Thoughts, ideas, and suggestions about weapon clusters and notables

A great deal of weapon clusters have very specific requirements to them.

A good example is Wrecking Ball.

Attacks with 2 Hand Weapons increase damage with Hits and Ailments.

HITS and AILMENTS. Okay yeah that's super useful right? It covers a ton of potential builds and nodes. Oh yeah it does, but look at the nodes leading to it.

Two Handed Melee Damage and Attack Speed;
12% increased PHYSICAL damage with 2H melee weapons.
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Okay, something doesn't add up here. We have a very conclusive notable that can cover all elements, and then you have it's leading nodes providing only physical. Exqueeze me?
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This is a good example of the inconsistencies with the passive tree currently. There's quite a few melee notables and leading nodes that look like this.

Right over there on the other side you'll see Executioner, which is basically cull-lite for all hits. Then the same PHYSICAL boost leading to it. Uhhh huhh... Lets go look some more shall we.

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Feller of Foes;
Axe attacks deal 30% increased damage with HITS and AILMENTS.
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Yeah that sounds good right, pretty good for a blanket damage boost to any element you have on your axe. Also all the nodes around it in the same cluster match this same format, they are HITS and AILMENTS.

Now lets go have a look at the section by the marauder shall we?

I don't even have to look. I know most of the Marauder tree is physical and melee physical. All weapon specializations are physical and melee physical.

Now you might be asking, why did I mention Marauder? The answer my inquisitive reader is simple, the Marauder has CHIEFTAIN, which converts physical to FIRE right? Wouldn't it be useful for physical damage to be beefy for a Chieftain right? Yeah that sounds pretty smart, and I would agree with this, however there are many other builds that require access to NON physical nodes in which these particular clusters are absolutely useless! Especially, anything that just so happens to use ohhh... any non physical element.

Sure you could argue this is just how it works, and yeah it is, and then I'd argue how few viable melee builds are being played this league. If this doesn't make you think, I don't know what would.
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NOW Funplayer, why are you mentioning all of this in such a strange fashion you're probably wondering. Oh you, clever you.

The truth is, we have very few dual wield clusters. Very few sword clusters. All the while, you have these generics that become core to many builds or are ENTIRELY ignored (I'm looking at you fortification +1), and the specifics are simply ignored by those same builds due to the jewel clusters simply overwhelming them (melee physical nodes in the base tree areas and beyond.)

You have the PHYSICAL, which is oh-so substandard in value. The MELEE PHYSICAL, which is quite juicy, and does almost nothing for any build ever. The <WEAPON> MELEE PHYSICAL, which does almost nothing for anyone.

All while the nice little Hits and Ailments notables take the real show. Like a great deal of useless crap along the line of shit that makes a build viable.

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MY SUGGESTIONS;
1. UNIFORM THEM. Make the line leading to the notables, reflect the notable. Not the notable taking an entirely different route as the line of passives leading to it. HITS AND AILMENTS for the minis, and the notables.

2. MELEE PHYSICAL, out the window. Make it PHYSICAL, <WEAPON> physical, or 1h physical, or 2h physical. NONE OF THIS MELEE PHYSICAL. This just makes people avoid certain sections of the passive grid like the plague.

3. REMOVE A SINGLE NOTABLE FROM EVERY MARAUDER WEAPONS TREE, and then place it as a mastery. That would provide a great deal more access to the rest of the passive grid, without forcing every single node along the way. I don't mean BAD GENIE here either, we're talking rework the nodes around it to reflect the more generic approach to hits and ailments, and then provide the chosen notable AS A MASTERY.

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Done right, this will revitalize and provide quite the entertaining league for mele

Most masteries imho need an overhaul as well. They either have 1-2 mandatory choices or are completely useless. The bow mastery would be pretty ridiculous to take on my bow raider.

All of this already exists.

Cluster jewels solve all those issues and allow you to ignore the parts of passive tree not supporting your build.

Jewel clusters are powerful yes, and I'm certain they are useful no matter where you are on the passive grid.

There just happens to be far too specific of clusters in the Marauder section, which quite literally just leads even the Marauder to the jewel clusters instead of making use of them.

They just aren't good.

Its flavour mate you can't just make all nodes regular damage nodes its boring.

The whole point of physical damage with weapons is that its the intended ethos for the archetypes in that region, marauder and duelist to a degree are in this category with ranger round to assassin being increasingly elemental.

They've actually diluted this over time and more general "damage" nodes are bleeding round the tree so you'll probably get there eventually, most of duelist is straight damage now and phys only nodes are pretty restricted to the bottom left.

The flavour is what gives depth to PoE's character building though, there are lots of nuances that you have to know/respect to build a good character and every change made towards the generic is one towards shallow.

Marauder phys with wep nodes for example used to have a higher numerical value than straight damage nodes (they might still do? Not compared recently) then you'd convert them with fireborn or cold steel if you wanted elemental scaling for a nutty Oro's build.

This type of depth has already been bled about by the constant reshuffles and power creep and that's a shame.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Its flavour mate you can't just make all nodes regular damage nodes its boring..

OP's post is something i agree with, i get your points too, but if we take a look at starting area nodes to have an idea of how GGG intended new players to see the themes of each class, we can see some rigidity.

Shadow : ele damage, phys+chaos
- these options are very flexible. ele damage can also work for burn. phys chaos also has ailment counter parts. it's so flexible that a shadow has other options such as using spells/mines/melee/range. the theme is "damage types"

Ranger: projectile damage, attack damage
- projectile's theme is projectiles. can be from a spell, or an attack, its still general.
- attack damage's theme is attacks, can be ranged can be melee. also theres flexibility.

Witch: Spell damage or minion damage.
- similar to ranger, the themes are quite general.

Templar: Phys damage+minion damage, ele damage
- the themes are very broad. in fact can be overloaded as templar has access to a node that makes minion damage nodes also apply to templar.

Duelist+Marauder: MELEE PHYSICAL
- theme is ONE THING and one thing only melee physical.
- instead of physical damage, it only affects melee attacks.
- instead of melee attack, it's only melee physical specifically
- does not affect ailments

the plus side of the duelist marauder nodes is that theyre significantly stronger roughly worth 2 extra passive points. but they shoehorn the players into a specific playstyle.

that said, i feel that these nodes originate from the start of how poe open beta used to be while the game was developing. it was back before ascendancy. back when puncture was used for bleed, back before impale existed.

my opinion on why it's still the same now is simply GGG has not gotten the time to revisit the nodes. duelist/marauder nodes are already packed with different weapon clusters, weapons style clusters, bleed/impale clusters.

thematically GGG SHOULD make the weapon clusters "melee damage and ailments with x weapon". heck even the word melee could be given a second consideration to take it out and just make it damage/ailments with x weapon.

i BELIEVE why this is not happening is because some melee weapon clusters come bundled together with enemy phys damage reduction. forcing players who have taken the same nodes everytime to get them to spend extra points to gain the reduction might not be desirable.

the cluster jewels implicits are a good example of how specific damage types/playstyles can be categorized while allowing them to still be broad enough to encourage build flexibility.

i can only hope that ggg revisits and reworks them.

I buy what your saying about melee physical being one tier more specific than the other starts that's a good point well stated.

They could use some more consistency in general tbh but PoE is a game eternally in need of polish and it never has time to get it :/ next league takes priority and next league will make a mess again.