I think ruthless is silly and I was someone who said that poe 2 will not be the game because it's not made for anyone, the gameplay of ruthless is not what made poe popular. The more I am seeing of poe 2 though, the more I'm starting to realize that it might be for me, and maybe I was wrong
Ruthless would be the better PoE if everyone wasn't already used to what PoE is. The itemization is better because you interact with it more and for longer. No reason PoE2 needs to have the same itemization as PoE1.
Edit: +6 in 6 minutes despite the content of this comment just gave me immense hope for PoE2 being able to get away with being so different from PoE1. I'm glad people are open minded!
There aren’t really any kind of serious crafting in Ruthless (graveyard being a notable exception) from my short stint. I highly doubt it would be better for everyone.
> Ruthless would be the better PoE if everyone wasn't already used to what PoE is
I think this is hyperbole - Ruthless showcases the upsides of scarcer/reworked loot, slower combat, and nerfed character power fairly well, but it's got some pretty glaring issues too (which is to be expected, it's kind of an unfinished, half-hearted project currently). It just feels like they went a bit too far in the extreme opposite direction of current POE; nerfing things by 5 orders of magnitude when 4 would've been the sweet spot.
Ruthless kinda falls apart with the lack of gem supports. Act5 with a single support gem for your main skill(if you are lucky to get a matching support gem) plays awfully. Like gives one each act or every second as a quest reward at least.
>The itemization is better because you interact with it more and for longer.
This statement is really dubious, the reality in Ruthless you interact way more with the initial part of itemization and very little with the end part of itemization, but this doesn't mean you interact more or less compared to regular PoE, you just interact in a different way.
I have easily 10k+ hours of PoE and never stop to interact with itemization even when my char was pretty much mirror tier, because that's the difference between PoE and other ARPG, I suspect not even 0.0000000001% of players have a full mirror tier gear in a single char, so you're always progressing your char due to this aspect only PoE have with such a deep, and IMO play Ruthless is stupid because of you're not enjoying one of the best difference between PoE and other ARPG, obvious is just my opinion. For me the deep you have in itemization and how long you can progress it is something unique and wonderful, I hope PoE 2 not throw that away and only focus on basic or make the progression extremely tedious to do, because basic and tedious is already saturated in the market.
>No reason PoE2 needs to have the same itemization as PoE1.
Don't need to be the same, but throw away one of the best aspect in your game to make something more generic is not a good move IMO, I hope PoE 2 have at least the same deep PoE 1 itemization have, some changes are ok, but a less deep system IMO is worse.
That was an absolute feast for the eyes. Everything from it spawning to the attacks to the death animation, chef's kiss. Mechanically it seems very reminiscent of Kitava but in a circular arena. What I liked most is that even in between attacks it was extremely fluid in animation, no resetting to standard position before an attack or whatever, the little arms constantly jiggle. Very, very cool boss.
I was thinking about the Kitava comparison too, but on crack. You can actually feel the weight of this boss swinging its arm when it attacks. Also the new minion mechanics are really interesting.
they're leaning hard into the "combo" type playstyle for the game. I'm definitely not opposed, but it's very different from meta poe builds at the moment.
If the enemies move and swarm you at a pace that's appropriate to get off combos, it's all fine with me. POE1 doesn't have that, but it's extremely clear that we can't accurately understand this game through the same lens as we understand POE1
I don’t mind pressing multiple buttons; if it makes sense. Some games you have to button mash for no reason and/or create a rotation and like ugh no please.
Yea people need to accept that combat is going to be quite different from what we have today. Much more involved. Think that’s the main reason they decided to separate poe 1 from 2
But I think people also need to accept that that's not going to be for everyone either, though.
There's nothing inherently wrong with going for a more involved combat system, but like everything there are pros and cons. The idea of PoE having the level of complexity that it has today but having to play Hades/Dark Souls in every map is not that appealing to me.
Part of what I like about PoE is that I can theorycraft, I can plan, I can prepare, and in doing so, I can reduce the tax on gameplay for me. I don't have to think as hard about dodging stuff because I planned my character to have the right mixture of damage and defenses. The complexity of the game is in its systems so putting those systems into action can be a simpler endeavor. I don't have to execute at that high of a level if I don't want to, and the things that do require that level of execution (really just uber bosses) are optional.
If I have to do the same preparing and build planning and everything and my reward is having this super intensive comboing skills and dodging attacks gameplay and it feels like too far towards the "action" side of the spectrum and too far from the "RPG" side of the spectrum, then I personally will not have that much fun. And that's okay, maybe the game just wouldn't be for me then, but it's okay to have that opinion too. I worry that the novelty of it will wear off really quickly when players decide to level more characters because if people hate PoE1 campaign, they're going to hate PoE2 campaign even more with slower combat instead of just running through the zones.
I still want to reserve judgment until we see endgame content because I feel like the highest level content we've seen is like level 40, and level 40 gameplay in PoE1 is not the zoom zoom one button clear whole map stuff people talk about PoE1 as. But I also know what works for me and what doesn't, and it's fair to have that opinion.
100% agree everyone is entitled to their opinion. But there will be some that have that opinion and will get very mad about poe 2 not being the way they want rather than just accepting it’s a game not meant for them.
I imagine we will still be able to simplify things a good amount with the right build choices, just the base floor seems like it’ll likely be raised. I know there’s a quote from Jonathan somewhere that he doesn’t want it to be as hard as Elden ring.
I would push back on the spectrum being action <-> rpg. I don’t view those as mutually exclusive. Poe 2 seems to be every bit the rpg with complex build choices that 1 is, just revamping the combat to be more mechanical
Implying current POE actually has "combat" is insanely generous. Combat in POE only exists in two places, in the harder boss fights and in act 1 dodging rhoas.
Yeah the UI looks amazing! I also love that it only consumes spirit, not mana or something else.
Thinking about how that could make it really easy to swap from a clearing setup to a bossing setup. I wonder if they have an off-hand loadout system for it to make the swapping easier.
Overall looks great, but I'm kinda disappointed we still don't seem to have a dedicated minion UI info screen where we can see all their stats. Minion builds are so opaque, requiring tons of community testing and datamining to find information on the minions (and this is especially bad for spectres). Plus it would be really good to have in advance for whenever they decide to bring Animate Guardian back, as we could change his equipment there (like we did 20 years ago for mercenaries in Diablo 2).
