The reworked Ascendancys

The reworked Ascendancy looks equally bad for both Chieftain and Guardian.
There is no synergy in the skills and they can only be used as cheap Forbidden Jewel combos. The number of decent skills in each Ascendancy is 2, everything else is rubbish.

Well he pretty much lost his totem focus but the new chieftain is a defensive powerhouse so i don't see any issues power wise, it's a matter of flavour if anything. Guardian is a joke though...

Inquisitor could theoretically use Radiant Faith and Bastion of Hope.
Valako as a sudo non-downside meld, and Tasalio as a cheaper, less tight gear to set up aside from that, nothing really useful.

P.S. Even this skill is not that great compared to other Ascendancy skills.

So you realise that Valako is a (pre nerf) melding of the flesh without downside and you still call it "not really useful"? Nothing to say then i guess :/

they have basically with the guardian change deleted my guardian necromancer from the game just a patch after they deleted my alternate witch build from the game via the shroud of the lightless rework for bows making 1handed weapons useless.

They need to add specialized versions of the ascendancy's which would account for all of these special nodes they are trying to shove into the current ones which are unfortunately removing archetypes from the game.

This is not vision.. rather a lack of it.

I don't know what the reason is, I don't say this stuff to disparage the devs but this is not an evolution of PoE in any way imo.. If anything they're simplifying things and making it more like final fantasy or world of warcraft.

The very soul of this game is in danger.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

So you realise that Valako is a (pre nerf) melding of the flesh without downside and you still call it "not really useful"? Nothing to say then i guess :/

in this case down side is playing Chieftain or u need spend 2 jewel sockets for that coz in end game builds u can get 90% all res even with melding imo that looks like lucky suppression chance good in early game useless in real end game

Guardian defensive nodes look worse with this rework.

Bastion of Hope loses its conditional stun immunity for higher attack and spell block chance, but Guardian doesn't really need that much more of it since higher end builds can usually go for Glancing Blows and Divergent Tempest Shield to pair with Aegis Aurora.

Coupling the armour and maximum energy shield effect of Radiant Faith to reserved mana can be seen as a good change for builds that utilize Chaos Inoculation, but the flat armour value gained will be much lower for most solo builds. This is the most disappointing change for me since I considered life and mana reservation for auras as the Guardian's signature trait as an Ascendancy and was hoping they would add a node to specialize more into that identity with something like "chaos damage cannot bypass energy shield if your reserved life is 90% or more" (This would allow the Guardian to not be as dependent on uniques like Solaris Lorica or Shavronne's Wrappings when stacking auras).

Increasing the life regeneration effect on Time of Need to 100% of life over 1 second definitely would feel more impactful that what it is now (30% of life), but I don't really see the point of the change to the curse effect. Sure the new effect also removes elemental ailments every few seconds, but Purity of Elements solves this by just giving you immunity with the added benefit of applying to your minions as well (I normally use Dominating Blow as Guardian). I would've liked this node better if they lowered the reduced curse effect on you to 50-60% (can still get up to 100% or more with Soul of Yugul and the protection mastery tree between templar and witch) and increased the life regeneration to 60-75% instead.

The new Harmony of Purpose looks somewhat better since the effects specify Allies now instead of Party Members (possible minion synergy), but still underwhelming because the +% max res and elemental damage effects doesn't look like they would affect you or your linked target.

Unwavering Faith gives better regeneration effects per aura activated, but loses out on % physical damage reduction. Still probably a good pick when playing in a party, but I would've liked it if they gave it an additional effect that is more for solo or minion-focused builds.

No strong opinions yet for the new Radiant Crusade and Unwavering Crusade nodes other than those new minions better be REALLY GOOD because we are losing out on at least 20% attack and movement speed and twice that for our allies (minions) which is A LOT. Also, would it kill GGG to just let us summon minions ON HIT instead of ON KILL? You can put RNG on every other aspect of the game but please just make my minions consistent and reliable.

I think that even defensively the Chieftan isn't in a great place. Lets not even talk about offense ...

-- Recovery: If you have totems you get some recoup from the totems but seeing that most totems have small lifepools this is pretty bad mitigation esp. seeing as you have to rely on them taking hit damage, have to resummon totems, etc.

-- Avoidance: If you count totem taunting then I guess that's something but in practice it's not particularly good.

-- Mitigation: Seeing as the only mitigation that I see on the ascendancy is Ele-res based it seems like you're limited on what you can do. Damage shifting seems like your best bet but now you're committing serious gearing resources and steep opportunity costs. An alternative may be to stack armour but then you're talking about an added passive tree cost to get that up without any native buffs.

-- Damage: Offensive totem synergies seem to be gone. Damage conversion appears to be gone now so that's more pressure on gearing / passive tree. Damage increases were always fairly easy to come by -- so much so that they weren't a huge issue. Crit, Spell damage, cast speed, etc. all seem to be missing entirely ... Needing to be both NEARBY and STATIONARY is crippling just to get some extra DoT damage ...

-- Synergy between the above. Virtually none. The star of the show is the Ele res -- but there seem to be no synergies between that and recovery, avoidance, or damage at all.

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Overall I'd rank the ascendancy as 1/5 stars and good only for memes and Forbidden Flesh + Flame fodder ... The ascendancy is bad at Recovery, Avoidance, and Damage and even it's mitigation can be emulated with a jewel and better gearing requirements.

If they wanted him to be a defensive powerhouse, they honestly should've doubled down on the damage shifting he had rather than taking it away. Keeping a large chunk of that along with the res ascendancies would've given him his own real niche.

@TemjinGold : I agree with damage shifting. Leaning into this more as a key facet of BOTH mitigation and recovery would have been vastly better.

For example:

"Cleansing water" ascension:
-- Take 20% of any non-fire damage as fire damage
-- Take 10% less fire damage

The current "max resistance" ascension could add in an "immune to fire penetration" effect.

"Added cold & lightning resistance" ascension also having a "fire resistance may not be lowered" effect.


With the above mitigations you would be in a good position to scale your "tankiness" into end-game. You'd need damage & recovery from other places but at least you COULD get those if you're willing to pay the price.