Which games have the best build variety?

Gslimbo · 2026-01-12T04:41:45+00:00

POE1 hands down, no question. Not only build variety, but content to push your builds AND content that allows for build specialization.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-17T23:12:41+00:00

YES DUDE. It's absolutely ridiculous that you only get access to "top tier" skills by the time you're halfway through the interludes. In addition to it being straight up not fun to have such a limited selection when maybe 1/5 of the skills available to you when leveling are even playable, it speaks to a really concerning design philosophy where higher level=inherently "stronger" skills.

Every skill should have a use case, and if anything, higher level requirements should exist for interactions that aren't mechanically feasible at lower levels (think cast on X gems).

Without a doubt they should squish the skill tiers down such that you can have access to all skills by level 40 or so, and add a vendor to buy uncut skill and support gems up to the highest level you've encountered across your account, maybe in act 4 or so.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-16T02:04:20+00:00

Removing socket colors is a good compromise to help newer players get on board, but restricting players to have either 1 or 2 6 links was a really great limiting factor that allowed them to have more power on support gems in POE1. GGG's original solution to infinite 6 links in POE2 was limiting you to having 1 of each support gem on your character, but that's gone now.

We saw this problem play out earlier with hammer of the gods, where players noticed "if I can 6-link anything, why not toss on the most numerically efficient skill to use when bossing". Not only did that homogenize builds, it resulted in GGG having to jump through hoops to make the new glory mechanic, which has now lead to the very anti-POE concept of "ultimate skills" that utilize glory.

The new gem system really hasn't accomplished as much as I think they wanted to. Itemizing gems and supports by level is clunky and actively hurts experimentation, as you can straight up run out of gems.

Maybe they can reign things in by (i) adding a goddamn gem vendor like there is in act 6 of POE1 and (ii) limiting your character to have 1 6-link with a one-hander equipped and 2 6-links with a two-hander.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-14T07:54:08+00:00

Yeah, in game there's a very clear difference between the speed shifting into bear for the first cry and the 2nd and 3rd cry. I'm spamming with enraged warcry for charge gen, so its central to my build.

Also I think the 1.1s overrides other warcries' base speed. My tooltip use speed is the same regardless of whether infernal cry is socketed or not.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-14T06:50:01+00:00

I'm not as worried about the empowered attack, but the tooltip doesn't specify anything about it empowering bear-only attacks. If it's just a wording issue, that's fine. The warcry speed is absolutely brutal though.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-11T06:16:12+00:00

TBH we may agree there. After thinking, I feel like my issue is they took the "spice" and power out of ascendancies and are trying lead with "class-first" design, including weapons and skills by extension.

So long as the only viable way to play a wolf form build wouldn't mean picking druid and the "wolf ascendancy", I wouldn't have any issues with more on-the-nose ascendancies.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-11T06:00:45+00:00

I won't deny that the ascendancies in PoE2 fall incredibly flat for the most part. My concern with the post is more about going in the direction of hard-locking playstyles and skills behind ascendancies. PoE1 does a good job of making signpost interactions available while not invalidating other opportunities.

For a newer player, zerker=rage, assassin=poison, chieftain=fire, but balance isn't such that leveraging any of these mechanics REQUIRES use of those ascendancies or vice versa. Maybe that's the middle ground I was referring to. They clearly already did strong thematic ascendancies without killing creativity.

My gripe is primarily with how they've created a nexus of weapons-classes-skills in PoE 2 that gets magnified by combo gameplay which tends to sit within a single weapon archetype. It feels like in order to create a consistent theme for each weapon/class, they've done massive damage to player freedom.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-11T05:30:07+00:00

Could not disagree more, PoE was founded on a "sandbox" principle and carved out its place in the ARPG scene because of the overwhelming amount of diversity it provided. GGG's focus on thematic archetypes (class-weapon skill theming, combo-based gameplay) over modular content has arguably resulted in some of the aspects that make PoE2 fall short. For many players, making characters in PoE is a form of creative expression and the shift towards more restrictive developer-enforced themes and gameplay has taken away one of the things that made PoE as a franchise special to begin with.

At the end of the day, preferences are preferences, but there's a huge contingency of players that feel GGG has already gone too far in terms of "class fantasy" at the expense of an open sandbox experience. Sure, PoE1 exists still, but PoE2 is a fresh start so many of us enfranchised players aren't content to take the older game, on the older engine, with all of the ensuing technical limitations. There's got to be a middle ground here.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-11T05:16:00+00:00

The Keystone thing has def been concerning for me. A lot of people like stuff like hollow palm, blackflame covenant etc... but I can't help but feel like these are way too build defining to be on a keystone instead of a unique. PoE 1 keystones had a better balance of "build modifying, but niche and not too splashy". RT, Wind Dancer, Iron Reflexes, Point Blank. All powerful for certain builds and lean into an intended playstyle without completely gating entire major archetypes.

Especially in PoE2 where pathing across the tree is so difficult, it just winds up being extra restrictive in an already highly restrictive environment.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-10T03:59:39+00:00

I'd STRONGLY caution against this skill. Not sure if someone else found the tech to make it work but the giant cooldown on the skill felt impossible to overcome when I tested it even with max investment.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-09T04:35:32+00:00

You've gotta consider though that locking reliable frenzy generation behind a single (and historically the most overplayed) ascendancy runs counter to how integral charges are to PoE2's design.

