Lightning Arrow lacks damage support to be uber viable. It was OP during season 1 with the trap skill support, but it got overly nerfed…
Heartseeker is only uber viable, either going zHP with ultra high-end gear or going with the shuriken corruption. both are not ideal in my opinion.
Hail of Arrows has some cool nodes that could scale up its damage, but they have hard caps that prevent it from doing so, which makes this skill barely used. Some examples are Nowhere to hide and Aim for the heart.
Really disappointing that there isnt a specific poll planned for Endgame feedback.
None of the other aspects of the game really matter if I’ve just lost interest in playing because of the poor quality of the Monolith system.
Shock wave on flurry is bugged and this impacts my experience considerably since i am a flurry main.
when shock wave is allocated on the rogue skill flurry, the hit box for doing the correct damage is very small. see
Our aim was to make the poll low lift while giving players the opportunity to share specifics with replies, which is frankly more important than anything. Us understanding what skills/passives impact your experience the most is what helps me take that information to the development team to prioritize fixes. Obviously, and I agree, we’d like all the bugs resolved. We’re trying to get there with a little help from you, our Travelers.
This a good call, I will add an Endgame poll as well. Very important. Big woopsie missing this one!
Skill issues impact - often. I’m playing offmeta builds from farest corners of Eterra. And every season several precrafted setups are dumped. ATM - 2 in a row, both are ghostflame/infernal shade necrotic+fire spell dot dmg, bugs and scaling problems in one pot
Some skills are screaming for revisiting, some unique affixes were never tested 
I REALLY like the playstyle of having a shuriken blade shield, ballistas, and lethal mirage. I use the blade shield almost like melee (run up to mobs to kill them, and move away or use Lethal Mirage if I need to heal), and drop ballistas for extra DPS (or be my only DPS) if I need to kite a boss, but I haven’t been able to find the right combination of skills/passives/gear to make this a viable build. It really struggles even at 100c.
I don’t know enough about the game to be able to answer the second question. I’ve asked for assistance with the build from people who know the game better, and they they’ve all pretty much said it’s not viable right now.
The only other builds I’ve played that could go past 200c were ones made by other people. I do sometimes wish there was some visual indicator that would help newbs like me know what nodes in the skill or passive trees that would work best with the nodes I’ve already selected. I’d rather rely more on guidance in-game than from 3rd party resources.
I get what you’re saying & the presence/absence of more multipliers is an issue with regard to balance. But removing them completely (which is effectively what changing them from multiplicative would do) feels like it’d be getting rid of a fairly fundamental part of arpgs. It’d be significantly easier to just make the numbers smaller on the more “problematic” skills & either add them to underpowered skills or make the ones that they do have larger.
Yeah, IMO, in a form, you’d be able to swap the human-form skills in so you can directly cast them if you don’t want to use a shapeshifted skill.
So you can still use expensive skills even if you don’t have the mana.
They want mana to be a resource you care about rather than something that you ignore like in PoE. But yes, lots of builds just find ways to ignore it.
Like Tornado, that the community voted as most wanted to see reworked, 6 years ago. The irony being that I think every other skill on that poll got reworked or touched since then…
Part 2 of wall of text. Acolyte is by far my most played class so I had a lot more to say about all the skills in it as I’ve tried to make every single one of them work at one point or another.
Massive identity crisis. Armblade slash, dive, and swarm strike all feel really good to use (visuals, sounds, ranges, timings, etc) but they have essentially zero support on the tree. The serpent strike tree is a bad joke for hit based setups (and swarmblade form really wants you to be going crit) The locust swarm is annoying to work with due to its hyper reliance on the bleed node + needing to micromanage the worst part of the entire form: locusts.
Locusts at baseline have 150% damage effectiveness 1.38/s default attacks. There is only one source of scaling for them and it does not change the damage (double damage, half max locusts). Both the locusts and the hives are far too squishy to use in any content. Anyone who is reading this, I challenge you to place down a hive during uber abberoth. See how many locusts it manages to spawn and how long those locusts survive even with tons of investment into minion defences.
I don’t know how to make swarmblade good, but I hate it as it is right now.
Some random locust related suggestions:
Walking tornado shaman was one of my least fav builds of S3. (20+ builds)
Ghost Flame warlock probably gonna be in same spot in S4. Sustain is good, but dmg is bad, esp single target. Weaker than Disintegrate sorc
I think the main issue right now is the insane gap in scaling between classes and builds.
A Falconer in random blue gear can smoothly kill Uber Abby while some other classes can’t reach even half that power with absurd investment. At that point it starts feeling like certain builds are just playing a different game.
You can also see it in class distribution. 39% of players are on Bladedancer after the rework, around 20% on Void Knight, and if you look at the few Necromancers pushing high corruption, almost all of them run the exact same Abomination setup with copy-pasted gear. That’s usually a sign that experimentation barely exists because most alternatives simply don’t scale enough to compete.
