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[Rex_Nex]

Is Dominating Blow not similar enough to D2's Revive? Revive summoned up to 20 monsters that barely follow you and lasted 3 minutes. Dominating Blow can summon a (theoretically) infinite number of monsters that follow you for up to 1.5 minutes. It's not a direct analogue, but you know. I think criticizing PoE's minion count is a little weird when you can have ~20 permanent minions and hundreds of temporary minions.

That's not to say summoners dont need serious help, or that raise zombie compares to D2's raise skeleton, but D2 would crash before hitting anywhere remotely near PoE's achievable minion count.

[ragnar119]

Is Dominating Blow not similar enough to D2's Revive? Revive summoned up to 20 monsters that barely follow you and lasted 3 minutes. Dominating Blow can summon a (theoretically) infinite number of monsters that follow you for up to 1.5 minutes. It's not a direct analogue, but you know. I think criticizing PoE's minion count is a little weird when you can have ~20 permanent minions and hundreds of temporary minions.

That's not to say summoners dont need serious help, or that raise zombie compares to D2's raise skeleton, but D2 would crash before hitting anywhere remotely near PoE's achievable minion count.

No, different type of mechanic, as Dominating Blow is for melee class, or what you had with paladin from d2. But as I said the problem is not about Revive (i just compared that type of skill to PoE summons that are on timer) but having a huge number of permanent summons. The max you can have i think is 16 or 15  permanent summons, while in d2 i had at one time 30+ (and that is after the nerf). Normally that number is important, as having a full blown army and forming a front line is very hard to happen with PoE as there is collision problems, AI problem of summons and similar.

Also about that d2 crash i guess you never tried to play one of d2 mods with over 100 summons in the game. Trust me d2 is a lot more stable than PoE and can survive a lot more as its old game with 2d graphics and offline at the same time.

[boki]

Must agree with people that suggested Grim Dawn. If you want diablo like game, play that. PoE is very strange hybrid of Diablo, Final Fantasy and random MMOs.

[nenjin]

I agree minion behavior is different than in D2. I don't find it a real obstacle though. Need skeletons? Drop them in the middle of the pack ahead of you. Need your minions to move? Attack the ground. It's a .5 second recast for the totem and you get 15 skeletons within 7 seconds, that easily continue through the whole fight with Queen's Decree.

I stopped using Vaal Summon Skeletons though because it was too hard to keep using it in boss fights. That's more or less my philosophy on builds these days. "Does it function the same during a boss fight as when farming? No? Abandon it." So many things I've tried in the last few days seem good until you try them against a boss and they don't work. Like Endurance Charge on Melee Stun. Great for cleaning up trash and farming. Completely useless against a boss due to their astronomically high HP preventing the stun from ever occurring. Icebite etc...great against trash when things are actually dieing. Useless in a protracted boss fight with a sprinkling of adds.

PoE is very strange hybrid of Diablo, Final Fantasy and random MMOs.

How is it like Final Fantasy?

[Rex_Nex]

Up to 21 permanent summons in PoE. 6 spectres, 12 zombies, 2 golems, 1 guardian.

Also about that d2 crash i guess you never tried to play one of d2 mods with over 100 summons in the game. Trust me d2 is a lot more stable than PoE and can survive a lot more as its old game with 2d graphics and offline at the same time.

As a huge D2 Median player back in the day, I did. Having a lot of summons wouldn't necessarily crash the game, but once too many sprites/effects were on the screen D2 would stop drawing models altogether to avoid freezing/crashing. Playing in places like median's Tran Athulua with a summoner would mean you'd spend half the time fighting invisible mobs while the screen was covered in effects that strobe in and out of existence as D2 decided whether or not there was too much to draw. Even several high-density vanilla areas had this problem, especially in multiplayer. The secret cow level was more like the invisible cow level if you played in a party.

Important to note here that we're talking "over 100" in Diablo, but "several hundred" in PoE. It wouldn't be a good build, but you could feasibly make a character that summons half a thousand minions. Your framerate would take a hit, but for the most part PoE is completely capable of those kinds of numbers. Good luck doing that in modded diablo, let alone vanilla. PoE's minion problem is entirely an AI/balance/QoL issue, there's nothing wrong with the minion count.

How is it like Final Fantasy?

He probably means skill gems and the skill tree being similar to a number of FF games. Nothing else is remotely close to a FF game, though.

[Damiac]

POE seems like it should be very D2 like, and at first glance it kind of is.

But there's something about the aesthetics, the movement, the monsters, and the fairly close zoom that makes it feel like I have barely any idea what's actually going on onscreen most of the time.

I felt a lot more in control in D2.  I could actually click a mob with a fair degree of precision, and if you put a melee skill on right click, the game was kind enough to attack the nearest mob to where you right clicked, rather than the ground.  In POE it just feels like I walk around until there are enemies, then I'm basically just spamming attacks in their general direction and running around like a madman to avoid projectiles and what not.

I also really miss something from D2 that is just a shame not to be in POE.  In D2 I could use my scroll wheel to change the RMB skill between any favorites I had set up.  In POE I can't do that, and having to press qwert for those attacks sucks.  Seriously, it makes my wrist sore just thinking about reaching over to that t button. 

[frostshotgg]

For what it's worth, Animate Weapon may be closer to what you're describing from D2's Necromancer. I never played it myself, but after a startup time of a couple packs per map, Animate weapon can easily hit swarms of 100+ dudes.

