eliminated items ?

from the "new player's perspective" it makes sense indeed to make it simpler cause the first game interaction is to combine skill gems and support gems.

but i apologise if i think stuff that ggg said years ago is a bit outdated cause the expiry date on their statements has been weeks too often now. and i've been right on reddit eventually choking on it's own hate, egoism and greed. that gives me alot of confidence ;)

I'm equally confident, if not confident in greater degree, that unless the skill system has fundamentally changed (again) from what we were shown in ExileCon the First, fusings will be going the way of the dodo. See, Grinding Gear is not afraid to add/retain complexity in their game, but the development team has made it plain that any complexity in the system has to buy them something. That complexity has to have meaning, enable something new or enhance something the player or the game can do, to be worth retaining. Meaningless complexity is often culled - see the increasingly ruthless removal of old league content the dev team considers no longer up to snuff.

If skill gems work the way they were stated to work in ExileCon the First? Then unlike current gem slots in gear, there would be no point in excess unlinked gem slots in your skill gems. If your body armor is six-socketed but you only have a 4L/2L split on it? You can put a four-linked skill grouping in the 4L and a couple of random spares in the 2L. The sockets don't care what's in them, they're agnostic to player choices.

That is not the case for a 5S Fireball in PoE2-as-proposed. You cannot socket other active skill gems into your Fireball gem to try and take advantage of the "unlinked" sockets. If the Fireball had five sockets but only two 'links', the three remaining sockets would effectively be completely unusable. Needing to fuse/link sockets in a skill gem would serve no greater purpose. It merely forces you to do the same activity twice in order to get the result - first max your skill gem, then max your link count. The extra step, the extra complexity, buys nothing. It does not provide meaningful customization or progression, it merely frustrates players to no conceivable gain. There's no reason for it.

And if there's no reason for it, why include it in the game?

Path of Exile 2 is Grinding Gear's chance to clean up and refine legacy game systems from the earliest days of their development efforts. Why would they cling to outdated items and concepts when the entire point of the initiative is to bring the game up to modern spec and make it fun and engaging for modern audiences?

Nah. Fusings are gone. Or if they do remain, they'll have a job unrelated to socket linking. It was hinted that with equipment no longer needing to carry sockets on their art, there was room for Grinding Gear to put other things in the spots previously taken up by gem sockets. Obvious hinting at the design space opened up for something like weapon or armor runes, or other means of putting items in your items to improve your items. Maybe fusings will be repurposed to working with that system, should it ever exist. I don't think that's likely, but it's not impossible.

What I'm willing to say with total confidence is that we won't be using Fusings to build skill linksets anymore. Not when Grinding Gear promised us a better way.

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1453R wrote:

Needing to fuse/link sockets in a skill gem would serve no greater purpose. It merely forces you to do the same activity twice in order to get the result - first max your skill gem, then max your link count.

true. it would be two currencies for the same purpose if there is no use case for split socket groups.

i was rather thinking of the time it currently takes to create a 6 link, the process is split between jewelers and fusings, with one achievement (or savepoint) when you 6 socketed your item.

with only jewelers you likely have the same (or even more) requirement of time and effort to get your gem 6-linked and having to click 2000 to 3000 times on a single skill gem doesn't sound fun to me. but yeah, they will probably make jewelers more sparse

The same dev talks that went over the elimination of fusings talked about The 6L Problem. Four years later and the "problem" is fully entrenched. The reality is that obtaining a basic 6L to get a build going with is pretty close to trivial these days. Gone is the era of having to fork over three or four exalts divines for a basic 6L with some life and resistances. You can get a solid mid-tier mapping 6L chest for, like...ten chaos, on a good day. Builds no longer treat the 6L as an endgame luxury; it's a core, non-negotiable part of the build. Even when you need a unique chest for your build, they're a lot cheaper than they used to be.

Grinding Gear said, four years ago, that they suspected gaining a single 5S gem would be easier than gaining a 3.0 6L, but that outfitting your character with nine 5S gems would be noticeably harder than obtaining a 6L. Obviously their stance could have changed since then given four years of development, but frankly I think they had the right of it. Letting people access max-supported skills for a reasonable cost is not a detriment to the game. On the contrary, it allows more people to have more fun. Maxing out a character should still take enough effort to be satisfying to achieve, but getting the basic pieces in place should be attainable without too much fuss.

If they want to even just keep pace with the current state of Path of Exile, they won't make attaining a 5S skill gem an awful hassle. Heh, ideally it'd still cost ten chaos, but I don't think we'll be that lucky.

Nets from bestiary league technically disappeared, although some people still have them. The same with perandus coins.

I think Fusings might end up the same way, although they will have no use to them.