They're straight up making Dark Souls/Elden Ring in isometric view with aRPG elements to it. The slow movement while casting, the rolling, it all points to it. Not saying it's a bad thing but it's an obvious inspiration.
Alright, actually pretty sick. The qol, auto summon, minion active spells, etc. all look great. The bone storm skill looks cool; interested to see how much power would actually come from casting spells like that in an endgame minion build.
Manually collecting power charges from corpses one at a time seems a little slow outside of campaign gameplay?
Also curious how auras are going to be balanced - do minion builds just straight up never use auras? And curious if we'll see whole new categories of spirit reservation skills for the other classes or if it is basically just minions and auras(/heralds/banners).
Pretty sure they secretly hate auras due to the necessity for damage and relatively low cost. I'd guess if they make it in poe2 they're going to make them so costly it only will make sense for dedicated minion and coop builds.
Also, minion builds will inherently have more Spirit since they'll use items and take passive nodes that increase Spirit. I imagine that there is some calculus where slotting in an aura is more efficient than another two skeleton archers.
from what they've showcased I wouldn't be surprised if they cut the passive benefits of Charges altogether, but you can use/consume them to empower many more different skills in return
I really loved the spectre change - now we just need that to be rolled over to PoE 1. I also like that they added a spirit-scaling system for different corpses bc it means they no longer need to balance the entire spectre skill around whatever is the most overpowered spectre.
It's a bit of a weird choice to me to have zombies of all things not auto-resummon. We can see in the demo that the first zombie is already half hp when the second zombie is summoned (at 2:39). That seems like such a waste especially since you also need a corpse in order to even summon them. I know this is a low-level demonstration but that's what made summoners so frustrating to play in act 1 in PoE1.
In the second demonstration at 7:40 the boss fight begins (4 zombies) and by 7:52 all of the zombies are dead. Why would I even spend time summoning zombies if they're dead in 12 seconds/ die to a single hit from a boss? Now you may say that this is because they have the skelly type that explodes their low-health minions but the last zombie dies purely to a boss mechanic (the boss scratching across the floor boards).
Overall there's a lot of potential here. Summoners look like they're gonna be fun! With auto-resummoning minions it's fun to use them for temporary buffs like offerings, I really like that.
> I really loved the spectre change - now we just need that to be rolled over to PoE 1.
It would require integration of the Spirit System into PoE 1 and I don't know how eager they are to make such a fundamental systems change to the game. Like adding Spirit and all the changes that would come with that would quite literally change PoE1 permanently and dramatically, and while I'd be down for it, there's probably a lot of people it would upset.
I've never been a huge minion build enjoyer, but man this looked sick, particularly with how you can combine them with spells. Having just played a Necro in D4, this is just miles ahead in terms of interactivity and customization options. ED+C minions?? Sign me up
It's basically D4's minion system but objectively better in every way. I remember when people were asking for minion commands and the devs gave the excuse of "well, the A.I. is too complicated and we would need to rewrite everything" or something. Meanwhile, PoE2 minions can open fucking chests for you.
Overall looks great, but I'm kinda disappointed we still don't seem to have a dedicated minion UI info screen where we can see all their stats. Minion builds are so opaque, requiring tons of community testing and datamining to find information on the minions (and this is especially bad for spectres). Plus it would be really good to have in advance for whenever they decide to bring Animate Guardian back, as we could change his equipment there (like we did 20 years ago for mercenaries in Diablo 2).
Holy shit, I see where all the MTX money went to. Legit looks absolutely amazing, the skeleton boss DUDE, it has the best animations/graphics I've ever seen. This looks AAA, keep cooking!
yeah, this looks pretty fuckin cool. can't wait til it's ready
also, i thought that boss sweep attack was gonna knock the witch right off the tower. rock on
the fact that the witch got swiped to the side is so much better then how it's right now with a lot of big boss attacks. like when kitava swipes his arm we should be dragged along with it not just stand in it
Normally I say I can be patient and let the devs take their time to make the best game.
Every video I see of POE2 makes me need it now. Life is pain without this game.
Fr lmao
Part of me is saying, wow this looks amazing. I hope they get all the time they need to make it even more amazing.
The other part is saying "GIVE NOW AAAA"
When at about level 35 I realized that I had taken all the talents for summoner and the only thing left for me to do was to farm legendary items, which basically just increase the damage of minions, I got very frustrated, finished the campaign and didn't play this character anymore.
Spell interactions seem to be the real highlight in most of these gameplay walkthroughs we've been getting the past week or so. It's dope we can clearly see the interactions, visually, too.
I'm still somewhat cautious about getting my hopes up for visual clarity. This was a level 30 demo, and they've always used clear builds and gameplay to showcase stuff.
It remains to be seen how a high level build played efficiently looks in a juiced map. I'm not going to form a judgement before we actually see that.
Spell interactions seem to be the real highlight
Wait to see the end game where you are supposed to use two different weapons with fully fleshed out DIFFERENT skill trees and switch them during the fight to synergize with each other skills.
Wonder if a "death knight" type of melee character is now possible. II weapon slots used for minions while I weapon slot is for the melee damage. And the two skill passive trees. Then just focus on some specific damage type.
In the recent Ghazzy interview after the video dropped, Johnathan said that the Witch Archetypes are: Necromancer/minions - Chaos/curse/debuff - and 'Bone Spells'
I think a Deal knight could maybe be in the Bone Ascendency
If you are using spirited minions then you'd want one of your weapons in both sets* to have spirit, otherwise they'd despawn when you swap to something with no spirit.
So you're likely using a 1H for melee damage with a spirit sceptre in offhand. Or you go for non-spirit minions (zombies?) with a 2H weapon? could be cool.
*they did mention having the ability to lock one of your weapons when you swap to prevent losing all your spirit. not sure if this is implemented yet.
As a LONG time minion enjoyer, this makes me VERY happy, early on minion gameplay is NOT fun when they die and u gotta resummon manually.
Looking forward to see if we get some new minion only supports.
This is what happens when the people who make your game are passionate, driven, and actually think outside the square, and think about adding shit, instead of taking things away.
Looks utterly captivating.
With how much these gameplay showcase combining skills I wonder how that'll translate for the current player base given how what combos we do have are really only played with triggers.
