Path of Exile 2 In-Progress Total Flask Rework

A recent video from Talkative Tri (who is a clickbaiting monkey, but who does have good information in between his daily clickbait posts. Sometimes) went into detail on a number of tidbits from the recent physical-print issue of PC Gamer. PC Gamer featured PoE2 on the cover of this month's release, which is a lovely bit of validation, but the thing I want to talk about most from this video is the new information on flasks.

Disclaimer: this is all taken from one paragraph written in a game journalism magazine by someone who is not a PoE diehard, so grain of salt. But to summarize and avoid claims of plagiarizing both PC Gamer and Tri:

Flask slots in PoE 2 do not exist the way they did in PoE1. You get one (1) health flask and one (1) mana flask, both of which have increased capacity due to being the only flask of their type allowed. There is a new "Trinket" system which 'provide utilitarian buffs', with mentioned examples being automatic cures for freeze, bleed, or stun.

Needless to say, this is a huge rework of a bedrock-level foundational system in PoE1, and one such system that has seen almost no real change in PoE2 up until now. My best understanding of this admittedly limited information is that "flask" slots beyond your one (1) health and one (1) mana flasks do not exist, at all. You only have two flask slots, and each of them can only accept one type of flask. All other flask slots have been replaced with these 'Trinkets' that perform the utility function of utility flasks - quite possibly without the burden of needing to keep them refilled.

I doubt that this is an "everybody gets Mageblood built in" level rework...but I'm also not sure it's not that. The PC Gamer journalist writes "Once again, a push towards cutting out the fiddly bits while retaining that classic Path of Exile complexity." If utility trinkets can be automatic as the article states, are they all automatic? Are trinkets effectively passive, requiring no specific hands-on managing once they've been equipped?

Mageblood is as powerful as it is due to the unfortunate intersection of its specific mods and Enkindling Orbs, but it's popular because it dramatically reduces the need for Flask Piano and makes playing the game smoother and more enjoyable. Why not try and capture some of that popularity in the baseline experience for players by making trinkets universally passive/automatic in the same way Mageblood makes utility flasks passive/automatic? If this is assumed from the start and becomes a foundational part of character building, utility trinkets can be balanced and designed from the outset to be passive/automatic and allow everyone to have that smoother, more enjoyable experience that previously was completely unavailable to anyone save the most elite of one-percent-of-one-percenters.

I am legitimately super jazzed to see this change in action myself, it feels like such an obvious and highly functional change of the flask system. One of those "why didn't anyone think of this before?" moments. There are so many interesting and exciting possibilities and potential knock-on effects from this change.

Like, now that flasks don't have to carry your ailment fixes and such anymore, what are the mod pools on health/mana flasks going to look like? How can they change those to make the two remaining flasks in the game more interesting? How many trinket slots do we get, and how can their effects and mods change now that they don't need to be tied to the durations or effects of a utility flask? Could Quicksilver be back on the menu as a unique trinket? How will tinctures work - and is there a need for trinkets to be purely defensive utility, the way utility flasks were originally slated to be in PoE2?

December 7th will be one hell of a drug however it goes down, that's for sure.

Not much to say besides I love it. Anything that reduces piano play gets a thumbs up from me. Or would that be a fingers up?

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WaywornExile wrote:

Not much to say besides I love it. Anything that reduces piano play gets a thumbs up from me. Or would that be a fingers up?

There were real and valid concerns I'd seen with the introduction of WASD movement. Namely: "If you're making us use WASD for movement, and we've got like nine-plus skills in combo gameplay, precisely which fingers and which keys are you planning on us using for flasks, exactly?" Like, WASD movement is a game-changer, but that is a very pertinent and logical question that needs a good answer.

This rework, if it works the way I think it will work with trinkets being largely automated by default, would solve that issue elegantly by removing the need to constantly manually activate what used to be utility flask effects while also solving the longstanding player complaints about Flask Piano without the rigmarole of dealing with Instilling Orbs.

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1453R wrote:

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WaywornExile wrote:

Not much to say besides I love it. Anything that reduces piano play gets a thumbs up from me. Or would that be a fingers up?

