Small changes that need to happen to save build diversity and unlucky players

I started this league with the will to make a thematic build when i saw the smith of kitava ascendency : Since the ascendency would make me a mega tank, and give me zero offensive buffs (which is very fine in itself) i could basically play any weapon and i decided to make a "doom guy" character with shotguns (crossbow). I'm very used to play these kinds of "off meta" builds, done countless in poe1. Act 1 was fine globally, i was lucky to find a sapphire ring and pump my cold res so i could take down geonnor just fine.
It was slow, but i have no problem, it's usually how it goes when you do these kind of builds. Then i arrived on act 2 and found myself completely softlock on the necro + bone oliphant boss.
Reason ? i was unlucky and had not found one piece of gear that gave lightning resist. My character was too slow to evade every single projectile from the necro and each was hitting for more than 40% of my health. I've tried 4-5 times trying to kill the necro first, or the elephant first, but would end up short every time (over 10 minute fights everytime)
The problem here is i had no solution to unlock myself. Loot is so low that just "let's go farm a lower area in hope to get what i want" was not realistic, correcting my build was a no go because the warrior only have access to melee damage nodes which was doing nothing for me and i was 5 lvl short to get to the first damage nodes that could help me. I lacked either damage or resistance and there was simply no solution to fix that.
Since then, i got help from a friend to clear that boss, we're now in act 3 and my build is now getting online and i'm very comfortable now. But what happened back there was a symptom of something fundamentally wrong in the current design.

Bottom line, there are two small changes that really need to happen, that doesn't change the balance of the game at all and would have saved me in my situation :

First, The starting nodes of different classes should be more generic, or there MUST be sub-optimal generic damage (physical damage) accessible from any class starting point that we could take as a temporary rubberband if we intend to travel a bit before going to the meaty nodes we're targeting.

Second, you need to add purchasable resistance rings (white ones) in the vendors to help unlucky players fix their resistances when they need (and it need to happen before geonnor) In POE 1 we were swarming with resistance rings way before Merveil even happened. I'm fine with lowering loot globally, but you NEED to add basic deterministic options in that case to compensate.
Another possibility would be to bring back resistances in the tree (why exactly did they disappear ?)

I did a test in 0.1 where I did all of Act 1 and half of Act 2 in only BLUE gear, solo self found, on a melee monk. Not a single rare. And mostly junk. (i prioritized 10% movement speed boots from a vendor as soon as i could buy them) The first boss that requires a bit more survivability is the thief boss in Act 2, becuase doing it without any surivability requires making zero mistakes. But it doesn't really need resists, just some effective health buffer. And of course one needs some better gear for Act 2 Jamara end boss.

However, I had to literally bank and not use at least a dozen rare drops that would have been helpful to even do this.

Why do you need resist rings? What kind of build is this?

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Varn76#2904 wrote:

First, The starting nodes of different classes should be more generic, or there MUST be sub-optimal generic damage (physical damage) accessible from any class starting point that we could take as a temporary rubberband if we intend to travel a bit before going to the meaty nodes we're targeting.

Why do you think every class should have an "equal" start with every weapon?

This really eliminates uniqueness of classes and class starts.

POE is a game of overcoming constraints... If the weapon you want to use doesn't work early on the class you want to use.. then use another weapon for a while and then switch back later.

Give it more time.

Sorry but you completely missed the point.

What i said was "ppl want to build original characters and counter-intuitive builds, and there are problems currently when you try to do that"

your answer ? "Well i played a staff monk and it was fine, you should stick to your archetype"

you want to play the archetype and only the archetype ? then you can play each class in only one or two ways. That's diablo 3&4. That's trash. POE always was a game that shined through its build diversity.

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Varn76#2904 wrote:

POE always was a game that shined through its build diversity.

Do you know how many years it took PoE1 ?

Do you know that the very first OP build that was found on POE was a CASTER marauder ? Yes i'm talking about Kripp's fire discharge marauder way back when act 3 was the ENDGAME in POE 1

Believe it or not, the realisation that you could do stuff like that was a big part of what made POE1 what it ended up being.

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Varn76#2904 wrote:

Sorry but you completely missed the point.

What i said was "ppl want to build original characters and counter-intuitive builds, and there are problems currently when you try to do that"

I did not miss the point. I think you did.

Not every build is viable, especially not at every phase of the game. That's a fact. In order for them to make every build viable, they would have to eliminate all challenge from the game, because every decision would have to be good. And then it would be carebear world of warcraft, not POE ARPG.

You need to adapt to the game. THat's the game.

Find a build that works... don't ask for every build to work.

Love when people will tell you that you don't understand you own point. I'm the one that formulated it bro. You can disagree but don't come telling me i don't understand what i'm saying.

Your vision is "follow the archetype or die"
What i say is "that's exactly why diablo 3 and 4 failed utterly while POE1 grew"
Build diversity is the reason Diablo 2 is still played today and loved in comparison.

I'll make it even more obvious because i don't want to argue about a matter of opinion all day. I understand your point, but i fundamentally disagree with your stance. If the game requires you to follow the archetype then the game is doomed and will die just as fast as D3 and 4 for the exact same reason.

POE2 does *NOT* require you to follow the archetype.. There are *tons* of creative builds that work super well.

In fact, most of the "archetypical" paths GGG lays out are actually very slow (suboptimal). Just one example is them giving warriors a shield at level 1. Most optimal thing a warrior can do is equip the first 2H they see and save the shield gameplay for later.

I think the problem you are having is that POE2 doesn't currently support the build you want to do.... should it? Who knows. However, it's not a broke game if it never does. It's never going to make *all* builds viable.

THe biggest case of this I can think of is the way bloodmage gets a bunch of bonuses only for SPELLS. (aka spell crit, spell leech) This means you can't use those bonuses on melee builds, which is sad to me... I wish they would change these nodes to be more generic spell-or-attack leech, and spell-or-attack crit, but I also get that they are the game designers in charge of balance, and they probably didn't do this by accident.

Maybe make a case for *why* the off meta build you are finding too hard would be a worthy addition to the game balance, and how to get there.

You present the issue as coming from an off-path build, but the the roadblock you found at this act 2 boss comes from not having enough lightning resistance. I don't think those two are connected meaningfully. Resistance is tied mostly to gear in early campaign. I beat that fight with huntress by using a tower shield against the mastodon. The shield bash pushed it back, I melee attack, raise shield again. It stun locked it until it died, then I continued to the necromancer. Your warrior should have enough strength to equip a tower shield too. Isn't that a creative use of a build too? You have two sets of weapons for that reason. Maybe even equip a one handed hammer with the tower shield, and keep the crossbow on the other. Many warrior builds do that.