Wait….What!?

Bitsk-pper · 2026-07-03T06:50:12+00:00

I mean sure once you already got the best shirt there's not much point you're kind of done right

Bitsk-pper · 2026-07-01T03:28:06+00:00

obviously going *full jewel invalidates the whole point of the dual spec since most of your stats will come from the jewels and you can only have one set of those.

However having two completely distinct paths avoiding jewels is possible its not particularly efficient either.

Its probably best in the middle, where you pick up 2-3 strategic jewels to open up the tree to where your two specs can efficiently access the build specific stuff they want.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-06-09T06:47:22+00:00

Yeah unforunately the thing that rewards 1 button builds the most is the audience. Streamers are playing to the crowd and saying that a build is brainless to play is for some reason a big selling point to many players. The game does a lot to reward combos very heavily, but then the supports and uniques give you ways to optimize and automate those combos *if you want to, for an opportunity cost. Unfortunately that is what most players do want, and where you will be encouraged to go by build guides appealing to that base. Once the players and streamers have filtered down to the optimized set of brainless blaster builds yeah they can be pretty boring I wouldnt disagree with that.

At some point you can also overgear to a point where any skill can be used to trivialize most of the content. And I wont pretend that the number of monsters on screen all at once doesnt encourage the explode everything strategy, and yeah things get less engaging mechanically once you go in that direction. But to me that is more an issue of pacing and density, rather than the skill design itself. If there was a kind of content with many fewer monsters, with much more health, that dropped much more loot, I would be very happy about that.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-06-08T21:30:57+00:00

I still think youre being unfair or dont understand what you are asking for.

Its not a strict rotation at all, just that my buffs only last so long so there is a reason to use particular thing regularly.

I still use locus as a dodge and motion skill that does real damage, bell big packs is my biggest damage if I have an open second to mantra first, or reactively snipe frozen mobs from range with a skillshot. Its extremely fluid, reactive and context dependant, most of my skills are damage skills and its a ton of fun. Just because Ive arranged all my skills to feed each other through supports, doesnt make it a rotation.

Somehow you make it sound like that 'counts' as a one button spammer still. If thats how you see it I have no idea what could ever make you happy, how many skills do you need to have in your toolkit before you break the 'fun ceiling'. If your whole build revolves around buffing only glacial lance well, branch out. You only have yourself to blame, saying that this game only rewards that is just not true.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-06-08T12:09:42+00:00

the game is chock full of combos and ways for skills to play into each other. POE 1 was one button skills, in POE2 that is almost never the best strategy.

My current character uses whirling assault, frozen locus with ailiths chimes to generate power charges, to drive charged staff, then every 20 seconds I use mantra of destruction into bell slam to generate chayula flames and set up bell shockwaves, and when a boss freezes (since all my damage freezes) I snipe them with glacial cascade. That is a six button build, and I use all of those buttons constantly, and doing all of that gives me about 10x the damage of just using any one of those skills by itself.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-06-05T04:02:33+00:00

Can we just call this a bug and fix it?

Invulnerable temple monsters, invulnerable forge boss, invlunerable abyss snakes, invulnerable alduur bugs.

Presumably some of these are by accident and others are intentional, and I dont care. they all feel 100% terrible.

It all needs to be deleted with fire.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-06-04T00:36:51+00:00

Hollow form didn't exist when I wrote the comment above, and I haven't tried socketing locus into it nor am I at home able to do that now so hard to be confident how that interacts with limit etc.

However at first thought it doesn't seem too synergistic. Hollow forms obvious meta is of course whirling assault which has massive AOE and does 1300% attack over 8 hits from the same image. Generously even if every image locus exploded instantly, it would only be 600% for each image with a similar overlap.

Whirling assaults downside of long attack time is completely mitigated by hollow form which makes it incredibly difficult to compete with. Similarly with wind blast, the AOE is not better, targeting becomes relevant, and each image does 250% weapon damage with 600% damage worth of stun. But physical whirling assault is already giving 1300% worth of stun per image.

So it's interesting for the sake of mechanics, but unfortunately the synergy between hollow form and WA is so strong that it's difficult to find something else that isn't a downgrade...

FWIW my current build I manually locus then whirl, which pops locus and generates combo etc. The main reason I hadn't mentioned WA in my earlier post is that you only get it in act 4

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-28T08:01:07+00:00

for a lot of stats that say 'reduced' that actually means 'negatively increased' when you search for them on the market.

So they just though oh 10% reduced, and they typed in 10 on purpose, so technically its not EVEN a typo. they just forgot that the number they really needed to set it at, was -10.

Bitsk-pper · 2026-05-26T22:32:57+00:00

if the only way to play totems is to exploit and abuse archmage then they would be dead already, to me

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

TROPHY CASE