What We're Working On

Please make more hot pictures of Tullina.
Im asking for a friend.

Im currently playing hexblast without ignite, just the hit damage of exploding hexes and impending doom but it has god awful single target. Im talking 10-15min act bosses. Im trying to supplement with bane but its not of much help.

Crackling lance is very close to being a good skill, but just isnt quite there

In terms of playstyle it really feels like a channeling skill. However, it has none of the support that channeling skills have to promote the less mobile playstyle. No real support from the passive tree, no infused channel to add some defense.

I would call crackling lance a higher risk ramp up skill, but at current it ramps up to about the same place as arc so there really isnt much reason to actually use it. The promise of the skill is that it ramps up to huge single target (which is a nice tradoff for being hard to maintain) but it just isnt fulfilling that niche. It needs to gain more damage per intensity for that

Alternate quality Flameblast (the one with the extra stages/divergent flameblast) is bugged with quality incresing items at the moment. Quality beyond 20% causes it to become very slow and you get like 2 maximum stages in total while channeling and cant use other spells after casting it.

Playing Shattering Steel: When doing single-target, Call of Steel often only gives 5-6 shards, forcing me to cast it twice before going back to fighting. It really slows down the fights, and I'd prefer it if using call of steel restored all steel shards immediately rather than just some.

Really appreciate everything you and the devs do Bex, love this game/community

Mobs getting stuck in the wall with Glacial Cascade, especially on Blighted Maps, is very punishing. I lost a T13 and a T15 back to back Blight map because a proximity shield mob got stuck in a wall through GC pushback. Maybe despawn mobs that have been active for several minutes in Blighted maps?

How do we know if an hotfix is online or not ?

I'm not launching any Heists before the chokepoints nerfs, and mostly the engineering grand heist doors bug. I lost two grand heist for this.

The "crashes" I have are totally random and not too problematic, as long as it doesn't happen into the "fleeing" phase.

So far i like Blazing Salvo but i have trouble experimenting again. The skill felt really bad until act 6+. Then okayish. Now that it's lvl 19/20/21 and on a six link it feel nice.
So i would say the scaling and leveling experience is very wrong with this specific skill.

New Skills Feedback
We've seen various bits and pieces of feedback about the new skills but we would like to get even more. If you have feedback about the new skills, please reply to this post so we can review it. Including specifics is great.



Firestorm

This skill just feels terrible. It's definitely a bad damage over time skill and now scales pretty badly for that (as well as not having anything like an ignite bonus built in) and it's also really terrible for single target... even playing as a full crit max power charge assassin with solid gear for the build it feels like absolute trash to attempt single target with. This is a huge problem especially with how the rework looks. (the skill is only fixed with archmage which has become a massive crutch for underwhelming skills... that's it's own problem)
There have been a million suggestions about how to fix this rework on reddit but my ideas are more or less as follows:

1: you could just full on massively buff the damage across the board, especially if limited to 3 storms. this would make the skill better all-around
2: you could increase the delay on the meteor but have it do super insane damage to make it a better single target skill against non-speeddemons who will dodge it but not generally insane for clearing.
3: you could add some kind of burning ground situation/ignite into the skill to make it feel good like that (I'd probably still add damage onto the skill with this change cuz it's obviously weak).
4: do all of these things?

those are just a few ideas, but yeah the main point is that the skill is just really MEH as-is and was certainly a lot of peoples main disappointment going into the league... I mean the math was done and being yelled about A LOT and you guys seemed to ignore that going in as it wasn't and still hasn't been brought up but we all knew before even trying it that it'd be bad and now that we have, guess what? it's bad.
(poeninja currently has .1% of people using this skill which originally had some of the biggest hype around it of all the skills shown)


Crackling Lance

another meh skill, though not as terrible as firestorm overall. CL is just way too clunky and punishing without nearly enough payoff to be considered a decent skill in the game as-is. it has meh clear and not even remotely worth while single target dps... again, on well done builds for this skill without archmage you see it struggle. there's been a ton of feedback on this skill already and you'd be smart to listen to the audience here. I don't understand why all this work making this cool looking and sounding skill was put in only to have it be such a disappointment yet again. I feel like it should definitely be way better than it is because as it stands it's just easily outclassed by arc and other such skills.
(poeninja saying currently .2% of people are playing this vs the 2% playing arc which it was supposed to easily compete with)


