I have never played cookie cutter builds. I don’t play them in PoE and I try not to play them here. However in PoE when I do an odd build with more fringe mechanics everything always works.
In this cess pool of code nightmares and game design almost nothing works as described on the node tooltips.
Step 1: Decide not to play a top 10 build and actually use your brain.
Step 2: Respec into the nodes and spend 30 minutes changing your item filters and gear.
Step 3: Realize that none of them do what they say on the tooltip
Step 4: Figure out through trial and error which exact node doesn’t work and remove point(s)
Step 5: Spend 20 minutes with a gimped character running mono to regain lost points
Step 6: Reassign points to a different node.
Step 7: realize none of them work either.
Step 8: Repeat steps 4-7 until you give up.
Step 8: Quit the game forever.
Example 1: [Primalist] [Eterra’s Blessing] Soul Bound node says when eterras blessing is cast on your spriggan companion you both recieve increased spell buff for 4 seconds.
There are multiple ways to cast eterras blessing indirectly and if you do you don’t get the buff.
Example 2: Jhakarts Blast Knife - Explosive trap doesn’t attach to enemies even though it is supposed to be a melee skill.
Yes, these are two small examples that I can remember most recently but I could write an entire spreadsheet on the broken/not working/messy tooltips and interactions in this game.
Why do some skill nodes say “When cast directly” on the tooltip, when others are hidden and only show when you hold down ALT, and others don’t mention a damn thing about it needing to be directly cast???
Everything about this game is clunky and messy. The optimization is horrible. Most of the skill nodes make absolutely 0 sense like spending a point to only cast something on your self when you can literally use a hotkey to do the same exact thing.
There is a reason Path of Exile puts special skill interactions attached only to unique items and not directly on your passive tree. Think hard about that and decide
What types of interactions should be specific to a skill tree
What interactions should be specific to items
and what buffs/interactions should be only on the passive tree.
Side note: Ward bars on bosses and rare monsters is beyond stupid. You literally brought the parts of PoE (AN) that people complained about for years and somehow made it even worse all the while you have a dead endgame with 0 content and decide instead of actually adding something fun you spend 6 months making a useless dodge roll that doesn’t even dodge and lags your character every time it’s pressed. Waste of time playing this game.
Example 1 could be a bug, or it could be the tooltip needs updating to “when you directly use…” report it just in case.
Example 2 is, and someone correct me if I’m wrong, because while Detonating Arrow doesn’t require a bow anymore and is considered melee for scaling purposes, it doesn’t gain a melee tag. If it DOES gain a melee tag and the attaching a trap doesn’t work. Then it’s a bug and you should report it.
Yes, there are absolutely bugged iterations that need updated, but because a lot of people use cookie cutter builds, they don’t get reported and don’t get fixed. I found a bugged interaction with Macabre Waltz for Summon Skeletal Mage yesterday. Just report it so the devs are aware and can fix it lol. No need for rage.
It does gain the melee tag, and the item explicitly says the initial hit from Detonating Arrow becomes a melee attack.
But last time I tried, it did work with the “Hold This” node in the Explosive Trap tree.
Thank you both for correcting me like I asked lol. The weapon indeed says it becomes a melee attack, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the scaling changed while the tags didn’t. Based on Llama’s response it seems to be a recent bug and was working before.
Detonating Jelkhor’s marksman was super popular and people thought it was just overtuned but turned out to have some really weird bugs under the hood.
A lot of things are also really difficult to test. I feel like Howl of Might in Summon Wolf (buffs damage of wolves that have howled recently) is not working but there’s no indicator or buff icon so I can’t tell which wolf has howled recently. Since Howl itself boosts damage and the node has a base more damage as well, its really weird to test even on the dummies considering conditional damage modifiers like armor shred, shock, etc.
Yeah, guilty but also a lot of things its hard to test if its a bug or working as intended. In the same vein some things are worded weirdly so it is unsure.
Like, I raised this: Holy Trail and Siege Barrage
a year ago(and 2 more reports) and it got cleared up now that its intended from a reddit comment by devs.
Also with the ingame bug reporting Idk what happens is it a ticket? is it being looked at? there’s no record or list of bugs being investigated. So do our reports even do anything?
The description says “your wolves howl”, so they should all Howl, no? Even if not, you can simply summon just one wolf. And then you can tell everything from the damage numbers.
You’d remove the conditionals like Shred etc. for the test.
Then you note down three numbers:
Damage after using Howl, but 0 points in Howl of Might. (+25% from Howl effect)
You put 4 points into Howl of Might, don’t use Howl, and note the damage after putting the points in (+40% from passive points). This tests the passive effect.
Now you use Howl and note the damage with everything active (+25% from Howl and +120% from tripled passive combined). This tests the triple effect works.
The increase between 2 → 3 should be much bigger than the increase in steps 1 → 2 Of course, you can also use math to make sure.
I don’t think this is the case since then Swipe(procing nearest companion ability and healing to full) should be healing all the wolves.
Remove all gear, remove all passives, then do testing. If it works yay, the damage is just underwhelming. If it doesn’t give up on it till bugfixed which is who knows when.
Maybe, I’m just being jaded/burnt out but this wouldn’t be needed if they just made it simpler with a buff icon or merged it with Howl (like Snarl passive does).
