Flasks need a complete rework. Zizarian nails the problem:

"

KZA wrote:

"I know GGG at and I know that they would just make flasks useless while not moving that power to anything else."

Really? There's literally been about a 500% increase in player power in the last 5 years.

Yeah, and they buffed monsters even more than that, so in the end it still feels like a losing battle.

Wrong, wrong wrong. Look up any boss video from the early days of PoE. It takes MINUTES to kill regular bosses with end-game characters.

Lvl 66 Dominous for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TFVU72KpEA

True. True. True. Took like 30 mintues for GG toons to beat uber atziri when she came out. We only had like 50K DPS and kitted all those magic pack too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-3883up8ig

Nowadays? we straight phase her in one two shots. 5 min max whole map and magics are irrelevant.


Fuck.... you just reminded me another thing i hate about this game now. Power creep no combat/tactics.

lol like an year ago people complained that white conquerors are too strong. Now we wipe 4 guardian battles no problem.

Flasks aren't equipment. They're cooldowns that have become upkeep.

Even in old PoE you didn't really use all Flasks unless you were getting stunlocked and prolly going to die anyways. It was kinda obvious GGG intended for them to function as CDs early on.

Was that a good idea? No but at the same time the game is also still stuck in the one skill with support effects, something many ARPGs fall into so flasks were a concept to keep our hands busy.

I struggle to find any build that requires more than 4 buttons and while using abilities skillfully at the right time is ideal that's simply not the game right now. How many people use "Focus"?

Focus is a voluntary Cooldown unlike flasks and probably less than 2% of the community use it.

Macroing Cooldowns is not really acceptable so there's only one option to me. Remove them.
...and good luck to GGG with re-balancing the game around that.