The Facebreaker Paradox - No Unique Unarmed Combat Skills

There is so much work going into making new animates for unarmed combat skills generated from pre-existing gems, but it's work that is ensnaring unarmed combat into a similar constraint as the first game.

All these other styles of fighting get their own skill gems, they get to utilize & craft all their equipment slots in a game centered around loot, and they get unique buffs in the skill tree.

Unarmed combat though? They get a recycled form of other combat skills and less loot opportunities.

When are we going to get unarmed combat skill gems to compliment a boxer's style of fighting?
The gimmick item that put unarmed combat into a box can now put the same nail into the coffin of the sequel game.
I thought y'all were cooking when you created a new base type of gloves that could only roll damage modifiers, but I see the plot was disconnected from unarmed combat.

Unarmed combat needs a damage type, craft-able base to assign skills gems that actually make it feel like its own style of combat. I have so many ideas for this specifically as it's the only thing I've ever posted on.

The monk's unarmed experience feels like you are casting all these elemental skills with the power of your finger tips. I'm just trying to punch somebody, not be the Avatar. Those staff skills feel the same even if I'm not holding a staff.

Now with the Facebreakers, everyone can smash the ground using the mace skill set. Why are half my unarmed skills punching the ground when the enemies face is right in front of me.

Adapting these skills to use them with less range and equipment is not the way. Unarmed is quickly becoming literally the same thing that other guy does but with less loot, or itemized flexibility, and no advantages reminiscent of why you've chosen to have zero range.

I started off with unarmed strike when they first introduced it. It was incredibly weak compared to a strong rare staff. I think they really need to add a super strong endgame pair of gloves to make it viable outside of just looking really cool.

In essence it's like you have a transmog (if you know what that is from WoW). You just look like you're using your fists but you're still playing mace.

From my own experience and from what I hear from other people... when they hear of fists.. what they want to see is wrestling moves. And in the case of martial artists they want to see stuff like izuna drops And other moves like those.

But hey, aside from the fact that it's easier for them to do what they did, wrestling moves are probably not that good for screen clearing... which is all that engame is about, sadly.

Thankfully, for me at least, No Rest For The Wicked will satisfy that.

It feels bad that they made a whole node for Monk to enable that playstyle of just using your fists (even if you use staff skills with em (as you said it avatar like)), but the node itself feels terrible, especially mid game, maybe late, like SUUPER late when you have a ton of currency and you can craft for a while until you get everything perfect or if you can trade for a good pair of gloves, amulet and other items.
With Facebreaker being in the game it gives 0 incentive to play that node anymore, just play normal and get some mace nodes and poof, you're rolling..
Feels so bad

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UnskillableTV#2203 wrote:

It feels bad that they made a whole node for Monk to enable that playstyle of just using your fists (even if you use staff skills with em (as you said it avatar like)), but the node itself feels terrible, especially mid game, maybe late, like SUUPER late when you have a ton of currency and you can craft for a while until you get everything perfect or if you can trade for a good pair of gloves, amulet and other items.
With Facebreaker being in the game it gives 0 incentive to play that node anymore, just play normal and get some mace nodes and poof, you're rolling..
Feels so bad

Felt like you were dancing around a point and then concluded it got rid of any incentive. I have an alternative conclusion here:

In a game where a "melee" player's success is highly dependent on the quality of their weapon, giving them viable "mid-game" solutions like facebreakers (or hollow palm) that are "low floor, high ceiling) style approaches to mace/qstaff skills can let a player farm up the crafting mats and roll the dice a few times on that "endgame" weapon they eventually want to have.

The things like facebreakers/HP are interim solutions that keep the game fun instead of "grinding with a weak weapon".

The high ceiling means they could just min/max the facebreaker/HP approach, but I think it's meant to be the most beneficial in the mid-game, early late-game rather than be something that stands beside or outshines other late-game builds without insane investment.

And to be clear, 'late game' viability to me means having near-full atlas, 6-mod t16s (17s?) with rare tablets and a practical/realistic grind-to-100-in-maps capability. Many people confuse that with the ability to spec shrines and power through t15s while tolerating a death every 20 maps. Not the same lol.

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karsey#2995 wrote:

Felt like you were dancing around a point and then concluded it got rid of any incentive. I have an alternative conclusion here:

In a game where a "melee" player's success is highly dependent on the quality of their weapon, giving them viable "mid-game" solutions like facebreakers (or hollow palm) that are "low floor, high ceiling) style approaches to mace/qstaff skills can let a player farm up the crafting mats and roll the dice a few times on that "endgame" weapon they eventually want to have.