“Recently” in LE means “in the last 4 seconds” so take one wolf to the arena without the node and a spare point. Track 10 hits before howl, 10 hits during howl, 10 hits after howl. Then spend the point, repeat the test and see if the damage numbers went up from the first test during/after howl.
Edit: I see this was addressed. I jumped the gun lol.
I agree this is a problem. A simple “thank you for your report, we’ll look into it” from a team member would be helpful. Like your bug report about Javelin and mine about Skeletal Mage’s have no dev replies, so I don’t know if they saw it.
I also don’t want to play what everyone else plays. It just seems like an easy mode. It’s more fun to find something strong on your own, but the combinations don’t allow it.
This is a big problem for people who are trying out different things. Leveling the skills again is big waste of time just at the end to see that they don’t work as you imagined them, or are not as strong as you thought they would be.
Completely agree. They should do a rollback and make the mobs and bosses as they were instead of this ward bs.
There’s a lot of them.
Either it’s not specified.
It’s hidden.
It’s bugged.
The language is confusing which puts the subject last. Like “Thorn Totems benefits all healing totems.” I’m not sure on the exact wording, but in essence at a first read skimming through it. Instead of just writing it directly. “Healing totems benefit from passives in Thorn Totem.”
It’s a misuse of the word benefit. There are other examples.
When you spend hours trying to make your own build, and are constantly hindered by stupid game design, bugs, improperly explained things, you get to a point where you just want to vent. It’s not the players fault, nor is it their responsibility to test the game for the devs. They should’ve released a working game to begin with. This type of mentality is the reason behind the rage, justified in this game.
Tooltips should have never been a problem to begin with. Just hire someone to play the game and test the skills interactivity to see what goes where and then translate them.
Why do you allow this type of bs? Players shouldn’t be “testing” the game nor waste their time writing and posting pictures and explaining what works what doesn’t work.
It’s nice to gulp on the money they get but they can’t spend some to a dedicated team of people who will play and find these bugs?
On top of what Llama already said, you have cases where neither the devs nor the players realize there’s an issue until the node is used. Take, for example, exploding ballistas. A single error in the scaling formula for that node in the code caused it to go from correctly scaling area to incorrectly scaling radius. This made the explosions exponentially larger than they should have been, A=πr² after all. So instead of A×1.04, we got A=π(r×1.04)².
Until players used this and the devs said “wait a minute… Something ain’t right.” the error, which again was one line of code, wouldn’t have been caught.
Players help test games all the time. We’re not living in the age of cartridges and CD Roms that can’t be patched
If they paid someone to beta test this as they should’ve to begin with, and use ALL OF THE SKILLS and their interactions, this error would’ve been found out.
You need 1-2 people per class. The best part? It’s a one time thing! You don’t have to retain them forever! Give them god mode, level them to max with cheats, and give them a testing environment in which they can play around with the builds. How long do you think they’ll need to work to go through every viable combination? Week? Two weeks at most.
Don’t tell me about scale. You’re thinking in player perspective. With cheats they won’t have to waste time leveling or finding items.
You’re excusing bad practices. Do what you want. But don’t turn it around on the players as IF ITS THEIR DUTY to report this shit.
Howl says “your wolves howl”, but Primal Resosnance says “your nearest companion … is restored to full health.”
So no, it should not be healing all the wolves, only the nearest one. But it should still make all wolves Howl, per the Howl’s description.
It is their/our duty to report this shit. Dude, you must be insane to think that even the most rigorous testing will catch 100% of issues. Players are the last line of defense in the testing process, and testing doesn’t stop before launch, it’s an ongoing process because things will change and need to be fixed.
Even Square Enix and Blizzard with the two most successful MMORPGs of all time and have the money to pay full time testers have bug fixes weekly/monthly and looooong “known issues” sections.
Players have a duty to report any bugs that will slip through any testing that is done.
I don’t know what to tell you.
There was time when games did exactly that, and the bugs that slipped through could be counted on one hand. Now it’s an entire gallery.
When ff14 came out ARR, there weren’t this many bugs, and the bugs were mostly quest related not skill bugs, and there was no weird translation bs. It just goes to show that it can be done. Some companies did it, some didn’t, they saw they can get away with it, and they keep doing it because we as players allow it.
IF ARR had that many bugs as you describe it, the game would’ve died on the spot given the debacle 1.0 had.
Also I didn’t say don’t report bugs. I said it’s not our duty to spend more of our time for what the company needs to be doing. I said DON’T USE THIS AS A SWORD against players. Like the person above did
This would not be a thing if they actually did minimal QA testing. That means actually using the functionality they created, at least once.
If this happened, there wouldn’t be obvious bugs like like Synthesis of Light from Healing Hands tree, or the very recent “Warpath echoes only deal damage if you stand nearby” issue.
They supposedly have an internal QA department, and even a closed group of community testers since 2022 (source), but I really have to question wtf is this QA department doing, and if this community group even exists or does anything at all.
Please don’t tell me you’re referring to the cartridge/CD era because I can literally find you examples of hundreds of bugs for most of those games. And if you’re referring to more modern games, I can, again, easily point out games like… Any Bethesda game, that are so broken the players had to fix it with mods.
Of course, you can also use math to make sure.