So... Time to quit PoE (at least for now)

Why are you nerfing/changing attack speed? [Removed by Support]

Yes, I realize that's probably not their reasoning, but I figured I'd probably mention it because it has been the go-to excuse for SO MANY changes. It's a meme at this point. Mjolner... I'm looking at you in particular. At least this time they added %more damage to make up for the reduced speed. They did NOT do that for Mjolner and that is why it didn't just fall out of meta, but fell into the toilet. Anyway, I don't read the forums much and so I don't know the official reason. I don't even read patch update news until they come in the form of patch notes. Sue me.

But the question remains... why? Again... baffled.

"Ugh, Multistrike wasn't nerfed. It does more damage on consecutive hits, now, and it's actually more DPS overall, especially with the buffs to the melee gems themselves. It's just slow and hits harder."

First of all... we already have a gem that does that. It's called Ruthless. Go look it up. Why are we duplicating gem functions? But much more importantly, the ENTIRE reason why people used Multistrike was for the speed. You see... speed is more than just damage scaling. Much more.

Molten Strike (or really any skill) CoC, Mjolner, or any other procced system on melee: You need speed. Go play those with the new Multistrike and tell me how that works out for you with that "it's actually more DPS overall" bullshit. Multistrike for proccing now (and LGOH for that matter) is... calling it a joke would be an insult to even the worst of stand up comedians.

Two Handed Weapons.... [Removed by Support]. So, here's a perfect example of why SPEED is MORE IMPORTANT than raw damage. My Wild Striker Elementalist. I made a thread for it here on the forums. Don't go read it. That shit is old and these days it's about twice as powerful (was... twice as powerful). This (updated) Wild Striker of mine used to be one of my favorite builds. It wasn't anything stupid solo, but I had specifically designed it to be played with aurabots (more on those later) because I found out that Wild Strike + Elementalist + Aurabot = retarded amounts of damage scaling. Like... 7 figure DPS for pennies on the dollar cost of typical meta builds. That build died to a bunch of trash as soon as I logged in and redid the passive tree with this patch. It wasn't because it didn't hit hart. It did. Possibly moreso than normal. The problem is that it was so goddamn slow that by the time my character had hit one enemy and killed others in front of her, other enemies had moved around her and I was getting hit. Movespeed and attack speed on monsters is extra dangerous when your own character is slow to hit. Pre patch, I click 1 button and the screen lights up like a Christmas Tree because of how fast the attacks cycle. 9.5 attack speed without an aura support on a 1.25 Two Hander base. Now I'm at 3.2. THAT'S WITH ALL SELF BUFFS, including totem. [Removed by Support] Do you have the sightless idea how clunky and just BAD 3.2 feels at max self buffs at level 95??? That entire build is based around clever scaling and attack speed so that I can blow screens up and keep the leech stacks flowing to replenish my 8.5k CI ES. Speaking of which, you already nerfed ES. You nerfed VP. You nerfed ES again. You nerfed Leech. And did that again. And yet I was still able to make the build work even though I lost a few thousand ES and about 60% of my leech potential. I survived more than once. I've kept/updated this build for THREE YEARS. Or... close to it. Changing Multistrike? BOOM. Dead. Can't even safely clear a T15 map anymore.

It's not just this 2h build. It's all of them. My Smiter, Cleave, MS... How about my tripple-dip-Onslaught Raider? That build had a... 13.5? 14.5? somewhere around there APS on a 1.25 base. Whatever, it's at 6.4 now. It feels terrible. It's Glacial Hammer. It was my fast/safe Ulab runner build. It feels like shit now, and you know Glacial Hammer is terrible for clearing besides. The clearspeed getting TO the bosses is... well...

Clearspeed... This is kinda funny. Low damage at fast speed means faster clearspeed than high damage at low speed.... because you're hitting more things. Most mobs are not strong enough to slow down a build with at least a moderate amount of raw damage. Sure, the fallout of that means bosses are a massive hurdle. But you get the point. Was multistrike's change a nerf to clearspeed? Was that the point? I don't think so, because casters and bow builds were not affected at all.

Overall ease of play/fun factor... Slow is clunky. Slow FEELS BAD. IT IS NOT FUN. My casters and my bow builds FEEL BETTER than all of my melee now (except Cyclone. Cyclone... feels pretty fucking good now. Not gonna lie. That's one thing they got right this time and... oh... Cyclone doesn't use Multistrike. Oof.)

PoE is NOT an FPS. It is an dungeon-crawler ARPG. It does not need animation canceling.

"Umm, animation canceling is kinda good for melee because you can get out of position locks and avoid a big hit. I'd say it's a much needed feature."

That's true... but that's only "needed" because GGG has a hard-on for nerfing defense layers and outright refuses to give melee a decisive and exclusive edge to make up for the danger. Spellcasters and bow builds have never dealt with the BS that melee has to. Spiky Bois, I'm looking at you in particular. [Removed by Support]

Also, there's a lot of times when skilled use of animation canceling is going to be hard if not impossible. I just love how the demos of it you find (like ZiggyD's video) are all at low level where everything moves... slowly...

