How Skill Balance Could Be Reworked in PoE 2 – A Concept Based on Animation-Centric Design

Right now, the game isn't in the best shape, and there’s not much reason or desire to play. But PoE 2 still stuck with me, mainly because even in version 0.1 there were a ton of interesting mechanics—most of which are now gutted or broken. That got me thinking: how could the overall skill system be reimagined to fix both balance and progression?

Here’s my concept.

Centering Builds Around Animation Type

Let’s use the crossbow as an example since I’m most familiar with it.

The crossbow has 5 core damage styles:

-Machine-gun style rapid fire
-Shotgun-style burst
-Grenades
-Ballista
-lazer

These could act as your base skill archetypes. Now, imagine the game introduces a 6th socket, whose sole purpose is to modify the type of damage dealt.

At the start of the game, you’d have access to all skills dealing base physical damage. But this extra socket would allow you to modify the element:

Add a lightning gem → Your shotgun shoots galvanic shards

Add a cold gem → Now you're firing frost shards

Add chaos → Boom, chaos shards


This solves a key problem in early game progression: lack of available skills. Instead of being forced to use boring filler skills, you can customize the core archetypes.

It also makes skill balancing easier. Instead of having to tune 20+ active skills, the devs would only need to monitor how these base skills interact with their elemental conversions.

Flexible Skill + Element Combos
Skills would no longer be locked to specific elements. Instead, they’d be defined by their animation and behavior, and the elemental flavor would come from the gem you socket.

This opens the door for much more build variety:

Don’t like how Glacial Bolt plays? Pick a smoother animation skill and slot in a cold gem.

Want a chaos lazer? Just add a chaos gem to lazer.



Spells: Another Example

Let’s look at early elemental spells. Currently, you get:

A knockback

A projectiles

A bomb plant

A wall

But there’s no single-target spell at the start.

Here’s an alternative starting pool:

Air-based knockback

A single-target spell (like Essence Drain)

A basic bomb

A cone-AoE spell

Now apply element gems:

Fire gem + knockback → Fire blast AoE

Lightning gem + Essence Drain → Spark-like projectile

Chaos gem + bomb → Chaos explosion



What This Solves
Build variety from the beginning

No more forced filler skills just to get through acts

Skill gem are less critical – they still matter, but missing one won’t kill your build

Better experimentation with passive trees and interactions

Easier balancing by focusing on fewer base skills and scaling effects infusion



Final Thoughts
I think this system could offer a more flexible, intuitive, and satisfying way to progress through the game. It reduces early frustration while keeping the door open for creativity and optimization in the endgame.

And perhaps the best part — from a development perspective — is that most of the required animations already exist in the game. This means such a system wouldn't require a full overhaul or massive new asset production. It’s more about reusing and reorganizing what’s already there in a smarter way.

What do you think? Would love to hear other perspectives.

When it comes to cutting gems — the elemental infusion gems could still be upgraded and have their quality increased like now. They would scale their conversion percentage and bonus damage over time.

Here’s a simple model:

Let’s say a base skill deals 100 physical damage.

You socket an elemental infusion gem, which converts 100% of the base damage into elemental (e.g. fire).

As the gem levels up, this percentage increases — up to, say, 190% base damage as that element.
(These numbers are just illustrative — actual values would need to be tested and balanced.)

This adds a clear and rewarding progression path: not only do you choose your playstyle via animation, but you also scale it through the infusion gems.

Open Questions
One area that still needs deeper discussion is how to handle multiple skills with the same animation type — for example, two cone-style skills or two grenade-type abilities. That’s a broader design topic.

Another idea: increasing the quality of infusion gems could affect ailment application chance.

This gives ailment builds — especially those relying on status effects — better stability.

Right now:

Galvanic attacks rarely apply shock

Ignite builds often struggle to ignite consistently.

Only poison has 100% guaranteed application

What if:

Fire infusion gems increased ignite chance with quality

Lightning gems improved shock chance

Cold gems boosted chill/freeze chance and etc

This could also be extended to Heralds, curses, and other supporting effects.

Utility Skills & Accessibility for New Players

Another usability upgrade would be to separate out universal utility skills (curses, totems, etc.) into a dedicated “Utility” tab.

