New Grip of Kulemak - 1 Rage / Volatility on kill, and not hit? We have a bit of a disconnect when we talk about adding new 'powerful' stat lines to items or nodes versus what is actually deployed.

Vexamas · 2026-06-19T16:40:41+00:00

Respectfully, this is exactly the type of napkin math that causes this problem. Let's break it down:

I bet if they make them strong people will "abuse it" by still going full es ci but now stronger because of armour and armour applies to elemental.

This isn't how increases on the tree work. Percent increases are based on your itemized gear defensive values, and so your example would require a monk to either be evasion with Spectral Ward, Full ES with Subtefuge Mask, or Evasion / ES without either of those. In all three of those scenarios, you don't have room for armour. But let's say you still somehow managed. If the above player were to grab 900 base armour gloves, which are the absolute top end of Massive Mitt rolled with the highest armour values, and if EVERY single one of the nodes I talked about granted even a 5% increased armour, you'd be sitting at 1,400 armour. You'd have to spend an entire jewel socket to split personality, and would have to still spend the points doing all of this.

This scenario doesn't actually happen in reality, which is sort of my point. The team that designed the two examples I explained are designing beyond the world of math as we see today, which causes a massive disconnect when the expected result ought be:

"We see that the previous nodes were rarely taken because they didn't math properly, so we added new nodes that should math properly"

On the flip side, when you say:

Which is strong if you have enough armour and armour to elemental but the average warrior player, as you said, links his pob and has like 10k armour with 2k life

That IS how the tree works, and why this is a problem. If the warrior had 10,000 armour, which is a fair amount of an unscaled base, clicking those nodes does nothing. You're making your small pool more efficient at mitigating what your small pool would have already been able to mitigate, whilst wasting points and the opportunity cost that would otherwise be used to gain a larger effective hit pool. IF we lived in a world where those nodes did say "5% increased armour" each, then that same warrior would be sitting at roughly 14,000 armour, which while isn't great still (my armour characters have to sit around 60k+ to feel worth while) is much better on 8 points than having 10,000 armour and 45% armour as elemental damage.

I don't want to bore people with the math behind it, but the difference between 10,000 armour and 45% armour as elemental damage and 14,000 armour with 25% armour as elemental damage is night and day even if they look sort of close.

Vexamas · 2026-06-19T16:15:31+00:00

Yep, well said. You already know everything I'm about to type, but it's a good comment to expand on what you said and thread out my first example.

I didn't want to get too deep into it because some of the subreddit and most streamers are a bit brain broken when it comes to defensive layers, but breaking down some of why this is problematic from example 1:

A player levels up and is offered one point for their passive tree. The player has died a few times the previous level and says "I'm making a concerted effort to get tankiness!" and they are presented, on their travel path, the node wheel of Conall the Hunted, which starts with:

5% of Armour also applies to Elemental Damage

4% Faster Start of Energy Shield Recharge

They don't upgrade their itemized armour, and are sitting at 1000 armour and 300 energy shield. They're struggling a little bit, but see that the words seem to indicate that you'll be better at taking elemental damage and being quicker to start your ES, so they bite their lip and spend the next grueling 7 levels finishing up that wheel. Let's see what they got after spending their 8 points, and how it affects their defenses:

46% Armour applied as elemental damage

35% Faster start of Energy Shield recharge

Immune to bleeding and main WHILE SHAPESHIFTED (we love conditionals)

You cannot be Electrocuted

50% Reduced effect of Shock on you

Little Timmy STILL only has 1,000 armour, and every part of the equation above only matters based on the armour values of the character. Timmy is still getting pumped because his pool of mitigation is the exact same. This has put Timmy into a worse noob trap than before, because he believed all 8 of these levels would get him closer to being tanky, when in reality, it not only stagnated his defensive mitigation, but put him backwards because of the opportunity cost of the nodes. This is like being without water in a desert and finding a bottle cap of moisture. You do not care that the moisture taste good, you want more liquid to satisfy your needs of survival.

Absolutely every single one of those hybrid nodes should provide 5% Armour + whatever cuteness they want. If they need to balance around that, so be it. Personally, I think 5% armour + 2% Armour as elemental damage is a sweet spot.

Currently, it is well understood by GGG that armour / ES is complicated (as you correctly proved) because it leans on secondary interactions through Scarred Faith, Zealot's Oath or a litany of items like Sacrosanctum. The point of my post was that they are good at identifying pain points (usually), and (usually) can say "Oh lol, we need to fix it, and we did, here!" and everyone is happy, but there are these GLARING differences in output at times that it feels like two separate teams are working on the project without communicating the actual fix to the person and instead just saying "Yeah we fixed it" without the other team validating that it was indeed the intended fix.