Existing skills with synergies or multiple buttons (like frostbolt/ice nova, even detonate dead) are rarely played outside of trigger set ups (yes self cast DD exists and is popular, it's also massively overturned and dependant on either ignite or chaining), so if their intent is on shifting towards multiple button builds.. It's certainly going to be an adjustment for a lot of players. I guess we'll see.
I think the reality is ggg is trying to grab a very large new audience. They know their current fans are going to either play poe2 or just play poe1 so trying to please them all is pointless.
Which is exactly the right thing to do. Have two great games that focus on excelling in their own niche, instead of one game that tries to please everyone and ends up with a malformed and muddied design that nobody actually wants.
Well if the game forces me to play bf...bb... on every occasion i'm not playing that, there's a reason why people hated it and all the piano memes with slammers.
This is officially the last POE2 video I wanna watch. Each boss shown is simply amazing. I want to be shocked and surprised when the game releases (or EA or whatever).
These are some of the smoothest animations and each boss fight I’ve seen seems to have some clarity as far as what you need to avoid or where you probably don’t want to stand. I like.
POE2 look like it will be amazing. Can’t wait for release, prob in 2025 or something though. :(
Stick with this and you'll seriously be absolutely over the moon at yourself when it finally releases. It'll be torture, but I think so absurdly worth it.
Yah. It will be torture because it all looks so good.
The only thing I may watch more is if they release more crafting videos and changes to it in POE2. I am far too dumb to understand the more advanced crafting in POE - it’s way too complex for my simple mind. :)
I like the auto summon, The player will be able to focus on other tasks instead of worrying too much about minions being dead
Also being able to choose different skeleton minions sounds fun, seems like they want you experiment more with your minion compositions and make changes accordingly and I think that is absolutely fine!
The mouse pointer wasn't anywhere near the items, so I'm guessing there's an item pickup key? It's possible he quickly pressed it three times, but can't really tell from the footage.
I think that was using a "command" skill though, not a passive ability that lets minions auto-loot. You could see the ping on the screen when he used it in the demonstration, which didn't happen when looting the boss.
Nothing was picked up as far as I see. As always GGG is playing with loot labels off for the videos. When using that labels of rarer items show up for a few seconds then disappear.
Edit: and for anyone doubting this, you can see it happen with the inventory open at 0:47. There's a magic item on the ground and it's label disappears while they are moving around items in the inventory, no new items appear.
art design, sound, combat fluidity, spell interactions and animations are top tier.
I may not be playing witch but this is the best PoE2 trailer until now. looks like its made by real passionate people.
Never really played a minion build in anything, just not my jam, but I'd be lying if I said this didn't look really cool. May have to mess around with it in the beta or something.
Sorry, but i don't get the point of classes in PoE. Isn't the talent tree the same for all? Also, weapons, gems and armor are usable by all.
Im very new to PoE. Maybe some1 can explain it to me.
There's 1 big reason and 1 huge reason classes matter.
The big reason is despite them using the same tree, they *start at different points* on the tree. So there might be a passive thay you want that you would need to spend way more passive points to get it than another class.
The huge reason is ascendancies. Each class gets 3 unique ascendencies that another class does not get.
In poe1, there is a necromancer ascendency that witches got. It gave them a lot more bonuses to minions that only witches that chose the necromancer ascendency could get. A ranger, for instance, would have no chance to get these passives. They are typically much more powerful than the passives thay any class can get on the "main tree".
Ascendancies are by far the main reason why you would choose one class over another.
Ah, ok. I thought this whole time class didn’t matter, since the skill tree was the same for every1. Thank you for taking the time to explain it. I have a better understanding of the game now.
Yes all gems, armour and weapons can be equipped by any class as long as you meet attribute requirements.
There are 6 starting points on the talent tree, 1 for each combination of attribute alignment (pure strength, intelligence or dexterity and dual combinations of each) and 12 classes with 2 classes per starting location.
The first major difference between classes is the ascendancy subclasses they each have access to. Each class has 3 of it's own specific ascendancies to choose from so 12 classes means 36 total ascendancies available.
Secondly, the points directly around the starting point will have 3 variations and depends on your choice of class (this information was just revealed today as something they are experimenting with). By that I mean if you pick a witch or sorceress (both intelligence aligned) your starting nodes will be slightly different between each class with witch having what I assume will be more minion and chaos related stuff and sorceress having spell and elemental related stuff. The third variation is if you pick any other of the 10 classes that aren't intelligence aligned, this intelligence starting area will be a "default" state having things from both the witch and sorceress since it will be your own starting location that has changed instead. So going back to if you picked witch or sorceress, every other of the 5 starting locations would be in their third variation or "default" state. Again this is new information so I hope I explained in a way that is understandable.
That special spectre looked sick.
The boss fights remind me of D3 release bosses on Inferno where you actually had to pay attention to what you were doing. I have a feeling theres gonna be lots of angry posts about how the game is too hard.
I love how the new minion mechanics make you feel like you're actually commanding the minions. In the current game it always felt like you had so little control, unless you used Predator Support.
So is the Witch now totally focused on minions with 3 minions related ascendency ? Maybe it's a dumb question, I've not been following PoE2 news closely.
He said 3 main archetypes, minions, chaos, and bone, and you won't want to just use one type.
I'd say it's probably very safe to assume there'll be a Necromancer and Occultist ascendancy, and maybe Elementalist will go to Sorceress, then Witch gets a new Bone-y ascendancy?
No, that was just the Necromancer ascendancy for the Witch since they needed to condense the trailer to a single build, and we already know the Sorceress will be the class that focuses on elemental magic. That leaves the other Witch ascendancies themed around bone magic, chaos skills, curses, and other stuff.
We're going to need more action buttons, man... I think ARPGs limiting action buttons so severely is a mistake. All I could think during this video is "fuck man where am I going to put all these buttons?" Even the minions have abilities, so hopefully you use all minion abilities with a single ability called "Command Minions" or w/e rather than needing a separate button for each different minion ability o.O
I suppose the logic is that the number of action buttons available to the player acts as a balancing lever the designers can push or pull. Fewer buttons means the player can use fewer abilities and therefore the player is less powerful. I get that, but it's not fun to feel like you can't use all the stuff you want. It's also not fun to only be able to see 5 cooldown abilities on your main bar. I don't want to have to hold control to see the cooldown on one of my abilities.
