Quality or Quantity, the age old question (about skills)

This is a question is about a tough (or not) choice we all must make when choosing our skills.

Ok so first a little ground work for people who may not know, but we all should know about sockets, spell gems, and support gems by now. The thing that I'm not sure many people are aware of though is that if you have two items with both a skill slot and a support slot of the same color, and you put the same skill gem into both but with different support gems then the skill is counted as one but receives all stats and mods from both support gems, creating a "stacking" effect.

So lets use a mock gear set as an example for the purpose of this post. Let's say you have a total of 8 slots, 4 skill slots and 4 support slots, two slots connecting on 4 different items.

What would you think is a more viable build for PoE? choosing a variety of four different skills with one support each in combination with each-other for a more dynamic play style? Or would you choose four of the same skill gem of your favorite skill and use four different support gems that stack, creating a bad ass uber spell that you will spam to wreck everything?

I personally choose the latter, and my reasoning is based on the fact that unlike what I am seeing from D3, the moster AI in PoE is not spectacular, so the neccessity of a variety of skills to use tactically in battle is just not there for me. I feel if I have a bad ass freezing pulse with four mods + stats, I will own.

But tell me what you think! I love your ideas, and I'm sure you love each-others' so Stay Awhile and Listen as we speculate on our play-style stratigems.

This is very tough question to answer because of all the variables involved. What class you're playing, what skills and supports you have access to, what color your sockets are, etc.

In general, like most games of this type it's useful to have a variety of skills for a variety of situations. An AoE skill, a single target skill, a crowd control skill, a mobility skill, etc. Many of these may not need support gems. The mobility skill for example is simply there for utility and generally not for combat.

In answer to your question you would more practically go with something a little more graduated rather than an all or nothing setup. For example, 1 skill with 2 supports, 1 skill with 1 support, 2 skills with no supports. As I already said, though, these decisions are highly dependent on your specific gameplay circumstances/limitations and your preferred playstyle.

Designing the game so that it requires tactical play is an important goal they're striving for. This is not seen much in the current beta but you will definitely see more of them as development progresses.

If you want to keep discussion specific to what we've seen in beta, then I'd agree with you that making one skill kicks ass seem to work better than having several skills for different situations.

I would definitely support quality. Having more skills make a game have more depth but it also means it will be much harder to balance and to bugfix them.


Also while some variation like a melee strike that makes enemies blow up may be fun, but it can also ruin the immersion and the integrity of the game. You either go arcade and have sheep bombs and retarded joke abilities, or you go serious and have proper strikes a warrior is expected to do.

A good example of this is Starcraft42's cold and fire Witches. (Last I saw) his cold Witch has several different cold spells set into a range of equipment, plus some support gems, and she's pretty effective. On the other hand, Fireball is the only fire spell his fire Witch has, so she's forced to specialize, with a buncha supports and space for some nice minion gems and curses. With her narrower focus, she is VERY effective, even though she lacks the CC abilities of the cold Witch.

I think skill specialization breeds more power in a single element/maneuver, while allowing space for more non-damage utility skills. =^[.]^=

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Raycheetah wrote:

A good example of this is Starcraft42's cold and fire Witches. (Last I saw) his cold Witch has several different cold spells set into a range of equipment, plus some support gems, and she's pretty effective. On the other hand, Fireball is the only fire spell his fire Witch has, so she's forced to specialize, with a buncha supports and space for some nice minion gems and curses. With her narrower focus, she is VERY effective, even though she lacks the CC abilities of the cold Witch.

I think skill specialization breeds more power in a single element/maneuver, while allowing space for more non-damage utility skills. =^[.]^=

That is correct.

I would like to add a third - and not only in my experience - the most important factor in finding high level equipment and orbs: Kill speed. The more stuff you kill in a shorter time, the more items you will get - and the more chance for "good stuff" you will have. You may have seen our thread on statistic about drop rates that seems to indicated that kill speed > all.

This is certainly true for monetary items. When it comes to yellow drops and high quality items, the increased rate of Quality will come in VERY handy. My ice witch is now rolling around 380 MF (including support gems on all kill skills) and she drops more yellows than scrolls of wisdom (well, that may be slightly exaggerated).

I feel this may be VERY interesting once the recepies and vendors show up in Wraeclast. "Turn in 5 rare items for a regal orb" or something along those lines could make things exciting.

Other than that I personally feel like the Ooomph you lose by going MF actually slows you down more than it helps. My MF ice witch just does not kill stuff fast enough (yet). PLUS when in a group, its hard for her to last hit, b/c the damage output of say a shock witch or shock templar is so high. Thus, no last hit, no better loot.