Off meta players right now

Yes, that's right. Ggg wants everyone to play hunter.

Worst case I'll self cook a bunch of campaigns and then shift to a strong build guide when the dust settles. Life is good for ARPG enjoyers these next few weeks!

Time to explore again all the possibilities...

The off meta HOTG Chronomancer build I was using got deleted from the game entirely.

As a player, who spend 1000h of making few non-meta builds my self, with thons theory and testing. I have to say: What a waste of time. everything is dead, i have to start from scratch. RIP mana leech chonk, RIP elemental invocation invoker, RIP 100%crit siphoning striker invoker

Molten Blast Deadeye standing atop shit mountain stronger than ever.

True. I'm like rolling slam and sunder got buffed so I'm good.

Hopefully. I didn't see any big boosts to the off-meta skills, but that may be in the unlisted wider reworks.

As an example, now that Ice Wall, Archmage, and Cast on Shock have been gutted, I expect (please, GGG) a huge numerical buff to Fireball and other skills like it, so that Fire builds can be Fire builds, and compete at the damage thresholds they stated.

It's funny, I was expecting huge deadeye nerfs but nah was pretty alright overall, then my crossbow build just got straight buffed and it was already capable of doing all content. Waiting to see what the gem number changes are like to see what the crossbow skills are like there.

Phys build, sunder, rolling slam, even molten blast got buffed, warrior buffed, armor buffed on pinnacles, ancestral totem may affect from sunder and rolling slam buff?. Im good

Are the minions safe?

I mean if you liked physical damage or armour break today is a good day. People are too distracted by the nerfs to see the buffs.

yeah like hexblast KEKW

Man the had to go and make poisonous concoction deal physical instead of chaos

Yup my favorite build of .1 was my Warbringer warrior build. Utilizing shield charge to fully stun enemies, boneshatter spam mixed with HoA for added AoE on aftershocks, for tough enemies it was armour break into sunders ( 2x sunder with seismic ). I also had the no cooldown warcry passive so i could spam seismic cry for AoE pushback to keep swarms off me while also bringing something close to threshold. The build is so fun especially with massively enhanced attack speeds. Very snappy even mixing skills. And some skills naturally flow together like armour break into boneshatter. So id often shield charge / roll out of slam interaction animation, armour break into boneshatter. Watch everything explode. So fun.

Sunder got massively buffed. Now only 1 second attack.

Raise Shield now has a basically perfect block timing stun AoE which is gonna be awesome especially mixed with molten block passive.

Warcries now cost less mana

Only nerfs i see so far are 20% less armour break on the armour break attack but that is fine.

The Heralds nerf hurt big time but looks like I'll be going to be doing an incinerate pathfinder with those speed reduction buffs.

Man I just play the game, IDGAF what they change. Give me a butterknife and a pet crab, I'll be ready to grind to endgame as usual.

Off meta was nerfed too...

My poison chaos bolt acolyte of chayula got several nerfs and no buffs. I wasn't planning to play it again but I still got a chuckle out of it.

All I care about are fast builds, I just wanna run around like the feral creature I am

Bownomancer on a mount feeling pretty strong right now.

They've literally done nothing but buff my build (I was pure phys, stun-oriented warrior)

I was originally looking to play something new, but they literally buffed the class that I was already having fun with, so I guess I'm going back LOL

I am pretty sure I am actually buffed compared to 0.1.0 for what I was playing which is funny.

True, I can't wait to do some dumb shit with new gem and unique. I tried having a full Thorn build, but it didn't end that well. I want to see if I can do it again with this patch

Not if you are/were a Flameblast enjoyer...

Or you are a Deadeye bow player.

As a totem warrior- yes!

Was shit before, still shit!

Nothing gained, nothing lost

I thought I was off meta going with a build centered around flameblast.

Shit was nerfed harder than most skills. Idk why it needs a 15 second cooldown.

Dunno about that. Hexblast was far away from being meta, and it was made absolutely unplayable.

Ice Shot - Glacial Bolt Deadeye relatively unscathed. We love projectile vomit screens

Ice Crystal life nerf beyond lvl 20 gem the only real pain honestly. Had +7 on the crossbow and +2 ammy and it still didn't last more than 6 shots

This is not a shot at those people, everyone plays however they want, but i really don't get people that play PoE1 or 2 just to then follow ready-made meta builds

To me the unique selling point of the game is literally the build diversity and deep buildmaking. If you're just gonna be following the meta then all of that is wasted and you don't get to enjoy it

You say that but my chaos dot chrono caught enough stray shots to seriously hurt a low damage, high investment build.

I was already planning a Lich version that gets damage from the ascendency this time, but chrono's aura will be worthless now with the presence change.

Yeah chayula enjoyers are probably extatic now kek

Not really. My league starter from EA launch (Essence Drain Contagion Chronomancer) got gutted as well…

This is why I find HCSSF fun. I have to cobble together whatever random garbage build I can with what drops I got and just... make it work (Tim Gunn voice). I don't care about what the cool kids are doing or what passive/unique combination is most exploitable.

My biggest gripe is it feels like PoE's skill pool is more of a puddle.

Like on Witch, the two real physical spells you can cast with reliability is Bone Cage and Bone Storm, and maybe the really low damage Unearth. If I spec physical passives on blood mage (who is locked to spell crit and spell leech), it's those three and maybe Bone Blast which feels awful. Detonate Dead is okay, but there's entire boss encounters with 0 corpses, and 0 ability to generate corpses without also having a sacrifice minion setup. Then Exsanguinate and Reap is not going to be in the game for how long? This ends up with this build essentially being spam Bone Storm until you get bored of the build, the game.

I'm okay with that if I can freely change builds to a different build or playstyle - but there's no system like Diablo's closet system (save your current build and swap to it anytime you want) and the game expects you to pay gold to respec and memorize the setup every time you want to swap back and forth.

I think as a consequence, once the game starts getting stale, it sours really fast. So, either dish out lots of gold to hop builds regularly (and hope the build you swap to is actually fun) or you put in the time investment to level and gear a new character (since you can't change class/ascension, this is practically what you're expected to do, especially if you're looking at a class like Blood Mage who can't use Chaos Inoculation and all their good passives are for spells, so you're unable to "just swap to this build anyways"). So it's like, should I really be needing to go through the campaign again to get to a level where I can even use the build? (i.e. Fireball is not usable until level 31)

At that point, yeah, the game was enjoyable, but I'm ready to put it down and move on, and I love ARPGs where even if I'm weak or not "meta" I can keep the gameplay fresh for myself. Like, I feel like it wouldn't be too egregious to allow players to make a new character at level 40, once they clear the campaign once in a season.

As long as lightning spear didn't get nerfed im guchi

I wouldnt be so sure non-meta stuff like Flamestorm/Flameblast got murdered (First one was dead to begin with)

Except the meta is gonna be Amazons, duration depending on their power.

My builds are untouched it appears. Off-meta builds for the win!

Hello ma bois good morning :kekw

My off meta plan for league start actually didn't lose much at all, and maybe even got a bit stronger.

Off meta got destroyed just as hard since they still got nerfed and already were hard to make viable

Bonestorm was basically unchanged. If anything a little buffed, sorta.

Wish they changed blood mage more.

wym? Every skill got nerfed even underpowered weird offmeta skills and items nobody uses.

Oh hey!! How did you get a picture of me? 😆 Can't wait for Friday!!

off meta... meta in early acess.. damn, people smoke what here?

Too many people treat PoE like their job.

Meta is stupid and does not matter. I’ll still fuck up the endgame like a legend anyways

As a warbringer main, I cannot stop smiling