My feedback & suggestions after having played quite a bit (EDIT: Sorry, wrong forum )

EDIT: Oops, just noticed I posted it to the wrong forum, hopefully a mod can move it.

So having played quite a bit, and consider myself to be quite well versed in all things PoE I have some suggestions & feedback, so I thought I'd just as others gather them all in a single thread.

Feedback:

First of all, and this is my main complaint, I've talked about it before but I think it's worth mentioning as often as possible, something needs to be done to chaos. I know it's only a temporary area, but I'm willing to bet the current end game is losing you players which might or might not come back when you have some real end game in place. It's boring ( and surely very heavy on your own servers ) to roll ledges. Either let us chose what type of chaos to roll ( all would roll ledges 100% of the time ), or remove the possibility to re-roll chaos and re-balance accordingly. Secondly as been stated a million times before, the chaos leeching system is fun for no one. I've yet to see any response from GGG on this end save for "chaos is only temporary", well it's been the temporary end game for quite a long while now. I'm not suggestion you spend a lot of time on chaos, but instead band aid the most glaring flaws.

Melee is currently inferior to ranged in so many regards. Mostly this is down to the fact that melee characters aren't sturdy enough compared to ranged builds. The exception is builds which have gone very heavy on survival, those are however are sub-optimal for obvious reasons.

Multiple proj + ice spear witches, and I'd argue probably my own bowlar build are horribly, horribly broken. It's not even remotely close to balanced, using only 4 links I still 1 shot some 6 man chaos rares if I crit. Ice spear witches in particular, there's a ton of way to craft them and they're all horribly broken because of the same reason.

Uniques are way poor. Out of 55 there's about 10 which isn't garbage. Usually I think it's down to the fact that uniques are designed around the fact that there's 1 or 2 high ( or unique ) stats, and then 1 or 2 drawback stats. Sadly the 1 or 2 stats never seems to make up for the fact that you're wasting a slot which could have 6 + 1 all positive mods in the same slot.

Rangers currently makes poor glass cannons, they make poor everything. This has been discussed a million times before but I think it's down to a few core problems. First of all quivers are inferior to other off-hand options. Bows doesn't have implicit mods and are restricted to 5% crit chance options ( making crit builds more or less impossible imo ). Evasion being the absolutely poorest defense, and dex being the absolutely poorest base stat. A lot of the ranger gems are even used primarily by other classes. The ranger specifics at this time is mostly: "Go frenzy, pick the obvious frenzy skill gems". Problem is that frenzy charges are mostly inferior to power charges when it comes to pure dmg output, sure it's cool to shoot fast but I've yet to see any ranger shooting anything but peas. There tends to be quite a few of these running around in my leecher groups with pretty nice equipment having a stab at it. When 1 of their projectiles does about 1 / 30 of a hp bar on a mob which I kill in 1 - 2 hits it doesn't matter that they shoot fast.

Made up ballpark figures:
Int glass cannon: 350 hp, 1500 energy shield.
Str glass cannon: 600 hp, ~65% phys dmg reduction.
Dex glass cannon: 450 hp, ~65% phys dmg reduction ( because most picks iron reflexes ).

Add 35% block chance to the int cannon with little dmg trade off, and the possibility of going chaos innoc, and do the math.


I think it would be nice with some more complimentary skill gems. As it is now I use 1 curse & 1 dmg skill, that's it. Some builds have some back ups for dealing with reflect mobs and single target cases, but that's where it ends pretty much. I've given some 5 minute made up examples in the suggestion area.

Suggestions:
Just as there's multiple projectile for ranged, melee needs a gem which turns single target into splash. Would work nicely with concentrated effect / increased area supports etc. Can be balanced by controlling percentage of dmg splashing, size of effect etc.

It would be cool with a unique that has 7 slots with proper trade offs.

Remove SD mods from the melee weapons and give them STRONG defensive implicit mods. Remove the possibility for witches to use shields ( or remove the SD related mods from them, using shields on witches is currently a no brainer because they're so extremely strong and you don't need to give up much in the SD department ).

Ice spear base crit chance should go from 7 -> 5 at the very least.

Elemental hit, I don't know what to do with this skill. Perhaps tweak it down a bit.

Multiple projectiles, this is a hard one to balance. If it gets 5 additional at 20, then I think it would be good if that is changed to 4 and the gems scaled accordingly. It's currently to strong but a very interesting gem.

It would be cool with "fast-tracks" on the grid, paths which perhaps have a bit weaker nodes but very quickly takes you to a different area of the grid. This would open up more complex builds, but perhaps make it a bit harder to balance.

It would be nice if the different classes had something distinctive about them, doesn't need to be anything super advanced. Like maras perhaps gets +15% multiplicative hp, rangers +15% multiplicative attack speed etc.

A shield that increases resistance by X% to the next element you get hit by for Y time, also increases the cap of that resistance by Z%. Would be interesting because there would be some timing involved making sure it gets set to the correct element, and it would be a terrific option for dealing with clusters of troublesome mobs.

Mana shield, does exactly what you think it does.

Thorns, this would be a staple gem in high defense builds to make them a bit more viable. During X ( long duration ) you reflect Y% of all incoming dmg pre reduction, all your current reflect is increased by Z% ( very very high ). The point of this gem is to make reflect builds viable. The kicker for this gem is the Z% value which would make +reflect gear desirable, which is currently a poop stat of the highest order.

Proc support gems, these could even make frenzy builds viable. There's a load of possibilities here so probably deserves its own thread. Just don't normalize proc rate by time, as that would defeat the entire purpose of them.

Greed shot, very high dmg penalty, but gives +rarity & +quantity mods as part of the skill. Would be a support type of skill which you'd try to use for cases when you've reduced the mob to very low hp to finish it off for maximum payoff. Might make game unfun if it's not restricted and balanced correctly however.

All in all I love the game, will be interesting to see how it changes up til release :)

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Sairony wrote:

It would be cool with "fast-tracks" on the grid, paths which perhaps have a bit weaker nodes but very quickly takes you to a different area of the grid. This would open up more complex builds, but perhaps make it a bit harder to balance.

I like that idea.

These tracks could be placed at the skilltree's outer rim, encircling all the tree's 'branches' (~class-areas), consisting of two to three (or more?) low-attribute nodes (e.g. +1 int, dex or str) between each branch.

It shouldn't be too easy to reach another class's powerful nodes near their respective starting location, since the 'rim-node's' connection points are supposed to be placed near the tree's outer nodes.

Additionally these nodes could be bordered with some background-art, surrounding the tree.