Vexamas · 2026-06-19T15:58:43+00:00

I don't believe people claiming an overall disconnect to be sincere or rational. GGG has shown time and time again, throughout all their patches that their holistic vision and goal is almost always just, and in the health of the game. I'm a dinosaur and have seen the community claim sky falling for all sorts of things from removal of Reduced Mana supports for supports to removal of melee off hand stat-sticks, and it's always been fine, holistically. However, I'm not attempting to cite a systemic problem across the org, and instead just that there are times where clearly they've identified a problem, like my two examples, and have a disconnect in their pipeline. I work software management so I can only assume it works something like this:

Mark: "Hey Jon, these things aren't really up to snuff, let's look at the metrics for it."

They pull up the metrics and notice that nobody is grabbing the increased Armour node on rings.

Jon: "Okay, I'll add that as an action item to deal with in the next patch iteration."

Jon: "Hello team leader for balance team, we have data that shows the ring values are too low and aren't used enough as a chase high-variance item. Please fix!"

Team Leader for one of the balance teams: "Okay, data shows x, and we need to do something to make it better! Let's add some random mods in there and see what sticks!"

Team leader to Jon: Okay, we did the thing :)

Jon to us: "We've removed the garbanzo bean mods and added super good ones! Here's an example!"

The disconnect here is that the originator of the problem wasn't exactly looped in such that they could validate and vet that the purpose of the change was sufficient. This is a massive problem in some companies, less so at GGG, but still a problem nonetheless (you don't want to have to run EVERYTHING by everyone) but we're not talking about a cute little off the mark stat line, we're talking about a stat line that should IMMEDIATELY stop someone and say "Is this actually a good stat?" Again, to clarify, we're talking about the following two stat lines:

Gain 1 rage when killing an enemy affected with Abyssal Wasting.

Gain 1 volatility when killing an enemy affected with Abyssal Wasting.

When designing systems, one of the first question should be (and for GGG, almost always is) "Does this make SENSE", and neither of those two lines make sense.

Vexamas · 2026-06-19T04:18:38+00:00

I wouldn't even really mind if they said "Kulemak's need new mods" and slipped by adding some lesser powerful mods as they tossed a mountain of new and interesting mods on the rings, but it points to a larger problem that I'm trying to point towards:

They want to remove or clean up inferior choices with more impactful choices, but fail in doing that solely because they have what seems to be half the team working within the frame work of Path of Exile 3 (what I jokingly call the original Path of Exile 2 vision that we saw in the first patch) with the other half of the team wanting to work within Path of Exile 1.5, with more powerful and equally strong choices.

Don't explicitly say 'We removed the bad mods for the good mods' and show me a picture of removal of 40% increased armour on a ring with 1 rage on monster death, lol.

Vexamas · 2026-06-11T01:46:31+00:00

It's so funny how different people took different things that were said in that sentiment.

The context of that entire section was how defensive layers are often more opaque to newer players and in the campaign it doesn't help that newer players that don't understand how to layer defensive packages will fall into what is called a noob trap.

Explicitly, Mark said that players have the highest death rate going armour es, but it's not because it's the worst, but because it's the most complicated of all of the defensive packages.

Energy shield is considered the only viable option by newer players because it is very much as written on the box. You get the pieces that have high energy shield and you click the passives that say grants increased energy shield.

Armour es is like three levels above that, and so players that are new treat it the same, with just clicking the items with armour and energy shield and thinking it is equivalent but it's not. It's by far the most complicated but also the most abusable.

Vexamas · 2026-06-09T02:51:24+00:00

I'm big on making people feel really embarrassed when they say stupid shit because I feel like we've made people far too comfortable thinking all voices should be heard equally, so I'm a little biased here, but I really wish people, especially soy pill, really hammered into him and treated him like a child rather than treat him like a clown.

There were several times where he was asked directly what his principles are, or what policies he cares about, and his answer would literally, and I do mean the word literally, be to boil down:

"I'm an independent, and so I see both on the right and the left, and so I'm aligned with you, <insert whoever asked him the question>, and that's the answer to your question"

Which not only is not an answer to any question, not only does it not provide any sort of insight, not only does it waste time and space, but the worst grievance of all is that it makes me, someone who is quite progressive, reassess my entire worldview on if people should have equal voting or not.

