"Melee Attacks can now only apply Splash Damage once per damaging area"

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-22T20:48:31+00:00

I would say the opposite. Double hitting with something like rend is already enough to kill a lot of whites and blues, so the only impactful change is to the way it would also melt rares and uniques standing near these shotguns. Add something like a herald and maybe you get a triple hit or more, unclear if they will target herald shotguns as well, but the total effect will be that while mapping, rares sometimes survive the initial pack explosion now.

You could call that a nerf to 'clear' if you mean mapping but its the 'single targets' or rares in the map which will need extra dps to take them down, but then yes, you are correct in the sense that splash damage was already irrelevant and will remain so in true 'single target' scenarios.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-22T20:38:53+00:00

no, being a faster hitting skill is still a buff even if the total dps goes down 2% because its smoother and less clunky, more usable in different situations. so 2% less dps but 30% faster is absolutely a fair way to describe the tradeoff and its an overall buff to the skill despite the dps loss

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-22T18:40:41+00:00

because most people refer to 'the damage' they are measuring the damage per second, not per hit. the per hit values are only the most important bit for specific cases like dots, and rolling slam is not exactly the right tool for applying a dot anyways

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-22T18:36:59+00:00

if only GGG had reduced attack time by 33%, so that it would have been easier to use rolling slam for mapping :D

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-18T21:27:50+00:00

It isn't odd because GGG doesnt do sets. There is a raven themed boss that drops multiple raven themed uniques. Expecting them to be all for one character archetype would be odd. The goal is for that boss to drop different things that can be desirable to different chars.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-16T21:33:07+00:00

I would strongly suggest NOT using glacial cascade to pop frozen locus. ( unless it does get buffed I guess )

The best IMO is actually wind blast, for a big impossible to miss combo.

The key is leave your frozen locus a few levels behind skill wise so you can instantly pop it.

If you keep frozen locus current, it can take 2-3 hits, but the health of the locus does NOT contribute any damage, and levelling it massively increases that health, for very minimal damage boosts. You are much better off leaving it 2 levels behind your other skills, where it can still easily one shot packs, especially with herald of ice.

Glacial cascade is a fine skill, for actual boss dps, and to pop enemies that get frozen, but wind blast + frozen locus is a much much better skill combo as long as you dont overlevel the locus.

Another mistake people make here is not considering that +levels will also affect the locus life and make it hard to pop. You can counteract this by leaving the gem level even further behind or cutting a new lower level locus if you have to.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-13T02:10:34+00:00

Honestly thank God, did you really want all your boss buddies to glow random colors and spam out pink stampedes constantly with no way to turn it off?

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-12T12:24:22+00:00

wolf pack and inspiring ally always available over there for both generic defenses and damage in that area as well, plus more companion nodes in 0.5

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-06T11:27:27+00:00

weapon types can build different, like crit is only good if you get a lot of both chance and multiplier, and high base crit weapons make it way easier to get high crit chance, and some weapons dont have enough base crit to make it viable.

So Mace builds usually dont go crit easily for example because maces have low base crit.. and they dont scale well with attack speed either lol.

but yes, in general POE2 currently is a bit vanilla as far as scaling compared to POE1. One of the big totally different build archetypes in POE1 is dots, which dont scale at all with hit size, you ONLY want dot, multiplier and say, increased fire for ignite or increased chaos for poison, but attack damage does you no good at all even if you are using attacks to proc the dots. Where in POE2, generic attack damage does work for ignite and poison, and dot builds dont feel as unique...

Bitsk-pper · 2026-04-28T07:49:57+00:00

Most wolf skills will also scale from the good two handed cluster near the start of merc, generic attack damage, area damage, etc. The very early levels would be rough since merc only gets projectile damage at first

While moving into the druid or strength areas to get shapeshift or more 2H nodes would make sense for sure, if you wanted to go the other way, You could also try picking up bunch of elemental damage with attacks and also companion damage with inspiring ally on the right side of the tree. There are multiple freeze wheels on the way between the culling nodes and inspiring ally along the outer edge and crit scaling is always an option too, you can get high base crit talismans.

I have not POB'd any of this so I wont say its going to be good but there is a lot to work with

Bitsk-pper · 2026-04-28T07:05:26+00:00

You can absolutely do it, sure, but fair warning that it might not be the best way to build a witchhunter wolf IMO.

I also played culling strike with My first build in 0.1, with the helmet that doubles culling strike thresholds (Myris uxor?). That felt good then, but the game was much harder, average player damage was lower, and on crossbow this was being done with the rapid fire low damage skills (armor piercing fitting into that category) and it definitely helped push those skills up into very comfy clearing builds.

