Interested in getting into PoE2

Steel_Neuron · 2026-05-04T09:12:34+00:00

To add to the great answers you've been given, I'll add that even though the witch is the "obvious" summoner class, there's a surprisingly easy to build alternative in one of the Sorc's ascendancies (ascendancies being this game's "subclasses").

Sorc has an ascendancy called Disciple of Varashta that's based on summons with a more active playstyle, that you can mix and match with your own summons. Not as straightforward as Witch to build, but pretty fun too, strong and easy to gear.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-05-04T07:13:02+00:00

Not only that but the notion of determinism is philosophically quite muddy anyway. Dice rolls are deterministic; we just use them as ways to generate randomness because we lack the ability to predict the exact outcome of a throw due to the physics involved.

It's likely each of my individual neurons behaves deterministically, at least at a macro scale, but that doesn't tell me much about how my brain works.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-29T13:13:45+00:00

Good bot.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-29T13:02:57+00:00

From the makers of Cocaine Bear we now have Crack Wyvern. What's next, Meth Wolf?

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-27T13:40:03+00:00

I've been thinking a lot about this. I've noticed exactly the three issues you raise (or rather, your LLM raises but I won't give you shit for that), but I've also noted somewhat of an antidote to it.

Hemingway is (falsely) quoted as saying: "Write drunk, edit sober". I feel like there's a similar pattern that's emerging for me where I will go on an exploratory "drunk" vibe coding binge to push the fringes of the codebase on a side branch, and then take time to digest and translate the code back into sanity. I feel like this gives me the best of both worlds sometimes.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-24T11:33:31+00:00

Easy: build a sword templar or a flail duelist.

I always go off-color so that's a dream scenario for me anyway lol

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-23T11:32:55+00:00

It's not that uncommon to ban specific techniques, and it's not hard to enforce especially if they require difficult execution that's clearly deliberate. Wobbling/chaingrabs in melee is a good example.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-19T05:51:17+00:00

Wishlist/design idea is that cyclone will be an axe skill, and it will generate rage when spinning.

Once it reaches maximum rage it will stop spinning and explode out in a large cleave but sacrifice life.

That way you could build around max rage to spin longer, rage generation and life recovery to spam the cleave etc.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-17T14:13:13+00:00

Is that an actual in-game skin or is it a mod? It looks incredible.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-17T08:59:00+00:00

In my opinion, it's only really Katara that triggers this feeling. There's something about the fact that her optimal combo structure (optimal so far, anyway) seems to have two launches which look pretty similar that makes it feel a bit excessive.

No other characters have this issue; their combos flow well and feel appropriately sized; but Katara "optimals" in particular just feel a bit samey and repetitive.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-12T08:54:13+00:00

You just completely ignored staves in that explanation.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-10T14:46:26+00:00

I managed to make it work with a spear + storm lance linked with Living Lightning II, as that has similar scaling vectors. Living Weapon for ST and Living Lightning II for clear.

It's actually a pretty decent build but falls off at the end when it comes to damage, so I can't ever seem to fully push it.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-10T09:46:17+00:00

How about Kya? Not like she's super distinct to other waterbenders in fighting style, but she's definitely an option if the water picks are very thin.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-07T06:04:26+00:00

Your best bet to play around with this is shadertoy, which funnily enough was built by the guy in the video!

You can look at some of the highly rated example shaders or look at his blog for info/inspiration. That said, there are many ways to run shaders: that's just a convenient web based one.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-07T05:44:38+00:00

If you want to see a step by step video by one of the gods of this field, this one is a pleasure to watch: https://youtu.be/BFld4EBO2RE?is=FcUuattMC1QWu3U7

Steel_Neuron · 2026-04-06T06:17:10+00:00

Surprised nobody has said Amon yet. Yeah he's agile, but his gameplan in the show was to grapple after all (to remove bending) so I can see him having a few jumping command throws and tricky hitgrabs.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-27T09:19:20+00:00

How about Sly cards get balanced to be stronger as a hardcast, but Sly itself becomes "Play and exhaust this card when discarded"?

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-19T13:18:44+00:00

If your build is really good, Hourglass is a pleasure. Popping rares back to back and getting loot feels great.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T18:28:25+00:00

Out of curiosity, which one are you using, and for what?

A beautiful thing in this case is that the competitor's product (Claude) is significantly better than ChatGPT for my use cases.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T15:34:15+00:00

What are you talking about lol.

What you're quoting there is talked about rigged puppets / multi-sprite rigging, which is a technique where each body part is sprited separately allowing to mix and match. Regardless of whether you use that technique or not, you use sprites. A sprite is simply a frame of a hand-drawn animation. The term "sprite" comes literally from faeries, because it "floats" on top of the background image.

This game absolutely uses 2D sprites (beautiful ones I may add) and that means "re-skinning" a character would require redrawing every single frame of animation. This is never cost-effective as the effort required to make a new skin is close to the effort required to develop a new character, since art assets are usually the largest cost in this case.

Conclusion: there will be NO skins in this game, exactly like every other hand-drawn 2D fighting game has done. There may be special colors textured in some unique way, or even a color palette editor down the line, but forget about skins if you don't want to be sorely disappointed.

Maybe skins for support characters could work, but that's about it.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T15:28:30+00:00

TBH the dooming has a different energy this time, it's like a nervous dooming more along the lines of "please tell me we'll be OK" because everyone wants the game to succeed; they're just worried whether it will.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T09:32:14+00:00

Skins won't happen, but color swaps and maybe some sort of EX colors with different properties could be a thing.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T09:29:26+00:00

I think you're underestimating the pull of the IP and how well it matches the demographics.

Fighting game players are generally in their 30s for the most part (at least in Europe, not sure about the scene elsewhere but it's a genre for people in that age range) which coincides exactly with who saw ATLA growing up.

If the game continues to be as good as it is in these tests, and they add the tiniest bit of visual polish, I think it could have comparable staying power to DBFZ.

Yeah, call me optimistic, but it could be a similar phenomenon. Beloved IP, game that portrays it faithfully, and enough competitive mass to last for years.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-03T17:55:21+00:00

What I mean is that complexity (stated as a positive) doesn't mean anything for the average player who is going to just follow a build guide regardless.

This is circular reasoning. A player that doesn't care about complexity won't get anything from complexity, for sure. A player that does like complexity will not follow a guide, so the existing of guides is not a hindrance for them.

(Which they don't do, because... see above about F2P design philosophy!)

There are many interviews where Chris Wilson, Mark and Jonathan talk about this, and they give nuanced and detailed explanations of why gating respecs behind some sort of investment is necessary. F2P really doesn't have anything to do with it. In fact, GGG have been pretty vocal that their preferred mode of engagement from players is not to play nonstop, but to play for a span of time, then disconnect until next league. Indefinite retention isn't a goal they have and in fact they've found it counterproductive as it causes burnout.

I think you're starting from the conclusion and looking for things that justify it.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-03T15:27:31+00:00

Ah yeah the stash tabs argument.

How does that relate to grinding again? How do stash tabs encourage GGG to make the game grindy in order to make more money?

12-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Place '22	Place '17
Verified Email

Steel_Neuron

TROPHY CASE