VIsual Clarity

Visual clarity, especially around player skills, is a problem PoE 2 has that I fear will really box in some design/gameplay choices unless meaningfully addressed.

You take something like Volcanic Fissure (by far from the only example, just one I'm picking), and visually it's just gorgeous... but now try to pick out enemies and especially ground effects or volatiles anywhere in its AoE, which is most of the screen. Depending on the skill key gameplay elements that you're supposed to interact with like Zarokh's intermission phase can also be highly obscured. Cues for attacks that you're meant to dodge rather than tank are hard to read in the sea of fire/grenades/frostbombs/sparks/whatever.

This is further exacerbated if you play with other people, because quickly the chance that someone in the group is running a screen-obscuring skill nears 100%. I'd say at this point a solid 80% of my deaths occur with no monsters on the screen at all that I can see. And really how do you dodge/maneuver/parry/whatever around that?

As long as PoE2 continues to move it's combat decisions towards the zoom zoom, screen clearing style of PoE1... there can be no meaningful discussion about visual clarity.... after all... it's pretty much a direct cause of that.

Skills that turn most of the screen into burning ground (or similar) are going to be a visual clarity problem at any play speed.

This is the most annoying problem I'm having in PoE2. I can't see anything and I'm dying to some runic bs under my feet which is spawned by a random mob from offscreen. Especially in the maps like "Razed Fields", I'm dying to something I cannot even see which is so funny for a isometric game.

Bump

GGG really needs to focus on improving visibility

It's fine singleplayer IMO. It's cool to have your skills fill the screen, and obviously you can work around it by not attacking/casting for a second.

The problem is in multiplayer. We need an aggressive culling option for players in our party because it just gets insane when just 2 decent builds are in the same party in the late game.