Blazing Salvo

god... more disappointment. if you're not playing blazing salvo as mines you're probably doing it wrong, and even then there are better choices it seems. the skill just doesn't scale well yet again. it feels very weird and weak without flame wall and again I just don't understand creating a whole cool new skill just to have to under-perform and disappoint?
this skill needs some kind of damage boost, ailment addition, and/or area increase to feel nice because as-is it's just a clunkier worse fireball...
(poeninja saying currently .8% of people are playing this skill vs 2% fireball + 1% vaal fireball making that a total of .8% vs 3%... this shouldn't be the case - and in either case they're almost all sabs or tricksters... I'll bring that up at the end)



Additional Thoughts On Skills

I have negative thoughts and feelings on hexblast as well, and personally would like some extra juice to void sphere since it seems like a pure utility skill as-is (fine I guess but meh) but haven't personally played either of them and have seen other people making more informed comments. I really think at least those 3 skills that I mentioned though need some serious addressing, and also the way you showcased them for the general audience was super uncool. A lot of people, especially the less informed players, league started skills like these and got fucked because what they saw was NOT what they got in terms of power.


Extras

Now a different question related to these skills... why is the elementalist untouched? Right now they're HARDLY elementalists. They're golemancers... alike 85% of elementalists right now according to poeninja are using the primordial jewels and focusing golems out of the 6% total players playing the ascendancy at all. Nobody plays the elementalist to sling elemental spells anymore... we see tricksters, sabs, assassins, occultists and hieros all doing the types of things elementalists are supposed to do BETTER than them and we've been seeing more and more ascendancies entering that list every league since elementalists got changed (I think since prolif was taken out?) This is A PROBLEM.

Additional note is that it's SUPER WEIRD that in a league where curses reworked and big flashy elemental things added to the game we saw no change to either the elementalist or occultist who are supposed to be the SIGNATURE ascendancies for those themes.(6% & 4% as it stands, but elementalists are all golems like I had said, and occultists are widely vortex dot builds cuz ofc they're using cold skills instead of elementalist and they're also doing hexblast/bane which are both being reviewed badly by MOST people right now.) Guys... please. Address these skills and can we please take a look at ascendancies going forward?




EDIT: (for some positivity) Btw, whoever worked on story, flavor, etc of heist itself did an awesome job. REALLY hoping this goes core since it's easy to understand, really fun, and doesn't add any weird side jank into the game... but ya'know, once the bugs etc are gone. It's a blast when it works and it's the worst when it doesn't.

Quite a bit of us got excited to play the new skills. But from this league forward this might die off quite a bit. Its a trend that keeps repeating.

Hey check out this new skill! look at this video! Then the community plays it and its all so very underwhelming. This really needs to be looked into.

I am assuming the dev team keeps taking the approach of lets underwhelm the new skills so we don't have to nerf them(and outrage the community). Sounds good on paper, but here is whats happening. Its making the community not excited when new skills come out and we feel tricked after playing them then after a bit(depending on how stubborn the individual is) we switch and keep replaying the older skills. For people that are brand new to the game and try it out, they get screwed over.

Hexblast + Doom:

This skill is clunky, Its a 2 or more part system (depending on the curses) and its a lot clunkier to other skills, this is even after putting in tons of casting speed, and trying a hundred of different ways to play it

The damage around level 40-60 feels ok. Leveling with it was a horrible experience.After around 60, lets say 65 the damage is not that good especially for being a 2 part skill. Single damage is awful. It just doesn't feel like it scales like it should.

Crit might help the build. But after getting all the curse points+doom things then trying to get survivability there is no room for crit.

Blazing salvo:
I only got to try this one for a bit. Its so weak there is no point of playing this skill over others.


I think the biggest thing is that we keep getting the similar experience on league launches. I understand the GGG team thinks it was a good launch because we didn't have huge server issues. (That is awesome). But the user base mostly just looks at the new league mechanics. This one was riddled with bugs.

The fact that a new mechanic gets launched and every single league and there are so many issues, shows that the testing has not been done that well. (Yes we understand that small scale is not the same as large) But if anyone spent an hour playing hexblast as an example they would know there is something wrong with the skill. Also the amount of bugs in heist its hard to believe the bugs only showed up when scaled up.

This has been happening so much that its a meme now to play the game 3-4 weeks after new league launch. So its becoming a trend and its not magically going to get better. From an outside perspective. It seems like the team is spread too thin. With some working on future leagues/some poe2. Who knows what else. But from the consumer point of view the team is too thin and might require hiring some more people. I understand covid is a thing too, but this was an issue before covid.


Edit: I wrote all the above soon after client crashed inside of heist. So near the end there was better ways to word that. PoE by far is the best game in its genre. Even with the "bugs" it beats other games by a long shot. Thank you for all of your work and making the rest of us have something fun to do especially during covid