Dynamic, versatile skills are vital to the enjoyment of POE. A PROPOSITION!

I love the concept of this game, a sandbox to get various skills and builds to create a wide variety of play, but the game doesn't quite foster this. Instead abilities do not lead to others in the sense that unique and interesting builds come naturally. It feels fairly restrictive which ability synergize with another, so we end up with fairly generic build types.

There are a few rare items and skills that foster unique play, but they are too rare and the game does not promote their utilization from day one, or even week one. I feel this is the biggest negative to POE. Incredibly fun and useful skills that shake up builds need to be more common and the sooner they're introduced to the game, the sooner the game can be tuned to allow for them across the difficulty levels.

The game is fast becoming saturated with gems and items tuned for specific builds and purposes, rather than abilities that open the door to interesting and unique powerful builds that few have tried

I will list a couple gem abilities here that i hope illustrate this point. Skills useful to everyone that really shake up how the game can be played.

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Shatter:
Hits all enemies in an area with very high ice damage, but gives them massive ice resistance while lowering their resistances to other types of damage. If this skill gets the killing blow it increases loot by a % based on how much extra damage it does beyond their max life.
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Who uses this ability?

Player type one: Anyone seeking bonus damage against their target.

Player type two: An ice heavy build seeking bonus loot and a strong nuke finisher. This spell would synergize extremely well with increased resistance debuffs, loot increases, and damage buffs. Few skills currently open the door to multiple build paths and 1 obvious support gem choice is the obvious way to go. Skills are spammed as a core ability, there is little planning in the flow of combat: I'll open with this, spam with this, finish with this.

Player type 3: Hybrid builds who sometimes need the extra oompf in damage to their other skills, but who also utilize the skill for the bonus loot from time to time

Restrictions on what sort of build would make this skill useful: NONE! THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART!

So why doesn't everyone use this ability? Because there are several other very awesome abilities that are just as worthwhile, but maybe moreso depending on your build. It ultimately depends on your setup to decide which culmination of abilities is best, rather than simply picking the skills that do X% more damage with your items and bonuses.

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Whirling Dervish:
Expends all frenzy and endurance charges.
For every frenzy charge you gain 20% bonus movement speed
For every endurance charge you stun enemies near you for 1 second
For every paired endurance and frenzy charge you gain 10% damage for 10 seconds, negates the other two bonuses
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Who uses this ability?

Anyone able to generate endurance or frenzy charges. The more you are able to generate of either, the more potent the skill is, but by being able to generate both, the skill becomes more dynamic. The bonus run speed and stun are abilities ANY class would want to supplement their arsenal.

I could see caster classes actually building into frenzy or endurance for this skill to utilize the bonus run speed or stun bonus.


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Hopefully just 2 skills illustrates my point: that the current "path" this game is taking is very calculated and predefined build options. Because skills only work for such a small subset of classes, and serve only one real purpose, the game really limits the potential for builds.

This game needs less generic skills that do X damage with Y% bonus, and more skills that truly define play and foster complex combat engagement scenarios

I would also like to add that these skills should be no drop, and serve to throw a wrench in your plans in how you're planning to take your character in the best way possible. Perhaps these very dynamic and potent skills can only be carried in certain quantities, but such talk is going overboard, I simply wanted to show the potential for truly dynamic skills that work for a wide variety of players and would benefit from a wide variety of builds and support runes in exciting ways that we currently just don't see.

I hope you guys took the time to read this and agree that such skills would be totally balls to the wall AWESOME!

Would they be overpowered? Yes. Is that a bad thing? No. Balance the game as you go once the core is fun and dynamic. In its current state i'm merely min maxing damage %'s in a linear manner that doesn't make me want to roll new characters or hope for the next potentially awesome rune or item to totally change how i play the game.

I worry for this game, because it has so much potential. But with every generic and niche skill gem added, the game becomes locked into its current generic state. This game needs more skills like this to become the theory crafting paradise it has the potential to be.

It wont be easy, but it's necessary. Too much effort has been put into making a robust socketing and build system in this game for it to just go to waste on generic skills and builds.

I certainly agree with this. I'm level 50ish now and although I really enjoy the game, the skills have not excited me at all. If I compare what I can do to skills like Whirlwind, Frozen Orb, and some other D2 skills, then PoE skills play out rather boring. So perhaps I have not yet discovered what I'd like to use, or perhaps the gameplay just isn't smooth enough, but I definitely need something more exciting.

I'm always up for skills that do interesting things and make unusual builds possible.

