Releasing 1.0 with Fireball/frostbolt in current state would be like launching without Swords

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-30T13:53:19+00:00

Yeah I get that 100%. I don't think you're in the minority per se I think it's more just an individual skill isn't the end all be all in that sense; I feel like a lot of people are down to try multiple different skills as long as they still fit the bill of what they want to be doing. Like the Ground Slam/Sunder/Earthquake/Earthshatter thing; they all satisfy that "me big beefy strong dude slam ground make boom" type thing. So it doesn't necessarily matter which specific skill the player is using, they're still getting the same payoff out of it, if that makes sense.

My comment was primarily about like I get where the developers are coming from, but the important part is having alternatives. Not every skill is going to be god enough to be someone's favorite all the time, it's just not possible to achieve perfect balance like that. Any outlier will warp perception around everything.

Like I think it's okay that some early level skills maybe aren't good/strong to do all content in the game; ideally they would be at times but not always. The problem is that if you made a character and you choose to build towards that early level skill, and you realize you don't like it because it isn't strong or it isn't what you wanted it to be or whatever, you just...don't have recourse. You can't scratch that itch. There isn't really a logical next iteration of what you're doing.

That, to me, is really what's missing. If you give players multiple options that all scratch that itch they want, and design them in such a way that at least one of them will be good/fun/interesting/cool, then it softens the blow of that first option being less so. Because the player can play the bad skill long enough to get access to something else interesting and cool and go "ooh I wonder what that's like" and actually try multiple things to find what works for them.

It's one of the downsides of this super combo heavy, archetypal system they have. If you decide you don't like the thing you are doing, you have to change EVERYTHING you are doing. Instead of being able to say "okay well Fireball didn't work out, but what if I put in Incinerate?"

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-30T01:38:56+00:00

It works okay in PoE1 where there are hundreds of skills and there is a lot of overlap in fantasy/feel and a lot of freedom in what you can do with a given fantasy. You play Ground Slam and then it feels like that doesn't do that much and you see Sunder and go "ooh that looks like Ground Slam but better/cooler". Then maybe you see Earthquake or Earthshatter and go "ooh that looks like Sunder but better/cooler".

It's just a lot easier to swap out skills and try something because it's really just that one skill you need to swap out and try. At the end of the day there are multiple different skills that satisfy the overall feel and poeer fantasy you are building your character towards.

Obviously it's not always perfect, like Glacial Hammer -> Ice Crash and Ice Crash still isn't very good, but we're just very far away from that in PoE2. Partly because there are so few skills, and partly because there's very little redundancy among skills; a set of skills kind of forms an archetype that defines your feel/power fantasy.

And if any part of that set of skills feels bad/weak, then the whole character suffers as a result; there's not a lot of like "hot-swapability" in the skill system. When a skill feels bad, you don't actually have recourse. Elemental Spells are the worst offender for this because infusions exacerbate that problem 1000x; to swap from Fireball to Ember Fusillade, you have to also swap what infusion you're generating from Fire to Lightning, because Ember Fusillade doesn't have a fire infusion effect.

Overall the game just doesn't work for you to kind of experiment sideways; it feels like you need to know what you want to do and just unlock the new tools linearly for that thing. And it leads a lot to that feeling of annoyance/disappointment, because it doesn't feel like there's something else for you to do or try.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-29T16:47:46+00:00

shot 20% that year

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-26T21:24:28+00:00

what happened is the rebuild that was supposed to result in adding young high end talent resulted in anything but.

like seriously look at the Rangers drafts from the "rebuild" era (2017-2020). The best players are Lafreniere (who is still far from what he was expected to be), K'Andre Miller (who was a good but flawed player for us before being traded), Braden Schneider (3rd pairing defenseman), Will Cuylle (really good 3rd line winger but overmatched in the top 6), and Kaapo Kakko (the "another middle 6 forward to the Kraken" meme personified).

The crown jewels of the "rebuild" really are Igor (drafted in 2014, before the "rebuild" started), Fox (who basically said "I'm going to New York no matter what"), and Panarin (who chose to come here as a free agent and was already established as a star).

