Skills that have to be nerfed in order to achieve a balanced game

Melee:

Groundslam


Ranged:

Kinetic Blast, tornado shot and explosiv arrow


Spells:

Flameblast, discharge and glacial cascade


Utility skills:

The combination of blood rage + enhance + quality blood magic and the CWDT + ic + ec + id setup

Quality Blood Magic linked with Blood Rage is only going to make you cast Blood Rage faster when in lowlife afaik?

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Melee:

Cyclon, static strike and flicker strike

Cyclone doesn't need nerfed. Static strike is strong, but I don't think its broken. Flicker strike, really?

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Ranged:

Kinetic Blast and tornado shot

Don't know much about these skills.

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Spells:

Incinerate, flameblast, arc and discharge

Um flameblast was already nerfed, incinerate is medicore without so many things, 6 link, quality gems, ect. Arc was nerfed in 1.2 its actually in a really good spot. Discharge is interesting, the spell when self cast is 100% fine. When used with mjolner, volls, ect is incredibly strong, but so expensive to do not sure its worth touching the skill for one specific interaction.

Wait and see what act 4 brings before you complain about balance anymore, ok?

Don't agree with nerfing any melee attack skills, thats nonsense. Melee is in the worse place right now as its ever been and with Cwdt-ec nerf coming it'll take a lot just to compensate.

Have you even used any of those melee skills as core builds with avg gear and on rare 77+maps, solo and group post 1.3 mega nerf? Especially flicker?

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Have you even used any of those melee skills as core builds with avg gear and on rare 77+maps, solo and group post 1.3 mega nerf? Especially flicker?

I have never bothered myself with playing a melee character however what i do see in party play is that the only melee skills used are either static strike or cyclon because they are stronger than the rest if the melee skills and therefor they have to be brought in line with the other melee skils.

Goetz:

The same goes for caster builds, nearly every caster plays one of those four skills i have listed in the op so there is some disbalance of the caster skills that has to be eliminated by nerfing said skills. Tell me, when was the last time you saw someone playing a fireball witch/templar, which didnt suck?

Edit:

To give some examples regarding the opness of the four caster gems:

Incinerate:

Can get enought dps to farm atiri with minimal effort and can do maps without greater problems.

Discharge:

8% crit chance, enough said

Flameblast:

Stack fire damage, cast speed, cti and life, gratz you have won the game!

Arc:

Solo clearspeed is faster than the one of all the other spells, meaning arc is not balanced

All skills deal one damage to only one monster...there you go ballanced, and incredibly dull

None of those skills need nerfed really it required a good investment into the skill tree and gear.

Done on run of the mill self found gear they are powerfull but not particularly over powered.

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vangrandson wrote:

... however what i do see in party play is that the only melee skills used are ...

Goetz:

The same goes for caster builds, ...

I disagree with further or new nerfs to mentioned attacks and spells.
Why everybody plays these types of builds maybe occurs because the attacks and spells just look great designed, have good "handling" and are just most fun to play.
I tried almost every gem before I got deep into building something on my own or looking in the community, what they have come up with.

There still are Gems like Groundslam, Summoner Gem Set, Ice Shot, Ice Spear or Glacial Cascade (one of my friends uses that one -> very strong) out there. Builds including those gems also turn out to be very good in endgame (with the a little know how).

And especially a nerf to Kinetict or Tornado Shot wouldn't be desireable, because crit chance was already "under the knife", so it was like an indirect nerf to these Gems, cause they basecally work best on crit. Ranged Exiles need damage to maintain distance between mobs and themselves. They mostly can't tank for long ... (Cpt. Obvious goes off now)

On a final note, if you look on the crappy Diablo 3 side:
Bli$$ard nerfed the freakin hell out of the piece of garbage "they" called a worthy sequel to Diablo 2. I played it a long time and after every goddamn patch you just sat there ... looked at the changes and flipped the table, because you can start with your complete gear all over again!
I'm very happy that GGG doesn't pull that huge guns on PoE!
Looking forward to the next Act ;)
Best of luck, Exiles!

Cyclone is fine, it's strong but it's by no means taking over the game. It's just the easiest to use of all the melee skills, especially because of it's lack of weapon requirement.

Static strike, while I might be alone saying it, it sucks a dick. Ya the AOE is good and blah blah blah, but it's like a melee splash skill, you have to hit something single target and unlike splash the AOE comes after a short delay. All of the problems with splash skills come with it, basically the extreme desync. If you accidently namelock something that moves, you get body blocked not only do you desync but you run into a crowd taking damage not attacking. I tried static strike and around 60s I had to switch to GS because even though the damage was good I hated how the skill functioned. So my vote is it's fine.

