Global Masteries - How to keep current league mechanics

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XCodesLIVE wrote:

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SilentSymphony wrote:

They removed some nodes from several ascendancy's that won't be getting added back so if they don't make some of this core they have deleted a number of builds from the game otherwise.

The guardian is so bad it has un-used ascendancy nodes in almost every build that does not use link-skills, that historic for me i've never not been able to find SOME VALUE in ascendancy points for any build.

The wildwood is the only reason im back and almost nothing in it is new because they stole most of it from our ascendancy's so outside of the visuals of exploring the content what exactly shouldn't go core as most of it literally was core and is now just recycled which happens but if you just keep recycling the same thing over and over that's not game development, that's modding.

Also i am using a trash monster from scourge over all of the new pets because almost all of them are a waste of time, its eye candy and fan-service for meta-summoners, the one's that aren't are either too weak or their AI is so bad that they might as well be doing backflips in place.

You need to chill. Stuff isn't getting stolen from ascendancies, ascendancies are getting appropriately nerfed, or in some situations things are being moved from them to other places because people play a specific ascendancy for a specific node and everything else gets ignored (see also wicked ward and ghost dance). As someone who played several years ago, there is not one ascendancy that is substantively less powerful now as it was then. If anything, formerly bad ascendancies are now much better.

The one area where you have the tiniest bit of a point is that too many ascendancies do have too many niche picks, and Guardian is definitely the #1 problem ascendancy in that respect, and I'd throw in Saboteur as the #2. The Guardian shouldn't have a whole branch of it's Ascendancy dedicated to Minions, it's an Aura Ascendancy, it doesn't need explicit minion support. What's more, these minions are static and can't be scaled with +gem level bonuses, support gems, or anything else. They're just not at all compelling options for typical minion builds, which further pidgeonholes them into Guardian Summoner builds.

All that said, this is pretty off-topic at this point.

If it gets any worse im just going to stop ascending entirely, Earnestly i could care less if its a "minion" class but i literally have two dead ascendancy points on a lot of builds now and that's never happened before.

The wildwood offered a pathway at the very least to reach endgame again on that build if i should want to attempt it so i definitely want as much of it to stay as possible.

+1 to literally whatever solution achieves that.

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XCodesLIVE wrote:

there is not one ascendancy that is substantively less powerful now as it was then. If anything, formerly bad ascendancies are now much better.

What game were YOU playing back then?! More than half of the ascendancies are significantly WORSE now than they were before (like a magnitude of 30% or more overall nerf). Gladiator is useless. Guardian is useless. Even Necromancer is worse (even though its still "good"), people are instead playing summoners as OTHER classes now because of it. Pathfinder is worse than it used to be. Assassin is way worse than it used to be. Hello, sabateur? Do you still exist back there? Scion is worse. Chieftain is arguably "worse" overall, although it now has a place as a "leveling" ascendancy. Anything you can do currently with chieftain, can be done better with either of the other two ascendancies and better gear. Champion is just straight up nerfed from its old values (still good though). It could be argued that, even though they are still good, the current Raider and Deadeye are both straight nerfs from where they used to be. And pretty DEEP nerfs at that.

So which ascendancies actually got better? Elementalist and Inquisitor? They were always popular and good. Seriously....you may want to review what the ascendancies USED to be prior to their most recent overhauls because it seems you may have forgotten.

[Removed by Support]

Assassin has literally always been a garbage noob trap. It's the epitome of sheet DPS meaning absolutely fuck all. The original incarnation of Assassin overkilled everything and absolutely couldn't ever survive reflect, leaving it with a painfully mediocre clearspeed. It also was the one Shadow ascendancy with literally no defensive utility at all and in the corner of the tree with no life, shit defenses, and bad mitigation options, it made for the actual most frail Ascendancy in the game. Now it has Elusive, and lives in a part of the tree with lots of Spell Suppression and Ghost Dance and it's really better than ever because it's not made of toilet paper. It's actually reasonably playable. None of the stupid crit multiplier nerfs matter -- like I said it was just hilariously overkilling everything, anyway, and in today's meta damage is easy.

Gladiator has always been "useless". It's a build that does pure physical damage and non-bos with the far more meta Phys build which spams Conversion uniques and pays it off with Elemental added as Chaos damage. The only time it was considered good was about 5 Versatile Combatant nerfs ago when you could make a max block/max spellblock ZDPS build with it -- a build that would absolutely suck in today's meta. Later it had a niche with it's physical booms, but the build was always expensive before. Today, the kit really has all the tools it needs to go full Autobomber and faceroll content without even using actual attack skills, and has pretty clearly viable branches and combos with dual-wielding, shield attacks, charges, and debuffs.

Guardian has *never* been useless. Radiant Faith has been astonishingly fucking busted from the start and has never been meaningfully nerfed. Yes, the other four Ascension points have always been a bit of a question mark, but who gives a shit? Radiant Faith is an Ascendancy all on it's own and is the single best Ascension point in the game because of it's game-breaking enabling of Int-stackers.

Necromancer has always been Necromancer. The problem with Necromancer is that at the beginning it was the Ascendancy that most epitomized the monopolization of archetype features behind a specific Ascendancy, which more-or-less forced every Minion build to play as a Necromancer or get basically zero support from their Ascendancy for it. In order to make it reasonable to play a Templar, Marauder, or Scion summoner, they had to take some of those exclusive features and put them in places where everyone could get them. Good news, the stuff it was replaced with is still good! Bad news, it's kind of jank and again plays into the problem that Summoners have in general where they've got too many f'king gems and uniques that they absolutely have to have in order to just function on the level of a normal build.

