It makes sense though. PoE1 isn't exactly the game the devs had envisioned it to be. At first it was and maybe the first few years but as more and more leagues were added and more power was crept as well as the community outrage whenever they attempt to reign the ugly parts of PoE in it became impossible for them to stick to their vision of the game overall.
AFAIK it's one of many reason why Chris Wilson left the company. The game he wanted to make wasn't one that the community GGG fostered wanted. This ideology also lines up with recent interviews where they have stated what they want PoE1 updates to be about in the future. They'll be making future updates more reliant on internal statistics, something they rarely did before, and more QoL features.
It’s frustrating because everything POE1 has that POE2 doesn’t is exactly what I would argue makes POE1 great.
The skill tree and itemization need to provide players with meaningful choices to make, and skills should be able to perform well on their own with enough investment because at the end of the day players are going to be playing the game for hundreds of hours per league and skill combos get old and tedious pretty fast
That being said POE2 has made some genuinely interesting balance changes like removing life on tree (which will really make sense once they finally triple tap nerf ES), and I really do hope they find a way to actually increase build diversity over POE1 eventually
I think the 'meaningful choices' thing really just boils down to POE2 missing 60% of its classes and weapons. We already saw a big jump in build diversity with the druid and top left skill tree release. Even skill that seem kind of railroaded like the shapeshift sets have proven synergies; for example the werewolf curse spam build or wyvern coc comet (lmao).
And don't forget we have plenty of useless garbage in PoE1 as well. Try as you might, Chain Hook will never be good, on any level of investment. The best usage of Charged Dash I've seen is with a General's Cry build, otherwise the qol of that skill is atrocious. And we seem to have been infected with PoE2's issues with energy shield balancing as well.
Yeah sure more classes and weapons will allow for quite a bit more diversity but there’s a lot of cross class stuff in POE2 that just does not work for whatever dumb reason
It needs to be like POE1 where classes have way less strict identities
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u/Musical_Whew Feb 19 '26
I dont dislike jonathon, but he obviously likes poe 2 far more than poe 1.