Various feedbacks from SSF perspective

Hello, been playing a ton of PoE2 and really enjoying the game. I think there are a few balance changes needed though as the game is a bit too easy due to the nature of multiplicative scaling.

Player Damage:

1. Shrines
the damage shrines (elemental/chaos) need a nerf. Both for monsters and players. I don't know what layer the damage is getting added in (seems multiplicative instead of additive with other sources of damage as extra), but 50% more damage per shrine is frankly too much. Also the animation for the shrines before you acquire them is invisible yet the damage also insanely high. I think both of these aspects could do with a significant nerf.

2. Headhunter/rare mods
Headhunter needs a nerf somehow, it makes any build trivialize a majority of the game. I'm off the opinion that it should take 1-2 rare mods or simply rare mods should have significantly less power than they currently do (needs significant changes to the game balance though).

I can't tell you how many times I go to watch a build showcase and one of these two aspects shows up and I can no longer judge the actual strength of a build. They make every build go god mode and delete everything they look at.

3. +gem levels
I like how many levels one can acquire, makes it feel VERY D2 alike and satisfying. What isn't satisfying or D2 like is that it is always multiplicative per level. I think it needs to normalize or become a linear scaling cause this stuff is ridiculous. I don't want to see +levels disappear or be significantly reduced, just the power level of the individual levels toned down.

4. Cast on critical (honestly just comet)
please make comet not the far and away best choice for CoC setups please. Please remove cooldowns and rebalance the other payoff spells or something. I've seen a few super cool self cast Comet single target setups so please leave them alone, just make it so Comet isn't the best in slot for almost every CoC setup ever.

Player Defenses:

1. Sorcery Ward
a personal one, but PLEASE make Witchhunter Sorcery ward more visible somewhere. Like above the health bar or something, I hate having to track it in the top left corner of my screen.

2. Energy Shield
Still trivializes all issues with pool and scales way too easily to absurd numbers. I think base ES nodes should be almost half the power and same with jewels. (8%-10% on small passives and 10-15% on jewels) Plus the largest downside of pure ES is taken away by an accessible keystone (CI).

3. Chaos Inoculation/Chaos dmg
This keystone is bull. Chaos damage sources in this game are quite frankly too high or simply just balanced around 75% chaos res as early as low tier maps. CI removes the downside of ES (double damage from chaos) much too easily and frees up a significant amount of affixes on gear when doing so. ES builds are already immune to the worst of damage bypass effects with the changes in PoE2. I think CI should lean into removing all bypass as it does currently (poison/bleed immune) but should not give blanket chaos damage immunity (can be supplemented with some sort of extra chaos mitigation or removal of the double damage from chaos sources on ES).

Alternatively, just make chaos damage balanced around 50% res so that it doesn't feel nearly as punishing trying to play anything besides another ES/CI build.

4. Life pool vs defense scaling
The ability to scale both life pool and defenses are very much at odds on affixes in this game due to them sharing prefix slots. Life gets additive gains while defense has many layers of multiplicative gains. Often the best use of item affixes is pure defense, no matter if its evasion/armour/ES yet only 1 of these schemas also gets pool from leaning into the multiplicative scaling of defense stacking. This gets even worse with hybrid ES builds and their ability to outright ignore life scaling for the more efficient ES/defense scaling. I know there are other issues that end up needing to be solved with these schemas, but they are simply much more manageable to tackle then a pure life build's issue with pool scaling.

I can offer no solutions to this issue beside nerfing base defense values and increases on tree and then balancing mobs to match. I don't want to see %life becoming a necessity along with all other defense scaling that life builds have to go through anyways.

5. ev/ar is mechanically bad
idk what else to say, they do not play well together and each are best used in a pure or hybrid ES way. I'm sure Duelist will bring more toys to make this a viable method of mitigation like it is in PoE1, but til then it's kinda ass especially with the armour to elemental and deflection rewarding a pure investment doubly so. tactician armour + deflection/glancing blows is pretty cool, but is its own flavor of varied mitigation that still ignores the hybrid ev/ar formula.

Item Acquisition:

Honestly, things feel pretty good. I think trade is a cesspool of whiners and complainers and it's hilarious. I see showcases of "400div builds" and I laugh cause they are showing off a Rakiata's and Garukhan's and the rest of the build is actual garbage items and both those lineage gems are extremely easy to achieve. This league's economy is weird but honestly the Temple only needs a slight nerf to its output at the top levels imo. I'm not even a temple "abuser", I just do atziri rush strats for the most part.

TLDR; love the game, multiplicative scaling is over the top currently and would love to see some player power pulled back from the 1%ers. Temporalis is and will always be a mistake that hopefully only beta trade players will suffer.

+1

Game plays too much like an ARPG and that's outdated by 30 years

yeah, been watching some newer arpgs and seeing people not have to play inventory tetris and even pick up off class things cause everything is a 1x1 makes me kinda jealous. Not that I'd ever play a mace build cause flat attack time was one of the worst design decisions GGG made, but at least I'd pick up/ID 2x4s a bit more.

Also why implement WASD and keep name locking. These things feel sooooo bad in conjunction, especially with mobility skills. I may be an outlier though cause of whilrling slash/twister, but at least make it a toggle in that case.

Tldr devs dont’t care about SSF, good luck till next league.