Pathfinder is only worse in that you only get about 20% increased Flask effect instead of about 50% increased Flask effect, which was, is, and always will be fucking ridiculous with Unique flasks. It is better in every other way in that the temptation to just grab as many small nodes as possible to stack ridiculous amounts of Flask Effect is countered by the fact that there are Notables that actually *do something* now. What's more, the ability that initially got everyone to actually look at Pathfinder in the first place, Nature's Reprisal/Master Toxicist, has only gotten nerfed as Poison got better, and is still fantastic.

Chieftain isn't worse, it's different. It used to play a role in Strength stacking builds by providing 10% Strength, now it plays a role in those builds by providing lots of flat Strength. Plus, Chieftain looks like it's the one Ascension that actually just makes it trivial to hit 90% allres -- that's just goofy with Strength stacking.

Saying Champion is worse has got to be a joke. The shit that people actually used is better than ever and the shit nobody cared about is gone and replaced with some actually really nice shit. Mostly the same deal with the Deadeye, although the Deadeye did legitimately lose an easy more damage multiplier and now has Tailwind to work with. Lots of boring shit it used to have is gone, though, and there's some really interesting shit replacing it, it's great. Raider is maybe nerfed in that the Onslaught path is weaker than it used to be, but the spell dodge to spell suppression change worked out really amazingly well for them.

Saying glad was useless just says what type of play you find acceptable, glad was relatively popular prior to it getting absolutely gutted as it had the most easily accessible general mapping defences and at the time bleed wasn't clearly the worst of the ailments either.

GGG haven'#t really done all winners or all losers but they do miss sometimes, glad was a big miss and one they've done nothing about since. Most of the rest are OK to sidegrade - I have personal views on them but i'm sure other players will prefer what I dislike and dislike what I prefer which is usually when somethings in an OK spot.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Saying glad was useless just says what type of play you find acceptable, glad was relatively popular...

Popular doesn't mean good. Assassin was wildly popular because number go up. Gladiator was only decidedly popular one time: that ZDPS max block build I mentioned. When people started messing around with the corpse boom Gladiator Builds they were kinda fun for a while but a bit expensive never *that* popular -- mostly because Occultist literally just did it better. Besides, the "gutting" of Gladiator was _before_ people started messing around with the corpse boom builds and the corpse boom builds have only gotten better.

EDIT: Oh, and yes, it worked for the time because damage was actually even easier back when we first had 4 acts than it is, today. You could roll around with a ZDPS build and as long as you ZDPS'd over a big enough area and double-dipped an ailment you did pretty alright for both clearing *and* bossing. Make no mistake, though, those ZDPS Max Block Gladiator builds would actually be shit, today. They have aged *horribly*, and the current Gladiator is way better for the current game.

And no, it says literally nothing about what type of play I find acceptable. I think Gladiator is better than ever today. Versatile Combatant was stupid. It was obviously stupid. Everyone literally called it out as stupid from the day it was revealed. Turns out, it was *really* stupid. It got nerfed repeatedly and pulled out of the Gladiator tree. Also turns out it doesn't matter because Block was, is, and always will be a shit defense, and now Gladiator has actually good defensive options in everything that is Blood in the Eyes and another excellent bonus in Reigning Veteran that directly attacks the reason Block is shit and makes it less shit. Seriously, Versatile Combatant was easy, but Reigning Veteran is actually *good*.

So I played Gladiator as my favorite class for nearly half of my entire time in PoE....what you describe just isn't true or even remotely close to reality!

Same with Assassin: both of these two ascendancies were popular and varied for many years FOR A REASON.

"Gladiator was only popular that one time": true! that one time from 2013 - 2018!

Dude I would suggest you stop while you are ahead. By the numbers, history, and popularity you are just plain wrong about "old" ascendancies. Almost everything you have described is off the mark and untrue. I believe your memory is clouded by your own individual preferences, which maybe strayed off the meta or wasn't as creative back then as it might be now.

To say that assassin has always been bait.....gladiator has always been useless outside of ONE build....i mean that is just WAY off the truth train. Zdps gladiator...omfg. Tell that to my 2017-2019 era gladiators dealing millions of damage, some of my MOST powerful builds EVER.


"The current gladiator is way better for the game" says all I need to know about your ability to assess ascendancies.....current gladiator is probably the worst ascendancy currently in existence by a WIDE margin, except perhaps saboteur although that triggerbots thing can be super fun. Current gladiator literally has NO strengths. It's bleed effect can be mimicked by a single unique glove. It's block is completely useless without spell block, which you can only get on a gladiator if you gimp your normal block via keystones, thereby removing your gladiator identity and power in the process. If even a portion of what you said was true about the OLD gladiator: even you admit it wasn't remotely overpowered and yet it got nerfed into oblivion. HOW in the heck could the current iteration be GOOD for the game?!


I can tell you are going to dig your feet in and stick to your guns but....so far all the comments made about current vs old ascendancies are factually and frankly objectively untrue. We could do a numerical analysis of each one to see just HOW much was lost, and I can guarantee you 90% of them lost a SIGNIFICANT amount of power, not to mention identity and uniqueness. GGG themselves have said as much when they revamped certain ascendancies. They want to "remove power" from ascendancies and add it to the base passive tree.

Ok, you are the self-proclaimed Gladiator expert. What was the nerf that gutted Gladiator in 2020? I literally wasn't playing. What god-tier Gladiator build were you playing in 2017 --before Fall of Oriath-- that did millions of DPS? Because I was there, and I was watching when the Meta was decidedly not Gladiator, but was Occultist, Necromancer, Guardian, Deadeye, Pathfinder, etc.

add a charm slot above left ring so we get to keep 1

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auspexa wrote:

add a charm slot above left ring so we get to keep 1

No.