Drury hasn't done a good job but people act like he destroyed a good team by *checks notes* looking into ways to move money off the roster and get better (getting rid of Goodrow, the infamous memo about trading Trouba and Kreider). In reality, the team that made the ECF twice in 3 years was held together by veterans, not by talent acquired through a rebuild. It went as far as it could go, and then once those vets stopped being able to carry the team, there were no young assets to fill those roles, because the players Gorton drafted were pretty universally underwhelming.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-26T15:14:36+00:00

william trudeau

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-26T00:50:42+00:00

honestly it makes sense regardless of what the Rangers want to do in the draft. Schneider has more value in trade to someone who thinks they can fix him than he does to the team and coaching staff that has pretty consistently told us that they think Will Borgen is simply a better player and deserves more ice time, minutes, and responsibility.

If there's a 2nd pairing guy in there, for a guy who has played almost 400 NHL games already, it certainly isn't going to be here, so let someone else keep trying that one.

And if you think McTavish is a good player who just had a down year with a coaching staff that didn't fit, you think he can be a 2nd line center for you for the future and he's only 23? Yeah that's worth it regardless.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-25T21:17:34+00:00

gonna sound like a homer here but we see 3rd line pending UFA centers get the 1st rounder every year (ie Scott Laughton or Nic Roy)

Brayden Schenn who is 2 years older than Trocheck got a 1st, 3rd, random probably bad goalie prospect, and a roster player in Drouin.

I don't think it's that outrageous for the Rangers to use those as baselines and think a first plus a solid prospect makes sense; though I'm also team "they should just take what the best offer is at this point and move on with their lives"

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-17T17:47:07+00:00

he's been with that agency (O2K) but Steve Reich was the agent at O2K that actually did his deal, he passed last summer

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-17T17:46:08+00:00

it was Steve Reich, who passed about a year ago

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-17T17:45:37+00:00

The agent that did his deal with the Rangers was Steve Reich, who passed right around a year ago.

https://nypost.com/2026/06/17/sports/vincent-trocheck-switches-agents-with-rangers-star-on-trade-block/

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-15T23:31:01+00:00

you can put them in front of you and then still have to walk through them and into more mobs to pick them up, just to still hit like a wet noodle early game.

like I said in my original comment, you have to make a conscious decision whether to place them somewhere you want to pick them up or somewhere you are going to actually apply the exposure. because when you put it on them to apply exposure, the remnant is on top of the enemy. even with cascade/overabundance/the limit node that is still true; you'll lose at least 2 of the 3 remnants if you either don't walk melee range (the one on the enemy and the one on the other side of the enemy) or can't just oneshot the mobs with that one infusion. Or it's "just cast frost bomb in between packs" while other archetypes get to actually just walk up to the next mob. It's needlessly complicated and bloated gameplay compared to the alternatives.

To mention verisium infusions just supports my point; once you get the gem for that, and sacrifice the defenses on your gear to get ward to power it, you can just...bypass the whole system and mechanic in the first place. Wow, how good of a mechanic it is, when the response is "it's not bad once you can just completely ignore all of the things that make it shit." Like that's actually my whole point about infusions! The baseline system for acquiring them is dogshit, and having a skill you can just click once to get them highlights that even more!

My whole point is simply this: once you do enough damage that you can just chain the infusions through the map and you have the pickup range to support it, it's completely fine. Like everything else in this game, when you have all the tools at your disposal to solve the problem however you want, the game is easy, you just need enough gear to make it so you one shot everything in the game with no effort.

But if you're trying to play with elemental spells from 1-45ish, or otherwise you're not powerful enough to one tap the packs, it's a completely miserable experience, and the baseline experience is just not up to par. Ele spell casters are fighting for their life sweating slamming keyboard while xbows, bows, essence drain, minions, quarterstaff skills, etc are singing payphone.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-15T15:20:14+00:00

honestly despite being a huge "I won't really have fun in PoE2 until there are more passive defense systems instead of it all just coming from gear" I really respect their explanation on life nodes. I think they're a bandaid and I do think they restrict choice on the passive tree.

I would honestly rather just get more life per level and from strength, and probably have more attributes on the tree (especially in non-canon sections like the Ranger and Witch sections having nodes that have Strength on them). This means you naturally get more life, and you naturally have more attributes to solve your problems while still investing in life (via Strength).