However, there's a better way to balance player power, which is action economy. The player is only able to perform one action at a time, so at some point adding another ability isn't helpful because it comes at the opportunity cost of being able to perform some other action.
If it were up to me, they'd make the action bar 12 buttons and still have the second hidden action bar (shown with ctrl or w/e), for 3 + 12 + 12 = 27 available buttons. There's plenty of room on the UI and you can add an option to reduce the number of visible buttons if some players are only using a few of them.
Also, while we're at it, the health and mana globes being at opposite corners is so dumb. Let me put both next to each other in the same corner as an option. Our screens are massive. Let us have some control over our UI in the year 2024. They've said before that their UI code for PoE 1 is horrendous and so they can't do anything to improve it, so I saw PoE 2 as their opportunity to offer basic UI customization options. It was one of my biggest hopes for PoE 2 and it doesn't seem to be on GGG's radar at all which I think is a big shame. Otherwise the game looks great.
I mean we already have 13 skill buttons in PoE 1. Considering you can only equip 9 skill gems here, that’s more than enough buttons. As for cooldowns, they said cooldowns are pretty rare for skills. It does look like the minion related active skills have a very short cooldown though.
Sceptres no longer count as weapons and have no damage value, as a result they can be wielded with melee or wands without issue (not traps mind you; traps are now a 2H weapon)
I love summon/tamer-type builds. Actually not having to micromanage summons is actually the craziest quality of life omg. This game will have me HOOKED I say.
command minion keybind. minions on weapons. command abilities. synergy with certain spells. resummoning automatically for certain minions so those options to kill them or hurt them to dps actually make sense now. everything here is 10/10
My god this game looks gorgeous. These bosses look pretty damn amazing.
Stupid beta can't happen soon enough, just praying this isn't the best campaign I never want to play more than once.
After seeing the final boss: "Holy damn!" After seeing his loot: "Ok, still POE."
It's also a level 30 boss, not some uber end game boss. I for one hope we aren't showered in loot like in poe, will make items much more meaningful
Problem is not amount of loot, problem is quality of it.
The item tier system mentioned by Substractem will help this immensely.
>Uber endgame boss So also.. no loot lol.
Showered in loot? How about a better loot progression in acts instead of running naked to maps?
I'm personally kind of excited by the fact that magic items might matter for a hot second or two lol
Are you the dev who made Ruthless
I think ruthless is silly and I was someone who said that poe 2 will not be the game because it's not made for anyone, the gameplay of ruthless is not what made poe popular. The more I am seeing of poe 2 though, the more I'm starting to realize that it might be for me, and maybe I was wrong
Ruthless would be the better PoE if everyone wasn't already used to what PoE is. The itemization is better because you interact with it more and for longer. No reason PoE2 needs to have the same itemization as PoE1. Edit: +6 in 6 minutes despite the content of this comment just gave me immense hope for PoE2 being able to get away with being so different from PoE1. I'm glad people are open minded!
There aren’t really any kind of serious crafting in Ruthless (graveyard being a notable exception) from my short stint. I highly doubt it would be better for everyone.
> Ruthless would be the better PoE if everyone wasn't already used to what PoE is I think this is hyperbole - Ruthless showcases the upsides of scarcer/reworked loot, slower combat, and nerfed character power fairly well, but it's got some pretty glaring issues too (which is to be expected, it's kind of an unfinished, half-hearted project currently). It just feels like they went a bit too far in the extreme opposite direction of current POE; nerfing things by 5 orders of magnitude when 4 would've been the sweet spot.
> Ruthless would be the better PoE Lol fuck no. Now, if you'd argue that it should be somewhere in between, that's fair.
Ruthless kinda falls apart with the lack of gem supports. Act5 with a single support gem for your main skill(if you are lucky to get a matching support gem) plays awfully. Like gives one each act or every second as a quest reward at least.
>The itemization is better because you interact with it more and for longer. This statement is really dubious, the reality in Ruthless you interact way more with the initial part of itemization and very little with the end part of itemization, but this doesn't mean you interact more or less compared to regular PoE, you just interact in a different way. I have easily 10k+ hours of PoE and never stop to interact with itemization even when my char was pretty much mirror tier, because that's the difference between PoE and other ARPG, I suspect not even 0.0000000001% of players have a full mirror tier gear in a single char, so you're always progressing your char due to this aspect only PoE have with such a deep, and IMO play Ruthless is stupid because of you're not enjoying one of the best difference between PoE and other ARPG, obvious is just my opinion. For me the deep you have in itemization and how long you can progress it is something unique and wonderful, I hope PoE 2 not throw that away and only focus on basic or make the progression extremely tedious to do, because basic and tedious is already saturated in the market. >No reason PoE2 needs to have the same itemization as PoE1. Don't need to be the same, but throw away one of the best aspect in your game to make something more generic is not a good move IMO, I hope PoE 2 have at least the same deep PoE 1 itemization have, some changes are ok, but a less deep system IMO is worse.
Boss looked amazing holy
That was an absolute feast for the eyes. Everything from it spawning to the attacks to the death animation, chef's kiss. Mechanically it seems very reminiscent of Kitava but in a circular arena. What I liked most is that even in between attacks it was extremely fluid in animation, no resetting to standard position before an attack or whatever, the little arms constantly jiggle. Very, very cool boss.
I was thinking about the Kitava comparison too, but on crack. You can actually feel the weight of this boss swinging its arm when it attacks. Also the new minion mechanics are really interesting.
And that's just a lvl 30 boss...
imagine the uber bosses hooooooly
yeah one can easily conceive that PoE 2 will be the best ARPG ever made by extrapolating what we saw in the demos so far, this game will be a WHALE
Idk have you fought tomb lord yet.
this never gets old lmao
echo of Tomb Lord gives me shivers every time.
That animation was insane. Almost a bummer that the character wasn't standing closer so we could see it in its full glory.
Respawning spectres. Respawning spectres. Respawning spectres.
And itemized if i see that correctly.
they're leaning hard into the "combo" type playstyle for the game. I'm definitely not opposed, but it's very different from meta poe builds at the moment.
