
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" I play almost entirely off-meta builds. The problem is that when you actually try playing a meta build, you realize that you're literally playing an entirely different game. The difference in power between the two playstyles is massive. Another problem is you really can't play off-meta builds in HC or SSF. Off meta builds often require so much specific itemization that they only function if everything is perfectly in place, which isn't something you can really pull off in HC or SSF. I would love to be able to pick an ability and just make it work. That's something you can more reasonably do in PoE1, but in PoE2, there's just a lot of bad choices that just don't work unless you have the items to make it work. There's a much greater emphasis on item based stat thresholds than seen in PoE1, where much more power is tied to the character itself via the passive tree, where almost all character power in PoE2 is tied to itemization. |
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" I mean, I literally play hcssf. I get 90+ with a lot of interesting builds - I don't follow guides. I will say that ssf is a different beast than trade where certain meta's just can't even exist, like, I'm not gonna be able to make a choir of the storm rathpith +4 infusion corrupted vertex temporalis CoC Comet Bloodmage with a large collection of unique jewels in ssf unless I become extraordinarily lucky. Those sort of builds are basically completely off the table. I guess if builds like that are being used as your benchmark for what constitutes "viable" then I guess maybe ya, you're going to have trouble finding comparable substitutes for outlier builds like that. So maybe we ARE playing a different game lol - it would explain our different perspectives. I will say though that I think the fact that there's more power in items vs the tree/inherent attribute stats actually adds to build flexibility and reduces tree restrictions. I quite prefer poe2's style over poe1 - and I love poe1 lol. |
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what i lack is possbility to roll completly random mods on unique items that can completly decide the build also uniques that add something so unique that u can make build out of the interaction not just lowering cd or adding damage u feel me?
i love the idea of dropping something and its so good i decide to make new character and make a build around it |
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