Final 0.9.3 Patch Notes

"

Torin wrote:

I wish you worked on minion AI, UI and instance transfer before making and "wasting" time on minion support gems. You need to get the basics working 100% before making extra stuff. Personally these supports will not get me to play a minions based characters, I will try one of those only once you fix/implement minion basics :)

I don't do UI, that's handeled by someone else. I do make supports. Should I avoid doing so until our overworked UI guy has gotten round to implementing stuff for minions? No, of course not.
AI is a very, very hard thing to get right. Some small adjustments to monster/minion AI have been made. Big sweeping changes aren't the kind of things we can expect to make and still have things work well. AI is a huge task, and very hard to get right.
Whereas two of those gems took a total of 20 minutes work, and the third took only about hour. and I was implementing some other supports at the same time.

"

DarPhoenix wrote:

"

Changed the gem-support system so that only Support Gems in the same physical group as a Skill Gem connect to it. If you have two groups with the same skill, you get two bindable skills. This is done so that supports can be made more impactful and so that players can have multiple variations of the same skill in their build.

This is a huge disappointment for me. Its cheap way out of uber-skill problem. Instead I would prefer if you'd take the long way and balance uber-skills with high mana cost, so that uber-skills builds are still possible, but require careful planning and items with specific mods.

Another way to balance is to make multiple skills work together, increase synergy between them, so that players are encouraged to use multiple skills, instead of one uber-skill with multiple supports.

Make it hard to achieve, but don't take away multiple supports. These builds will be very viable and fun in high lvl team vs team PVP matches, where different focused builds will work together as a team. By doing this you severely limit character differentiation especially in high lvls.

I disagree. First off, support gems HAVE been costed to make uberskills less attractive, and rebalanced to match so each individual support has more effect.
What this change gives us, at the cost of limiting to a max of 5 supports per skill, which is skill a lot, is a huge increase, not decrease, in build diversity. It lets a player use two copies of a skill and support them differently into different skills - If I really like Poison Arrow, I can now have a faster attacks / multiple projectiles / pierce version for killing lots of weak monsters, a knockback / increased damage version for bosses, and a version with elemental damage to get around highly physically resistant monsters. Or any combination thereof, while keeping them different skills.
It's potentially possible to build a character around only one skill, and have access to several practically different skills by supporting it differently, if a player wants. Or you can still combine different sets of skills like before, and the only thing you've lost out on is the abilty to link more than 5 supports to a single skill gem, which under the new balance would be prohibitively expensive anyway.