How "More" multipliers are ruining the new skill design philosophy.

Yeah, everything was great in interviews. They pointed problems, suggested solutions, and didn't implement it.

In current state, damage supports should be weakened to:
1. No unconditional 'more'. Heavy swings? 20% less attack speed, 25% more attack damage. Martial tempo? An opposite. Net dps without change.
2. Tradeoffs, like 'controlled destruction' or 'concentrated effect', need individual approach.
3. Light conditional 'more' (like, 'against ignited') nerf to 10%.
4. Condition consuming supports should be the main source of damage boost. Thing like "consumes broken armor to deal more physical damage", "consumes frozen to deal more ignite damage", etc. Player will be motivated to use multiple skills with different utilities.

i think my current take on moving forward from where we are now is take every gem that gives you damage and cut the damage it gives in half.

make boosting the dps via gems a thing but less impactful which would let a utlity/function change gem be more competitive at least.

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IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

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Dxt44#4050 wrote:

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IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

I simply cannot understand how they drew the right conclusions, they even understood the root of the problem and even had the solution right in front of their face... yet didn't implement it... how??? How is this possible?

Overall, I agree with what you're saying, although I don't understand the surprise, since every system they've talked about over the years has turned out to be completely different from what they said. Now, with the increase in the number of mobs on the maps, their vision has completely fallen apart.

But why though? Why did they turn around on everything like this? Was it really just pressure from streamers after Gamescom and PoE1 community? Was their vision really that frail as to be bent so easily? What is the reason for this?!

i wonder if they came up against a failure in the concept of the gem system?


to make a good design i think you should boil it down to only the options that provide meaningful impact and then present them in the most simple, digestible format possible. i wonder if they tried this with the no damage support philosophy skill gem system and found they ended up with too small a selection of gems that worked with each skill?

maybe it didnt feel like poe, it was essentially the correct philosophy and implementation but the result felt like we went from poe that seemed like we had infinite options to what seemed like a dumbed down game where you had 12 gems that could support your skill?






ive thought this for a long time, if i pick a skill like reave in poe. i can build reave in 200 different ways. physical RT dagger, poison with a flat chaos claw, i could convert to fire or lightning or go mixed ele and do it as almost any ascendancy, go full aura stack, go stat stack, the possibilities are endless when it comes to the details of how i scale this reave.

when it comes to how the build actually plays, how it feels what it looks like is happening on the screen there are maybe 2 or 3 ways you can really use reave realistically, and 2 of them are wrong. the right one is max aoe max attack speed and you spam, everything dies almost instantly and ultimately its completely irrelevant if they were frozen or poisoned or ignited or crit etc. that doesnt change how reave feels.




if it was a system like D3 where i had reave and i have 6 runes, i can tailor design 6 versions of reave for each of the runes you could probably make reave play at least 4 significantly different ways.

is the support gem system actually a good system? sharing these supports across all skills, does it actually work in terms of providing this infinite variety of possibility?



i have an arrow skill. do i multiproj it? yes, always. do i make it chain off terrain? yes always. is there a realistic choice for the 3rd gem between chain/pierce/fork? yep, absolutely ok we got 1 meaningful gem choice.

now what? 2 mandatory supports, 1 meaningful choice...? weve run out of road.



you limit the supports to 1 so that you dont use those 2 mandatory supports on every arrow skill and you add damage supports to give people the feeling that theres 60 different gems they can add and theyre making their own build, because theres nothing else you can really do right?

at least with that they can go fire or lightning and while almost completely meaningless to the play of the skill in practice, you just spam a cone of arrows and everything dies, at least it makes their gearing and tree choices meaningful?

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

i
i have an arrow skill. do i multiproj it? yes, always. do i make it chain off terrain? yes always. is there a realistic choice for the 3rd gem between chain/pierce/fork? yep, absolutely ok we got 1 meaningful gem choice.

I'm using Lightning Arrow with my ranger. Do I multiproj it or make it chain of terrain? No. It has good AoE on it's own so I don't need lower its base dps or aspd. If you always use these supports for arrows skills then that is only your choice.

This is part of a greater problem, and that is intended gameplay vs player motivation.

Designing interesting interaction is one thing, but then your game mechanically discourages this and rewards damage stacking to the nth degree.

This kind of game will always benefit from ultra specialisation and even if all of the 'more' multipliers are replaced with additive 'increases' (which I would be fine with) there will always be a 'best option' for whatever skill setup.