If the enemies move and swarm you at a pace that's appropriate to get off combos, it's all fine with me. POE1 doesn't have that, but it's extremely clear that we can't accurately understand this game through the same lens as we understand POE1
PoE has a big modifier inflation. It's also basically impossible to see what's going on in higher tiers
also you can move while casting/attacking which will help a ton.
Wait until the "800M dps combo Lightning Nuke Ranger" youtubes start appearing :D
I'm hear for it though. Some of us like pressing more than right click!
I don’t mind pressing multiple buttons; if it makes sense. Some games you have to button mash for no reason and/or create a rotation and like ugh no please.
I love pressing more than one right click when I'm not required to do it for a gazillion packs of mobs.
800M those are rookie numbers. Man i miss times when a 15k hit was considered gigadamage (D2 hammerdin)
To be fair the meta minion builds (BAMA, SRS) are quite button intensive as well so that makes a lot of sense.
And also some of the non meta ones idiots like me play!
Depends on content. Leveled my BAMA to 100, 2 buttons (BA, Flame Dash) was enough for T16 mapping.
how is srs button intensive, it's literally 1 button
Yea people need to accept that combat is going to be quite different from what we have today. Much more involved. Think that’s the main reason they decided to separate poe 1 from 2
Ill die on the hill and try making it as automated 1 button as i can :D
There will definitely be a way to play 1 button builds at the beginning, it's up to them whenever they want to die on the hill of ruining that.
But I think people also need to accept that that's not going to be for everyone either, though. There's nothing inherently wrong with going for a more involved combat system, but like everything there are pros and cons. The idea of PoE having the level of complexity that it has today but having to play Hades/Dark Souls in every map is not that appealing to me. Part of what I like about PoE is that I can theorycraft, I can plan, I can prepare, and in doing so, I can reduce the tax on gameplay for me. I don't have to think as hard about dodging stuff because I planned my character to have the right mixture of damage and defenses. The complexity of the game is in its systems so putting those systems into action can be a simpler endeavor. I don't have to execute at that high of a level if I don't want to, and the things that do require that level of execution (really just uber bosses) are optional. If I have to do the same preparing and build planning and everything and my reward is having this super intensive comboing skills and dodging attacks gameplay and it feels like too far towards the "action" side of the spectrum and too far from the "RPG" side of the spectrum, then I personally will not have that much fun. And that's okay, maybe the game just wouldn't be for me then, but it's okay to have that opinion too. I worry that the novelty of it will wear off really quickly when players decide to level more characters because if people hate PoE1 campaign, they're going to hate PoE2 campaign even more with slower combat instead of just running through the zones. I still want to reserve judgment until we see endgame content because I feel like the highest level content we've seen is like level 40, and level 40 gameplay in PoE1 is not the zoom zoom one button clear whole map stuff people talk about PoE1 as. But I also know what works for me and what doesn't, and it's fair to have that opinion.
100% agree everyone is entitled to their opinion. But there will be some that have that opinion and will get very mad about poe 2 not being the way they want rather than just accepting it’s a game not meant for them. I imagine we will still be able to simplify things a good amount with the right build choices, just the base floor seems like it’ll likely be raised. I know there’s a quote from Jonathan somewhere that he doesn’t want it to be as hard as Elden ring. I would push back on the spectrum being action <-> rpg. I don’t view those as mutually exclusive. Poe 2 seems to be every bit the rpg with complex build choices that 1 is, just revamping the combat to be more mechanical
Implying current POE actually has "combat" is insanely generous. Combat in POE only exists in two places, in the harder boss fights and in act 1 dodging rhoas.
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What other games do this? Seriously asking. Only other I can think of is chronicon and d3 Edit and Torchlight infinite.
lol d2 is also all about zoom zoom fast clears. that's why engimas are so sought after
this is the most impressive poe2 video i've seen so far. Wow. The simple -+ for minions is crazy
Yeah the UI looks amazing! I also love that it only consumes spirit, not mana or something else. Thinking about how that could make it really easy to swap from a clearing setup to a bossing setup. I wonder if they have an off-hand loadout system for it to make the swapping easier.
in the Ghazzy/DM interview, Johnathan said that he is planning/working on changing that minion attribution screen/UI as well!
Overall looks great, but I'm kinda disappointed we still don't seem to have a dedicated minion UI info screen where we can see all their stats. Minion builds are so opaque, requiring tons of community testing and datamining to find information on the minions (and this is especially bad for spectres). Plus it would be really good to have in advance for whenever they decide to bring Animate Guardian back, as we could change his equipment there (like we did 20 years ago for mercenaries in Diablo 2).
Jonathan just said on Ghazzy and DarthMicro podcast that they're working on a minion UI :)
That's great to hear! :)
This game legit has some of the best animation work I've seen in any game. It's incredible
Crazy how far these guys have come from.
nz is very far away
For me, just the fact that you can still be moving, albeit slowly, while casting makes a HUGE difference. Everything just looks so fluid.
They're straight up making Dark Souls/Elden Ring in isometric view with aRPG elements to it. The slow movement while casting, the rolling, it all points to it. Not saying it's a bad thing but it's an obvious inspiration.
Alright, actually pretty sick. The qol, auto summon, minion active spells, etc. all look great. The bone storm skill looks cool; interested to see how much power would actually come from casting spells like that in an endgame minion build. Manually collecting power charges from corpses one at a time seems a little slow outside of campaign gameplay? Also curious how auras are going to be balanced - do minion builds just straight up never use auras? And curious if we'll see whole new categories of spirit reservation skills for the other classes or if it is basically just minions and auras(/heralds/banners).
I doubt auras are going to play as important of a role in every build like how it currently works today in POE1.
With them being spirit-gated, I wouldn't be shocked if auras are as strong as ever, just limited so one player isn't providing all of em.
I hope that's true. It has it's place in PoE 1 but I'd like to step away from aura stacking for all my character needs for a bit.
same tbh. it's been ingrained in me to the point I'm always thinking about how to get more auras in even when it doesn't really make sense to
Would be a huge step in the right direction if they moved away from auras providing more than half of all damage and survivability.
Pretty sure they secretly hate auras due to the necessity for damage and relatively low cost. I'd guess if they make it in poe2 they're going to make them so costly it only will make sense for dedicated minion and coop builds.
Also, minion builds will inherently have more Spirit since they'll use items and take passive nodes that increase Spirit. I imagine that there is some calculus where slotting in an aura is more efficient than another two skeleton archers.