There’s where frustration for many people may start. Why struggle through every pack on one build when another build teleports around oneshotting the entire screen and melting bosses at the same time?
But there’s another side to it too. If your build already deletes Uber Abby instantly, what are you even farming for afterwards? There’s barely any motivation to gear another build when:
your current character already trivializes the game,
and most alternative builds feel dramatically worse instead of just different.
It won’t be fun for people who just oneshotted uber Abby to fight him with smth else for 10 minutes.
Another issue is how mandatory some item and skill interactions feel. Synergy is important, obviously, but some skills are so underwhelming on their own that they only function inside one specific setup. It stops feeling like build creation and starts feeling like solving a preset equation.
Also damage conversion is an interesting yet unfinished imo part of the game. For example there are some interesting uniques like Nightbringer which gives you extra void damage as a marksman, but you basically don’t have any ways to improve it further. None of the rogue’s skills can be converted to void, the only void affix you may apply to bow is void penetration.
I wish some items would get more love like Leviathan Carver, this weapon looks like a pure brutality, a badass two-handed sword similar to the one Guts from Berserk wielded. But if we look at unique 2h weapons, we almost every time choose world splitter because it has 3 mana scalings (which becomes even more sad because there are heavily mana dependant skills like smelter’s wrath or forge strike, which are clunky to use). Scalings like world splitter has, limits the usage of other items.
I’m not saying every build should be equal. Some builds being stronger is normal. But the gap right now is way too big. With growing upgrade mechanics like idol altars, corrupting items, future things, only really heavy invested characters should kill apex threats of the game easily and fast, and the balance gaps shouldn’t be that big.
Rampage from werebear form , stopping to every small pebble/rock/dent in the pavement . Annoying .
Bring back the days where skills like AoD actually did damage was 0.7 if i remember well . I want to see this kill uber aby as main source of damage.
The necromancer rework is just a joke at this point only abom is viable. To be honest some reword were no where the community wanted that mastery to be. And talking 1k corruption viable.
An 8 click poll is pretty low lift. A poll that doesn’t capture options a participant might select makes the polling seem low effort or isolates those people from participating. It’d be better to capture a more granular picture of the issues. If it resulted in less poll participation, I don’t think that’d be bad as you’d likely have more enthusiastic participants. You could get a better at a glance view of actionable items. Doing a small poll with options that aren’t clear and then asking for broader response I think makes things far muddier.
Another thing is the lack of clarity or effort in the poll makes people not want to participate in it or even further. Most of the replies I’ve seen are in response to the poll quality. Even being gracious and including most replies to this post it seems like less than 10% of poll participants even gave proper feedback.
Lastly, people are fatigued of giving feedback in long form. Expecting feedback in that manner is naive, imo. You’d be better off scouring the numerous posts, comments, videos, etc. that were made over the past 2-3 years as most of those issues remain. Prior CT feedback, reddit posts, feedback posts, suggestions, content creator videos are all great sources for this exact feedback.
Neither of locust swarm’s conversions work properly; the cold one has only been converting the physical half since 0.9 making it difficult to scale, and the minion one breaks all expected scaling (loses all attribute scaling, no longer gets any locust swarm damage modifiers from the skill tree).
Since locust swarm is my favorite skill in the game, this is what affects me most, but there are definitely tons of unintuitive behaviors that aren’t explained in game and many broken skill nodes as well. I don’t think I could list them all without significant effort, but I do bug report them as I find them. Seems hit-or-miss whether they get addressed.
Would have voted on all 4 options in first section if I could.
Skills I specifically use and would like looked at:
EXPLOSIVE TRAP TREE
1 - Explosive trap, you nerfed the acid flask chance from 100% to 10%. It’s no longer usable with acid flask.
2 - Explosive trap detonating arrow node - you capped it at 10 per 2 seconds. I have tested last 2 seasons extensively with awesome gear it’s just no longer playable. You nerfed this same time as eye of reen which was the issue causing old builds to be over powered. You should remove the cap and this skill will NOT be over powered but will once again be fun to play and potentially end game viable
3 - Explosive trap even with -10 or -12 throwing reduction still needs to be about 8 mana less in cost.
HAMMER THROW TREE
1 - the bottom left is useless. Ignite nodes on the tree are terrible too they should be replaced with bleed nodes. Very high chance, phys pene/damage nodes - the bottom left of the tree should be all bleed and the stun stuff should be moved to the right more.
2 - most people love to play bleed with this skill as do i but there are no bleed related nodes in the tree and sentinel has them spread out in pally and FG.
3 - spiral hammers are fun and great early game, converted to bleed later are good you can scale pretty high but bossing is terrible with hammer even using echoes. Would be cool to see the damage nodes pushed a lot higher in the tree, especially compared to shield throw bleed which applies over 10k bleeds on a dummy vs hammers which do 1000-1500.