Something to note about the animation canceling. I have continuously gotten into situations where the animation canceling has PUT ME IN DANGER or simply wasted my time.
A) LMB Click-to-move getting stuck: Go try this experiment. Get a cycloner and use LMB for movement and any other button for Cyclone. Mid-attack, hold LMB to move to a new location. You will go there and then stop moving. Even as you move your cursor around the screen with LMB still held down, you will not move. Why? [Removed by Support]

B) Canceling skills you don't want canceled: example, Mirror Arrow. I right click fire Mirror Arrow to a new location and immediately go back to holding down LMB for movement with the cursor ahead of where the arrow is meant to land. I do this so that my character smoothly transitions into continued motion upon landing. I dodge Elder roots/siphons with pinpoint accuracy using this method, FFS. With animation canceling, if I do this, my Mirror Arrow does nothing. Took me like 6-7 times to realize what was going on. Congratulations, GGG, you've ruined a movement tactic that bow builds have used for years with no problems. Now, we have to worry about timing our Mirror Arrows so we don't fuck ourselves and take a slam to the face. [Removed by Support]

You could have added an option to turn off animation canceling. [Removed by Support]

A) "Reduced the amount of increased Energy Shield granted by early Witch passives."
B) "Each of the small passives on the Guardian Ascendancy tree now grant 5% increased energy shield (from 6%)."
I'm not going to say much here. After ES being nerfed patch after patch, I'm not even going to argue about it. I will point out that I think it's funny that GGG gave us methods of increasing quality (and therefore flat es) on items while nerfing ES passives. Nevermind the fact that this kind of weird change disproportionately affects newer/poorer players as well as unique ES items in general... making them even more worthless than they already are.

The main thing I want to say here is... those witch passives... when you said "reduced" what I thought you meant was a few percent points lower... NOT A REDUCTION TO A FLAT +10 ES. [Removed by Support] 10 flat ES is NOTHING. I am NOT spending a passive point on TEN ES. [Removed by Support]

C) Blood Magic/Mortal Conviction Wheel: You guys REALLY hate Aurabots, don't you? Why? They are rare (at least in standard). Very rare. And they are not very rewarding to play to begin with. The concept of the new Mortal Conviction is very cool. I'll give you that. It's cool. PUT IT SOMEWHERE ELSE AS A SEPARATE KEYSTONE [Removed by Support].

See my previous comment about GGG having a hardon for nerfing defensive layers/tactics and that being the reason why melee has sucked for years.

A) Immortal Call: Less dmg taken from physical and ele dmg being a buff coming from an active source... is really cool. I like this idea. I do NOT like this idea being a replacement for Immortal call.

Immortal Call has, since its conception, had only two purposes: first, prevent getting "bursted" where multiple hits come it at once that would have otherwise killed you. Second, prevent one shots from skilled manual activation or looped prooced activation combined with a consistent End Charge generation source. This change nerfed both of those uses.

Ever since the Pantheon came out, Immortal Call had a third use: Soul of Arakaali + Blood Rage for proccing bonus life/es recovery. This change completely fucked that use.

"Umm, you can still get 100% invulnerability and that will proc Soul of Arakaali. You just need to spend 5 endurance charges."
[Removed by Support]

B) Immortal Call + Molten Shell + new Steelskin sharing cooldowns and having a forced cooldown: So, you made it to where 100% uptime on Immortal Call is basically impossible. Why? There are few builds that can do that to begin with and those builds are still vulnerable to elemental damage... which is the overwhelming majority of enemies' damage type. Molten Shell is already a "meh" defensive layer, but now... I'll never use it. I will never use Molten Shell ever because using it would force me to not use Immo Call or Steelskin. Speaking of Steelskin... 2,209 extra health pool? That's it? With a basically unavoidable cooldown? 2,209 extra health is not enough to stop Spiky Bois. It's not enough to survive a boss slam. WTF am I supposed to do with this when even the new Immortal Call is better?

Lets do some math using a build with a health pool of 6,700 with NO ARMOR or Fortify or anything else. Build takes a physical only hit(s). Immortal Call with NO END CHARGES effectively increases the health pool by 34% by blocking that much damage (we can answer the question of "will you survive" by calculating how much bigger of a hit or hits we could take). 34% of 6.7k is 2,278, just a bit more than Steelskin gives us. Again that is with NO endurance charges. In other words, if you have 6.7k or more life/ES, then Immortal Call is hands down better than Steelskin, especially when you consider that it syndergizes with armor, Fortify, Arctic Armor, resists, etc.

If these skills could be kept up 100% of the time... ya know... like they used to be... and/or if they could be overlapped, then they would actually be worth a damn.

Conclusion: this is dumb.

C) "War Banner: Now grants you and nearby allies 15% increased accuracy rating at gem level 1 (from 40%), up to 21% at gem level 20 (from 59%)."
So... War Banner is now as weak as 2 passive points spent near the the Raider/Shadow. Yup... there's a mana reservation skill I will no longer be using, ever...

D) "Warlord's Mark: Now allows you to leech Life and Mana from cursed enemies with Attacks only, rather than from any source of damage."
So you add some weak general spell ES leech nodes to the tree in the top right and 1 weak ele-specific leech node per element... both of which require passive point investments to even get to... and you don't put ANY mana leech spell does on the tree... and you nerf Warlords Mark for casters.

GGG, I'm not sure if you are aware of this but... casters do not take Warlords Mark by choice. NOBODY DOES. They take Warlords Mark when they don't have any other better option for their build and they don't want to sacrifice a ton of other utility just to fix the leech problem. Also... Melee objectively and across the board ALREADY has better access to leech than spellcasters have EVER had.

WHY? WHY DO YOU MAKE THESE CHANGES? WHY???????

[Removed by Support]

Took me 22ex to get the appropriate Watchers Eye to fix the leech problems on ONE spellcaster, and that was after spending another 2 or 3ex on a temporary Watcher's Eye that was shit other than the mana leech it gave.

[Removed by Support]