Flicker is incredibly dangerous until you get high enough DPS to one shot everything, also good enough defenses to deal with a surprise reflect pack. Meaning it's fine as any build with this gear level will be as effective.

I have no opinion on KB, have yet to make one. I get the feeling people see it in the hands of GG gear rather than average player.

Tornado shot, probably. It's in the spot that LA once was, good damage and hell of a lot of hits. Should probably be a little lower DPS than LA overall, as LA needs LMP/GMP + chain/pierce to be as effective.

Incinerate, maybe a little. It doesn't have stellar DPS without other systems in place, can't exactly balance spells around RF. Big sacrifice to get it, so big rewards should be allowed.

Arc, sucks a dick without good gear. When I did this in a new league I was wildly unimpressed with how everyone praised it. It's single target is shit, inconsistent crit being as it's 5% base. While it can get good easily, I don't think it's a no brainer like everyone says. Then also end game I have a dozen builds that will beat it's effective DPS for similar cost as it's still limited to how many targets while most proj/AOE skills aren't. This is just an easy build to put together and be relatively effective, not something that's best early game or best late. I'll happily out pace a PoHs arcer on my GSer in cheaper gear any day.

Flameblast, recently was nerfed. See how this pans out. The real problem here is probably ele prolif as proven by all the other burn builds which you could easily argue nerfs for. Copying that mirror arrow build from reddit has shown me this. It's not nearly as good if ele prolif wasn't so good.

Discharge is only too powerful with volls, an item that's very expensive and very difficult to get. Otherwise it's exactly what it needs to be, a non-spammable nuke that takes a good build to make it have good damage while not dying to every reflect pack that accidentally enters the screen.

Blood rage + blood mage hasn't been changed because it must be hard to, I can't imagine any other reason. I still hold that blood rage should lose it's low life bonus as it was implemented in a time where LL was much more difficult to sustain, making it more of an inconsistent bonus rather than something you can build around.

nl;dr - nerf incinerate, blood rage LL bonus and tornado shot, rest I disagree with. They aren't OP, either they're just easy to set up for decent DPS or just end up very powerful with great gear, which all builds can be and should be.

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I have never bothered myself with playing a melee character however what i do see in party play is that the only melee skills used are either static strike or cyclon because they are stronger than the rest if the melee skills and therefor they have to be brought in line with the other melee skils.

LOL? Mana cost on cyclone is an issue, you must sacrifice a gem slot in order to even think about running that. Cyclone is good for what it is. Just because those are the 2 "most popular" that you see doesn't mean others that have niche ones aren't good, groundslam comes to mind.

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The same goes for caster builds, nearly every caster plays one of those four skills i have listed in the op so there is some disbalance of the caster skills that has to be eliminated by nerfing said skills. Tell me, when was the last time you saw someone playing a fireball witch/templar, which didnt suck?

Think about it fireball\shocknova are shit compared to the other skills, not that the other skills are so much better. You neglect to mention a good spell like freezepulse.

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Incinerate:

Can get enought dps to farm atiri with minimal effort and can do maps without greater problems.

With what quality and 5-6 links and either the max block build or RF build? Both of which have their downsides\cost associated with them.

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Discharge:

8% crit chance, enough said

Not enough said, discharge on its own is perfectly fine, self cast discharge is one of the most balanced gems in the whole game.

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Flameblast:

Stack fire damage, cast speed, cti and life, gratz you have won the game!

You mean like every other spell, no way. Flameblast was JUST nerfed or did you miss that? AA was nerfed as well, both affect flameblast significantly.

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Arc:

Solo clearspeed is faster than the one of all the other spells, meaning arc is not balanced

You ever try to kill a lightning resist rare that is curse immune, what about bosses?

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Moosifer wrote:

Tornado shot, probably. It's in the spot that LA once was, good damage and hell of a lot of hits. Should probably be a little lower DPS than LA overall, as LA needs LMP/GMP + chain/pierce to be as effective.

Totally agree. LA is one of the skills I have the most experience with, and its a fabulous skill - with proper investment, gear, and playstyle.

Tornado shot is just an easier/cheaper/stronger version of a big AoE multi-hit ranged attack, and needs to be nerfed or have its mechanics somehow altered. It's currently opening the door for easy, fast, cheap cookie-cutter crit builds that random casual gamers can pick up and run with (I don't normally complain about PoE being "too casual" or "too easy," but this is a special case).

I can't attest as much to the other skills on this chopping block, but as a general rule melee skills definitely don't need nerfing at this point.