Why?
Because new players often don’t realize that they can use spells on a bow character. When I first started playing PoE, I discovered only two weeks after in that my bow build could cast spells — and it was a huge surprise.

Making the separation clearer between:

Weapon-based attack skills

Universal utility

…would drastically help new players understand the system and feel less overwhelmed or confused.

and i see how my thread is going down under complaining how bad POE 2 is now. Sad but true. Hope GGG will see that

cmon, don't let die this thread

I think the ability to choose your element is good, but when you think about it
it would cut the number of skills in half or even more probably, and to ggg that wouldn't look good

But yeah i really don't like how some skills feel samey, like lightning spear and lighting arrow are basically the same skill, and i know they're based on the same character and that might play a role in it but still

I'd like to see some sort of limiter of elements you can use too, bcs rn it feels like every character is the avatar from ATLA to me and i don't like that personally, so ideally i'd want something like almost every skill is from the neutral/physical property, and you can't have all the elements at the same time unless you're playing a specific ascendancy or a class that makes sense having all these elements at the same time

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Vyend#2601 wrote:

I think the ability to choose your element is good, but when you think about it
it would cut the number of skills in half or even more probably, and to ggg that wouldn't look good

But yeah i really don't like how some skills feel samey, like lightning spear and lighting arrow are basically the same skill, and i know they're based on the same character and that might play a role in it but still

I'd like to see some sort of limiter of elements you can use too, bcs rn it feels like every character is the avatar from ATLA to me and i don't like that personally, so ideally i'd want something like almost every skill is from the neutral/physical property, and you can't have all the elements at the same time unless you're playing a specific ascendancy or a class that makes sense having all these elements at the same time

it will not cut the skills a half. They would use all existent skill animations for sure but make it like neutral without any element infusion. Then you add support gem to that animation and change it's base elemental damage. After that all additional extra damage comes which adds after all dmg base infusion.

Personally, I support anything that increases visual customization. I'm not sure about the rest of the design choices in the post though

I like the inspiration for the idea, but i didn't love the idea.

Builds need to be more flexible, not more complicated.

Remove the single use support Gen requirement entirely... It is part of the reason we have all these one button builds, because we can only use the best sports on one skill.

Then we could equip the elemental conversations multiple times, in whatever way we wanted.

Then rethink the attribute scaling interaction.

Personally i would get rid of gem leveling all together, and just keep gem tiers. Then give each gem different scalings based on each attribute.. currently building cross attribute is a major gimp, because anything that curbs gemlevel if our main skill gimps dps.. but if some martial skill got base damage from strength and crit from dex, it wouldnt be a total loss to split attributes.

These are specific ideas, but backing up, the things i dont like are:

- pressure towards one button builds
- from one support gem usage, and other constraints
- gem leveling (its just a bunch of clutter)
- huge downsides of moving away from core skill attribute(s)
- low viability of dual weapon type setups in endgame (because of attributes)

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ShaDarkLord#6528 wrote:

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Vyend#2601 wrote:

I think the ability to choose your element is good, but when you think about it
it would cut the number of skills in half or even more probably, and to ggg that wouldn't look good

But yeah i really don't like how some skills feel samey, like lightning spear and lighting arrow are basically the same skill, and i know they're based on the same character and that might play a role in it but still

I'd like to see some sort of limiter of elements you can use too, bcs rn it feels like every character is the avatar from ATLA to me and i don't like that personally, so ideally i'd want something like almost every skill is from the neutral/physical property, and you can't have all the elements at the same time unless you're playing a specific ascendancy or a class that makes sense having all these elements at the same time

it will not cut the skills a half. They would use all existent skill animations for sure but make it like neutral without any element infusion. Then you add support gem to that animation and change it's base elemental damage. After that all additional extra damage comes which adds after all dmg base infusion.

It would though, what's the difference between shockburst rounds and armor piercing rounds? Rn these are 2 different skills with different uses, if you can customize your skills however you want there's no need for skills that plays similar, in this case these 2 skills enter your description of "-Machine-gun style rapid fire".

Another example: Gas Grenade and Gas Arrow. And there are many other cases like that.