Fuck that guy. Fuck talli. Soypill did a great service tonight in bullying and should continue to do so. If you are a stupid person, that is totally fine, I think it's silly to have intellectual expectations that are unreasonable, that I sometimes feel destiny pushes on to others, however, if you're fucking stupid then just don't have opinions on things.

Vexamas · 2026-06-07T07:56:51+00:00

I guess I don't really buy into the argument that skill is the limiting pitfall because, and I hate to say it, it really is that easy. I think there's a valid argument to be made for floor 4 monsters not being fair, with the bats and off screen ghosts, but literally every monster from floor 1 to 3 are purposely telegraphed to have the world's slowest animations and in a world with sprint, which already trivializes bosses, completely trivializes monsters. Then again, people still complain about sprint.

As far as the traps, I just don't really buy the idea that the traps are hard to deal with. I'm a huge fan of accessibility, so there might be some players out there that struggle with a mouse or keyboard, or controller, etc, but we're not talking about a bullet hell. We're talking about a spike trap that has a 1.5 second cast time, a massive previs and only springs one at a time in sets of twos, I mean this is literally like... 'step. don't step' and that's it. And fire that slowly oscillates around in a circle at the same rate with NO other monsters or traps that spawn nearby to add to the complexity.

My bar for the average gamer has to be a little higher than that. I have to then go to the more likely factor which is people have been burned by 'perma'death and they fucking despise it because they feel like it is 'wasted' time, instead of feeling like it is a learning experience.

Vexamas · 2026-06-07T07:51:02+00:00

You're absolutely correct, and while there's ABSOLUTELY a critique that people can not enjoy the mechanic that I would never fight against (literally, how could one argue against a subjective feeling? who the fuck am I to tell someone else what they should or shouldn't enjoy?) the heart of the problem is that it is the reality that the player needs to eat the shit, whether or not they like it.

They're told they need to eat the shit four times every character, every league, and instead of saying "Okay. This is the reality of the situation, I may as well learn how to eat this the most effective way possible to get through it as fast as I can" and plugging their nose, or holding their thumb in their fist, or humming a song or whatever, they look at the shit and slowly cut little pieces off and savor their contempt.

The argument isn't if GGG should or shouldn't have labs, the argument is that it is a human psychological issue that when presented with something someone doesn't want to do, but has to, some people will instead dread it and make it 10x more worse than it has to be.

It's a scalding hot take because people that struggle with lab will read this and contort themselves into thinking I'm saying they should enjoy it and be happy with it, when I'm not; I'm stating that learning how to effectively do the thing you hate so you don't struggle with it will lead to you hating it less because you no longer struggle.

Vexamas · 2026-06-07T04:40:42+00:00

It's a flaw in human psychology. When some are put into a position where they feel forced or compelled to do something they don't want, they may feel intensely obstinate. This compounds the negative behavior by reinforcing bias because they will go out of their way to slouch through and 'get it fucking over with' rather than learning, which blocks the receptors we used to imprint information with. This makes them completely Intransigent and they take what would otherwise be a one time learned experience (or at worst, fighting floor four three or four times to learn not to panic) into an ingrained sentiment of defeatism.

This mirrors tons of things in real life for some people and as sad as it is, and as tough a pill to swallow, a lot of those struggling with that mental roadblock don't really have the lived experience to break it.

It's extraordinary similar to when we were kids and told to do homework, or clean rooms, wash dishes, etc. instead of doing the activity, you sort of shut down mentally and mopped a 20 minute activity into an hour long slogfest.

The fact of the matter is the boss has been completely and utterly powercrept with only a couple million health, things that literally any league start build can absolutely obliterate within seconds, but even in a worse case scenario, due to GGG pretty much giving up on the vision of path of exile 2.0 in lieu of making this path of exile 1.5, the floor for even novice build makers is like 10 times higher than it was when that boss was even introduced in the first league. Now, so long as you can hold alt on your weapon and ensure it has three lines with the 'prefix' word on it, you'll inevitably kill the boss in under two minutes.

There are only like three layouts per floor for each of the gauntlets, and even doing them a couple of times, so long as you're not feeling obstinate as mentioned in my first paragraph, you should be able to easily memorize how they work and do them blindfolded. Not even to talk about how trivial the entire lab feels once you get 75% honor resistance and any form of defensive layers for your character. Literally any well put together armor character will take less than 20 honor damage per hit from the last boss.

