Grip of kulemak and allies scaling nerfs. Outrageous.

Hey, hi, not sure if anyone realized this or not but with the recent grip of kulemak nerfs the number of droppable grips worth farming just went down by 25+ roll compositions.

This is a 500% nerf to group stat stacking, to the only item in the game made for group stat stacking.
(at 500% nerf does this make this nerf the largest nerf in poe1 or poe2 history? I bet it is.)

Anyway, I understand why you cant just legacy the rolls. But I feel like capping the allies stats you can gain from grips is a better approach than the one you guys have taken. I understand you are trying to push people away from party builds to make solo players feel better, but making them feel better will eventually cost you significant players.

This grip nerf killed Hundreds of build compositions. Those builds are no longer worth touching.

Not sure if this was a fully baked decision or if you guys just rushed it. Eitherway it doesn’t seem like a healthy one. And no that’s not because I did the math before your nerf and knew you’d have to do something about the grip allies rolls. Even tho I did the math before and did know you guys would need to do something.

I don’t think the developer or player realizes how many builds died with the grip nerf. It is a significant number. Diversity took a large hit today. Especially the diversity that didn’t prioritize damage.

You want to do screen lagging twisters with hundred twister on and off the screen no problem. You want to stack group cdr and have to all play inside of each others radius to get bonuses, no go bro, even tho the solo twister build will out damage the entire 6 man group.

I write this simply to say that the decision to cook kulemak rings forever will result in an entire aspect of the game being “dead” in .5.

If you are a developer I want you to check the number of times kulemak was killed in .3 .4 then compare to .5. You have created an actual hellscape simulator with kulemak boss as now the number of rings worth farming represents literally maybe 1% of possible outcomes. It cannot be stressed enough that farming kulemak is already an absolute pain of loading screens. Now you’ve reduced worth while rings to farm by literally like 10%.

When I did the math and knew you’d have to change something, not even on my best most intelligent day would I have predicted this as the change you would choose. As someone who loves detailed math, this choice seems like a terrible decision.

Also worth noting, due to the changes you have made, the only class worth using as a grip of kulemak support is ritualist, due to third ring and 25% bonus. You have force funneled a single ascend to be the only viable option because of the kulemak allies changes. Not sure if this was realized before you made your decision.

But yes, also not sure if they changed tactician but just giving 25% of your weapons flat attack is better than any kulemak composition.

TLDR: Not only did you kill kulemak’s, you killed kulemak support ritualist as now tactician support is 100x more viable. And tactician support is just a damage aura bot. I genuinely struggle to believe this was a decision that wasn’t rushed beyond comprehension.

Party of 5x tacticians support give 125% weapon damage to the dps player. But pay no attention, the real problem was 12% attack speed. Makes sense considering the attack speed actually scales your crit damage to a higher number right?

All you’ve done is delete party diversity and make a single
Meta party build. I don’t think the solo complainers are gonna be as excited to see you thrust 5x tacticians to an even higher pedestal, considering it’s been the pedestal party build since debut, but we can find out.


Also just gonna add, grip allies stacking was nerfed more than 500%, because the fact new rare rings with better implicit and new rollable mods simply exist. But anyway yeah, I’m sure people will be avoiding kulemak and crafting rings with seasonal mechanic a lot more. What a way to kill the most diverse and interesting unique in the game.

ALSO, you completely wrecked the pool of “high tier” kulemaks with this change, and .5 due to spirit walker is the season where 10% spirit 10% spirit reservation X stat X stat grip of kulemak will be most desired.

Like the amount of damn that sucks from the latest update is INSANE. Next time lead with the Damn that sucks patch notes. I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t be separating them into good news bad news, but if you insist on doing so please lead with the bad news patch notes from now on. I don’t speak for everyone, but p sure psychologically you just made a lot of people say 1.0 isn’t that far away.

This patch might have the most work done and best reworked systems but that last update is really a dream killer for what a lot of people had planned for league start.

Feel however you’d like, were you part of a 100+ person guild all aligned with making the craziest spirit walkers mid season for party play? Oh you weren’t cool. Then it doesn’t effect you at all really. Lots of people were looking forward to kulemak party spirit walking.

That entire genre is dead before it got legs.

Can we still do it? Sure. Can we still do it anywhere near as effectively? No.

Does it now require all of us doing a different type of farming method/crafting method that is far less forgiving? Yes.

Is our reward for the input work anywhere near as good as tactician mathematically? Hell to the no.

One thing you guys don’t respect about tactician support is realistically you can do 6 supports and they will all slap dps if done right. Just because the streamer only hit things himself doesn’t mean the other 5 can’t hit things.

Just fyi the streamer one tapped multiple insane hp bosses. The supports might not one tap, but 5 of them probably one tap each = dead boss.

You got no idea how cracked the tactician support comp actually is. Because you just watched a streamer bonk a boss while the other 5 stood around.

Don’t even get me started with how the 6 tacticians can side stack str and instead of a sceptre 5 of them use Brutus sprinkler in offhand.

