Hybrid skills in Poe (Gunstar Heroes retro-review)

Some might remember a very old sega megadrive game called Gunstar Heroes...

You can play it free here, quality is tuned down a bit compared to the real Sega version.
I recommend anyone to beat this classic at least once if you haven't already.
#nopinkgoggles

http://www.ssega.com/game.php?id=752

The music still kicks ass even though the game was released 20 years ago,
if you're into 16-bit at all, here's the playlist


I started recalling this game when thinking about the types of skills Poe has.

GSH had 4 different power up balls that you could load and shuffle as weapon type,
2 at a time could be crossed over for hybrid skills.

The 4 stand alone base types were:

"Force" fires ballistic projectile balls like a nerfgun
"Lightning" fires beams of piercing lightning
"Fire" short range flamethrower
"Chaser" fires triangles that slowly orbit to targets


All 10 hybrid combos listed:

- Force + Force (buffed rapid fire)
- Force + Lightning (free flow lightning beams)
- Force + Fire (exploding fire balls)
- Force + Chaser (magnetic curved ball beam)
- Lightning + Lightning (strong constant beam)
- Lightning + Fire (yes, a motherfucking lightsaber!)
- Lightning + Chaser (target locking laser beams)
- Fire + Fire (bigger flamethrower that can also be fired off)
- Fire + Chaser (fully responsive flying fireworm)
- Chaser + Chaser (powerful homing missile spray)

Even though it's just a short platform beat-em-up-shooter, and it's two decades old, the quality the game had with this weapon design was so profound that it's still fully enjoyable.
This feeling is something I'm missing from Poe.

I started working on it but couldn't find a proper solution.
The closest I got was something like this:


1 - Skill gems are placed into the passive tree,
where the sockets for them are, which unlock as you level up.


2 - Gear sockets hold only support gems and work universally.

But this would raise the issue of conditioned support gems,
like cast on kill/crit/dmg taken/etc, since they can't be linked to skills that are in the passive tree. This could maybe be fixed with white sockets, which allow gems to show up on both gear and passive tree sockets.



Anyways, as I said, my approach would be too radical and change the game design completely,
but I would still love to see some sort of similar mechanics in Poe.

Melee gems would focus on buffing stacked gems

For example, stacking 2 lightning strike gems would increase the resource cost ofc a bit,
and add more projectiles. Add a 3rd one and get 100% shocking or pierce chance,
Or stack arc gems and start channeling electricity like a teslacoil while without recasting, burning mana over time, Stack cleave for a +200*degree broad slashing attack,
and leap slam could make targets blow up like detonate dead.


The more interesting stuff would be crossing gems over,
which would be mostly done with spells and projectiles due to their nature

Fireball + frost nova on hit,
Lightning warp + arctic breath = giant skull pillar of frost
Firestorm + EK, raining EK from above,
Animate guardian + any spell = animated elemental, there could be dozens of options...



Just saying that this kind of design would open the door for a million new builds,
don't you think?

Or maybe unique gear items that allow you to link the skills like you're saying.