4: The void aura for 2 seasons I have tried to scale this even with crazy imprinted items last season it’s just kinda meh. Not sure why it’s there.
RIVE
1 - dmg effectiveness needs to be about 250% not 125.
2 - Rive needs its base crit as a whole not for each strike
3 - Rive needs more AOE - compare it to ES and WP which have 10x the AOE and tons more damage and more specific gear for builds. They map better they boss better they level better people quit rive this season because of omen windows being insane to do with rive.
4 - Rives node that doubles dmg with a 2H should also be the same with dual weild I am sick of having to use 2H for certain skills when dual is so cool
SHIELD THROW
1 - Needs more pure phys nodes on the right. Fire damage with this skill is far to strong and if we play it as classic shield throw there’s no comparison. I would love the top left gone as the only node people use is 1 point to bounce shield off allies.
2 - The top left should be replaced with pure physical nodes like the bottom left has tons of fire dmg. Top left should be phys pene, pure phys for throwing etc.
3 - When you throw your shield you lose 20 resistances is CRAZY no other class/skill in the game has anything this wild, why is it even a thing? My shield doesnt give me +20 when I’m holding it why would it take -20 when I throw it?
4 - MOST IMPORTANT ASKED FOR A YEAR - please make shield throw, once pierced ricochet off terrain. The new idols are a good start but terrain is vital for single target and would be amazing for positioning bosses in fights like abby/uber near walls where they always end up.
ACID FLASK
1 - Poision flask is a joke. I have posted threads and suggestions about this. Poision puddles only works with traps, you nerfed traps. It’s no longer playable and even when it was it was so weak you didn’t want to use it. The whole poision tree needs re-doing. Tons more chance, more speed to apply, more dmg.
2 - Poision effect, plague bearer staff - plague - that melting effect is how poison should look from acid flask, its how it looks in POE2 from Poison concotion which is the same thing. There I can clear all content and bosses but here it’s some forgotten skill you convert to fire only because as usual you’ve made fire stronger than all other elements.
3 - Redo poison flask or rename it fireflask, honestly. Un-nerf poision and make it able to melt enemies and clear all content. Needs big aoe, spreading effect, flat dmg for initial hits, much higher dots, more applications etc
SMELTERS WRATH/FORGE STRIKE/PASSIVE TREE
1 - I have seen a lot of chat about these in game and on forums/reddit and the majority of people seem to dislike these skills as do I. FG is this 2H weilding tank class that should have massive MELEE attacks not some casting anvil from the sky POE2 lameness or some weird channelling caster type skill. BIG melee/aoe/high damage skills should be there.
2 - Manifest armor is slow and clunky, dies a lot and does average damage when compared to other minions. It needs a lot of love. Its weapon should scale off ALL weapons FG uses and get to use special affixes on those weapons. This should be at an amplified % of the weapon. It needs more survivablity.
3 - FG passive tree is horrible. It needs 2H multipliers for damage. 2H and shield needs to have haste to block REMOVED. It shouldn’t slow attack speed. It should be FULL effect as per normal. FG - 1% of people play it you know this. Its because its other classes are so much better. More dmg multipliers, leech, attack speeds etc.
4 - FG needs more damage nodes. Less block nodes. Crit/attackspeed/dmg with 2Hers.
ROGUE SKILLS
Flurry / Puncture - both seem in need of a refresh for more build options.
It’s good to see these kinds of posts popping up. The dev team should really be doing this every season just to see if something you weren’t aware of is posted.
I’m commenting specifically on the acolyte since I gave up on it at some point in season 2 because many of the minions were too frail and died to everything even in early corruption. The changes you made to necromancer minions don’t look like much when we read it on the patch notes, but when you actually play the game, the difference is huge. You can take summon skeletons to 1k corruption now. I just beat Aberroth this week with summon skeletons and unimpressive gear. Honestly, I couldn’t believe it. The changes you made didn’t seem like they would be big enough when reading the patch notes. So good job with that.
A suggestion for the future, in this topic and on the forums, you can find people saying necromancer minions are shit. This isn’t the case anymore, yet people still say it. When you make future balance changes and those changes aren’t being accepted as being enough on the forums. Show some videos with the changed skills in action, explain the different build types that will be able to work. Try to help and educate the naysayers. If you fix a problem but public perception is that the problem isn’t fixed, does it matter that you fixed it?
Wandering Spirits
Transplant
Summon Volatile Zombie
Hungering Souls
Summon Bone Golem
Spirit Plague
Infernal Shade
Summon Skeletal Mage
Sacrifice
Summon Wraith
Drain Life
Aura of Decay
Soul Feast
Chthonic Fissue
Reaper Form
Assemble Abomination
Dread Shade
Bone Curse
General
My gripes with skills so far…