My biggest problem with PoE2 - Weapon Specific Skills/Uniques

TL;DR: Skills being tied to Weapon Types means Uniques are also tied skills.

Maybe this is just because there are so few weapon types in the game at the moment, but I feel there's a huge problem with attaching skills to a specific weapon, rather than multiple weapon types like PoE 1.

Firstly, by attaching a skill to a specific weapon, you create an "archetype", if you want to use Falling Thunder you HAVE to use a quarterstaff. If you want to use Leap Slam you HAVE to use a mace. Whilst PoE1 did have some of these limitations, nearly every skill in PoE2 is like this.

Why is this a problem?

It reduces player choice and independence in a really widespread way, and the worst part is that it ties uniques to skills specifically, which completely removes the funnest thing in PoE1, using a unique in an unintended way, with an unintended skill, to create a fun and unique build.

I really hope this is just because swords/daggers/axes/spears/flails aren't in the game, and that once they are there will be more cross polination, because without it the number of different combinations for builds drops precipitously. It feels like you're playing pre-made builds/playstyles...

+1
Fully agreed. It feels VERY restrictive and anti-poe with the current limitations.
I could see their response being something like "we can't really do that because of animation work for each skill and weapon combo" but who really cares? Just use the same animation and let it look a bit silly with different weapon types.

Let me Leap Slam and Stampede with my quarterstaff or use Falling Thunder with my hammer (and my axe, whenever that makes it into the game).

+1
I dislike this a lot, and completely agree. has made the game WAY less exciting.
Might as well play any other arpg with their version of limited skills. took away one of the best parts of poe by doing this.

+1 this.

I'm not opposed to being necessary to have a weapon to cast many skills, but it seems super bottle necked. It feels more constraining than it needs to be. On top of that you even have tags on both skills like "slam," but then it doesn't feel like I am building around an archtype of tags, but throttled to the weapon.

There's a lot of other weapons coming and get that it'll be more complicated across them, but I'm hoping this is just the product of EA and letting them see and test local to a weapon without having to balance it across each type. At least that's a silver lining I'm hoping for the reason of this as it does feel abnormal.

+1 , i bitched about this even before EA was released.

i would defend GGG a little bit tho as they want to make the game polished and functional before they can look into making skills less weapon class locked

+1 It definitely feels like the build variety is quite limited currently because of this, I don't necessarily think the archetype concept is bad but it needs to be compensated with greater variety within them. Something this particularly harms at the moment is acolyte of chayula monk, it's a dark monk/chaos themed ascension but there are a grand total of 2 somewhat complementary quarterstaff skills that also happen to both be supports.

For Real.

There are some bow skills I'd like to be able to use on x-bows.

There's only 1 poison grenade skill for the xbow and rest are for bows.

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Bubutt#5421 wrote:

+1
Fully agreed. It feels VERY restrictive and anti-poe with the current limitations.
I could see their response being something like "we can't really do that because of animation work for each skill and weapon combo" but who really cares? Just use the same animation and let it look a bit silly with different weapon types.

Let me Leap Slam and Stampede with my quarterstaff or use Falling Thunder with my hammer (and my axe, whenever that makes it into the game).

I seem to have a memory of them saying in PoE1 it was really hard, because you had to manually rig each character or something, but with PoE2 it was easier with how they had it set up? So hopefully they can implement this, I also wanted a lightning slamming warrior

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GammaNZ#3788 wrote:

+1 It definitely feels like the build variety is quite limited currently because of this, I don't necessarily think the archetype concept is bad but it needs to be compensated with greater variety within them. Something this particularly harms at the moment is acolyte of chayula monk, it's a dark monk/chaos themed ascension but there are a grand total of 2 somewhat complementary quarterstaff skills that also happen to both be supports.

Yep! This is what triggered it in me too, I played Monk as my first character and had great fun, but then I thought after I'd gotten to late maps "If I were to play the Chayula Monk, what skills would I have used instead?" and realised that there weren't actually that many I could use differently? Maybe it's because we can use so many skills at once (and are encouraged too), but there aren't even really chaos/physical versions of most of the skills, and because you can only link a support to one skill, you can't just slap chaos damage on all the normal elemental skills, feels very weird and almost as if there are set builds which have been put into EA :S

Agreed, baffling choice IMO.