It’s not like I’ve calculated more math about this game than most people have done in real life in their life.

You assumed I was uncultured swine who can’t do mathematics.

If something is functionally gimped in party play compositions and something is functionally buffed in party play compositions, the gimped version might be playable and function, but the non gimped version is going to clear at a rate that makes the non gimped version the same as not functional.

Airing on the side of caution is fine, but this was an overly precautious choice. They should have functionally limited the stats you can get as a party from grips, but not at the abysmal degree they are now capped.

You are legit better off just using rare rings for group comp now.

They have made support style obsolete.

Now the pedestal of pure dps group comp and tactician which is basically the same thing different engine.

The absolutely cratered and useless group comp : grip of kulemak and allies scaling

You know what’s a banger idea, release spirit walker, advertise taming uniques, then destroy allies scaling group compositions!

Surely nothing could go wrong. Do people even read these anymore?

A dude keeps telling me to read more books but I feel like I write like 10 a year talking common sense to people.

Free advice if it’s that you can get too much % minion damage now using uniques/other tech maybe lower that shit, instead of absolutely slaughtering your own design room. I guess something had to get slaughtered. Too bad it was literally the most interesting kulemak’s.

I can’t lie and say they weren’t mathematically the best rings in the game. Now they are trash. Along with anything that could have been done with group cdr %, attack speed %, cast speed %, accuracy %.

Yall got no idea how many group builds are now just gone.

Because most of you didn’t even know how cracked these rings were.

Prior to this change a party of 6 ritualist just using the you and allies cdr roll would be better than legacy temporalis equip on each player. Did I mention with legacy ingenuity it got more cracked?

Oh anyway you could equip temporalis and then use this tech to lower the cooldown of everyone’s mirage archers to next to nothing.

Now you can’t.

You could also have 6 ritualists with 3x rings % you and allies cdr and % skill effect duration. Was lit.

Past tense of course because now it’s dead.

Along with hundreds if not thousands of other compositions/builds.

Most people are so math illiterate they don’t know what they lost.

I simply ask you to show me something getting nerfed more than 500% in the history of Poe or poe2 other than this.

A simple request I will wait.

To put this into perspective legacy temporalis isn’t actually a 100% nerf. It’s actually like a 85% nerf due to additional socket potiental not existing on legacy temporalis.

The 15% quiver bonus to 6% is 150% nerf.

Do you think either of those combined nerfs killed either build type to anywhere near the degree as the kulemak change?

Let me help you, the quiver jewels are for bow builds, the temporalis does have some range in its uses, but those grips represented far more builds than you think.

Dead honestly I wanna see how good the community actually is at math. I was told everyone was good at math but those rings cost exalts and single divs all of .4.

I guess because most of you will never actually know what you lost, it doesn’t matter to you.

That’s as far as I’m gonna talk on this topic.

With one final note: this may have an unintended consequence of even less people caring about defense/defense based builds.

What’s less than next to none?

yeah, groups running around with "booster groups" for a billions divs a second, no thanks. nerf it out of existance.

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eye_356#2542 wrote:

yeah, groups running around with "booster groups" for a billions divs a second, no thanks. nerf it out of existance.

Lmfao. They should remove all fast travel skills too since that’s what actually separates builds.


Remove all movement skills so all builds can suck equally pls.

I was scrolling your wall of text and was wondering who would read all this and then I saw your name, yep, moving on.

All I'm gonna say is this: If party play is only fun when you run a rarity bot kind of group, that means there's a fundamental problem with group play in PoE2, one of them would be collision, this has to disappear before 1.0.

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Warrax#2850 wrote:

I was scrolling your wall of text and was wondering who would read all this and then I saw your name, yep, moving on.

All I'm gonna say is this: If party play is only fun when you run a rarity bot kind of group, that means there's a fundamental problem with group play in PoE2, one of them would be collision, this has to disappear before 1.0.

This guy, this type of person, is the entire problem. He just said “rarity bot” when not a single aspect of my post concerned rarity bot. This is what entitled looks like everyone, doesn’t read the argument, has an opinion about the argument. Infinity IQ activated. How could I expect to compete with such cultured individual like yourself.

Since you choose not to read here’s a tldr: they killed thousands of builds with just the kulemak change not including the other allies stacking changes.

The only reason you aren’t complaining is because your seasonal plan of copy pasta martial artist or spirit walker like the other 70% of player base didn’t get hit. That and you need exceptional math skills to understand what this change actually did.

There’s always that group of people who don’t read or think but formulate opinions regardless. Worst part of such individuals is they do no actual math and think their opinion is of any relevance. Super toxic trait.

That dude who complains about his build being nerfed every league launch right before league launch Connor right? Yeah well they nerfed hundreds of my hand tailored builds that only I knew existed. I think you don’t have any appreciation to the scope of loss in stat stacking.

Non perfect corrupt rings at highest non corrupt values you lost

208% cdr to the entire group.

176% attack speed to the entire group

208% cast speed to the entire group

Over 400% accuracy rating to entire group.