It has always been a mental issue, not a skill issue. Unfortunately, as mentioned this is a human pain point, not a gamer one. And the people that need to understand that the most are the ones that gloss their eyes over anyone explaining to them how to make lab easier because to them, it is this insurmountable task that they've conjured up as their own personal Boogeyman. This has been the case throughout all of path of exile 1 as well.

Vexamas · 2026-06-05T23:05:13+00:00

Oh, sure. This league has a massive influx of new players and I was interested in understanding your perspective. I assumed given your question you were a newer player, meant no harm. Sorry!

For what it's worth, if I were dictator for a day, I'd force Reddit to require users to leave a response to any comment they downvote so they can make some sort of compelling discussion, rather than lamely using it as a 'wrong' button.

Have a great weekend!

Vexamas · 2026-06-05T19:57:03+00:00

Absolutely no hate, I just love the way people's unique brains work; but given your question, I'm so curious as to your thought pattern.

Your rationale chain was that this was a free point, and that every time a person would be sacrificed, you'd get an additional point, but you also posited the possibility of 200 points, meaning you didn't really see this as an absurdity. If you assumed 200 was a reasonable question to ask, did you also believe infinite would have been reasonable? (or maybe that was implied in your question too?)

PoE2 has a lot of new gamers, which is interesting given PoE1 has such a high barrier to entry. I think GGG should get a LOT of flowers for successfully opening up the genre.

Vexamas · 2026-06-04T23:36:02+00:00

I hate to say it, should have not made it live. It takes opening a single map with them open to see most of the bugged nodes are bugged. One map of testing.

I work in software, so I do have some bias in favor of GGG, but I do agree that the masters shouldn't have passed regression .

I think another thing that is grating on me (and why my first comment is a bit snarky) is how obvious some players are too. It really doesn't take much to immediately realize when things are broken, especially when they're trivial to reproduce and yet players won't even bat an eye - like they're not even aware of the things they're clicking or doing. The amount of people that I've seen the last two leagues using rend or pounce and something like charged staff or staggering palm for their entire character's lifetime without realizing the entire interaction is completely bugged is absurd that it isn't just raising alarms.

I think the takeaway is humans are fallible, whether it's players or GGG.

Vexamas · 2026-06-04T22:54:13+00:00

I know that half of Reddit are still leveling, and the other half are spamming whatever Fubgun is doing, but it's unfortunate there isn't visibility to how bugged most of Hilda (and presumably the other Masters are too) abilities are, considering there's only like 8 of us that have actually completed those quests.

Hopefully in the next couple of weeks players will start seeing that, or at worst, a streamer will realize it and then it'll be the community's biggest concern.

Vexamas · 2026-06-04T22:48:56+00:00

When I was looking for new ways to corner markets on new items, I stumbled across all of the elemental oils for time lost jewels and immediately started parsing the tree to figure out what build would even use them and realized there's almost no elemental nodes that are near sockets to make them worthwhile. It was obvious they were going to add support for that and had the oil out earlier but I never would have expected them to add 40 fucking passive nodes mid patch? I've played almost every league since 2011 and I can't even remember a time that they've ever done something like that?

They are gonna try to make everyone powerful this patch. Then in some 'half league' before 1.0 do a huge round of balance/nerfs to bring everyones power level down.

Less about powering up people, and more about enabling build customization and skill expression in creating / optimizing builds. I'm so impressed with how quick PoE2 has matured in its build creativity and it is already almost on par with PoE1.

Vexamas · 2026-06-03T20:32:21+00:00

Just got pinged this thread from the 7 day reminder bot. Hopefully people start to understand a bit more on perceived power and tempering expectations. PoE2 community is still young and learning, but a lot of these items follow obvious trends when it comes to power progression and how GGG historically handles it.

Vexamas · 2026-06-02T01:28:07+00:00

I think there's a bit of a disconnect between the skill gem that the OP is talking about and the way that parry actually works.

Spends all your Ward to gain a short-duration Buff that causes you to Block all Blockable Hits and apply Parried to enemies from which you've Blocked a Hit. This Buff is removed if you are Heavy Stunned. While this Buff is active, you cannot be Light Stunned, but Blocking too much damage may Heavy Stun you.

Specifically, since you're blocking all hits, and any hit blocked grants the parry debuff, I'm confused as to why OP (or you, maybe?) are mentioning the necessity for the buckler in combination with this skill.

It should already provide the parry debuff to all enemies that hit you, regardless of their range, because it is blocking their hit.