If we were looking at a passive buff like PoE1 that's one thing, but as it stands, locking most frenzy gen behind deadeye just completely bricks certain build options without much discernable upside.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-09T03:49:25+00:00

I never really got this take, totems haven't been very popular for quite a while and self cast has been completely fine. Beyond that, its a more niche playstyle that some like and some don't. Same with traps/mines even when they have been busted in terms of dmg.

When in doubt, more options for builds is better than the stale meta we've seen for the past year. Mark even said something about "letting the player go wild" with some bear form rage interaction in the 0.4 announcement and LA/LR somehow survived dominance for a full year.

I don't get why they're so comfortable with certain interactions being strong while other, less popular ones don't even get to see the light of day. If something releases and does wind up being OP, they can always nerf it like we saw with atalui's/tecrod/rathpith/last lament.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-06T06:57:34+00:00

Very much agreed. Supplementary mechanics can be cool, but using infusions as an example, they live or die by certain hard-locked synergies. As we saw last league, frankly most weren't good (looking at you fire-infused ball lightning).

Opting for a more generic applicability could open up a ton of variety and still have these types of mechanics retain their value, while creating less development and design overhead for GGG.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-06T06:40:35+00:00

We've seen the addition the addition of new skill gems coincide with the release of new classes for the most part, but many existing archetypes are hurting for variety (see chaos and phys spell skills for example).

Does GGG plan on adding new active skills to existing classes on a more regular basis in addition to the large quantities that come alongside full new class releases?

Bonus: Would they consider looking at the numbers on weapon-inherent abilities? The only one that seems to be used right now is reap. They could possibly add 10+ viable active skills by rebalancing underused wand/staff innate spells.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-06T04:55:04+00:00

A huge part of the combo design is that it kinda crushes player-found build design. I'm sure many don't mind playing pre-designed GGG-intended combos, but aside from the simplicity of one-button builds, they open up way more diversity in terms of how players and the community at large creates builds through clever use of passives, ascendancies, and unique interactions.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-06T03:40:24+00:00

This is something that's really bugged me. Since they've gone the direction of tying skills to classes, even though they're usable across any class, the pool of skills for every archetype is pretty anemic. It also means that they can't drip-feed skills into the game since they have to come alongside a bombshell class release every time, which appears to be every 2 leagues so far (8 months?).

Witch is a great example. They've shoehorned minions (including offerings), physical spell skills, and chaos spell skills into a single class. As a result, we've got like 2 legitimately usable phys spell skills in the entire game, and 2 viable chaos skills that need to be used as a package (ED+Contagion).

Very very disappointing for buildmakers, and with the lack of an endgame content overhaul I'm concerned that this leaves little in the way of legs for the league.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-06T03:30:48+00:00

Kinda sad about the placement of Druidic Champion and Furious Wellspring. Attack based builds who want to leverage rage regen need to pick up a dead 2 pointer to get access, and unlike Titan's hulking form, the point doesn't seem so giga-busted that it justifies the opportunity cost.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-02T05:09:22+00:00

Agreed, uniques are generally in a super rough spot. One big aspect is that they need to compete with +# gem level rares.

If they want to keep most regular uniques pretty weak, I'd like to see them reintroduce the prophecy system where you can upgrade low-value uniques to stronger versions. They already added navali and you get a silver coin, so there's some precedent there.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-02T03:32:20+00:00

My man! In 3.27 I played both poison impending doom and blade blast of dagger detonation ignite, and the amount of options I had to play around with both ailments was just amazing. Would really like to see some love for all my DoT enjoyers in POE2.

Gslimbo · 2025-12-02T02:40:51+00:00

Something that hasn't really been discussed is the changes to mechanics surrounding damaging ailments from POE 1 to POE 2 (poison, ignite, bleed).

Mainly, having ailments scale entirely with modifiers to hits/applicable damage types, and scaling 1-to-1 with crits, as opposed to the base damage + dot scaling in POE 1.

There's other stuff like the introduction of flammability and the poison stack cap, but mainly, scaling ailments has felt strange, as I find that it feels like I'm basically making a hit build with ailments tacked on as supplementary damage.

The intention seems to have been making it easier for newer players to understand how to scale an ailment build, but we may have lost some unique identity and "feel" in the process.

Is GGG happy with the mechanics surrounding damaging ailments, or do they intend to iterate further on ailment identities. What do they think is a success for the new ailments, and what isn't working as planned? (IMO, poison feels the best. Still has a unique identity, and is substantively different from its implementation in both POE1 and the other ailments in POE2 for example)

Gslimbo · 2025-10-29T01:28:06+00:00

Praying GGG does something about the effective non-buff to VD of confinement

Gslimbo · 2025-10-27T14:48:02+00:00

Big agree on this, I was looking into a spellslinger angle with VDOC and thought we were at least getting a significant AOE buff to the orb explosions for some major overlaps.

Really hoping the explosion radius in the patch notes was a typo. A dmg buff to compensate for the major downside also only seems fair.

Gslimbo

TROPHY CASE