There were real and valid concerns I'd seen with the introduction of WASD movement. Namely: "If you're making us use WASD for movement, and we've got like nine-plus skills in combo gameplay, precisely which fingers and which keys are you planning on us using for flasks, exactly?" Like, WASD movement is a game-changer, but that is a very pertinent and logical question that needs a good answer.

This rework, if it works the way I think it will work with trinkets being largely automated by default, would solve that issue elegantly by removing the need to constantly manually activate what used to be utility flask effects while also solving the longstanding player complaints about Flask Piano without the rigmarole of dealing with Instilling Orbs.

Mhmm. At this point, I'm very tempted to buy myself a couple of PC foot pedals. One for life flask, one for mana flask. Think about how liberating that would feel alongside the new system.

Another case of PC version / game gets adjusted for consoles? Never saw that coming. Maybe ProjectPT was right after all.

The change was inspired by the console U.I., yeah. I'm not sure why that's bad.

Let's assume for the moment that a New Health Flask has two health flasks' worth of charges/healing potential and ditto a New Mana Flask, for the sake of easy numbers. That seemed to be what GGG considered a 'standard' flask loadout - two health, two mana, and a utility of some sort.

Condensing the health and mana flasks into one single Supah Flask each is mostly pure upshot. There's a few edge case builds that do weird things with health flasks, or the Eternal Mana Flask people, but the vast majority of players only ran a single health flask anyways. Now they get a single health flask with double the use count, which also simplifies obtaining flasks. You only need one really good health flask instead of the two or three you were looking at before, and again - ditto mana flasks. I don't think anyone ever used multiple health or mana flasks for their effects on health or mana - nobody did a Bubbling flask and a Saturated flask to try and cover different healing methodologies. or if they did, it's so rare as to be noise. For the overwhelming bulk of the playerbase, the Flask Crunchening is upshot for health/mana.

Utility flasks are, of course, the Swing Thing. Will Trinkets be the equal of utility flasks? Impossible to say without knowing more about them, but remember - PoE1-style Ultraflasks were already dead. No Jade/Granite/Basalt or other Beeg Deefence flasks. Utility flasks were intended to be reactionary problem-solvers. The PoE2 home page (currently) shows a whole entire-ass flask slot devoted to an "Antidote Flask" that offers four seconds of poison immunity if used while poisoned, and eats 25 of its 50 charges to do it. That is a PoE2 utility flask, if admittedly a super low level one. If that's the level of effect that utility flasks were intended to provide? A.) trinkets that provide those effects automatically win almost regardless, and B.) nobody was ever going to use those utility flasks anyways.

It looks quite a lot like power is being moved out of the flask system and elsewhere into the character, with flasks being streamlined to avoid Flask Piano. That power was already gone from PoE2. Between the dodge roll, combo-based skill use, and managing red/blue flasks, there's more than enough going on to properly engage a player without needing to devote three additional buttons to manual reactive curatives.

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1453R wrote:

A recent video from Talkative Tri

"Flask slots in PoE 2 do not exist the way they did in PoE1. You get one (1) health flask and one (1) mana flask, both of which have increased capacity due to being the only flask of their type allowed. There is a new "Trinket" system which 'provide utilitarian buffs', with mentioned examples being automatic cures for freeze, bleed, or stun."

(snip)

The video linked with Tri-Tip talking shows 3 life flasks and 2 mana flasks.
https://youtu.be/geRCuTUEV_w?t=73


The video embedded in the the PCgamesn article shows 5 flask slots.
https://youtu.be/mU7mLtj7nxU?t=67


When I played the Poe 2 demo at PAX, it had 5 flask slots.
Until GGG announces flask slots have changed, I'll be skeptical.

The PC Gamer article specifically mentions that the new flask system is a recent development, not included in the demo build the reviewer was given access to. It's a new idea being pursued barely a month before EA release. The journalist specifically mentions how unusual Grinding Gear's willingness to make major changes like that with less than two months to go before their major release is in dev circles. Any other company would be feature complete and locked in now, no changes allowed unless a disastrous bug or interaction is located. But GGG is willing to rip the flask system out nearly wholesale and fitz with it to get rid of a pain point. That's impressive. Provided they can stick the landing, of course.