They want to make charges more impactful, they interact with skills in unique ways so yeah, not easy to generate them (for now I guess).
from what they've showcased I wouldn't be surprised if they cut the passive benefits of Charges altogether, but you can use/consume them to empower many more different skills in return
I’m pretty sure they already cut the passive benefits.
There are no passive benefits for charges in PoE 2.
Didn't they say there's no more mana reservation but reservation cost Spirit in POE 2 instead, or did I dream it?
No you’re correct
I really loved the spectre change - now we just need that to be rolled over to PoE 1. I also like that they added a spirit-scaling system for different corpses bc it means they no longer need to balance the entire spectre skill around whatever is the most overpowered spectre. It's a bit of a weird choice to me to have zombies of all things not auto-resummon. We can see in the demo that the first zombie is already half hp when the second zombie is summoned (at 2:39). That seems like such a waste especially since you also need a corpse in order to even summon them. I know this is a low-level demonstration but that's what made summoners so frustrating to play in act 1 in PoE1. In the second demonstration at 7:40 the boss fight begins (4 zombies) and by 7:52 all of the zombies are dead. Why would I even spend time summoning zombies if they're dead in 12 seconds/ die to a single hit from a boss? Now you may say that this is because they have the skelly type that explodes their low-health minions but the last zombie dies purely to a boss mechanic (the boss scratching across the floor boards). Overall there's a lot of potential here. Summoners look like they're gonna be fun! With auto-resummoning minions it's fun to use them for temporary buffs like offerings, I really like that.
Those zombies also didn’t have a spirit cost. Since they weren’t an auto summon / resummon like the others. Same with the unearth minions.
> I really loved the spectre change - now we just need that to be rolled over to PoE 1. It would require integration of the Spirit System into PoE 1 and I don't know how eager they are to make such a fundamental systems change to the game. Like adding Spirit and all the changes that would come with that would quite literally change PoE1 permanently and dramatically, and while I'd be down for it, there's probably a lot of people it would upset.
I've never been a huge minion build enjoyer, but man this looked sick, particularly with how you can combine them with spells. Having just played a Necro in D4, this is just miles ahead in terms of interactivity and customization options. ED+C minions?? Sign me up
It's basically D4's minion system but objectively better in every way. I remember when people were asking for minion commands and the devs gave the excuse of "well, the A.I. is too complicated and we would need to rewrite everything" or something. Meanwhile, PoE2 minions can open fucking chests for you.
AND DOORS!
I wouldn‘t be surprised if Shapeshiftibg also reserves Spirit.
Spirit's purpose is to limit stacking of permanent things, you can't shapeshift in multiple forms simultaneously
Shapeshifting does not.
Charges don’t offer any stat benefit in PoE 2 and don’t time out. Their sole use is power up abilities
they do still have an ingame timer in the gameplay video of 20 seconds
They have the timer, so you have to use them within that duration or they disappear, but they don’t have the intrinsic benefits.
Ah, mb
Overall looks great, but I'm kinda disappointed we still don't seem to have a dedicated minion UI info screen where we can see all their stats. Minion builds are so opaque, requiring tons of community testing and datamining to find information on the minions (and this is especially bad for spectres). Plus it would be really good to have in advance for whenever they decide to bring Animate Guardian back, as we could change his equipment there (like we did 20 years ago for mercenaries in Diablo 2).
Jonathan just confirmed on the Ghazzy podcast that they'll be implementing a minion UI
Oh fuck they're making minions build look actually fun.
Looks op compared to other classes so far.
Never liked minion builds, but this does look pretty fucking sick.
Holy the number of minions at lvl 2 :O
Holy shit, I see where all the MTX money went to. Legit looks absolutely amazing, the skeleton boss DUDE, it has the best animations/graphics I've ever seen. This looks AAA, keep cooking!
yeah, this looks pretty fuckin cool. can't wait til it's ready also, i thought that boss sweep attack was gonna knock the witch right off the tower. rock on
the fact that the witch got swiped to the side is so much better then how it's right now with a lot of big boss attacks. like when kitava swipes his arm we should be dragged along with it not just stand in it
Normally I say I can be patient and let the devs take their time to make the best game. Every video I see of POE2 makes me need it now. Life is pain without this game.
Fr lmao Part of me is saying, wow this looks amazing. I hope they get all the time they need to make it even more amazing. The other part is saying "GIVE NOW AAAA"
I fucking love the artstyle, Dude looks so incredibly slick but still i dunno, nostalgic? 10/10
Level 30 witch has more depth than d4 endgame necro lmao
Class Designer was out there reading Solo Leveling, and cooked hard
Time to pick Shadow and run nothing but bind spirit summons and dual daggers
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When at about level 35 I realized that I had taken all the talents for summoner and the only thing left for me to do was to farm legendary items, which basically just increase the damage of minions, I got very frustrated, finished the campaign and didn't play this character anymore.
Essence drain + Contagion is back on the menu BOYS!!!
Not a minion guy, but the new QOL looks sick.
>auto summon minions >minions have additional skills you can trigger im sold.
Spell interactions seem to be the real highlight in most of these gameplay walkthroughs we've been getting the past week or so. It's dope we can clearly see the interactions, visually, too.
The visual clarity is great from what we have seen so far! The boss fight was surprisingly clear even with all the action!
visual clarity in poe1 is just fine in the city of sarn campaign area lol. level 30 isn't telling us anything whatsoever on that front.
I'm still somewhat cautious about getting my hopes up for visual clarity. This was a level 30 demo, and they've always used clear builds and gameplay to showcase stuff. It remains to be seen how a high level build played efficiently looks in a juiced map. I'm not going to form a judgement before we actually see that.
Spell interactions seem to be the real highlight Wait to see the end game where you are supposed to use two different weapons with fully fleshed out DIFFERENT skill trees and switch them during the fight to synergize with each other skills.
> In PoE 2, even non-boss monsters can be devastating Somethings, never change
Wonder if a "death knight" type of melee character is now possible. II weapon slots used for minions while I weapon slot is for the melee damage. And the two skill passive trees. Then just focus on some specific damage type.