There is a cost for any design choice, and the cost for not having obvious power multipliers and single build options is a lack of perceivable impact from build choices, and increased preferential options means fewer 'correct' options.

People think they want choice, but what they really want is the illusion of choice (mostly) where there is an obvious right choice and a small handful of obviously suboptimal choices they can feel good about ignoring.

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Sakanabi#6664 wrote:

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

i
i have an arrow skill. do i multiproj it? yes, always. do i make it chain off terrain? yes always. is there a realistic choice for the 3rd gem between chain/pierce/fork? yep, absolutely ok we got 1 meaningful gem choice.

I'm using Lightning Arrow with my ranger. Do I multiproj it or make it chain of terrain? No. It has good AoE on it's own so I don't need lower its base dps or aspd. If you always use these supports for arrows skills then that is only your choice.

so what do you use? are you firing 1 single arrow?

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

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Sakanabi#6664 wrote:

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

i
i have an arrow skill. do i multiproj it? yes, always. do i make it chain off terrain? yes always. is there a realistic choice for the 3rd gem between chain/pierce/fork? yep, absolutely ok we got 1 meaningful gem choice.

I'm using Lightning Arrow with my ranger. Do I multiproj it or make it chain of terrain? No. It has good AoE on it's own so I don't need lower its base dps or aspd. If you always use these supports for arrows skills then that is only your choice.

so what do you use? are you firing 1 single arrow?

Yes. With herald it is mostly enough to kill a pack in one or two shots.

ok, so what are your other gems?

what sort of a comeback is I don't use them because i clear with herald -_-

might be OK if the supports were mixed up between other skills you are using to clear with but dumping it on herald basically means your gems don't matter because something else does the clear anyway - its single target only that matters.

This is also a fine representation of why heralds are going to get gutted as is the great cycle of repeating PoE1s mistakes immediately in PoE2

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Draegnarrr#2823 wrote:

This is also a fine representation of why heralds are going to get gutted as is the great cycle of repeating PoE1s mistakes immediately in PoE2

yeah for sure.


i just hope what u said about things becoming too set to remove doesnt come true and they have the balls to do it. cause it seems like a lot of what people are doing now revolves around heralds for clear right? and theyve let that be how people think about the game for a long time now. it does make me wonder m8.

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Draegnarrr#2823 wrote:

what sort of a comeback is I don't use them because i clear with herald -_-

might be OK if the supports were mixed up between other skills you are using to clear with but dumping it on herald basically means your gems don't matter because something else does the clear anyway - its single target only that matters.

see i think maybe i didnt explain myself well enough perhaps, because not using multiproj just makes my point even more.


im trying to work out if hes using damage gems, cause what im trying to say is what do you do in a world with no damage gems? if i dont have damage gems what are my options for supports on my random shoots an arrow bow skill?

if we say well we dont need the multiproj because we got +4 proj on my well rolled dualstring or my herald takes care of the aoe... ok, well now we have 1 mandatory support and 1 interesting choice, and now theres 3 empty sockets. thats even worse, were just removing potential utility/playstyle changing gems.

what really goes in there if you dont have gems doing damage stuff like ele pens, more damage, shock, attack speed etc?


i guess move faster while shooting?



without damage supports where is 60 gems i can put in there that make my skill completely different? cause thats what we want from poe right? if we dont have that its gonna feel like were playing a dumbed down game that has gutted what made poe1 great surely? even if the reality is that in poe1 you had 60 gems and all you did was stack damage on a skill that felt exactly the same almost any way you played it 95% of the time.

there was an illusion there of meaningful choices in the gem system but, and maybe im wrong maybe people disagree, but i think what actually happened is that they just provided a sense of customisation that reinforced meaningful differences you made on your passive tree and gear. i used 5 different damage supports because i chose a bow with a different damage type and hence passives that scaled a different damage type resulting in a different tree that had a push/pull on other tree choices, i used different stats on my rings so i used different crafting methods to make them, different aura, different curse. thats where meaningful impact is made.



i dont rly see where, just on its own, you get a massive page of different gems that make massive differences to how skills play and interact with no damage amp supports. sounds like an amazing idea, i wonder if they tried it and just found it doesnt really exist and thats why were back with damage?

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

ok, so what are your other gems?

I'm using Martial Tempo + Conduction + Primal Armament (yes one damage gem) on Lightning Arrow and Maim + Blind on Herald.