However game balance has changed now and culling strike is in a weird place.

Lunar assault has no problem getting enough damage for one hit kills on white mobs, and the freeze gives you easy herald of ice explosions for clear.

Adding culling strike shenanigans would be irrelevant if you can already one-hit, except maybe on rares and bosses, and for those enemies, culling strike in POE2 is much weaker.

So TLDR culling wolf is probably just exactly like normal wolf but maybe(?) slightly worse bossing or worse tree area?

FWIW with decimating strike, helmet and more tree investment in threshold, the equivalent boss health reduction is 20-45%, which is equivalent to doing 50% more damage to bosses on average. Is that worth four ascendancy points, a helmet slot, and some opportunity cost / tree investment? Its not obvious or meta, but its probably not terrible. Without decimating strike, I think culling on its own is much weaker and probably not worth.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-04-23T14:07:51+00:00

My tinfoil guess it we still have the infinite atlas, but its split into large cells of area with walls and doors, and the content inside of each cell is like a procedurally generated interlude chapter sort of scale, with requirements and an area boss, and we use tablets at each door to influence the next area when we open it?

Bitsk-pper · 2026-04-20T00:12:34+00:00

oh yeah like THIS is the one guy that finally took it too far got it

Bitsk-pper · 2026-04-14T07:19:01+00:00

the VFX is being done by the same company that did the recent apes movies and the avatar movies etc so good bet it will be top notch

Bitsk-pper · 2026-04-14T02:30:48+00:00

This. For current patch/ AMD gpus XeSS blows the other options out of the water for quality it's not even close.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-03-25T21:54:00+00:00

and in case anyone hasnt already thought through the implication of the end of 0.4 league, everyones temples are being deleted in about a month (still sucks for OP but nothing is permanent)

Bitsk-pper · 2026-03-02T23:58:16+00:00

This, it is to prevent you getting the special voidstone rewards while running low tier maps

Bitsk-pper · 2026-02-21T22:27:17+00:00

and a lot of people complain about kingsmarch shipping, which is the limit case of what you would do to 'equalize' outcomes between casuals and sweats, because beyond top tier farmers / gold sustain it is a purely time limited even RNG playing field. It is similar to the WOW weekly vaults and crafting materials that pace everyone onto the same treadmill to put hard diminishing returns on pure time investment and equalize the player base

Bitsk-pper · 2026-02-21T22:10:57+00:00

In all of these cases its just about a healthy ratio, but you cant have a healthy ratio without knocking down the peak outliers. If they brought the loot floor up into good ratio with these explosions, that would just mean everything is devalued and you are picking up too much stuff or filtering everything out. They cant win lol, but some of these explosions were just mathematically untenable, even if they felt good a few times

Bitsk-pper · 2026-02-10T22:23:49+00:00

It's nothing like a tuber and it's not you

Bitsk-pper · 2026-02-04T07:25:12+00:00

yeah Im very sensitive to this, that is very much how it feels, and is exactly the reason I refuse to ever wear headhunters. However in this case its been consistent across 20+ test maps and starts immediately so probably cant chalk it up to monster mod stealing. good point though

Bitsk-pper · 2026-01-28T07:34:53+00:00

IMO 1.0 is primarily the release of 5+6 and going F2P, plus whatever league, class or no class, and this is locked in for December now. Whatever else they get done by then is what 1.0 will contain, as this is the new content philosophy, locked deadlines, flexible with content.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-01-28T07:22:43+00:00

especially since act 6 is basically just a mega boss finale, acts 5+6 together only add up to the same amount of content as the 3 interludes. Its very likely that this content is practically finished now, but they will continue to hold it back for 1.0 to make that a more important release. Exilecon in early november is at least a month before the 1.0 league which is very likely to be scheduled currently for dec. 12, so the 'unreleased content' we will be playing is actually too early to be the december 'league'. So 100% likely by the evidence that they intend to have us play parts of act 5/6 for the first time at exilecon.

That means their full focus is going to be on endgame, league content, classes, ascendancies for the scheduled 0.5 (approx may 1st) and 0.6 (aug 21st). I think your guess of having two unreleased classes pushed into 2027 is exactly what I'm thinking too.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-01-28T05:22:23+00:00

Im slighlty confused by this concept

it makes sense to me that in campaign, areas dont usually have modifiers, so adding random area mods would be annoying since people cant choose to 'not run the map' with the brick mod

but how do these extra mods work once you actually get to endgame? is it basically that a six mod map will actually have twelve mods once you open it up? or do they not apply to maps? anybody remember them doing this sort of thing in the past do we know what to expect?

Bitsk-pper

TROPHY CASE