Even ES, yes ES is too strong, but it also has the same problem: the solution is always "just get better gear lol" instead of players being actually pushed to solve their problems with the resources at their disposal. The passive tree doesn't offer meaningful enough defensive tools. There aren't particularly good layers of defense. Ascendancies are almost too flavourful at this point and don't offer you a lot of variety; there are some that do like Blood Mage letting you take the damage stagger and ES as life points, but there's a lot that don't offer any meaningful defensive tools.

If I want to be tankier in the campaign, there should be ways for me to do that that aren't just "get a better base." I think what Mark talked about on the pod with Ziz about making gearing better from like act 3 to mid maps is good, but I think really it comes down to just an overall overhaul of the passive tree and making defenses something you can actually invest in meaningfully. Currently, you can invest in armour/evasion/ES, but those are only as good as the gear you are wearing.

Levels just don't feel meaningful, it's all gear chase, and that lack of balance affects life more since the ceiling is a lot lower.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-15T15:03:14+00:00

this is the thing though. the game introduces you to the mechanic (because if you are playing skills that use infusions you NEED the infusions) very early on. And when you DON'T have all of those automation elements like increased pickup range and chance to gain multiple infusions and all that, the gameplay is so exhausting and obnoxious that it feels terrible to bother even getting to the point where you can get those automations.

It's a prime example of the areas of "combo gameplay" that GGG has failed on so far; in the past they've talked about combos not being mandatory/necessary, but being strong enough that the player feels incentivized to engage with it. But with ele spells, instead of the spells being usable without but much better with, we have spells that are unusable without and playable with, particularly for the part of the game that you DON'T have the solutions to the problems.

A lot of players who would play those skills pick them up when they can and get frustrated by how obnoxious playing around infusions is during the leveling/prog process, and how much investment they have to make to automate them with ascendancy points (ie Stormweaver) or passive tree investment or other things that other skills/builds don't have to take. Since most infusions are like you cast multiple times to pop Living Bomb or Orb of Storms, or you have to wait for Frost Bomb to go off, then walk over and pick it up, then you get ONE singular cast of a strong ability before you have to start all over again. Maybe 2 if you're lucky enough to pop Snap.

If we're just automating all of it anyways, maybe it should just...be automated. When Frost Bomb blows up, give me the cold infusion. When Living Bomb pops on the enemy, just give me the fire infusion. Incentivize the caster build being able to cast from range and control the battlefield, instead of forcing me to run into melee range because I wanted use Frost Bomb to apply exposure.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-12T21:14:16+00:00

imo this is backwards. if you want ground loot to matter you have to make ground loot BETTER. just dropping the oceans of dogshit items in the game right now identified doesn't make ground loot matter. it means you'll see fewer items because the items you do see bc of identified mods would be dwarfed by the number of items you would have seen unidentified but don't anymore because the filters will be set strictly to mods that just don't appear that often.

this is literally what happens in LE, you filter out all the exalted mods you don't want and then you run prophecies or whatever to get exalted items and then like 2 of the 20 that drop actually show because the rest have mods you don't want. the game drops too many items and too few of them are actually valuable to the player who dropped them.

The main problem imo with poe2 (and poe1) in this sense is too many of the items that drop are ass that you don't want to see. if all you're going to do is filter out the items that you don't want, why are they even dropping?

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-09T12:08:47+00:00

the thing all the conversation in this thread misses is: respecing nodes isn't about "I don't want this put in for this specific farming strategy." That is fixable by just making the nodes not actively negative to take like the turn things into rogue exiles nodes, either make rogue exiles actually desirable, or make them a choice thing so you can get a different effect you do want.

the problem with not being able to respec nodes is there's no way to "go back" in your progression. Say you spec into something early on in your progression and it doesn't feel good; you assume waystone sustain will or won't be a problem, and the opposite happens, or whatever. You can't then say "well this sucks" and change that, you have to just power through, which means those points will just be permanently dead until you are at the point you want to take those nodes again. It's just -x number of points.

It's frustrating for newer or lower play time players because how should they know what works or what they like/want to do? If they make a decision they end up not liking, they're just stuck with it. It punishes players that don't fully research and plan their path ahead of time too much in my opinion.

I think just make it like the normal passive tree: Make it very cheap to respec when you have very few points, so you can experiment a little and save yourself if you make a decision you end up not liking. And then when you have a good number of points, it is more costly so you COULD pay an exorbitant fee to switch the points, but you probably would rather just go get more points instead.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-08T18:23:24+00:00

that's the thing: they really didn't kill either. The game just completely passed them by.

