Has Ascendancy really created diversity?

Yes. The power creep alone made pretty much everything viable.
GGG banning all political discussion shortly after getting acquired by China is a weird coincidence.
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raics wrote:
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Shagsbeard wrote:
With the addition of act IV and the Labyrinth, there are far too many counters to evasion in the game.

True enough. However, even if we assume that armor is indeed a vastly superior defense method there's nothing wrong with that in my eyes, right side of the tree has stronger offense and favors ranged combat so it should by all means have weaker defense. You shouldn't be able to have everything, it's a choice you have to make. I'm thinking the ability to have everything in this game is what's holding it back, not enough choices, the assumption we have all our bases covered, sure, we can pull it off, but that doesn't mean we want to, or at least not always.


when you say "... right side of the tree has stronger offense and favors ranged combat so it should by all means have weaker defense. You shouldn't be able to have everything, it's a choice you have to make."

Part of the argument against the original post in this thread is that pre-AC, there were no classes, didnt matter what "class/character" you picked. If your logic holds true, then evidently it does matter where you start on the passive tree hence the entire reason behind the original concept of POE.

Again, taking out a fortify duelist, what other viable summoners can be derived from other classes now? (just using summoner as an example).

Legitly curious. I tend to think very few, so please convince me. Again, Im enjoying what spice AC added to the game, also worried that now Im "encouraged" to pick a certain class and subclass if I want to be viable lategame with a specific playstyle.

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cesmode wrote:
Again, taking out a fortify duelist, what other viable summoners can be derived from other classes now? (just using summoner as an example).

Legitly curious. I tend to think very few, so please convince me. Again, Im enjoying what spice AC added to the game, also worried that now Im "encouraged" to pick a certain class and subclass if I want to be viable lategame with a specific playstyle.


Ok, duelist aside you should be able to make a fairly stiff auramancer summoner with a guardian. Some other classes also lend themselves nicely to some of the more exotic summoner types, an elementalist can make a great caster/summoner with golems, saboteur is the best choice for a clone summoner and some bow-friendly class would be a good choice for a Null summoner.

Unfortunately, there isn't too much summoner variety in general, it's probably the most specialized one of the four archetypes and the least popular.

Anyway, your complaint about class limitation is legit and I said so already, if we take a properly ascended build as a baseline you're gimping yourself by picking an ascendancy that has nothing to do with your build. However, that choice is mostly cosmetic and even though I'm a sucker for character naming and flavor it's a price I gladly pay.
Wish the armchair developers would go back to developing armchairs.

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Last edited by raics on Jun 22, 2016, 6:33:36 PM
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raics wrote:
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cesmode wrote:
Again, taking out a fortify duelist, what other viable summoners can be derived from other classes now? (just using summoner as an example).

Legitly curious. I tend to think very few, so please convince me. Again, Im enjoying what spice AC added to the game, also worried that now Im "encouraged" to pick a certain class and subclass if I want to be viable lategame with a specific playstyle.


Ok, duelist aside you should be able to make a fairly stiff auramancer summoner with a guardian. Some other classes also lend themselves nicely to some of the more exotic summoner types, an elementalist can make a great caster/summoner with golems, saboteur is the best choice for a clone summoner and some bow-friendly class would be a good choice for a Null summoner.

Unfortunately, there isn't too much summoner variety in general, it's probably the most specialized one of the four archetypes and the least popular.

Anyway, your complaint about class limitation is legit, if we take a properly ascended build as a baseline you're gimping yourself by picking something that has nothing to do with your build. However, that choice is mostly cosmetic and even though I'm a sucker for character naming and flavor it's a price I gladly pay.
Don't forget CoC Juggernaut summoner using Trypanon! Or triple-totem SRS chieftan...? (never seen it, but it could work, maybe). If you count The Writhing Jar as summoning, Pathfinder can do a good job too.
builds: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1663570/
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cesmode wrote:


when you say "... right side of the tree has stronger offense and favors ranged combat so it should by all means have weaker defense. You shouldn't be able to have everything, it's a choice you have to make."

Part of the argument against the original post in this thread is that pre-AC, there were no classes, didnt matter what "class/character" you picked. If your logic holds true, then evidently it does matter where you start on the passive tree hence the entire reason behind the original concept of POE.

Again, taking out a fortify duelist, what other viable summoners can be derived from other classes now? (just using summoner as an example).

Legitly curious. I tend to think very few, so please convince me. Again, Im enjoying what spice AC added to the game, also worried that now Im "encouraged" to pick a certain class and subclass if I want to be viable lategame with a specific playstyle.



What are you looking for, man?

Non-SRS Summoners, pre-Ascendancy, were incredibly weak. Skeleton/zombie summoners have always been garbage, and even in terms of different grades of garbage, Witch has always been by far the best/most viable start for any sort of summoner because all the summoning nodes were clustered pretty tightly around Witch. You couldn’t make a Duelist summoner for beans pre-Ascendancy.

