Raiz seems to be surprised

This was a nice and enjoyable interview. Cant wait for more <3

Super engaging interview! There were a lot of thoughtful questions here.

Show us the next reveal already pleeeeease :P

wonderful interview.

TLDR of my comments below: melee builds should have few ramping mechanics because the nature of melee combat already includes a lot of downtime and adding more downtime through mechanics like totem management, stacks, trauma, rage, stacks annoyance beyond tolerance. Modern ancestral totems are like arcane surge used to be: mandatory in every build that scales, in this case, melee damage, and should be reworked just like arcane surge was.



comment on the melee discussion: i think the issue with the totems and melee in general comes down to uptime vs downtime. melee loses a lot of uptime versus ranged due to having to move around more since they're in danger's way more readily and often have to perform larger movements to avoid things. to add onto that, the totems, rage, ramping mechanics like trauma, charges, etc... all become extra elements of downtime in an already downtime-heavy play style. This isn't a linear annoyance; 10% downtime isn't a big deal, 25% may start to feel awkward, 50% starts to feel very frustrating and beyond that it very quickly drives people entirely away from an archetype no matter how good the numbers/fantasy are. Thereby, i think it's quite important to make sure no build nor archetype fundamentally contains high downtime because it'll never feel good to play until uptime becomes good via just getting so much damage you trivialize content. Note: a build that gets bonus damage for hitting infrequently isn't entirely downtime it's somewhere in-between.

there's also the issue that ancestral totems are basically the arcane surge of years past. every spell damage build mandated a source of arcane surge because the opportunity cost was trivial, so you nerfed arcane surge; rightfully so. Melee exists in the same area now with ancestral totems except that the value of the totems is about 5-10 times larger so the situation is even worse.

side note: bows kind of tread this line too. often not running a ballista copy of your main skill or a similar skill is a loss of about half your damage. bows don't have much downtime innately though, so it frustrates people less for the 10%/25%/50% reason mentioned above. We do have manaforged arrows now though so this is even less of an issue.

The quality of answers coming from these interviews explains why POE is such a titan in the ARPG scene. What a delight to see executives who actually understands the genre.

Waiting for that Witch trailer :^)

I just want to know if the game will tell you what killed you? Also a more accurate in game DPS calculation would be nice.

Thanks for another great interview.

Give us the witch trailer already!!