The things like facebreakers/HP are interim solutions that keep the game fun instead of "grinding with a weak weapon".

The high ceiling means they could just min/max the facebreaker/HP approach, but I think it's meant to be the most beneficial in the mid-game, early late-game rather than be something that stands beside or outshines other late-game builds without insane investment.

And to be clear, 'late game' viability to me means having near-full atlas, 6-mod t16s (17s?) with rare tablets and a practical/realistic grind-to-100-in-maps capability. Many people confuse that with the ability to spec shrines and power through t15s while tolerating a death every 20 maps. Not the same lol.

I do wish that I had the ability to elaborate further, but due to the fact that english is not my primary language I find it hard to get my points across but I will try to kinda simplify it I guess..

It's not that I personally don't know that there is a better way of playing, meaning I can get a staff, work on it, get better gear, farm efficiently etc.
My point was that the node itself, which gives it a unique way of playing (kinda) is underwhelming mid to late game and I am unsure if it even is viable in end game as a regular staff would be.
Now of course, granted if you have a designated weapon for your class or playstyle it will do better and actually increase your DPS and the ability to scale into the late game.
The thing that I don't personally understand would be that we have a notable, that changes our playstyle and helps scale in a different way, which I find fun and weird at the same time, which is why initially I started playing it.
But, with all that, I don't really see that playstyle viable in the game past like level 85 let's say.
The way an individual like me plays and farms can't be compared to someone like yourself (as I believe you have experience as a long term veteran of PoE1 and now in PoE2 correct?), I found it hard so far to actually be able to scale, get gear and craft it up to what would be expected or needed to play Hollow Palm to where I could probably fight Uber bosses.
Changing to a staff would probably be the play right now, but I have spent time and gold respec-ing and trying to make something out of it just to fail over and over again.

I get this reply is kinda all over the place so I'll sum it up with:
I don't need to have 1M dps with Hollow Palm nor with Facebreaker once we get it.
I am comfortable with it being a good alternative to leveling as a monk to where I don't have to worry about sweating to find a good staff or pray to any deity for good rolls, but I do wish that it was good enough to where no matter the content with a bit of sweat let's say, you can still play it end game.
Maybe not getting upto 1M dps but at least about 300k dps would feel decent imo (talking in game tooltip (as an example I put 1M)).

I hope that kinda makes sense, if not, just call me stupid and we'll shake on it hah

Oh that makes lots of sense! You're don't seem stupid, don't worry lol.

I mean if you've gotten to the endgame using hollow palm and have struggled against the pinnacle bosses, and then arrived at this conclusion, it's more likely you're just not seeing how a few of the in-game systems can interact to give you the damage you're looking for, and that doesn't mean you're stupid, it just means you haven't yet unpeeled the required 87 layers to the 34092983 layer onion that is PoE. Tool-tip is usually not the most important thing to care about. And you don't need to farm giga-rare items to do pinnacles (but they do help).

Here's an example of what you can do with HP without any gear at all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3GfYYtr9v4

Now that's not to say that "HP is fine because you can beat a pinnacle if you play perfectly" it's just meant to demonstrate that you don't need 20000 divs of gear to approach endgame pinnacle bosses. A gg-geared monk with a great qstaff could one-shot that pinnacle, while a mediocre one would do perfectly fine as well. There's lots of ways to approach the situation using HP.

And just on an off-hand google search I stumbled across this guy's HP demonstration from 0.3 doing endgame maps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6U-vn6CF4w

The gearing is a bit too offensively-oriented for my taste but the concept is still demonstrated: endgame content is very doable with HP. Sure it might be "better" with a qstaff but you're not going to feel like you're "leaving damage on the table" until you're at that point of min-maxing with access to well-rolled quarterstaves. Also I think you can technically (or maybe more easily) reach a much faster attack speed with HP than a quarterstaff, so it might feel a bit better for qstaff skills that benefit more from hitting faster vs harder, so it is a little bit of a unique aspect maybe.

I'd also argue that having 1 less slot to gear for should probably transfer that gearing pressure across the other utilized gear slots to meet a commensurate top-end output.

And having variety is nice lol.

I personally can't wait to try facebreakers. Hoping they aren't too hard to find ssf.

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karsey#2995 wrote:

Oh that makes lots of sense! You're don't seem stupid, don't worry lol.

