Feedback on Recent Changes to Cast on Trigger Builds

Hello,

Apologies for the lengthy post, but I feel the need to provide feedback and hope it reaches you.

I’m responding to the recent changes made to Cast on Crit builds.

I consider myself a long-time supporter of your work and truly admire what you’ve achieved. I’ve rarely felt that you’ve made poor or hasty decisions, and I’ve never before felt compelled to write such a post on your forum.

1) Unjustified and Hasty Decision

I’ll focus on Cast on Crit (CoC) as I haven’t played Cast on Freeze. When I started playing PoE2, I deliberately avoided guides and decided to create my own build. I thoroughly enjoyed the campaign and the game’s progression, even though my build was awful. After three days, I completed the campaign and was ready to transition to the late game.

I managed to craft a decent crit chance wand and decided to try CoC. I tested various setups – Firewall, Comet, and eventually settled on a CoC Spark + Comet build. After five respecs, I had a build that could barely handle Tier 1 maps. It wasn’t powerful, but it was fun and felt like progress.

After the patch, I can no longer kill even white mobs. After killing 20 normal enemies, I have just 12% energy for CoC. It’s completely unviable to justify 100 spirit for CoC under the current mechanics.

2) Extremely Abrupt Change

I cannot understand why such a drastic change was implemented so quickly. It makes no sense to nerf a build to the point of being unplayable in a single patch, especially when it wasn’t exploiting any in-game bugs. If CoC wasn’t intended to be viable, the current state renders it entirely useless.

3) Nerf vs Buff

If you decide to send a build into oblivion, could you please consider rebalancing instead of outright destruction? Perhaps buff alternative playstyles? The reason 3/4 of mages play specific builds is that others are simply not competitive, enjoyable, or viable. Instead of eliminating a viable option, enhance underperforming ones to promote diversity.

4) Disappointment

I’m deeply disappointed. This isn’t your usual approach, and it feels out of character. Of course, mistakes happen, and I understand that. However, this sudden, extreme nerf undermines the trust and excitement many of us have for your decisions.

FYI Bonus:

I spent all my gold on respecs and all my currency on items to support this build. I now have neither gold for another respec nor a viable character capable of earning gold or progressing. My last 50 hours feel wasted, and now I’ll have to wait for months until things stabilize.

Closing Thoughts:

I sincerely hope you return to your previous approach of balancing builds through buffs and thoughtful adjustments rather than heavy-handed nerfs. Thank you for your attention, and I hope you consider this feedback.

I can only agree to your post. I have had a very similar approach to and journey in PoE2. I've played without guide, trying a bunch of things and respecing in the process. My builds were never great (e.g. 0 single target chaos dot) but I had fun. I finally settled on cast on freeze comet bloodmage with a couple of interesting interactions.

This build finally took me to maps and was at a state that felt pretty good. Both life and mana cost on the trigger were scary high and the next piece of the puzzle I wanted to work on.

When I logged in today, the fun of the build was pretty much gone. White and blue packs are tedious now, hanging around being frozen most of the time. Luckily I have enough dps to chew through them and they can't hurt me being frozen. For rares and bosses little to nothing changed for me. I freeze them and manually cast comet as I did before. So for me it was no real nerf in power but only in fun.

I'll wait for the response of GGG before I decide on what to do next but I don't think I'll take the time to go through campaign again that soon if my char is bricked.

I feel you man. My tempest flurry monk was finally starting to feel decent and they nerfd cast on shock into the dirt.. its useless and my character is suffering.

GGG - I had tons of fun with sorc and just got through campaign.
Tried 1 map and this is now not going to happen.

Respeccing to not feel my char completely wasted? - not an option with the current passive refunding prices. <-- I would suggest to consider some kind free respec option for such a vital change maybe.... for people to have a chance to try out something else if you decide to do this.

I don´t have a week of play to get enough gold to spend on this....

Early Access serously why not just make respeccing free???

And I also not a fan of spending another week before endgame would be an option on something else until sorc maybe has been sorted so other options might will make it become fun again. Currently it lost its flavour sadly....

its pretty difficult to substantially nerf things or remove power from players without them getting upset and so early access will be an important time to get the balance right, a time when the game can be expected to be volatile, half-finished, and buggy.

i agree that trigger skills were massively overnerfed though, and i expect GGG will recognize that and buff them before too long. The nerf was also handled in a pretty sloppy manner, which i am hoping is a result of the team being taxed by the release and having not worked in a live development environment in a long time. If this is the case, we should be able to expect that the way they handle things like this will get better over time as they repair the damage they sustained in launch and get back into the swing of live development.

This stings extra because the caster leveling experience is such a slog.

Act 2 is hard and a struggle. Act 3, some new skills come online, a caster starts to feel decent. Late Act 3, the natural progression of the build is access to Cast on "X" support and suddenly the play starts to feel STRONG - not fast, but Comet has a real punch to it, and the gameplay gets some CRUNCH. Because the other spells frankly feel swinging around a wet noodle.

I've made it to Act 3 twice now with 2 spellcasters (re-spec the first one because botched build, wanted to go Monk Invoker instead, CoF seems good right?) then got to play something that felt decent for about 2 hours. Log off last night, log in this morning, and the build I worked on leveling for 15 hours is dead.

Access to re-spec points isn't even the issue, I just don't think there are viable caster builds to play, period, without the Cast On mechanic.

If GGG's stance is that gameplay should always require you to mash 2-3 skill combos to clear white mobs, and anything else is going to get nerfed, then this game is simply not for me.

Uninstalling now. Maybe I'll check back in 6-12 months. Not wasting any more time on this beta test.