[Aklyon]

If you're relying on spectres for most of your damage, you're in for a bad time as a summoner. Use the zombies and skeletons, and Vaal skeles. Have a golem. If you don't care about curse-on-hit, bring SRS! Maybe even drag animate guardian or animate weapon along. Spectres are nice ranged damage, but temporary unless GGG gives them the same effect animate guardian uses, and not worth being bothered about.

[nenjin]

Plus the pathing is pretty atrocious. It's embarrassing to watch like a Colossus mob actually try to get into the fight. It spends half its time moving around.

I generally go for multiple projectile casters or like Incinerators for spectres, to get synergy with Flammability.

[nenjin]

So it's the Breach League, and the forums are awash in salt from Blade Flurry. Not hard to see why when you see the streamers demonstrate it. Click --> Whole screen dies --> Movement skill --> Click --> Whole Screen dies.

It's things like this that make me realize I'm basically playing Hard/Impossible mode PoE, with my shitty skills and non-double dipping build I deliberately choose to use.

It's like....there's two ways to play PoE it feels like. You can obey the meta and just cram in whatever its about.....or you can play by what feels interesting to you and probably struggle mightily at some point. Things like elemental damage conversion and double dipping versus physical damage (which IMO just doesn't fucking scale at all anymore compared to Elemental/Chaos/DoT.) I could probably drop Cleave (lel) right now for Blade Flurry and with a little rework vastly increase my clear times and survivability. It just doesn't seem fun though to give up on what I've been doing on this character for what's new. Clearing faster doesn't seem worth the loss of flavor and identity, which honestly are maybe the most important thing to me in PoE. I wanna use a sword and shield and wade in to combat. I don't want to shoot green and black tendrils across the whole screen and kill shit, as gratifying as it might be to be that strong, and trivialize a game that I've let torment me for years.

So I'll continue to do as I have done: ignore the meta or anything new really and pursue this build as I've played it so far. Maybe one day they'll actually get around to enhancing melee instead of just dropping a skill that embraces the current meta and calls itself melee.

It's not that I completely hate what I don't opt to do in PoE....it just takes so much time to do anything that, when I have to choose between "Keeping playing your veteran character that you've been climbing a mountain with for years due to an ineffective but flavorful solo build" and "start a new character that obeys the meta" I almost always choose the former. I'd maybe even like to build an entire character around Blade Flurry. I just don't have the time, nor does it appeal to me in the same way that being challenged on my actual melee character does.

[Aklyon]

Blade Flurry is pretty much the pinnacle of 'technically melee'.

Meanwhile, you have posts like this having to explain to people that a skill based on burning things with lasers actually needs more than just excessive grand spectrums to be effective.

[Rex_Nex]

Scorching Ray could be really cool if it wasn't a fire skill, but it's alright as-is. The mechanics are neat enough, although in some way it does exemplify how PoE has failed in its dream of fully modifiable skill gems. It's nowhere near possible in the current system, but if GGG really took support gems in another direction I could easily see Scorching Ray being one of many options for a fully linked Incinerate. Either way, it would of been much more interesting as an electric laser than yet another flamethrower.

Blight is just really bad. I see what they were attempting to do - a simple chaos leveling gem to take you to merciless - but it's possibly the most boring gem in the game. Even disregarding the pitiful damage, the skill is the complete antithesis of PoE; a nearly unalterable skill gem utilizing two damage types (degen, chaos) that each ignore a portion of combat mechanics. No matter how they fudge the numbers, I don't see a way for Blight to ever be anything other than a waste of development time.

Blade Flurry is funny to me because it's basically just magic missiles. There's nothin' wrong with PoE having this flavor of magic missiles, but it seems like a slap in the face to make it a melee gem. It's magic missiles. The fact this is what melee skills need to be to compete with ranged spells is sad.

[frostshotgg]

The thing about blade flurry that has people in such an uproar is that it's a melee skill in name only. The aoe is just unreasonable. You're off-screening whole packs. With a "melee" skill. The amount of damage it does would be fine, maybe a little on the strong side but mostly fine, if you needed to get up close and personal like with blade vortex. It just sidesteps the issue of melee being bad because it's melee by being long ranged, which is dumb.

[Rex_Nex]

The patch notes for 2.5.0 (accompanying Breach league) are up.

Breaches look a bit "eh", but I'll enjoy it more than Essence league just because it's (mostly) a combat/loot league, not a crafting league.

Essence league was a complete dud for me; not only is crafting boring, but I couldn't bring myself to bother crafting anything lategame due to the costs and I never managed to roll anything useful while leveling. Basically just got a pretty looking rainbow stash tab and a bunch of junk before realizing I'd be better off selling them than trying to make anything remotely useful. Some of the essence-holding rares made for tough/fun fights, but the hyper HP inflation on them made for some bad experiences on my slower (worse) builds.

Patch itself looks fine, although the big balance changes (Ancestral Warchief nerfs, Blade Vortex nerfs) are the kind we need to see in action to judge. I think Blade Flurry got out way, way too easy, and I'm not happy that nothing was done to address poison/bleed/ignite's complete dominance over the meta. On the other hand, the nerfs to flask charge generation are going to help shake things up a bit. BV's flask charge generation in particular was completely decimated.

My guess: Bladeflurry Raider league, with a resurgence of Elementalist builds.

[Aklyon]

Not even a mention of the golem buffs?