Why is thorns a thing in this game?

At some point, Thorns was a cool niche build idea that somewhat transcended into popularity for 1 league, I believe. Nowadays, not so much sought after.

/edit
Oof Aynix was right, I was thinking of Thousand Teeth Temu and it's Reflect dmg mod...which essentially is what Thorns in my mind is: A mob hits you and in doing so, hits your "thorns", which returns some of it. Except Temu is fixed value.

Was he talking about Crown of Thorns or?

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al3xro wrote:

At some point, Thorns was a cool niche build idea that somewhat transcended into popularity for 1 league, I believe. Nowadays, not so much sought after.

pretty sure what u mean is that a couple people tried to make one at one point but they kind of weren't even close to viable. with that i don't mean meta but able to do much to begin with. which is sad. in a game where everything should be viable a reflect build should totally be one in my opinion it shouldn't be meta in anyways but it should at least be doable in maps

Either that or he is thinking of reflect build, which was something diffrent and wasnt related to thorns at all.

What a terrible argument to make,

We need useless mods for good mods to exist?

If there was only 1 tier of a mod, then yes filler mods would be a good idea.

But there are usually 100 Affixes and 100 Suffixes excluding dead mods on every item base type.

There is ZERO reason for bad, filler or useless mods to exist any more in POE, the mod pools and mod weighting negate any reason for them.

And the higher you go in crafting, more mods are added to the pools making it significantly harder to roll decent bases.

Most of the thorns affixes are for pathetically small amounts of base reflected damage, but aside from steel skills, not many players/items have ways of scaling this damage effectively.

And it doesn't work if the incoming damage is primarily non-phys: even phys can be partially or totally converted by a monster mod before reaching your thorns (and this brings up another issue, what if you're running HH and you pick up a mod that converts your thorns phys reflected damage into something else, something the target is immune to? But that's hardly specific to thorns)

Ideally a thorns based reflect build would have built-in ways of scaling reflected damage, or a skill set or cluster or other item that specifically scales or multiplies reflected damage efficacy (FOR PLAYERS).

There's the old sextant mod "players and monsters can't take reflected damage" that might need reworked so that builds 100% dependent on dealing reflected damage can still do something besides stand around wasting oxygen. But it would have to continue to be useful to builds that don't abuse reflect and in fact can't survive in a reflect map.

As for bad mods existing to make it harder to roll good mods, this argument is as old as Magic cards when Mark Rosewater said they deliberately designed some bad cards every expansion to water down the limited formats with "skill testers". It wasn't well received at the time, and in today's economy and pace of deck design in MODO, it's even less of a smart thing to do.

More like, there's a lot of mods with a lot of tiers, each one should have some utility to SOMEONE but in doing so, they should carry their weight. Rolling Jagged on a chest is feelbad not only because it's crowding out good mods, but also because there's NO build that wants this homeopathic amount of phys reflect TO ATTACKERS ONLY.

That said, there's potential here, unlike "reduced attribute requirements" which conveys NO combat benefit to anyone leveled up enough to drop the item naturally - it's so underpowered in the age of Omni and essence crafting, it really SHOULD be removed.