I mean if you've gotten to the endgame using hollow palm and have struggled against the pinnacle bosses, and then arrived at this conclusion, it's more likely you're just not seeing how a few of the in-game systems can interact to give you the damage you're looking for, and that doesn't mean you're stupid, it just means you haven't yet unpeeled the required 87 layers to the 34092983 layer onion that is PoE. Tool-tip is usually not the most important thing to care about. And you don't need to farm giga-rare items to do pinnacles (but they do help).

Here's an example of what you can do with HP without any gear at all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3GfYYtr9v4

Now that's not to say that "HP is fine because you can beat a pinnacle if you play perfectly" it's just meant to demonstrate that you don't need 20000 divs of gear to approach endgame pinnacle bosses. A gg-geared monk with a great qstaff could one-shot that pinnacle, while a mediocre one would do perfectly fine as well. There's lots of ways to approach the situation using HP.

And just on an off-hand google search I stumbled across this guy's HP demonstration from 0.3 doing endgame maps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6U-vn6CF4w

The gearing is a bit too offensively-oriented for my taste but the concept is still demonstrated: endgame content is very doable with HP. Sure it might be "better" with a qstaff but you're not going to feel like you're "leaving damage on the table" until you're at that point of min-maxing with access to well-rolled quarterstaves. Also I think you can technically (or maybe more easily) reach a much faster attack speed with HP than a quarterstaff, so it might feel a bit better for qstaff skills that benefit more from hitting faster vs harder, so it is a little bit of a unique aspect maybe.

I'd also argue that having 1 less slot to gear for should probably transfer that gearing pressure across the other utilized gear slots to meet a commensurate top-end output.

And having variety is nice lol.

I personally can't wait to try facebreakers. Hoping they aren't too hard to find ssf.

I will check out the links you posted of course.
My issue as of now was that due to having to scale evasion and energy shield (being over 500es on helm and 1500ev on armour) was hard, I am still not close to that threshold tho, and with not being able to do the temple or any other activities to quickly farm for exalts and other currencies that I can use to start the crafts with it's not as easy to get over that.
And to respec it takes forever to gather up the gold without the temple.
I literally have close to 300deaths, out of those 300 like 200 are just in temple as I don't do as much damage to be able to clear the mobs and let have a 1 on 1 with the room boss.
I might give it a go before the league ends fully but for now it seems impossible to scale.
I did also try working with some examples of earlier leagues but with the hits to the notable and how it scales I still found it hard to do so.
I mean, hell, I managed to get to level 87 with this toon even if my main skill has like 26k tooltip dps lmao

i can see what the OP's point is. but he just narrowed it down to unarmed combat.

currently, PoE2 is made to have skills bound to one type of weapon. if you look at it, its a very narrow choice of weapons with only a few overlaps (eg. ice tipped arrows working with spears too)

its the whole issue why it takes to so long to just fill the game with just the basic weapon-sets we are used from PoE1. Swords, Axes, Claws & traps.

PoE1 categorized melee skills into slams, attacks, stabs or slashes, and so you could use them with different weapons.

PoE2 restricting the choice of skills for unarmed, depending on a certain skill-tree node in a certain area is IMHO a bad omen for the future of skill and build diversity.

would have been better if "facebreaker grants hollow palm" and "hollow palm allows using mace attacks too"

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BunkerkindAnni#6570 wrote:

i can see what the OP's point is. but he just narrowed it down to unarmed combat.

currently, PoE2 is made to have skills bound to one type of weapon. if you look at it, its a very narrow choice of weapons with only a few overlaps (eg. ice tipped arrows working with spears too)

its the whole issue why it takes to so long to just fill the game with just the basic weapon-sets we are used from PoE1. Swords, Axes, Claws & traps.

PoE1 categorized melee skills into slams, attacks, stabs or slashes, and so you could use them with different weapons.

PoE2 restricting the choice of skills for unarmed, depending on a certain skill-tree node in a certain area is IMHO a bad omen for the future of skill and build diversity.

would have been better if "facebreaker grants hollow palm" and "hollow palm allows using mace attacks too"

The solution I propose here would be that we can wield a staff, keep it in like weapon slot 2 or something, you know the staff being on your back, but we get the benefits from the staff or 50%-75% of them and the benefits from the node of Hollow Palm

It might be a stupid idea but, why not? we don't need to run towards the staff nodes in the tree, unless they make it so it stacks..