POE2 has strict Authoritarian Builds, diversity isn't possible BY DESIGN. RIP Buildcrafting.

So over the past few days I have been researching this post and trying various interesting ideas and seeing how they would work out. In POE1 one of the coolest things about the skill tree is that it would allow you to do weird things. You could have a witch run molten strike or a marauder become a caster with righteous fire. So how does that work out in POE1. We have a big skill tree, lets try some things.

Build 1: Warrior Perfect Strike / Bone Shatter / Contagion : The warrior has one really critical weakness in its play. It can take on bosses effectively but struggles with packs. So why don't we mix in contagion? The idea is we perfect strike and set off dominoes as contagion flows through the packs.

Not possible in the end. to build contagion, you have to build area of effect for spells. The problem is all of the AOE nodes on the left side are specifically attached to attacks and not to spells. So although you can socket the gem, you will get minimal use. You can potentially drop some items with AOE on it, if you are phenominally lucky, but no help from the passive tree because you will need 10 points to get to the closest nodes that will scale up AOE for spells and few of the AOE nodes in the tree apply blanket AOE. Furthermore pathing is made much longer by the tree design. It takes 6 stat nodes to go from Devoted protector to Raw Power, for example. Not 2 or 3 but 6. And building stats is completely nerfed in POE2.

Unlike the POE 1, the tree in POE2 is designed, seemingly purposefully to keep you imprisoned in your class structure and that is designed to keep you imprisoned in a path that the devs have picked out for you.

Build 2: Chayula Monk Kiling Palm with Contagion / ED and Skeletal reaver minions. This doesn't work because monks MUST use a quarterstaff for all of their skills even the unarmed killing palm. Since there are no significant sources of spirit outside of sceptres, the idea of crossing killing palm with reavers is impossible. Although you can still run killing palm with a quarterstaff (as that is interestingly carved out of the unarmed) you cannot run killing palm with a sceptre and you cant put a sceptre in the off hand if nothing is in your main hand. Furthermore, inexplicably, all of the Chayula ascendancy nodes having to do with chaos are SPECIFICALLY tagged to apply only to attacks.

Also this suffers from the tree containment issue above but to a lesser extent. There is another interesting issue in that the witch gets a DIFFERENT starting tree with minion build then a monk would see if they navigated to that part of the tree, making picking up minion nodes difficult at best unless end game damage or survivability is to be compromised.

Build 3: Fangs of frost with Frost Nova / Frost wall and Cold as Sorcerer. The concept here is to leverage elemental capabilities of a sorcerer to amp up capabilities of fangs of frost. To be clear the build is impossible either way. Although you can socket the elemental skills the fangs of frost skill MUST have a spear and all of its cold damage bonuses must have an attack tag or they do nothing to the build. If you are building attack damage you cant build spell damage and vice versa. Few nodes apply cold to both types of damage and pathing to them is not going to leave you with a strong endgame build.

In addition to locked weapon skills, aggressive tagging of skills and passive nodes and a tree designed seemingly to imprison the user, another difficulty was introduced. Namely spirit. With spirit its impossible to run more than the proscribed number of heralds, armors and so on. You get a very limited supply of spirit because they don't want you running a lot of passive skills. God forbid your huntress should use arctic armor and wind dancer at the same time or even 4 of these. In POE1 I could craft a build that used a lot of mana reservation especially if my mana needs were low. I could work in multiple reservation skills and add passive defense or damage. Also ... perplexingly ... a lot of spirit skills are bound to a weapon like herald of ash. Why cant an infernalist use these while equipping a wand or sceptre?

SUMMARY:
The reality is that the build system in POE2 seems purposefully designed to keep you in builds that the Devs have planned out for you. The idea of build crafting in POE1 is all but completely shattered. Its more like "find the one build in the tiny tree that is feasible to reach that the devs didn't think of." Either you are constrained by mandatory weapons or mandatory tags. Also whereas the POE1 skill tree had racetracks around the tree allowing you to move freely, POE2 has rigid buckets and teases you with connected nodes but navigating to those nodes is so stupidly expensive that you will only end up having a gimped build.

