starter skills and gem combos feel bad

right now the starting two gems we get are pretty marginal.

If ggg wants to keep new players they should buff them or modernize them.

currently on poe ninja the starter skills are almost completely unplayed. Why even make mtx for these skills if the game doesn't support their play style.

fireball .1%
viper strike .1%
glacial hammer .1%
heavy strike 0%
double strike 0%
spectral throw .3%
burning arrow 0%

the highest played skill are the righteous fire/fire trap combo. It is really good if not basic too play. like 6500 players over level 85. Check out pohx's guide, it is really good.

Personally the melee stuff is just really bad currently. You kind of need to stack a ton of attack speed in order for the animation to hit moving enemies correctly. While spells are just generally good, but cost too much mana.

In addition attack builds need to stack accuracy. While this can be trivial, it does eat up mods and constrict builds.

The aoe of all these skills is nonexistent, and this game is pretty much about destroying groups of enemies. Viper Strike should be a good build because it has 4 second poison duration baked into the gem but it just is outperformed by heavy strike 250% attack damage effectiveness versus 135. It just feels weird, not that anyone would ever play poison based heavy strike

(as far as I know the base attack damage effects how strong ailments are, so heavy strike has 2x the base damage and in theory double poison damage. I could be very wrong here. Like poison is 30% of base phys+chaos then the modifiers. the order of operations impacts how useful some stats are because poe rounds down mid calculations for a lot of things).

But this is a tangential discussion, the fact is most skills in this game suck, they feel bad to play while leveling and in the end game. A lot of players feel forced to play numerically superior skills. And while that is neither here nor there, it means that a new player can easily pick up the game and trap themselves with a terrible skill. Especially when the starting ones are just basic rpg style attacks that don't really do what they aspire too. Fireball barely has aoe, heavy strike is bad at stunning, viper strike is bad at poison, double strike doesn't really do anything good things for bleed builds. At least glacial hammer freezes stuff and burning arrow/fireball ignites things.