But Shatter is basically a portable Elemental Equilibrium, giving the advantages of the passive when you want them and allowing you to ignore the drawbacks when you don't want to, which is pretty powerful. As for restrictions on what sort of build would make this skill useful, it sounds like an Int spell-based skill. My current 2-handed sword ranger would not be able to make use of it; time spent casting it are better spent on making sure my Endurance Charges are up, or actually hitting people, plus I can't spare the stats for Int. Finally I think encouraging people to use skills by giving +quantity is probably bad for the economy. Some other kind of bonus, maybe.

As for Whirling Dervish, I like the idea of combining charges, but it feels similar to Immortal Call as you describe it, and kind of bland I guess. Plus, PoE stun doesn't really work that way and 1 second stun per charge is way overpowered.

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DoubleSmiggins wrote:

I'm always up for skills that do interesting things and make unusual builds possible.

But Shatter is basically a portable Elemental Equilibrium, giving the advantages of the passive when you want them and allowing you to ignore the drawbacks when you don't want to, which is pretty powerful. As for restrictions on what sort of build would make this skill useful, it sounds like an Int spell-based skill. My current 2-handed sword ranger would not be able to make use of it; time spent casting it are better spent on making sure my Endurance Charges are up, or actually hitting people, plus I can't spare the stats for Int. Finally I think encouraging people to use skills by giving +quantity is probably bad for the economy. Some other kind of bonus, maybe.

As for Whirling Dervish, I like the idea of combining charges, but it feels similar to Immortal Call as you describe it, and kind of bland I guess. Plus, PoE stun doesn't really work that way and 1 second stun per charge is way overpowered.

I'm glad you brought up Elemental Equilibrium (which was an inspiration for the skill) because I feel that skill very much illustrates the some of the design philosophy behind this game that's killing it. Elemental Equilibrium is "muddy", it can be useful, it's a cool idea, but in practice it's clunky, and basically turns u into a one trick pony who just alternates spells or a debuff mule for your group to just lower ice resists for all the casters. Essentially you don't look at the skill and think of all the potential, you see the skill and think of all the things you can't do. I tried the skill briefly and i regretted the decision immediately. Had to ditch all my other elemental damage as every hit made them resistant to my attacks. This severely limited by gearing options, it severly limited my skill loadout.

Limited... limited... limited. Grinding gear are creating code heavy and impressive skills for this game, but they are not designed in such a way as to build on other skills in fun ways. They seem to think diversified builds means a player finding a really broken skill that's very limiting and finding a way to make it viable, rather than simply giving players many options to have fun with in various ways.

Why wouldn't your sword ranger use this skill? Maybe the area of effect is quite large, and the debuff it does to armor is quite potent for a decent duration.

As for Immortal call, the skill is one dimensional and obviously meant more for pvp purposes. It's not organic in the sense that you're spending your survivability (endurance charges) for survivability. Don't get me wrong, it's an ok niche skill, but the game doesn't need niche skills right now. It needs a strong core base of skills that build on each other without confusing the player with tons of random other little skills that may be useful to a very small % of players.

Lets be honest here Immortal is clunky and it's use is sorta vague, like many other skills in this game. It's bonus in use doesn't outright outweigh its cost and in most situations casting it is going to be more detrimental to your survivability than positive as you instantly lose a large % of your survivability for a small window of survivability you may very well regret doing. The skill feels safe in its implementation, nothing anyone's going to really need, weak in it's vanilla state, possibly usable with increased duration support runes.

As for a "1 second stun" not being in path of exiles style, I would agree completely, and move to motion that the current stun system is overly complex and too rooted in damage. Stunning is often not a conscious choice by the player in most situations, rather a constant faculty of their build. Having skills with core and transparent stun components would go a long way to rounding out the systems of the game.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I've been thinking about it a little more; what makes a skill versatile?

I think Flicker Strike is a good discussion point, because there are essentially two types of builds that use it:

1: Builds that generate a lot of Frenzy Charges and then use Flicker Strike as a primary attack
2: Builds that do not, and so use it as a positioning and assassination attack.

The skill fulfils different roles in the different builds (primary attack versus a sometimes-used supporting attack), but it's doing exactly the same thing each time - getting you to your target without having to walk there, being very fast, and so on.

I think as much as anything else we should be thinking, how different in the way its used can a skill be before it's better off being two separate skills?

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DoubleSmiggins wrote:

I've been thinking about it a little more; what makes a skill versatile?