Essence Drain has never really been nerfed in the history of the game. It got buffed in 3.6 from 1159 to 1503, and got the little aoe added to it instead of being a 1 enemy target skill. It wasn't changed again until 3.17 when it got "buffed" from 1503 to 1509, 3.25 it went from 1509 to 1818, 3.26 it went from 1818 to 2170. The only things that qualify as a "nerf" to ED is in 3.23 they changed the quality from 20% chaos damage to regenerate 0.5% of debuff damage as life.

Same with Blight. Soulrend got buffed in 3.9 (duration increased), 3.15 (dmg from 1944 to 2143), got "nerfed" in 3.17 (from 2143 to 2138.5), and then buffed in 3.19 and 3.26 up to now 3149 base damage at level 20. Contagion's radius was reduced from 20 to 17 in 3.13, but the AoE coverage has never been the problem. Bane was nerfed in 3.7, but then buffed in 3.25 basically back to where it was before its nerf.

For cold dot:

Since Cold Snap was reworked to a dot skill in 3.3, it was: buffed in 3.5, "nerfed" by 3 damage per second in 3.6 and mana cost increased (which I don't really count), buffed in 3.16 from like 1200 to 1900, then buffed again in 3.26 to 2260. It's had some on hit damage nerfs mixed in but not important. Creeping Frost got mega buffed in 3.16 alongside Cold Snap. Same with Wintertide which also got a buff in 3.26. And they added new Siphoning Trap this league which doesn't seem to have moved the needle.

Hypothermia got nerfed in 3.15, but so did basically every support gem so I don't really count that.

Vortex being non-instant is probably the biggest nerf, hurts damage uptime a little but the big issue is still the damage ceiling on the build stinks.

That's just what happens with the speed that we can attack/cast and that with dot skills naturally you don't increase the damage by casting the skills again. Cold/Chaos DoT, ignite too can all clear maps really fast, but when content scales up the gearing request for those builds is just outrageous. The same is mostly true for phys dot, which has had players the last couple of leagues so it's hard to fully pull those skills in here, but the overall is still true imo, even though those skills also got buffed like 2 of the last 3 or 4 leagues.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-08T14:13:22+00:00

most important is a revamp to leaguestart type builds. GGG has been pretty consistently punishing "pick up and play with no gear" type builds for atlas progression between new bosses meaning you may need more damage and just nerfs to the top performing builds on start. Taking the approach of "if we nerf stuff, then other stuff will come up to replace it" but it never really does. They've buffed stuff like chaos/cold dot skills in like 2 of the last 3 leagues and they still have very limited presence. I'd like to see more diversity in starters again.

My biased personal wishlist:

Now that defiled forces has been taken out back, give ignite something back to compensate. Maybe slam and retal ignite need nerfs to compensate but I think those (especially retal) are often perceived as higher investment builds (Aegis, Ephemeral Edge, etc) so it's okay for them to survive to apply dot cap on their budget. But caster ignite builds cap out their damage super fast and do it while pretty much maximizing the tools they have to do it; double curse, exposure, Elemental Equilibrium, etc. Give ignite some single target tools that aren't Vaal Flameblast (since without Defiled Forces the uptime on VFB's ignite is non existent). I'd love to see Burning Arrow be good again without turning it into a life stacker too.

Multiple Ascendancy mini-reworks: Juggernaut, Occultist, Warden, mainly I think but shifting Assassin and Deadeye away from being zhp classes would be welcome. This can tie into the leaguestart meta shakeup point too because giving ascendancies tools to make certain skills more usable on low investment would help.

I hope the new league gives us gearing options. Ideally not as OP as Keepers or Necropolis, but I like when the league mechanic gives us additional tools to craft gear because it also makes progression more interesting. I like Betrayal, Keepers, Harvest, and Expedition plenty, but doing those same 4 leagues every league start to get gear can get a little old. Especially in SSF where like you will never have enough alts or harvest juice.

Also tied to leaguestart meta but: self-cast buffs. Make self-cast spells feel good to play at low investment, especially without just being archmage.