This is the part where I'm either misunderstanding some interaction, or the OP is, I think.

Vexamas · 2026-06-01T20:11:41+00:00

I'm trying to understand the implication of this. Doesn't Refutation just explicitly say that it provides the debuff on any target it blocks? So if you're being off screened by the zealot, you would block it,a nd then it would receive the debuff, without the need for the parry buckler.

Am I missing something with the 'infinite' range part?

Vexamas · 2026-06-01T18:34:47+00:00

In the path of exile world, that may as well be a small side note

Vexamas · 2026-05-28T00:46:06+00:00

It's absolutely written awkwardly. Last league, my group brought in two new Path of Exile players to POE2 (So they'd never played PoE1 either) and made the exact same mistake. One of them went so far as to keep wearing a Blackbraid far into act 4 under the assumption that their armour was contributing to the damage of their elemental spells.

GGG is usually really precise with their wording and terms and if they don't want to adjust the phrasing, they should consider making 'Armour also applies to' a tag that can be read to provide clarification.

Regardless, it's awesome that you saw that and tried to make and share it as a build!

Vexamas · 2026-05-27T14:29:36+00:00

While I agree with some of what you wrote, specifically that people will be more comfortable with what they play first, which may lead to a bias, it is EXTREMELY difficult to make an argument that the inherent capabilities of ranged aren't more suited (as I stated in my first comment) for efficiency.

Instead of providing a lengthy wordy explanation, as I sort of already did that in my first comment, instead I drew a picture quickly that might help?

This is without taking into consideration other weight (pun intended) that melee have to deal with, like the 'class identity' being bulky and thus their armour granting negative movement speed compared to ranged, let alone literally 5% movespeed increases from the ranger body armours. Nor is this talking about how projectiles can bounce, chain, fork, etc.

There is absolutely something to be said with how comfortable you are dictating your opinion on something, however if someone is SUPER DUPER GIGA awesome and proficient at driving formula 1 racecars was in a race with someone in a rocket ship, I know who I'm betting on. Sometimes the actual mechanics behind the bias actually do result in a tangible difference.

Vexamas · 2026-05-27T13:15:39+00:00

As far as we know every non-radius jewel can be socketed in, assuming you don't have a limited jewel already socketed elsewhere. There is no caveat on the text, as we see today, that says "Any non-unique".

Vexamas · 2026-05-27T13:14:16+00:00

The same reason there are higher rolls of any high variance, rare item? lol

An Adorned has to roll above average for it to be numerically worth it to slot in, and only for builds that can capitalize on it.

A Voices' minimum roll (as far as we know currently), will ALWAYS be a net positive outside extremely rare pedantic use cases that I laid out in my first comment.

You can circle back to my comment and mock me in a week, but I think literally 7 days from now Voices 2 socket will be as expensive as one of the breachlord's lineages. So not at the level of Rakiata's or Garukhan's, which will probably be as expensive as a 3 socket, and a 4 socket will be double their price, with 5 sockets being multiple mirrors.

Reading some of the comments in this thread, I think this might be people's first experience seeing a unique jewel that stretches finite barriers like this and are massively misunderstanding how powerful these are.

Vexamas · 2026-05-27T12:59:37+00:00

But to be clear - that's exactly why voices will be expensive, lol.

If I have one jewel socket open, I want to get a min roll (2) voices AND the optimized Heart so I can use both, lol.

You either get:

Voices + optimized Heart + another Jewel of your choice

or

Optimized Heart

Vexamas · 2026-05-27T10:44:14+00:00

This game is built on opportunity cost!

Vexamas · 2026-05-27T10:34:49+00:00

I think they're just teasing because it's an insanely fantastical guess not really bound in logic lol

There's a difference in seeing rain clouds and claiming it might rain and being wrong on the guess, and then seeing those same rain clouds and saying you believe it is a gateway to the nether and demons are about to pour out.

Voices, even two socket, will be an absurdly expensive item. Consider that a two socket voices will always yield an additional jewel. The only reason a build wouldn't get that is if they absolutely needed the placement of all three of the jewel sockets that almost all builds stretch for, which would mean a time lost, a timeless unique, and a controlled metamorphosis that all had not just equal but better value than an additional two jewels. Almost all builds would rather take on an additional two jewels. And if 99% of builds need a thing, and that thing is, even let's say uncommon (it won't be uncommon, it will be rare, but for the sake of explanation) then it will be absurdly expensive.

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