Who cares about new class/weapons. Existing class, ascendancy, and skills suck.
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I genuinely do not understand the obsession with adding new classes, weapons, and flashy content when a huge portion of the existing skills, ascendancies, and archetypes already feel bad to play.
I came back excited for the update and tried Monk with Acolyte of Chayula because again, I was excited for the upcoming update. I wanted to experiment, theorycraft, and actually engage with the systems instead of blindly following guides. Instead, after hours of gameplay, I found myself asking the same question over and over: Why would I use half of these skills? Basic Attack is all I need! Hand of Chayula is a perfect example. It drains mana, feels weak, and gets completely overshadowed by skills like Shattering Palm which: * deal better damage * feel smoother and faster * hit multiple targets * provide utility/buffs * and are simply more practical in real gameplay That is not meaningful build diversity, it is the illusion of choice. A lot of skills in PoE2 currently feel like they exist just to exist. Technically usable? Sure. But practical, satisfying, or worth building around compared to the obvious top performers? Not really. And before people say “wait until endgame” or “follow a guide,” that completely misses the point. A game centered around experimentation should not make experimentation feel punished. The issue is not difficulty. The issue is that many skills feel fundamentally undertuned, clunky, over-conditional, or lacking payoff compared to a handful of clearly superior options. So honestly: Why should players care about new classes or weapon types if the current ones already struggle with balance, identity, and gameplay feel? Last bumped on May 11, 2026, 7:37:31 AM
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While this has become a little bit better since launch, class balance is not something you should look forward to.
Ever since 0.1, choosing your class was always a gamble. If you picked ranger for eg, you'd have a very easy time and chill post campaign. If you were a bad class, you'd have a significantly different experience and struggle. Not that we expect perfect parity across all classes, but some things such as melee have been terrible since 0.1 (Maces especially). Yes, you can follow a build guide to a T and make one or two functional builds, but most spells and builds are either super meme or situational. (Looking at you perfect strike). Don't expect any fixes, remember the "ALL CLASSES BUFFED" announcement from last reveal, where most of them were still as bad if not worse (Eg: Gemling) |
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people want new classes/weapons etc because the current ones mostly suck and feel weak.. but the thing is the new stuff would probably suck also. for example adding swords wont make melee be magically good overnight. melee would still feel bad compared to ranged or spell caster. so not sure what the sword obsession is lately
if you want a good time in poe2 then pick from the 5 meta skills that are strong in the current league. Last edited by Druidenjoyer#0031 on May 9, 2026, 7:57:42 PM
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" You initially answered the question yourself. As for the obsession for the swords - they are most popular from the rule of cool perspective. Personally I hate that GGG and the majority of the community consider that optimizing end game mechanics is more important than developing more weapon skill lines, new characters or ascendancies to be the point of no return...the point where I stop buying micro transactions for any GGG game until they learn their lesson about what is important in a game. And in spite of how lame this sounds, I think you hurt GGG more by using their games and not spending a single penny rather than by threatening to never come back. |
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" You definitely don't. That's something you're telling yourself so you can justify still playing. The way to show them they're on the wrong path is to show them their player count plummeting and not picking back up nearly as much as they'd hoped when their patch drops. It's showing them they're losing their audience, not just that the audience is spending less at the moment possibly due to economic concerns. |
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You do realise that "Hand of Chayula's" purpose is to apply marks and curses, yes?
Why would you compare it to shattering palm which has an entirely different design. I see this attitude a lot by people who say there is no build diversity in this game and that most skills are useless. The truth is that you're just incapable or unwilling to come up with interesting builds, of which there are plenty. Every single league start my youtube feed is full of videos with <100 views of random people sharing interesting builds using unpopular skills. If you made this post during 0.1 / 0.2 I would be much more inclined to somewhat agree with you. But since then they have plugged a lot of the holes and fixed the worst skills to be viable. |
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Of course there is build diversity. But admit balance between class skills sucks...
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" .5 to 1.0 is where a lot of the balance will come from as per devs - theyve been focusing on adding mechanics which took priority over balance. Theyre well aware of balance issues. Frustrating I know, but its EA |
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" .5 to 1.0 is where a lot of the balance will come from as per devs - theyve been focusing on adding mechanics which took priority over balance. Theyre well aware of balance issues. Frustrating I know, but its EA |
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" Dunno friend, that sounds like some wishful thinking to me. Not sure in what world 'we know all the current basic features are broken and imbalanced, and have been broken/imbalanced for some time, but we're adding some new things that based on our track record will also be broken, but trust us, we'll fix it all up right before go live, without any large scale testing of the fixes prior' is a defensible approach. Hopefully your faith isn't misplaced. I would think its more likely that the more features they add and have to contend with the fewer resources they have to work on balance, and the more difficult it becomes to achieve said balance. Wouldn't shock me if they do something lazy like follow these suggestions of allowing all ascendency skills and any atlas start point for any character, so they can just declare its all balanced because every character has access to everything. |
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