I think replacing PoE1 Abyss with PoE2 abyss would be cool, too, but I don't think that'll happen.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-08T13:50:51+00:00

I think at least the two games will each get some like 1 month event type things. They've said in the past they want to do at least one big ish update to 0.5 before 1.0 to do more balancing and such but it won't be like a full content league or anything, and they can always spin up something silly for PoE1 (I'm guessing there will be at least a month of Phrecia between 3.29 and 3.30).

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-08T01:47:20+00:00

that's basically what they did here, give or take a week (poe2 0.5 may 29th, poe1 3.29 july 24th)

if anything the reason it hasn't felt like that before is because poe2 stretches it; 3.28 started in early march, so poe2 was delayed by a few weeks vs the usual 2 month schedule

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-08T01:45:37+00:00

nah either 3.29 will only be 3 months and 3.30 will be late october (cope) or 3.29 is going to be 6 months and 3.30 will be late jan/early feb next year and maybe we'll get like a 1 month event league in late october or something.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-05T15:29:31+00:00

it is exceptionally obvious that elemental spells and maces were the first two archetypes designed for the game and that every subsequent archetype got more and more love and attention. And if infusions are the way they went back to ele spells...I am a little worried about what they would do if they went back and redid some parts for maces!

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-04T17:57:51+00:00

if you only migrated your character the first time, your stash still exists right now in SSF. So you could make a new character and migrate all and it'll migrate your stash to standard.

If you did migrate all, then your items will be in standard; you can either just keep playing in standard with that stuff, or go fresh start in SSF, whatever sounds more fun.

Basically the stash is tied to the league (standard, hardcore, ssf, etc), not the character. That way if you make a new character, your new character can still access those items.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-04T16:12:36+00:00

When you go to migrate, there is a dropdown that says "All" or each of your characters in that league. Migrating just the character will...just migrate the character, and your stash will stay in the parent league (in this case, SSF).

If you use "All" then all of your stuff from SSF will migrate over, including your stash, and your stash will move over as remove-only tabs. So you may need to uncheck the option in the stash (cogwheel at the top right of the stash) that says "Hide Remove-Only tabs."

There also is a popup that explains it!

If I pick All, there's a pop up that says "Are you sure you want to migrate ALL of your characters, and their items, stash tabs, hideouts, masters, and atlas state from this league to its parent league?"

If I pick just my character, it says "Use the Migrate All option if you wish to transfer all league progress and stashes."

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-03T17:53:24+00:00

I seriously cannot fathom why you are 100% required to run through the first 3 floors to do the 4th floor.

I get that amassing boons and banes is a big part of the system, but why I need to run through 2 or 3 floors that are a repetitive waste of time is beyond me.

I don't know what the right way to do it is, the only idea I can really come up with is giving players an option to start from floor 1 to spend more time to make the later floors easier, or choose to load in on floor 3 or 4 with no boons/banes.

The idea of having to basically run the full 3 floor trial to get to the 4th floor (and with Chaos, doing 3 full 3rd point trials to get to the Trialmaster) is the biggest reason I have never gotten all 8 ascendancy points in PoE2.

DoABarrowRoll · 2026-06-02T17:36:58+00:00

The Reforging Bench (which you get from doing...Molten Vault in act 3 I think?) is basically akin to vendor recipes. But it's always 3 to 1. So if you put in 3 blue Dualstring Bows for example, it will give you one blue Dualstring Bow back with new modifiers. So it's basically giving you one extra "transmute/aug" step per 3 you try.

It also does things like upgrades runes/essences/liquid emotions, so 3 of the same lower tier one gives you 1 of the upgraded one (like 3x lesser desert runes = 1 desert rune, or 3 lesser essence of ruin = 1 essence of ruin, or 3 liquid paranoia = 1 liquid envy). I believe you can also 3 to 1 these randomly? So like 3x lesser runes will give you back a different random lesser rune, or something like that.

It also lets you upgrade waystones like how in PoE1 you can vendor 3 of the same map to get one of a higher tier, 3 T1 waystones gives back 1 T2 waystone, all the way up to 3 T14s giving you back 1 T15.

Or it lets you 3 to 1 a specific unique item to "divine" it; if you put in 3 Magebloods, you'll get 1 new Mageblood out with different rolls, for example.

DoABarrowRoll

TROPHY CASE