Utility Flasks > Charms

Hi,

I would like to brings again some attention to the matter of Charms versus Utility Flasks.
I'm of the opinion that Utility flaks, the way they are implemented in PoE1 at the moment, are a nearly perfect addition to the game and way better than the Charms we have in PoE2 right now.

The reasons be:

1. Character Progression: During the campaign you will manually use utility flasks every now and than when you need them. You will continue to increase the potency of the utility flasks together with your character and than opt in into either automate them or make them stronger and keep them manually.

2. Versatility: The Utility flasks are more versatile. You can use them manually in preparation of a situation, you can run them automatically, you can give them situational usefull properties. You can make them run longer for better update, but be weaker in return - or the other way around. Charms can exclusively be triggered and are in practice only used against stun or freeze.

3. All the "During Flask duration" nodes and flask investment nodes on the passive tree are now only and exclusively usefull to exactly one ascendency, the pathfinder. No other ascendency does benefit from flask durations, as no one really cares about life and mana flask duration. No other ascendency is able to reliably have a flask running at all times.

The hastily last minute additon of charms was a mistake in my humble opinion and should be considered to be reversed. The given reason that "pressing additonal buttons" with either gamepad or WASD is not strong enough of a reason i think, if you can still automate them in the endgame. Also i played PoE1 on PS4 long enough before flasks could be automated to say that this is a non issue on gamepad.

Kind Regards

I think the reason for the switch to charms was to remove player control. It is something that has been removed from many aspects of the game, the most notable being crafting. But if you have a flask of thawing and you are making your way to a boss that freezes, you likely won't use it if a mob happens to freeze you. Instead you just tank a hit or two, unfreeze, and enter the boss arena. With the charm it is automatically used for you but then you have less charges with the boss.

Player choice is important, and it does feel like charms take that away despite it being nice to "auto-trigger" sometimes. The auto-trigger is faster than player reactions.

I don't really like the charm system, but to be fair i didn't like the flask system either.

Charms have potential and just need a rework

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Rikku#7536 a écrit :

I don't really like the charm system, but to be fair i didn't like the flask system either.

Charms have potential and just need a rework

Where do you see the potential of charms in contrast to how the flask system worked?

I don't like either.

The whole gaining charges for killing just isn't good. It's like true Life Steal. You shouldn't get survival / sustain by being more offensive. If I were to do it. Players would have a set number of potion charges which they can replenish before a boss fight or similar situation.

Potions should be for recovering from misplays and was the original downside to ES.

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Nokkyu#1880 a écrit :

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Rikku#7536 a écrit :

I don't really like the charm system, but to be fair i didn't like the flask system either.

Charms have potential and just need a rework

Where do you see the potential of charms in contrast to how the flask system worked?

That's devs job to figure out, i'm not very creative, but they should be more interisting and stronger and get some love from tree and other sources like charm effect

Maybe even with some unique ones, i try hard to be creative here don't judge, dropping from Beyond Boss with
"Monsters you kill respawn after [0.2 - 1.5] seconds, grant 100% more experience and deal 200% more damage"
"[100% - 300%] increased duration"
"Items found during effect are corrupted"
"Corrupted"

Flasks in poe1 you really just want to automate and forget about them, get some evasion, crit, armor, resist etc. Before you automate them they're annoying, after you automate them they're basically charms but permament

I read or heard somewhere that the reason flasks went down to just Life and Mana was to eliminate the finger dance in POE1 where you're constantly mashing your flasks or something along that line.

Personally if the result of having more flasks was to have those flasks woven into combat in the form of a "rotation", I'd rather take charms over those flasks.

Not saying charms are good. They still feel meh and boring to me, and charm slots are still so rare.

Charms are awful because there's no feedback; We don't manually activate them, there are no effects or sounds when they DO activate, and often do not work as expected.

They are a failed mechanic and need either a massive rework or to be removed entirely. Frankly, if they were removed entirely I doubt people would notice.

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Doomhammer5#4010 a écrit :

Charms are awful because there's no feedback; We don't manually activate them, there are no effects or sounds when they DO activate, and often do not work as expected.

They are a failed mechanic and need either a massive rework or to be removed entirely. Frankly, if they were removed entirely I doubt people would notice.

This. Most of the time I have no idea if charms are actually doing anything or not.

Aside from that, I got all the way into the mid 70s level wise and have never had an option to have more than 1 charm. There's very clearly 3 slots there but having one of them for the vast majority of the game and having no idea when its actually doing anything isn't even remotely interesting.

I never really engaged with utility flasks. I don't want to add something to my finger rotation that gives me a relatively small buff. So I only truly used them after I could automate them. As such, I believe charms are a step in the right direction. Adding better sound ques, better descriptions, and making getting more than 1 easier doesn't feel like a major rework to me