Weapon Classes Are Too Restrictive

The weapon classes are much more restrictive than in PoE1. Basically all attack skills are locked behind one specific weapon. It feels bad for build diversity, and it limits our capability to mix and match to overcome obstacles with ingenuity, or just to make cooler, more personal stuff.

At the same time, support gems are a lot more niche, gems cannot be bought from a vendor, links cannot be reforged onto another skill gem, and the game is a lot harder. This makes it easy to make a suboptimal decision in skill choice, get stuck, and be in a situation where it is incredibly difficult switch. More difficult/ less time efficient than playing with an essentially bricked character until the game's curve evens out anyway.

I would really love to see it, if some (hopefully most) of the attack skills were opened up to be used by their counterparts. Some staff skills that work with spear, bow skills that work with xbow, vice versa, etc.

I think opening up build diversity would go a long way to making players feel more powerful and in control again, as well as excite some people into returning to try out some combos they thought of but were too discouraged to try because of needing a weapon swap.

I agree the weapons in general are too restrictive.

Agreed, that's honestly the worst part of poe2 for me. GGG tried making weapon lines more unique, however what ended up happening is just a massive reduction in build opportunities.

I understand certain skills being locked to a specific weapon where it makes sense, like the bell being locked to staves or supercharged slam and sunder being locked to maces. However more 'generic' strike/slams skills absolutely need to be available to more weapon types, I really don't think being unable to use flicker strike on a mace or armor break on spear/staff adds anything positive to the game.

GGG just needs to add generic slam/strike/projectile categories.

"

Beffagorn#1657 wrote:

Agreed, that's honestly the worst part of poe2 for me. GGG tried making weapon lines more unique, however what ended up happening is just a massive reduction in build opportunities.

I understand certain skills being locked to a specific weapon where it makes sense, like the bell being locked to staves or supercharged slam and sunder being locked to maces. However more 'generic' strike/slams skills absolutely need to be available to more weapon types, I really don't think being unable to use flicker strike on a mace or armor break on spear/staff adds anything positive to the game.

GGG just needs to add generic slam/strike/projectile categories.

I think the railroading of archetypes on attackers in campaign through the restrictive weapon system is the worst part too. Probably my next biggest peeve is rares having "minions" that are somewhere in between magic/ rare strength but look and drop the same as white mobs.

That is one critic I really agree. Skills should support more weapon types. Sure not ALL of them. But several skills could support 2-3 weapon types.

I understand they want to make weapon types feel different but I absolutely hate this. Surely there is a better way of making them feel different without massively limiting build diversity. My favorite thing about POE was the amount of customization when it came to making builds. Everything in POE2 forces it into some completely watered down version of that and it sucks

"

Dmo90#6022 wrote:

I understand they want to make weapon types feel different but I absolutely hate this. Surely there is a better way of making them feel different without massively limiting build diversity. My favorite thing about POE was the amount of customization when it came to making builds. Everything in POE2 forces it into some completely watered down version of that and it sucks

Completely agree. "Watered down version" is a good descriptor for what it feels like. It doesn't feel like I accomplished anything with my brain by opening my gems tab and searching a single tag then picking the stuff that obviously was meant to go together. You also have like 3-5 choices at all breakpoints (which really turns into one or two) because you simply cannot consider any others.

I kind of agree

Some skills like tame beast shouldn't be in the spear tab, or sniper mark shouldn't be in the bow tab, it's kind of counterintuitive tbh, a new player might not even know that they have more options available

I understand their vision of trying to make each weapon type unique but locking skills to weapon types have a few problems to it

"

Urza_Mechwalker#7393 wrote:

That is one critic I really agree. Skills should support more weapon types. Sure not ALL of them. But several skills could support 2-3 weapon types.

I was surprised that staff/ spear skills were not interchangeable at all. I was hoping that it would be the first iteration of cross-class weapon skills.

"

Vyend#2601 wrote:

I kind of agree

Some skills like tame beast shouldn't be in the spear tab, or sniper mark shouldn't be in the bow tab, it's kind of counterintuitive tbh, a new player might not even know that they have more options available

I understand their vision of trying to make each weapon type unique but locking skills to weapon types have a few problems to it

It is really weird like that. Maybe they should have dedicated tabs for the weapon classes that include easy-build archetypes that are class specific, and then on a second page they should have more general tabs for players looking for stuff they can use across classes or to make their own archetype.


"melee"
"ranged"
"spell"
"buff"
"debuff"
"travel"
etc

It is a bit too tedious to type in a tag at a time in the "all" tab, and it often doesn't show you everything to do with that keyword, only gems that specifically contain that exact phrase/ tag.