Chris confirms to go through mid: Scion or bust

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Before these changes, I emailed Carl a rather long complaint regarding the Shadow and mana management, as in, he really doesn't have any, and that my response to that was to almost always drag a Melee Shadow through the center and down to Blood Magic asap.

I'm sorry, how does the shadow have no mana support? It has a mana leech node, a mana regeneration node relatively close, and is right next to all the witch mana nodes.

I have 3 level 80 plus characters that are ci and go through the middle to pick up vaal pact, iron reflexes and unwavering stance.

One char almost being 90.

And honeslty i wouldnt be too mad if 1.0 f'ed up all of these builds. In a way, i believe that classes arent very independent. i.e my duelist and ranger could have the same exact build with the same effectivness.


If this is GGG's way of trying to provide for a greater reliance on the relationship between builds and character choices.. than fine. I'm ok with it.

Of course my decision to play in the new leagues lessens this opinion, others will and should be frusturated if this change is put into effect and their only char in 80s is ruined (which i believe a great % of POE's population has accounts where only 1 high level char is developed)

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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BloodReign wrote:

Players wanted class identity and now we will have class identity, or a person can have more skill freedom and play scion.

The first rule of gaming forums is that gamers have absolutely no fucking idea what they want; they only know what they hate.

Or maybe lumping “gamers” all together is a stupid idea, because it’s dumb to assume that the same person who said “I want more class identity” is the same person who said, “I’m upset I can’t easily cross class zones”.

This needed to happen. I think the lack of class identity is a lot of the reason they have the balance problems they do. You can't put a nice fat life node buff in the Mara tree to give melee a boost because someone in the ranger tree can just run through the center and grab it. There needs to be some build affinity for the different classes or we're just going to keep getting the same poorly conceievd attempts at balancing the game (eg. Life node nerf, reflect, shielded mobs).

Sorry for those of you that are gonna get screwed by this, I know that sucks, but in the long run I really feel like its going to make for a better game.

Holy shit, I made this thread before I went to sleep and it blew up to 9 pages.

Like I said, I'm willing to give GGG the benefit of the doubt (Even though I dislike the change overall). Let's look at some positives (Although some of them are also negatives, depending on viewpoint) of this change.

1. Classes (That aren't scion) will have a forced specialization. It will become unreasonable to start as a witch to trek around to the duelist area, so builds for classes will now more often reflect the class + the classes to it's left and right on the skill tree.

2. This forces GGG to take a good hard look that the classes have easy access to the things they need. For example, mana regen for shadows MUST be improved, since they can't get to blood magic or the duelist mana regen area as easily.

3. I'm thinking life nodes are going to have to be buffed. Most life builds in some capacity went by the middle to the triple life cluster between marauder and templar. Shadow is going to be nearly cut off from these entirely.

TLDR: GGG now has to balance the tree even more so since they can't assume the original classes can just traverse the mid to fix their problems.

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Gravethought wrote:

3. I'm thinking life nodes are going to have to be buffed. Most life builds in some capacity went by the middle to the triple life cluster between marauder and templar. Shadow is going to be nearly cut off from these entirely.

Every single life build I've made ended up being more point efficient by avoiding most of the center nodes.

So maybe "some" builds are, but definitely not most. And if you're a Templar, Marauder, Duelist, or Ranger and you're taking all of those, you're doing it wrong.

My only two characters I bothered to play past level 75 both used central nodes that will now be inaccessible to then. Well done GGG for ruining existing character just to add a new class.

The Scion would have still been fine with the current skill tree, maybe simply throw in a few notables if needed, or better yet they could have made the central regular nodes slightly better than the nodes elsewhere to make them more appealing to spec towards.

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B2BigAl wrote:

This needed to happen. I think the lack of class identity is a lot of the reason they have the balance problems they do. You can't put a nice fat life node buff in the Mara tree to give melee a boost because someone in the ranger tree can just run through the center and grab it. There needs to be some build affinity for the different classes or we're just going to keep getting the same poorly conceievd attempts at balancing the game (eg. Life node nerf, reflect, shielded mobs).

Sorry for those of you that are gonna get screwed by this, I know that sucks, but in the long run I really feel like its going to make for a better game.

I don't think you get understand this game at all. There are no specific roles or builds for each class, class only determines your characters appearance and starting point on the skill tree, you are meant to be able to build any of the classes however you wish.

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tikitaki wrote:

I never thought this game was supposed to be about "class identity."

It was certainly never something that I personally complained about.

If you want "class identity" the best way is to just have separate skill trees.

It's beyond silly to talk about "classes" when there is a shared passive tree.

Yeah, pretty much. Not like there will be any "class identity" when most of the playerbase is gonna be a scion for like 6 months.

I'm going to have to remake both my main builds as Scions it seems.

CI / Vaal Pact / Ghost Reaver claw shadow, and dual ice nova totemer with the central increased AoE and cast speed nodes.

Both will now only work as Scions it seems, judging from the screenshot of the new skill tree centre.