Skill Gem design and synergy

Having skills that interact with eachother is definitely essential for fun and engaging gameplay. But skills need to be good on their own first, and then also have interactions.

It's very apparent that the skills you made are meant to be paired with specific gems, but it's bad design if the individual skills are worthless on their own, or significantly worse without the skill that GGG decides.

One prime example is Solar Orb and Flameblast. Solar Orb is a complete waste of a skill gem option for sorcs. There's quite a few of these too. Lighnting Conduit, Shockchain Arrow, just really generic skill combos that don't add to gameplay or theorycrafting, but rather take away from, restrict, and stifle build diversity.

TLDR - Make good, balanced abilities and then add affects or interactions on top of them instead of making crappy abilities that have crutches to make them almost useable.

One of the things I enjoyed most in PoE 1, was the skills, passives, and unique item interactions. Being able to theorycraft a build was very fun. Especially when the end result was a unique playstyle, and you exploding enemies faster/easier.

POE 2 is a significant step down in that aspect, and while I liked the Campaign, it felt kind of hollow reaching a higher level and seeing how bad the skills were.

This is one of my main gripes with the game. They focused so hard on making an end-game, they forgot to bring the stuff that made this game great over to it.

Unfortunately with the current state of the game, 90% of the skills are virtually useless.

Nobody is ever going to use them because they're too slow, too weak, require too much setup, and the only way to survive is to blow up the entire screen instantly.

Like seriously who is ever going to use stun grenade? Who is ever going to use rain if fire? Who is ever going to use ripwire ballista? Who ever is going to use molten strike? Shield wall? The crossbow shot that makes ice patches? Rolling Slam?