I think Flicker Strike is a good discussion point, because there are essentially two types of builds that use it:

1: Builds that generate a lot of Frenzy Charges and then use Flicker Strike as a primary attack
2: Builds that do not, and so use it as a positioning and assassination attack.

The skill fulfills different roles in the different builds (primary attack versus a sometimes-used supporting attack), but it's doing exactly the same thing each time - getting you to your target without having to walk there, being very fast, and so on.

I think as much as anything else we should be thinking, how different in the way its used can a skill be before it's better off being two separate skills?

I was with ya up until "how different in the way its used can a skill be before it's better off being two separate skills?".

I really have to disagree with you here. The more multipurpose a skill is, the more nuance it has, the more it actually gives a purpose to all systems that Path of Exile has constructed. It also gives the player most possibilities for play without overcomplicating the game. Want a nice escape ability, use flicker strike to dart to an outlying enemy. Want a good ability to dart in and close distance, use flicker strike. Want a great burst ability to tear people down. Use flicker strike! This is the mark of a good ability! It fosters creative builds and gives the players options without over-complicating everything.

I'll make up a new skill here to illustrate the point...
Battery Discharge:
Reduces you to 35% life, mana, and energy shield.
You regain 3x these lost values over 10 seconds, your party gains 50% of the mana but no other stats.

Looks pretty cool at first glance, "ok I can fuel my party with mana" but lets look at how dynamic this skill could be and its various uses. Imagine putting an increased duration on it, suddenly the skill is giving substantially more back over more time, making it a truly viable tank build if you have a skill to offset your initial vulnerability.

Or maybe you want to cast this to trigger your low life modifiers (the stuff that gives big bonus damage or item find when low life) so you use a gem that increases its strength reducing you to critical health levels. Lets imagine a caster that pops this gets low life at a whim and them pops the above shatter spell with increased damage at low life for massive damage bonus and shatters groups of enemies for massive increased loot gain. Pretty cool!

Hopefully this is starting to illustrate how just a very few dynamic skills start to snowball into infinite possibilities for interwoven and dynamic skills and builds that are truly unique and different from everyone else's.

Would such skills be possibly overpowered to the point of breaking the game? Yes. This is where balance comes into play. Skills can be tuned so they don't break the game, but still offer the dynamics of play that this game is screaming for.

There's one problem with using that skill you suggest to trigger low-life builds. Why would I use that to temporarily go to low life, when I can reserve some auras with Blood Magic and be on low life all the time, thus making Pain Attunement active all the time, getting my benefit from Redbeak etc? Perhaps I want more survivability; but if I do, I'd just switch of the aura(s), it's unlikely something I'd decide upon in a heartbeat. You'd only use that as a tanking and support skill, because the other use you suggest is impractical. Which I think can be a problem with these combo-based ideas, they're either impractical, or overpowered, and finding a middle ground is difficult.

That skill isn't really an example of a skill with varied effects, and is more an example of exactly the thing you are looking for since you can use in different ways, but it's still doing the same thing each time.

If it's an AoE for example, you could use it as party support, but, Concentrated Effect anyone? I like being selfish :3 Just to, you know, not be a complete buzzkill over here.

Gems make use of the same dynamics as the skill tree all the time, case in point there is a life magic gem that does exactly what you're proposing. I'm not advocating for this though, i feel the game has enough of an identity crisis with not knowing what to put on gems and what to make unique to the talent tree.

Also very few ice mages would have blood magic so i'm not sure what your point is here...

Personally think the game would be better if they removed the majority of the talent tree and made core choices bound to skills and items leaving the tree mainly for stat tweakers, if not removing it altogether, it's nothing but a cookie cutter node now. It's more exciting and dynamic if build options are left to the random gem and item drops you get.

Anyway, not even sure where this is going any more. I still stand by my initial post that the skills in this game are narrow and lackluster in their ability to synergize with each other and create interesting new builds.

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DoubleSmiggins wrote:

That skill isn't really an example of a skill with varied effects, and is more an example of exactly the thing you are looking for since you can use in different ways, but it's still doing the same thing each time.

If it's an AoE for example, you could use it as party support, but, Concentrated Effect anyone? I like being selfish :3 Just to, you know, not be a complete buzzkill over here.

My argument isn't that skills are too simple, or don't do enough things, far from it. I believe there can be tremendous depth in simplicity at times. My argument is skills aren't tuned in such a way that their appeal is broad, or the ways you'd want to modify the skill is varied. Much of this game tends to go down a very predetermined path and putting the gems into the sockets doesn't take any creative thought whatsoever. It's not an easy issue to describe but I've tried to do my best in the past several posts.