General Gem Discussion

As I'm sure it's been brought up dozens of times, spectral helix just leaves other melee skills in the dust.

Buff cleave radius by 10. Is it going to be OP? Nope. And who would care if it was. It's not like it could ever negatively affect anyone's single player game. Base damage and added damage scaling is still that much lower than helix.
Is it going to be fun and worth a try at least? Yep.
Same could be said for 90% of old skills left to rot.

Rebalance old gems DRASTICALLY and BOLDLY so that players have an itching urge to try out more builds in combinations with uniques, theorycraft and explore like the good old days.

Don't know if this is the proper procedure to post about this but...

I would like a lecture about how minimum gem levels effect the balance of skill gems

Should a new player be expected to swap onto newer skills as they progress through the story? I believe they are and that for that reason the higher minimum level(ml) gems tend to be stronger at their base level. I'm concerned about how this specifically affects the endgame, should the player be more incentivised to use the higher ml skills or should we be ok using the fireball or glacial hammer we start out with. I'm sure this was posted before but it was tedious for me to find discussion on it. I would like to know your philosophy on this.

Is there any plan to overhaul that crutch which is called Ancestral Totem?

It reminds me a lot of the old Elemental Overload, which was an almost mandatory setup to increase your spell damage massively by means of another skill (Orb of Storms or others).

Likewise, in the painful world of (actual) melee skills Ancestral totems are an almost mandatory setup to increase your DPS massively thorugh attack speed (and damage). The Double Ancestral+Multiple Totems Setup is so design-limiting and feels really bad, especially if you want to play an attack build without it.

Can we add some Flat Physical damage to all of the Strike skill gems? Currently i've been trying to make some of the physical melee builds to work. The only skill i've found viable is Boneshatter, and surprise surprise it has the highest added percentage + added flat physical damage.

Most of the skills can be somewhat usefull if you convert the damage type. But i've been trying to get a physical build to work which is simply not possible if you don't use Boneshatter

I'm fairly certain it's not unknown that Melee has been horrible for quite a while, physical melee in particular.
Even though most Melee strike builds already have the added downside of actually having to face mobs in close range making them far more vulnerable to the different types of shotguns the game has to offer.

Short summary, Melee requires massive defences to deal with various shotgun mechanics whilst working with a 0 damage skill. (Boneshatter being the exception)

I think just adding flat physical damage similar to boneshatter will pretty much solve unuseable melee strike skills.

Edit : I consider Melee to be skills that require you to be face to face with a monster to hit it. I do not for instance consider Lightning strike to be a melee skill.

"

groink19 wrote:

Is there any plan to overhaul that crutch which is called Ancestral Totem?

It reminds me a lot of the old Elemental Overload, which was an almost mandatory setup to increase your spell damage massively by means of another skill (Orb of Storms or others).

Likewise, in the painful world of (actual) melee skills Ancestral totems are an almost mandatory setup to increase your DPS massively thorugh attack speed (and damage). The Double Ancestral+Multiple Totems Setup is so design-limiting and feels really bad, especially if you want to play an attack build without it.

This is the 100% prime reason I do not play melee, the fact that every build runs multiple totems with Ancestral and Warchief as mandatory. Because without it, melee just can't compete.
And being forced to summons totems and keep totems throughout the fight is just not a playstyle that I enjoy. Trying to play melee builds without these totems, during boss fights, just delays the fight out and overall makes it less enjoyable experience.

Frozen Legion feedback in light of no thread yet:
The skill should really use charges in tight spaces instead of not consuming them and not spawning a clone.
In a layout like Toxic sewer, you never spawn more than 2 clones and that just feels very bad.
The clones should spawn closer to you or on the available outside space than not at all imo.

A lesser point of feedback is the skill is pretty quiet and the area of effect of each clone's swing is not very clear.

So you tackled the melee totem problem by adding support to make the ancestral totems stronger?

I'm underwhelmed.

xd

Explosive trap MTX,

explosive trap is recently one of my fav new things to play, but the orange flashing near on makes it playable for about an hour before a headache sets in.

could we please get a "dark" MTX for the skill, there's literally no MTX for this skill, something like a "puff of smoke" or on the dark/grey side would really make the skill easy to use on the eyes, im sure there are others that feel the same and would purchase this, Thanks!

new skill: snipe
I can't search for the alternate quality version of the new skill gem snipe in poe trade. I can't tell if snipe with alt qual is just too rare or is it a bug? did anyone see one of the alt qual snipe?