#1 DPS Seismic Cry Rant – Patch 3.26.0i

#1 DPS Seismic Cry Rant – Patch 3.26.0i

Hey guys, I want to start by pointing out that I was ranked #1 DPS on Ninja, with at least 10% more damage than the #2 Seismic Cry player up to this point.
I’m not saying this to brag — I’m saying it to make one thing clear: I’m not just some random guy throwing around complaints without understanding the game. I know the mechanics, I understand how the item pool, skill pool, and passive tree interact, and I’ve put a lot of work to grasp the systems that lie beneath it. I’m not a market flipper, nor a story or absolute gameplay enjoyer — I play the game to build the best builds. This is my game. Thus my insight into balancing issues in POE2.

Balancing Issues
The overall balance in this game is absolutely horrific and, honestly, not plausible. How does a game that supposedly offers the most possible build variety end up with a single class making up 30% of the player base because it’s just so much stronger than everything else?
It doesn’t stop there: the next classes sit at 15%, 10%, and 8%, all running basically the exact same build. That means 63% of players are playing just 4 builds — in a game that advertises 7 classes, at least 2 subclasses each, "hundreds of skills," and thousands of possible variations.
Some famous streamers with their cringe fanboy crowd behind them love to say: “Let them play what they want, what’s your problem? Don’t compare yourself to others, that’s when the fun stops.” Of course, they’re saying this while streaming that one 30% build themselves.

Economy
What they don’t seem to get is that this game has a live online economy. That economy forces you into these meta builds if you want to keep up. Key items rise in price faster than you can farm currency. That means you can’t realistically play the build you want because the economy simply doesn’t allow it.
And no, this isn’t an SSF problem. It also wouldn’t affect GSF (not that we’ll ever actually see that mode).

Example of How Bad Balance Was in Season One
To give you an idea of how bad the situation was in the first season: everyone started fresh, the top builds weren’t fully crystallized yet, and I — someone who calls himself a builder — decided to roll a Retro Totem Titan for the 50% passive effect bonus.
At first, everything was fine. The build felt smooth, damage was solid, and I’d even say it was fast. But eventually I hit the ceiling: totems maxed out, gameplay capped. Not because of damage — but because of the activation time my totems needed to attack. Around that time, people discovered the two meta-breaking builds: the Epilepsy Sorceress and the Broomstick Hermit.
Unfortunately, several of my friends played those exact builds & every single public game was full of them. So every time I partied up, I was stuck with them. And here’s the problem: those builds became so much stronger and especially faster than what I could ever achieve with the Titan, that it made no sense to continue. Party play stopped being fun — screens were cleared before even one of my totems popped.
Since I’m a builder, I rethought my approach. I made a new character dedicated to support. I’d argue I built one of the first — and arguably the best — supports in the game at that time, and of course at some point I even uploaded the build for the community. Thus, the POE2 Aura Bot was born - yes.
But it didn’t stop there. The top meta builds only got stronger and faster, while I, as a support, had just one job: stay in range. The problem was I couldn’t keep up. To keep up, I had to strip away most of my support skills, passives, and items, just to invest everything into movement speed and blink tech — barely keeping pace with the Broomstick builds. At that point, my buffs and debuffs weren’t even necessary anymore and needed to make space for speed. And so, the useless support — the POE2 Rarity Bot — was born - yes.
The game was so unbalanced that there was no way to play anything else. You couldn’t even build around those top-tier metas because enemies would die before you ever saw them on screen. I can’t find the numbers anymore, but I remember the build variety was way worse than this season.
That was my confrontation with “balance” in the first season. Eventually, I quit the league for exactly that reason and swore not to return unless they adjusted things.
Season Two? Same problem. Season Three? Have a guess.

This Patch Is Arguably the Worst So Far
Normally, you’d think there are two main paths for a character: mapper or boss killer. But with this patch, where you must kill bosses to finish a map, only 4 — the top 63% of meta builds — are even playable, the ones that can do both jobs perfectly well.
This isn’t even about the economy anymore. You’re now forced to play one of the few builds that can both clear maps fast and kill bosses reliably. Congratulations — the developers just hard-capped their game down to about 4 viable builds (or into insane “all-in 200 div weaponswap” investment builds).
Here’s how bad it is: the current #1 Seismic Cry DPS build can’t even kill bosses reliably. That’s how unbalanced the game is. And no, this isn’t about player skill or a bad build. I’m not a bad player — I’m literally playing the highest damage build for my ascendancy and skill choice, and it takes me 3–5 minutes to kill a map boss if I don’t get one-shot beforehand. There are so many more builds with the exact same — or equally bad — problems. The issue is simply terrible balancing, which makes the game absolutely no fun to play.
It’s bad game design — the devs don’t understand what they are doing. They are doing a bad job and forcing people onto the 4 meta builds, or to quit the season and uninstall this mess of a game for good.
And don’t hit me with the usual “streamlined top 30% streamer bait or GGG senpai” excuses. That’s not a solution, it’s just deflection — a cult.
At this point, you might as well play Diablo 4 — where, for all its faults, these exact issues probably don’t exist (not that I play that crap either).

And That’s Just Story Time…
I haven’t even started digging into the actual balancing disasters or the most basic QoL features that are missing.
Take Energy Shield alone — you could fill pages just talking about how busted that is. Then add in HP, defenses, range vs. melee comparisons, attack times, movement speed penalties, overkill scaling, condition-based skills, teleport mechanics… the list is endless.

It’s laughable at times. Imagine having to do a barrel roll and clap your hands 10 times before your Hand of Chayulah starts channeling with -50 movespeed — and then waiting another 2.5 seconds just to teleport. And to counter that, you have to spend 50 passive points and 500 divines just to still be slower than top-tier builds. That’s what some of these systems feel like.

The list of things that need to be fixed before one more shitty refurbished league comes out is endless. I’m not even tackling the more obvious mechanics introduced with this patch or the ones that still aren’t fixed. And the whales keep on giving.
This game is drowning in badly broken mechanics. Does anyone wonder why Chris Wilson actually left the team?

GGG: fix it, or sell it to Blizzard so we actually know where you are.