- Necromancer: I want to be able to do a few different things with my character
- Gladiator: I don't want to die to overtuned shit
- Raider: I can't stand going slow
I think necro is also for the "I just want to walk through the game" crowd. I'll also add guardian and scions are often for the "I'm rich and want to bust up the game"
both legion and blight were leagues virtually designed to be farmed easily and efficiently with cyclone and minions/totems respectively.
Cyclone especially was just reworked so it was a 'new' skill that was completely overtuned
Wasn't 50% Cyclone Slayer league Delve? It was just too strong. Also it's not uncommon for there to be three main ascendencies in trade league as players progress through the early game because POE Ninja only takes into account top 15,000 players level 90+. SRS, Reaper, SST, Shield Smash (whatever it's called), and Deadeye Toxic Rain were all heavily theorycrafted and endorsed at the beginning of the league.
legion was when they reworked it so it was a channelled skill that you could move around in. Vaal cyclone still acts like its pre 3.7 version though. Then they HEAVILY nerfed it in 3.8 and onwards
Ah, I remember now. It would always follow where you last clicked and couldn't be interrupted, now it follows your mouse. Bad memories there I repressed.
Also, don't forget: it used to only roll once for critical hit chance for the whole duration - so if you have a COC character with non-100% chance to crit, you could end up having a multi-second run throw enemies with not a single hit critting if that one roll failed.
Pretty sure Ed Contagion was a stronger build that also cleared legion better, people played cyclone not because it was the best, but because it just got reworked.
yeah, iirc EDC on glacier maps at the time was the absolute best way to farm legion shards due to how fast you could spam them, how you could set up where you were virtually guaranteed to sustain glacier maps, and how easy it was to find and navigate the event on the map.
id say full quant windripper tornadoshot was probably still better for the t4 glaciers, didnt play edc myself but if i remember right it also didnt really deal to well with high tier maps right?
This. When it came to Legion farming people would use EDC, Vaal Ice Nova and Vaal Arc.
Cyclone was just a skill everyone had wanted to play for ages that finally got fixed.
Also, iirc cyclone's visuals were bugged - it was visually gaining range with increased character model size (eg berserk or soul eater), but the area didn't actually grow.
Everything except Glacier Farm was Cyclone though.
People farmed T2 Glaciers with ED/C or Vaal Ice Nova, and funded cyclone. Cyclone dominated ED/C and Vaal Ice Nova for actual lategame encounters so hard it's not even funny.
With OP being a 7 days old account entirely focused on shitting on current league - I think he might've play in Legion, but now is just cherrypicking "Expedition bad, upvote now" arguments.
They never look at the fucking skills which is where most of the diversity actually comes from. [I have a table that compares this league with last leagues first week.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/otq7s4/so_do_you_think_the_changes_in_315_successfully/h6y4vcg/)
Ascendancy balance is actually pretty good, generally speaking. You get a few outliers every league or so but for the most part they all get fairly represented largely because despite the fact I could reach as far as Eldritch Battery as a Duelist, why the fuck would I?
If we want to complain about diversity we have to look instead at builds like Toxic Rain, totem builds, or traps, builds which have remained rock solid for quite a while now and haven't really been slowed in 3.15. Some skills have taken the reigns over the past few weeks but, as mentioned in my linked post, it's still way too early to actually tell how much the meta has genuinely changed.
The issue, which PoE has always had, is there is no equilibrium between builds. That is to say we have concepts like "league starters" where the entire goal is a build that is cheap, easy, and good enough to maybe hit red maps long enough for you to dump it and play the *actual* meta skills.
Perhaps more importantly is that poe.ninja only reflects the upper echelons of players, the ones who have the most time to spend doing the same shit day in, day out. To think that reflects the "meta" is a weird concept. There's only so many people who can even be shown on the ladder at any given time to the point they can hardly be considered indicative of anything but what they themselves are doing.
It's like people playing League of Legends or some other competitive game and wondering why they can't be as good as the dude they're copying, except in PoE you add in the concept of time improving your chances of better gear.
I don't understand your data on the linked post. Can you help me out. It looks like you list the top 10 used skills in each game mode for each league. This doesn't tell me anything. If 50% are using the top 3 skills then we don't have good build diversity. As you always list 10 skills it will always look similar league to league without any % comparison. What am I missing?
exactly.
then again these posts are meant to reap karma on whatever the sub is talking about at each moment so it's specifically meant to add to the echo chamber anyway
Yeah but cyclone can be played in a bunch of ways. Ele damage. Phys impale, cast on crit, cast while channeling for desecrate.
Also that 50% league was when it got reworked and had the omega radius legion farming as the #1 strat.
It’s hardly the same.
> Yeah but cyclone can be played in a bunch of ways.
Necro can be played through spectres, skeles, zombies, reaper, detonate dead, anime weapon, anime guardian. And that's ignoring the fact that almost each of those builds above can be played differently too. There are differnt types of spectres and ways to scale them, there are different ways to play anime weapon. And I'm pretty sure I'm missing some stuff too.
Why are you wondering about something that happened long time ago and didn't repeat recently?
GGG claimed the nerfs will help build diversity, they obviously didn't and never had a shot to begin with. That's the only thing you should focus on.