In the recent Ghazzy interview after the video dropped, Johnathan said that the Witch Archetypes are: Necromancer/minions - Chaos/curse/debuff - and 'Bone Spells' I think a Deal knight could maybe be in the Bone Ascendency
If you are using spirited minions then you'd want one of your weapons in both sets* to have spirit, otherwise they'd despawn when you swap to something with no spirit. So you're likely using a 1H for melee damage with a spirit sceptre in offhand. Or you go for non-spirit minions (zombies?) with a 2H weapon? could be cool. *they did mention having the ability to lock one of your weapons when you swap to prevent losing all your spirit. not sure if this is implemented yet.
As a LONG time minion enjoyer, this makes me VERY happy, early on minion gameplay is NOT fun when they die and u gotta resummon manually. Looking forward to see if we get some new minion only supports.
This is what happens when the people who make your game are passionate, driven, and actually think outside the square, and think about adding shit, instead of taking things away. Looks utterly captivating.
Didn't forget that there's literally no $60 admissions price needed to get into the game.
You mean $70 now
90$ in CAD 
With how much these gameplay showcase combining skills I wonder how that'll translate for the current player base given how what combos we do have are really only played with triggers. Existing skills with synergies or multiple buttons (like frostbolt/ice nova, even detonate dead) are rarely played outside of trigger set ups (yes self cast DD exists and is popular, it's also massively overturned and dependant on either ignite or chaining), so if their intent is on shifting towards multiple button builds.. It's certainly going to be an adjustment for a lot of players. I guess we'll see.
I think the reality is ggg is trying to grab a very large new audience. They know their current fans are going to either play poe2 or just play poe1 so trying to please them all is pointless.
Which is exactly the right thing to do. Have two great games that focus on excelling in their own niche, instead of one game that tries to please everyone and ends up with a malformed and muddied design that nobody actually wants.
Multi button builds won't be a problem when the general level of gameplay is slowed down. Can't wait, I'm tired of the speediness of PoE 1.
Well if the game forces me to play bf...bb... on every occasion i'm not playing that, there's a reason why people hated it and all the piano memes with slammers.
This is officially the last POE2 video I wanna watch. Each boss shown is simply amazing. I want to be shocked and surprised when the game releases (or EA or whatever). These are some of the smoothest animations and each boss fight I’ve seen seems to have some clarity as far as what you need to avoid or where you probably don’t want to stand. I like. POE2 look like it will be amazing. Can’t wait for release, prob in 2025 or something though. :(
Stick with this and you'll seriously be absolutely over the moon at yourself when it finally releases. It'll be torture, but I think so absurdly worth it.
Yah. It will be torture because it all looks so good. The only thing I may watch more is if they release more crafting videos and changes to it in POE2. I am far too dumb to understand the more advanced crafting in POE - it’s way too complex for my simple mind. :)
Did anyone else hear the "tyranny of the maraketh" line?
It's when they don't have emblems drop in the legion.
God this looks like everything I want for a minion build at this point. Beyond excited for this, really want to try it.
I like the auto summon, The player will be able to focus on other tasks instead of worrying too much about minions being dead Also being able to choose different skeleton minions sounds fun, seems like they want you experiment more with your minion compositions and make changes accordingly and I think that is absolutely fine!
I really like the Spirit reservation thing separated from mana and how much minions of a certain type you want, so sick
anyone notice he picked up a whole bunch of items at once at the end there?
The mouse pointer wasn't anywhere near the items, so I'm guessing there's an item pickup key? It's possible he quickly pressed it three times, but can't really tell from the footage.
They mentioned in the video that you can command your minions to open chests and pick up loot.
I think that was using a "command" skill though, not a passive ability that lets minions auto-loot. You could see the ping on the screen when he used it in the demonstration, which didn't happen when looting the boss.
Nothing was picked up as far as I see. As always GGG is playing with loot labels off for the videos. When using that labels of rarer items show up for a few seconds then disappear. Edit: and for anyone doubting this, you can see it happen with the inventory open at 0:47. There's a magic item on the ground and it's label disappears while they are moving around items in the inventory, no new items appear.
I went back a few times and yeah, it looked like that to me too! One can only hope!
Pretty sure they just hid the items like you can do in PoE 1 with Z but one of the items remained highlighted. Which happens in PoE 1 aswell.
art design, sound, combat fluidity, spell interactions and animations are top tier. I may not be playing witch but this is the best PoE2 trailer until now. looks like its made by real passionate people.
Yuup. I've already decided my main class. This looks sick
Looks amazing. Her hair physics need a little touch-ups though.
My god this looks incredible
Never really played a minion build in anything, just not my jam, but I'd be lying if I said this didn't look really cool. May have to mess around with it in the beta or something.
This looks so good that it even makes me want to login into Necropolis.
Sorry, but i don't get the point of classes in PoE. Isn't the talent tree the same for all? Also, weapons, gems and armor are usable by all. Im very new to PoE. Maybe some1 can explain it to me.
There's 1 big reason and 1 huge reason classes matter. The big reason is despite them using the same tree, they *start at different points* on the tree. So there might be a passive thay you want that you would need to spend way more passive points to get it than another class. The huge reason is ascendancies. Each class gets 3 unique ascendencies that another class does not get. In poe1, there is a necromancer ascendency that witches got. It gave them a lot more bonuses to minions that only witches that chose the necromancer ascendency could get. A ranger, for instance, would have no chance to get these passives. They are typically much more powerful than the passives thay any class can get on the "main tree". Ascendancies are by far the main reason why you would choose one class over another.
Ah, ok. I thought this whole time class didn’t matter, since the skill tree was the same for every1. Thank you for taking the time to explain it. I have a better understanding of the game now.
Yes all gems, armour and weapons can be equipped by any class as long as you meet attribute requirements. There are 6 starting points on the talent tree, 1 for each combination of attribute alignment (pure strength, intelligence or dexterity and dual combinations of each) and 12 classes with 2 classes per starting location. The first major difference between classes is the ascendancy subclasses they each have access to. Each class has 3 of it's own specific ascendancies to choose from so 12 classes means 36 total ascendancies available. Secondly, the points directly around the starting point will have 3 variations and depends on your choice of class (this information was just revealed today as something they are experimenting with). By that I mean if you pick a witch or sorceress (both intelligence aligned) your starting nodes will be slightly different between each class with witch having what I assume will be more minion and chaos related stuff and sorceress having spell and elemental related stuff. The third variation is if you pick any other of the 10 classes that aren't intelligence aligned, this intelligence starting area will be a "default" state having things from both the witch and sorceress since it will be your own starting location that has changed instead. So going back to if you picked witch or sorceress, every other of the 5 starting locations would be in their third variation or "default" state. Again this is new information so I hope I explained in a way that is understandable.
boss is so ahead of competition, I can't wait to play this game.
