Screen Clearing Meta Makes Builds Feel Less Diverse

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Ripto#7716 wrote:

I feel that when meta builds are screen clearing maps then the feeling of build and character diversity suffers. Many have said this before but it's basically reducing gameplay customization to choosing what color explosions your filling your screen with.

One of the biggest points of excitement for me was when the different ascendancies were revealed. They all had so much flavor and identity and really made me excited to enjoy different fantasies. But when the end product is that characters are just screen clearing and zooming it feels like so much of that identity and flavor is stripped away. Part of the problem is that endgame content has mobs that have extremely high attack power and speed so it feels like your forced to kill anything before it touches you.

For one it makes builds that are supposed to be slower for flavor completely irrelevant. I think that's a huge issue with Mace skills for example. I love the idea, slow, high impact hits. But the meta just punishes you for doing anything slowly. Incinerate is another example. I love the feel of the skill in campaign, turning your character into an inevitable flamethrower. But it just feels foolish to play when you can just Spark the whole screen instead. Another loop that I loved in the campaign is using Ice Pillar and then exploding it with another skill. It combined evasion, crown control, and repositioning. A very satisfying loop made trivial when I can just blast the screen with Held of Thunder.

I think slowing down the game would really make so many of the elements that are already there shine. It sucks that all the magic is in campaign and then once I want to push my character with more challenging content I'm limiting to a smaller set of tools that all have only one flavor, in different colors.

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Nem#6709 wrote:

I personally don't mind screen clearing builds, the issue is that it typically just boils down to "what's the best" instead of having any sort of diversity.

For example I love the witch and I think her minions are cool, but I want to use chaos, and chaos just isn't.....great. I've seen like 1 build for Chaos and it apparently takes a lot to ramp up to, and once you lose it you are at danger to be 1 shot and your damage just sucks for bosses

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ScandiDiver#0604 wrote:

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Ripto#7716 wrote:

I feel that when meta builds are screen clearing maps then the feeling of build and character diversity suffers. Many have said this before but it's basically reducing gameplay customization to choosing what color explosions your filling your screen with.

One of the biggest points of excitement for me was when the different ascendancies were revealed. They all had so much flavor and identity and really made me excited to enjoy different fantasies. But when the end product is that characters are just screen clearing and zooming it feels like so much of that identity and flavor is stripped away. Part of the problem is that endgame content has mobs that have extremely high attack power and speed so it feels like your forced to kill anything before it touches you.

For one it makes builds that are supposed to be slower for flavor completely irrelevant. I think that's a huge issue with Mace skills for example. I love the idea, slow, high impact hits. But the meta just punishes you for doing anything slowly. Incinerate is another example. I love the feel of the skill in campaign, turning your character into an inevitable flamethrower. But it just feels foolish to play when you can just Spark the whole screen instead. Another loop that I loved in the campaign is using Ice Pillar and then exploding it with another skill. It combined evasion, crown control, and repositioning. A very satisfying loop made trivial when I can just blast the screen with Held of Thunder.

I think slowing down the game would really make so many of the elements that are already there shine. It sucks that all the magic is in campaign and then once I want to push my character with more challenging content I'm limiting to a smaller set of tools that all have only one flavor, in different colors.

I agree on most of what you wrote.

But from what have seen so far, i don´t think the people making the decisions have the capabilities to make anything but a screen clear PoE1 style of game.

It being an Alpha are no excuse for their complete lack of understanding of their own game. If they think copy/pasting PoE1 endgame mechanics are gonna results of anything but PoE1 gameplay, in my opinion, all hope are lost for a good slow phased end-game.


The only difficulty "setting" they understand = spam the screen with tons of mobs and AoE effects.

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auspexa#1404 wrote:

if there's a build that can clear the whole screen, why would I play anything else over it?