That’s not calculated for the actual highest degree of scaled stats we lost, that’s just non corrupted grips, and that’s scaled for a 5 player party not 6.
I know I’m the only one who was making detailed builds on support grips.
So the number of players who have any idea what they lost is next to 0.

I’m not saying new stuff isn’t exciting, I’m saying from a playable perspective they nuked support parties.
Support parties were also the composition that pushed defenses the intended ways. Basically it’s back to damage is the best defensive layer period end of story.

I know it’s hard for you to see all the builds this impacted, but the number isn’t the only problem. The big problem is that the play style is literally deleted. A party can have a rarity bot and a support bot, but now you are forced into 4 dps for other slots.

Prior to this change you could run 6 supports pretty efficiently in a team, not as efficient as the fastest builds tho.

Something that was already inefficient and not seeing play gets slaughtered and damage builds get buffs? Makes sense.

It’s basically an MMO with no “tank”. Grouping up now has required rolls for party.

If I want to support as I level I now can’t just join a party, dps leaders will kick if double support. It’s just made things more complicated than it needed to be. And way too harshly nerfed.

P.S. I don’t apologize for the fact context takes lots of words to create, otherwise you’ll go around thinking you are right about everything off no factual basis.

Also it’s 2026, you can legit get your phone or pc to read what I wrote to you. The degree of actual laziness to be afraid of hearing an in depth opinion is more outrageous than the nerf.

People think I have this opinion only because it effected hundreds of builds I already theory crafted, and it’s true that most certainly hurt. But it’s more about the fact they just killed a way to engage with the content to make everything more funneled a less diverse.

Now it’s simply a dps checker with less skill ceiling and room for average players to unite and do streamer level shit.

The worst part of everything is the fact you think Rarity bots aren’t eating off this patch. They actually became better. Not worse. But it’s okay, you’ll complain about how 6 player groups out farm you till you someday realize you could make one or join one. Far more insulting than the allies nerf and grips nerf is the fact you can’t see the forest through the tree’s. It’s not like rarity bots need to be the support to function. They just need to be ritualist.

Don’t even get me started with how rarity player for party is always a ritualist which means there is legit no real diversity of 2/6 party slots as the pure support will also be ritualist. Also I bet there is a push to
Have 1/6 slots be tactician if party is doing atk based build, because tactician won’t need support stats just the ascend that gives 25% of main hand.

Okay so 50% of a 6 player party, 3
Slots are all predetermined by what actually is BiS for the party regardless
Of phys base fire base lightning base cold base or what the other 3 classes are as long as atk based.

If you aren’t catching on that’s called diversity deleted.

Nah, it needed to be nerfed.

Never even realized this could be good. Every single one I got was hot garbage.

One could also argue that they might want to put more emphasis on Ascendancies being niche again rather than just damage multipliers.

They nerfed my favorite build from last league, presumably as collateral, and now it's only viable (in the same form) with a different Ascendancy. The build lost ~62% of its total DPS. So, either you take a huge loss to max hit or you take a huge loss to DPS and retain your max hit.

Either way, while annoying, it's not the end of the world. I've cried foul many times over the years, and there usually is a viable workaround. Well... with the exception of my older builds, i.e. my first Candle Runner build (from 3.11) that is literally dead because the Vengeance skill doesn't even exist anymore:

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BaumisMagicalWorld#0673 wrote:

One could also argue that they might want to put more emphasis on Ascendancies being niche again rather than just damage multipliers.

They nerfed my favorite build from last league, presumably as collateral, and now it's only viable (in the same form) with a different Ascendancy. The build lost ~62% of its total DPS. So, either you take a huge loss to max hit or you take a huge loss to DPS and retain your max hit.

Either way, while annoying, it's not the end of the world. I've cried foul many times over the years, and there usually is a viable workaround. Well... with the exception of my older builds, i.e. my first Candle Runner build (from 3.11) that is literally dead because the Vengeance skill doesn't even exist anymore:

Oh so the emphasis is on making ascendancies niche. So for example if I want to do a support build in end game non rarity version, I have to pick ritualist as ascend. And if I want to do support rarity build in end game I have to pick ritualist. Sounds like good direction. What’s the definition of niche?

All that happened with allies scaling nerf is ritualist became the only viable allies scaling ascend and class.

Every other allies scaling build is dead. Period. End of story. Most people do not see the scope of this nerf AT ALL.

The only thing nerfed harder than grips allies scaling was BHAITAIR’S vengeance which got DOUBLE NERFED.

Legitimately all that has happened is the entire support archetype is now ritualist or you are choosing to be way less efficient. So much so no serious group will waste their time having you in it unless you are ritualist.

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Lore#3772 wrote:

Every other allies scaling build is dead. Period. End of story. Most people do not see the scope of this nerf AT ALL.

Bollocks. But okay, you are the Math Messiah and we are all dumb-dumbs who cannot possibly grasp the severety of the situation. Dude, I tried to stay objective, but this is a lost cause. Take care, I'm out.