POE2 dictates "You are a warrior you will hit things and stun and attack, all else is specifically forbidden." Variants for each class exist. The goal seems to be for the developers to rigidly control builds and prevent unintended interactions. These decisions are not an artifact of EA but intentional design decisions to limit gameplay because they seem to be terrified of player beating their game. This is another way where POE2 fails to carry on one of the things that made POE1 great.

"The players are not playing Huntress the way we envisioned her to play"

-Jonathan

Just remember to parry

Me just enjoying my lvl 92 fire mage ritualist in SSF while never having watched a single build video.

Just got all my towers done and simply waiting for the last unique map to reach 40/40 atlas points

There is another build issue I forgot to mention.

In addition to locked weapon skills, aggressive tagging of skills and passive nodes and a tree designed seemingly to imprison the user, another difficulty was introduced. Namely spirit. With spirit its impossible to run more than the proscribed number of heralds, armors and so on. You get a very limited supply of spirit because they dont want you running a lot of passive skills. God forbid your huntress should use arctic armour and wind dancer at the same time or even 4 of these. In POE1 I could craft a build that used a lot of mana reservation especially if my mana needs were low. I could work in multiple reservation skills and add passive defense or damage. Also ... perplexingly ... a lot of spirit skills are bound to a weapon like herald of ash. Why cant an infernalist use these while equipping a wand or sceptre?

I will edit this into the OP.

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Ash#9143 wrote:

Me just enjoying my lvl 92 fire mage ritualist in SSF while never having watched a single build video.

Just got all my towers done and simply waiting for the last unique map to reach 40/40 atlas points

Level 92 fire mage. Good boy. You played a build they wanted you to play.

Make that a level 92 Warrior fire god and I will be impressed. That isnt actually even possible with POE2. Whereas yo uget some fire stuff in attacks none of your nodes will allow you to build spell damage so you are screwed. By contrast fire nodes in POE1 are not tagged Attack or Spell, they are just fire.

And there you now maybe get it. Try adding molten blast or volcanic fissure to your mage. It wont work.

rip

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Kraythax#2592 wrote:

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Ash#9143 wrote:

Me just enjoying my lvl 92 fire mage ritualist in SSF while never having watched a single build video.

Just got all my towers done and simply waiting for the last unique map to reach 40/40 atlas points

Level 92 fire mage. Good boy. You played a build they wanted you to play.

Make that a level 92 Warrior fire god and I will be impressed. That isnt actually even possible with POE2. Whereas yo uget some fire stuff in attacks none of your nodes will allow you to build spell damage so you are screwed. By contrast fire nodes in POE1 are not tagged Attack or Spell, they are just fire.

And there you now maybe get it. Try adding molten blast or volcanic fissure to your mage. It wont work.

Search "Burn away", "Sigil of Fire", "Burning Nature", "Burning Strikes", "Fulmination", "Incendiary", "Smoke Inhalation" look the nearby fire nodes. Then explain to me why those doesn't work with spells, and why you as a warrior can't travel to those nodes.

Gamers when they can't just use an item editor.

That is the reason I am not playing PoE 2 anymore. I was really excited in the beginning. It was my first time playing a PoE game. I spent so many hours looking at the passive tree and reading skills in order to make builds happen, but there was always a problem.

Either I was lacking Spirit, or I was lacking a Skill Gem that I couldn't use because it required different weapon types, or the passive tree wouldn't allow me to go that way and this way, or I needed too many stats to make weapon swaps possible (I tried mercenary with crossbow and swap mace for bosses).

I played 5 classes at level 85 plus. I really put effort into it to understand all the nuances and find gear that would fit my needs, used so many websites to look for specific modifiers/enchants on all rares/uniques, still nothing. I could only make my builds semi work. They always lacked something, either mana, or boss damage, or map damage, or whatever you name it.

To me, this game has to be about builds and variety, because I already satisfied my need for items and currency in Diablo 2 LoD many years ago, playing it excessively.
As long as they don't implement build variety and change up spirit and requirements for items/skills plus if they don't change the passive tree, I don't see myself picking it up again.

Edit: Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the worst thing to me is that the skills are not really fun. I feel like they are just there. I rarely enjoy using skills because nobody actually thought about them when they designed em, I guess? And you can't really combine skills together that are fun. I feel like 70% of skills are boring as hell/trash.