Seems the new Retaliation Skills were only a Pipe Dream after all...

Practically nobody is using these, and it gets even worse when you start looking for builds using them as their main skill to build around. Seems like all the massive damage multipliers with an "on Block" condition aren't actually that fun or reliable to use in practice. And previously, building around Vengeance with self-inflicted damage was actually a viable build. (Personally, still salty about that one.)

Was it worth it? Was it worth removing all the passive counterattack skills and alt quality gems? People were actually using these before to proc Onslaught and various other conditions such as Rage and Debilitate (which lasted only a second anyway).

Now, looking at poe.ninja data, nobody (at large) actually gives a fuck about them. A whole new set of passives, items and skills centered around a Retaliation mechanic, yet nobody wants to use them in the same patch they were introduced and hyped up like crazy.

No, instead we got ES stacking Ephemeral Edge/Hexblast Mines Tricksters, Vaal Lightning Strike Slayers and Ice Nova of Frostbolts Hierophants dominating the META in a patch that was supposed to give us these grand new skills and huge buffs to melee.

And guess what, of the few that actually do use them, it's basically all max Block Gladiators (>92%). It doesn't matter if you give a skill a 2000% damage multiplier when it has a super specific condition and requires a lot of investment to make it worthwhile outside of specific use cases. Well, that and not keeping overperforming skills in check, that is.

I'm rather disappointed with the build diversity this league and it's pretty clear what's going to happen in the next one. I just hope we get a batch of new exciting active skills that actually bring something unique to the table.

Ninja will never show players using these when outliers the magnitude we currently have are present, getting on for 90% of skills are going to be next to zero representation.

My league start buddy did full retal and managed 94 + the whole atlas unlocked on HC with retaliation only, can't be that bad?

I realise to a degree that you just have an axe to grind about them removing old skills and tbh I agree with you, less work to just leave vengeance/riposte etc in and they had their role for melee as manaforged arrows less successful cousin.

However the retal skills are pretty good for what they are, you can't have a conditional be excellent in a game like this because of the first statement - if its conditional its automatically gonna get thrashed by everything that isn't if the other options are good.

Just to summarise my first point incidentally if you filter HC glads on ninja 92% are playing 5 skills on SC 65% are playing 1 skill and 94% are only playing 3. Point is if you look at a meta trend site you will find meta trends only you can personally find out if something off meta sucks or doesn't and thats usually where meta changes actually come from.

Incidentally in Necropolis there were 549 people using vengeance, 450 using riposte and 616 using reckoning.

In Settlers we have 732 using crushing fist though 122 of those are main linking it, 260 using swordstorm but again 120 ish main linking it, 1585 using eviscerate with half main linking it again and only 79 using glacial shield swipe. Oh and 40 absolute madlads using divine retribution. I used SC for these numbers as its the primary mode and you cannot play full retal on HC if you intend to do real bossing later on.

So basically what have we learned? They've gone from rarely used to rarely used but we've gained a few players using them as their primary. They also clearly have an identity problem to my eyes and really was obvious when they were announced - Eviscerate has synergy with the weapon type/build you play it with. Crushing fist is a slam, but only a staff can block out of the 2hs. Glacial shield straight sucks because its full cold but the build you'd play it on is full phys 99 times outa 100 and divine retribution is a spell so makes me go cross eyed when i think about it.

Would I be happy with that as GGG? Nope, not because of the player numbers but because of the last paragraph suggests some design fail. They clearly removed the old gems because it was easier to repurpose those gems in their existing index system than create new ones it seems. I realise this post got long but I was working my way through it as i wrote it ^^

tldr - nobody would play them regardless, some of the new stuff good/playable and offers a fun playstyle, some of them are designed badly currently, we probably shouldn't have lost the old ones which did have a purpose.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

My league start buddy did full retal and managed 94 + the whole atlas unlocked on HC with retaliation only, can't be that bad?

I wasn't saying that you can't make a build around them. Rather, why would you.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

I realise to a degree that you just have an axe to grind about them removing old skills

I do, in fact. I can admit that. :D Got nothing better to do at the moment with the weather being the way it is, so might as well use the time to rant a little to kill some time. ;) Though I'm not merely ranting for the sake of ranting. I did very much predict this outcome before the patch dropped, though I used the descriptor 'irrelevant', as in: "[...] will become irrelevant very quickly."

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Draegnarrr wrote:

However the retal skills are pretty good for what they are, you can't have a conditional be excellent in a game like this because of the first statement - if its conditional its automatically gonna get thrashed by everything that isn't if the other options are good.

Honestly, I have to disagree. Vengeance showed that you can have a "when hit" condition that works without breaking the game. It was iirc a 30% chance to trigger when hit - and iirc 40% with 20% quality - and it had a base cooldown of 1.5s or something, can't remember the specifics. I had a build that successfully used this concept with Martyr of Innocence back in 3.11 Harvest League (centered around Ignite):



I was planning to revive it this league before I found out they removed the gems...

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Draegnarrr wrote:

tldr - nobody would play them regardless, some of the new stuff good/playable and offers a fun playstyle, some of them are designed badly currently, we probably shouldn't have lost the old ones which did have a purpose.

Yeah, because they are terrible gems that only function in a vacuum, a scenario that isn't PoE 1's gameplay loop. They'd actually be cool to use if they weren't exclusively Retaliation skills. Like you said, they are suffering from identity crisis.

They are a reskinned gimmicky slam gem now. be carefull with this thread though, GGG/tencent will remove it for hate speech since it says something they made is bad.

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Judicas wrote:

be carefull with this thread though, GGG/tencent will remove it for hate speech since it says something they made is bad.

What?

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BaumisMagicalWorld wrote:

Honestly, I have to disagree. Vengeance showed that you can have a "when hit" condition that works without breaking the game. It was iirc a 30% chance to trigger when hit - and iirc 40% with 20% quality - and it had a base cooldown of 1.5s or something, can't remember the specifics. I had a build that successfully used this concept with Martyr of Innocence back in 3.11 Harvest League (centered around Ignite):

functional =/= non conditional, I wasn't saying you can't do it I was saying it won't compete with a straight pewpew build and that is the primary problem of expecting crushing fist etc to have high usage.

And while its frustrating the truth is GGG kill builds, my character list is a sea of old great characters rendered into 120 passive respec gimps with gear and ascendancies that no longer exist/function lmao

Its annoying but its also part of their schtick

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Judicas wrote:

They are a reskinned gimmicky slam gem now. be carefull with this thread though, GGG/tencent will remove it for hate speech since it says something they made is bad.

[redacted]

Everyone who's making a build around those gems is having a blast while others have fun playing something else.

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Guess all the people who built eviscerate and crushing fist just dont exist.

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Pashid wrote:

Everyone who's making a build around those gems is having a blast while others have fun playing something else.

I don't disagree, however, it doesn't warrant the changes they made. There was no reason to remove those 3 gems, like, at all. And the end result is that the skills are still irrelevant.

I'm not saying they should be META or anything, but it's ironic how they considered the previous gems bad and replaced them with new ones, 1 of which actually no one uses, and the others are slapped on just because. They serve no actual purpose anymore. Just another button press for some temporary power spike that no one actually cares about. I want them to revert this change.

How could they not foresee that a skill that has a "when you block" condition with a duration component on top is a really bad idea? (Edit: Don't forget they also have a cooldown.) PoE's gameplay loop is already "pay attention or die", and now they added gems you have to constantly check for cooldowns if you want to use them. It just makes no sense.