Forced Combos - Player vs Dev Perspectives

As a reaction to spell totem needing 3 charges. I enjoy combo play very much in principle, I always thought that not being able to have multiple six links in poe 1 was one of its larger downsides, but even though nothing completely new, I guess:

There is combos which feel good and I believe it is mainly because you are thinking of how exactly you want to implement them, and then you are doing all the combo parts with your own purpose. And there are those which feel bad, because you are just executing some, to you, meaningless stuff to reach a certain forced condition for a skill to work.

Examples which quickly come into mind are, the good, I find a way to break the armour of an enemy and then do my physical attacks - I have multiple choices, at least one or two for every weapon choice, it feels purposeful in combat. The bad, I throw in a living bomb in my ember fussilade/fireball gameplay, which I don't even notice, but I somehow have to "charge up" my fireball first, before I can use it.

I think one thing here is, that from a dev standpoint the "forced to do something" perspective can be much less prevalent even when playing the game, because they just are the ones which invented the combos basically. I had a similar thought with arch nemesis in poe 1, where, if I put myself into the boots of coming up with different drop conversions of certain mods, the idea of seeing them play together and interact ingame to produce really good and interesting/or results (six links, fractured flasks,...) was totally exciting. At one time I had agency and now because of my choices stuff happens. But for the player there just never was any agency (I think this whole thing could have been extremely fun together with Metamorph, I believe it did not really interact well, did it?).

I don't know what the solution is and this is not a "poe2 bad", I enjoy my time, but e.g. infusions mostly bore me (lightning was okish, because at least with orb of storms you could do some useful additional things unlike living bomb), maybe it's just that more choices are necessary. Really narrow stuff which only works with one weapon type and two skills is bad, maybe don't have x different systems there. I was thinking that maybe monster state (broken armour, bleeding (I am thinking about Bloodlust every other poe 1 league),...) would be better than player state, but I think it's more about stuff being more general - a "primed for sunder" state on the mob would be boring, too. I think also for charges the lack of an inherent use of them is what makes them boring compared to poe 1. It's only a means of "charging" your character up to then release this in very specific interactions (actually from a name perspective it makes sense). Having one or two skills working like this, ok, but if it is every other system and sometimes complete skill categories (elemental infusions, larger parts of spears). Enough rambling - make spell totems not cost 3 charges please! ;)

They seems to have an issue in their approach, construction and payoff to combo systems.

For instance. I don't really qualify armor / resistance strip as any type of combo interaction. It's dull and often redundant. As example if an enemy has 50% DR and a chain of skills apply -50% DR, you're just forcing an interaction when neither needs to exist.

The Elemental caster skill change was closer though disjointed and mostly just badly done. Infusions take away from enemy combat interactions and player's focus on the skill use themselves. The skill chains themselves are stupid basic, hardly worth the label of "combos" too. To further displace the entire concept, skill balance is even worse than their attempt at combos, insuring you will mostly just use one skill supported by your "combo skills".

Then there's the payoff. Because their combo systems are so basic the payoff is quite binary. Way too good (Fire Ball/Arc) or never worth using (Ember Fuselage/Incinerate). The trick is to not force more than a simple 2 step combo but to also reward 5 step combo properly.


I'm reminded of a talent I made for DOS2 that's evolved entirely different strategies from different players. The concept is simple. You deal 7% more damage for each negative status on targets. Some players just use skills and get extra damage as they go. Some players stack all the negative statuses they can with quick hit skills then use the heaviest dunk skill they have. Mathematically there's little difference but the method the player chooses inherently changes the playstylee.