You’re picking on this one, singular example – how Necromancer is ‘required’ for summoners – and using it to try and invalidate the entire system. Frankly, I don’t even know why – SRS is still far and away the best summoning skill in the game for actually killaging things. Skeletons haven’t been able to do endgame content since their introduction, specters have always been finicky and limited, and zombies…ugh. Raging spirits and sortakinna golems are the only summons even halfway capable of combat. Non-SRS Summoners have always sucked, and continue to suck; they just suck less than they used to with Necromancer, which is in fact kind of a ‘meh’ class for SRS spam – Spirit Eater is just about the only Necromancer node that really jives well with an SRS build.

Want to make a cool non-Necromancer summoner build? Run Heirophant – use Illuminated Devotion and put your SRS set-up in a +2 to Minions helm so your Raging Spirits get elemental penetration, put Skeletotems in your boots so the meat(?)walls gain life leech to help stay up, and put your Taunt-y Stone Golem in your gloves so it gets a bigger AoE on its taunt slam and other stuff. Grab Pursuit of Faith so you can cast Raging Spirits faster while you have a Skeletotem active. Take whatever third option you like, and fourth if you can manage to get through Endgame Lab – Divine Guidance and Sanctuary of Thought would be cool, so you can cast your wall of homing fireskulls from behind a Skeletotem barrier and as long as nothing hits your energy shield, you cast for free.

That’d be an interesting mix of stuff to try and balance out. Neither a Witch nor a Necromancer, either. Is it endgame viable? I dunno – but I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was reasonably close, and it’s not really any less endgame viable than a non-SRS Skels/Zombies/Specters Necromancer.

The Ascendancy classes are not nearly as narrow as people think. You may have to adjust the details of your idea, but I’d be willing to bet a paycheck that most any (serious, non-trollish) idea you have, you can finagle into working.

If you want to, anyways.
yes and no

yes, in a sense that power creep, like people said, made a ton of builds "viable" and all. yes in a sense that there's way more synergies available and theorycrafting sometimes is very fun.

no, in a sense that it pigeonholed a lot of builds into classes and some classes have a pretty terrible design that is rather one-dimensional (chieftain is just a terrible design for a game like PoE which prides itself with customization and flexibility)
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grepman wrote:
yes and no

yes, in a sense that power creep, like people said, made a ton of builds "viable" and all. yes in a sense that there's way more synergies available and theorycrafting sometimes is very fun.

no, in a sense that it pigeonholed a lot of builds into classes and some classes have a pretty terrible design that is rather one-dimensional (chieftain is just a terrible design for a game like PoE which prides itself with customization and flexibility)


That’s an issue with specific Ascendancy class design, not necessarily the entire Ascendancy Class system. Yeah, Chieftain is…not great (which is sad, because I really love the ideas and themes behind it). It’s quite telling that when playing an Avatar of Fire Blast Rain Marauder (i.e. 100% Fire damage class)…I ended up deciding that Chieftain was the least viable Ascendancy for it.

And frankly, the less said about the tangled-up mess that is the Scion’s Ascendant, the better. Especially after they powernerfed two of the only…two…Ascendant nodes that actually accomplished anything. But again, that’s a design issue with the Ascendant in particular and GGG’s decision to make each Ascendant mini-node an unfocused, generally-useless scattering of random mini-themes from its parent Ascendancy instead of giving them a solid central tenet to work off of.

The Ascendancy system as a whole, however, greatly added to build diversity simply by allowing for options that would otherwise have been impossible. Champion is the classic example; Heirophant is another Ascendancy with a huge range of possible builds it can benefit and a ton of versatility baked into it. It can be the Totems class; it can be the three-more-five-links class; it can be the ES/MOM Tank class; it can be various combinations thereof. There’s not many builds out there you can’t do on Heirophant in some way or another, though those builds may well end up working out on other Ascendancies as well.

They just need to work on tweaking things up, and making the Ascendant not categorically inferior to any other standard Ascendancy class, and everything will be peaches and rhoa feathers.
A general rule of thumb to follow any time you hear someone say they're trying to create "diversity" or "diversify" something: They're going to do the exact opposite, and keep claiming they're helping when they're not. Never trust a person claiming to change things for reasons of diversity.

Anyone who's been playing online games over the past fifteen or so years probably has a story about this. Any City of Heroes players out there probably remember mine, Enhancement Diversification. Which led to upgrades becoming even more homogenized than they were before.

These things tend to repeat themselves, my advice in regards to Ascendancy is this: They didn't gut the game to do it. So just enjoy the power creep, even if the distance between the average and best builds hasn't changed, and only a minority of skills and builds are top performers, you can now make anything at least a little overpowered.
"Diversity" isn't equal amounts of everything.

It means it's viable for any build to be taken to end game and perform well enough.
Anyway I think TC is a bit confused here. Diversity =/= every skill build can be run on every class. In fact that is the complete opposite of what diversity is. When every skill build can be run on every class and function roughly the same that is call homogeneity.

Diversity is creating differences and variety and Ascendancy has definitely done that.
Last edited by Megatyrant on Jun 23, 2016, 12:26:52 AM

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