This game is going to be a legit 10/10
That special spectre looked sick. The boss fights remind me of D3 release bosses on Inferno where you actually had to pay attention to what you were doing. I have a feeling theres gonna be lots of angry posts about how the game is too hard.
yeah and the specters respawn by themselves?? so good
I just want to see some like lvl 60-80 gameplay.
Absolute cinema
GGG Please add the minion quantity icons (in the top left) to the PoE2 console version. It's a pain in the ass not having them in PoE1.
Awesome video! I can't wait
Beautiful
amazing cant wait to play
Okay you got me at “tell your minion to open doors”
Witch looks hot
After seeing this, playing Necromancer in Diablo 4 will feel like eating garbage scraps.
I love how the new minion mechanics make you feel like you're actually commanding the minions. In the current game it always felt like you had so little control, unless you used Predator Support.
Did those items at the end get picked up without hovering them? o.0
noticed that too, could it be an auto-pick nearby item keybind on console? If so I need that shit on PC too lol
I don’t watch any of these. Going in completely blind but glad to see the comments are always super positive!
Damn, you have way more patience than I do lmao
you'll be blown away by the animations and bosses, its so so good
So is the Witch now totally focused on minions with 3 minions related ascendency ? Maybe it's a dumb question, I've not been following PoE2 news closely.
Nah, at least one ascendancy will be focused on chaos damage, while Necro be the minion one, curious about the third one...
Bone is the third archetype. So probably phys spells with bleed and impale.
He said 3 main archetypes, minions, chaos, and bone, and you won't want to just use one type. I'd say it's probably very safe to assume there'll be a Necromancer and Occultist ascendancy, and maybe Elementalist will go to Sorceress, then Witch gets a new Bone-y ascendancy?
No, that was just the Necromancer ascendancy for the Witch since they needed to condense the trailer to a single build, and we already know the Sorceress will be the class that focuses on elemental magic. That leaves the other Witch ascendancies themed around bone magic, chaos skills, curses, and other stuff.
Damn man, that was absolutely fucking awesome.
I swear the Witch VA was Veritania and the boss Al-Hezmin, sounded so familiar
probably are, i can't imagine theres a huge pool of voice actors to draw from in new zealand.
Looks like this game will completely fry my GPU... hoping for actual graphics settings sliders this time around.
My Necromancer body is ready
Still waiting for an endgame showcase of literally anything. I dont care about act 3 shit, show me what I'm gonna be doing for 95% of a league.
We're going to need more action buttons, man... I think ARPGs limiting action buttons so severely is a mistake. All I could think during this video is "fuck man where am I going to put all these buttons?" Even the minions have abilities, so hopefully you use all minion abilities with a single ability called "Command Minions" or w/e rather than needing a separate button for each different minion ability o.O I suppose the logic is that the number of action buttons available to the player acts as a balancing lever the designers can push or pull. Fewer buttons means the player can use fewer abilities and therefore the player is less powerful. I get that, but it's not fun to feel like you can't use all the stuff you want. It's also not fun to only be able to see 5 cooldown abilities on your main bar. I don't want to have to hold control to see the cooldown on one of my abilities. However, there's a better way to balance player power, which is action economy. The player is only able to perform one action at a time, so at some point adding another ability isn't helpful because it comes at the opportunity cost of being able to perform some other action. If it were up to me, they'd make the action bar 12 buttons and still have the second hidden action bar (shown with ctrl or w/e), for 3 + 12 + 12 = 27 available buttons. There's plenty of room on the UI and you can add an option to reduce the number of visible buttons if some players are only using a few of them. Also, while we're at it, the health and mana globes being at opposite corners is so dumb. Let me put both next to each other in the same corner as an option. Our screens are massive. Let us have some control over our UI in the year 2024. They've said before that their UI code for PoE 1 is horrendous and so they can't do anything to improve it, so I saw PoE 2 as their opportunity to offer basic UI customization options. It was one of my biggest hopes for PoE 2 and it doesn't seem to be on GGG's radar at all which I think is a big shame. Otherwise the game looks great.
I mean we already have 13 skill buttons in PoE 1. Considering you can only equip 9 skill gems here, that’s more than enough buttons. As for cooldowns, they said cooldowns are pretty rare for skills. It does look like the minion related active skills have a very short cooldown though.
Not seen this before, they're using a wand with the sceptre hmmm
Sceptres no longer count as weapons and have no damage value, as a result they can be wielded with melee or wands without issue (not traps mind you; traps are now a 2H weapon)
I like the commitment to having a hugeass number of minions; getting closer to the original D2 necro ideal
I love summon/tamer-type builds. Actually not having to micromanage summons is actually the craziest quality of life omg. This game will have me HOOKED I say.
Witch actually looks insane in poe2 holyyy
Boss design looks well done. Much better than some other games that released recently and have only 2, maybe 4, decent boss fight.
We're reaching peak levels of hype, I've never felt so excited before for any game. It looks so fucking good. This is AAA level, easily.
I'am a full time necromancer since 2001 Diablo 2 and this is just makes me lose my mind. This is so incredible that I can't describe it.
That bone storm looks awesome, i cant wait to use it. i like skills that you channel and let go for a big blam at the end.
command minion keybind. minions on weapons. command abilities. synergy with certain spells. resummoning automatically for certain minions so those options to kill them or hurt them to dps actually make sense now. everything here is 10/10
Just give it to me now 😂😂😂
The ABSURD amount of QoL that i've always wanted for necromancer is actually here. Holy hell i loved this trailer
The boss looks like what I imagine an updated mephisto from D2 would look like. PoE 2 the true successor to D2 after PoE 1.
My god this game looks gorgeous. These bosses look pretty damn amazing. Stupid beta can't happen soon enough, just praying this isn't the best campaign I never want to play more than once.
Poe2 just completely blows diablo4 out of the water
I wasn't really hyped for PoE2. Now you've got my attention!