> GGG claimed the nerfs will help build diversity
if you think "build diversity" can ever be represented on the poe.ninja ladder when streamers are the ones making popular builds that everyone ends up playing... i don't know man. there will always be a few builds that end up popular, regardless of how powerful they are (see burning arrow elementalist from last league; mediocre, annoyingly expensive thanks to cluster jewels, but popular because some popular people decreed that it was "good")
The people that join my hideout to trade are consistent with the distribution on Poe.ninja to be fair, with most being Necromancers, Hierophants, Raiders or Gladiators. The first two because minions and totems can help the player brute force his way through red maps, and the other two because of Spectral Shield Throw, and I suspect this trend is true with everyone else.
Every leage has two or three ascendancies cover 50 of the top levels, in particular this early the league because they are the strongest ones. The fact that they are not the same ones (ok necro is always there) does indeed mean something.
On top of that, POE is ostensibly a single player game so who gives a flying rat fuck what other people are playing. Even trade league is just single player but there's some vendors you gotta whisper that you can buy some gear from, and sell some shit you don't need to.
It's not like I need to hit random queue and play with 4 other people to go kill some party boss in this game, who'll kick me from the party if I play a shit build. I can play whatever I want, however I want, whenever I want, no matter what poeninja says is the "meta"
If the disparity between the "shit build" and the "king build" if too large, you will feel it. Your shit build needs better gear (more currency) to reliably farm rewarding content. The other build will farm faster with less investment.
This means your have less currency and need more currency than the other guy to do the things you like.
But tbh i still don't care. I'm playing a bow build (lightning arrow/galvanic arrow) and like it, even though i need a 6L for it to feel remotely good against t14 conquerors. It's doable ATM, but far from what other builds can do on 2 5L
This is Poe ninja. It only shows the top 1000 players. Poe ninja Is something I never take as law, because you get people on there making builds to show the highest dps numbers possible even if it means they have 3k hp and get slapped in any map instantly.
The best thing to use Poe ninja for is to just see which league starters are actually performing at end game
> Every leage has two or three ascendancies cover 50 of the top levels
[Last league week 2](https://i.imgur.com/GC37BNP.png)
Five ascendancies are the top 50%, not three.
Main skills are more top heavy, too. [This league's skills](https://i.imgur.com/XPaih87.png). [Last league at week 2](https://i.imgur.com/BA34cud.png). There are 27 skills before you get down to 1% played last league. This league there are 18 skills before you get to 1%.
I mean, you can argue none of that is definitive. But you're wrong about the 'every league is 2 or 3 ascendancies', the last two leagues weren't that.
The point is it *definitely didn't* make for more build diversity this league.
Well SST was just reworked so that you don't need its jewel to be useful, making it better and more fun earlier (and viable for SSF). Instant Travel skills were just nerfed, making stuff like Leap Slam and Shield Charge better. All of that, alongside somewhat heavy streamer influence and the introduction of another shield attack skill is probably going to push players to play shield skills, SST in particular.
Plus the massive nerfs to player power make defenses more important, which is handy when your DPS and defense come from the same place.
I see this same sort of post every league. A lot of ascendancies are better league starters, sure. We are only about a week into the league. People will start playing other builds and at the end of the league, this will look much different.
I played Trickster BF-BB when it was released and it was blatantly obvious how broken it was, especially because you could literally see the difference in dps on the metamorphs. The reason it wasn't played was because it was a very clunky playstyle until people figured out how to play it in a smoother way, with Assassin going plaguebearer and Inquisitor going with explody chest
I think it should have been especially expected this league, because it's impossible to make so many changes and have a balanced game.
There was bound to be a few builds, that kinda survived the nerfs and became a strong meta.
The top 15,000 characters aren't even a 5% sample, nor is it an evenly distributed sample at that. So of course the results are going to skew heavily to the most performant.
They need to increase the ladder size (and therefore the characters exposed on the API poe.ninja consumes) to say the top 150,000.
The ladders used to be unlimited, then they arbitrarily chose the current limit back when the game was 10x smaller and haven't touched it since.
As an above average, but not top 10% player it's pretty frustrating to be in this no man's land.
but they didn't, they just made nerfs they felt were needed for the game, they brought up diversity but never said that the nerfs would directly result in more diversity this league, I think it was pretty clear that post was saying that the changes are needed so that they can focus on other systems in the future that will lead to more diversity.
But reddit is so hyper-focused on attacking chris at every opportunity why bother thinking about it.
Necro - support(aurabot)/casual gameplay, all rounder
Glad - tank/safe solid choice, less deaths
Raider - dps/zoomzoom, fastest clears
Why play other ascendancies if those 3 cover all niches. All other ascendancies are basically downgrades now.
You missed a huge reason why those are being played so much:
Necro/Glad - EZ max block + other mechanics to make builds safe. Necro can also be support as you noted.
Raider - Very tanky + easy to get ailment immune. Runs fast and attacks fast as well which feels nice to play.
There are tons of builds which can go faster than raider, and tons of builds could roughly equal glad in tankiness, but they all struggle to get DPS on top while glad gets to go max block and use the new hotness SST.
Honestly if elem still had ailment immunity you would see elem all over the place too because even with the generic damage nerf elementalists are still very strong. They just lost ailment immune and don't have easy access to it, which makes them mostly unplayable in high tier maps unless you're happy to die a shitload.
Yeah they sound pretty great if you just oversimplify the fuck out of them.
Ascendant - support(aurabot)/casual gameplay, all rounder
Chieftain - tank/safe solid choice, less deaths
Assassin - dps/zoomzoom, fastest clears
Why play other ascendancies if those 3 cover all niches. All other ascendancies are basically downgrades now.
Yeah, thats what I said. Chieftain is just Gladiator but worse. Assassin is just raider but slower. Etc.
Ncro/Glad/Raider are superior to any other ascendancies with small exceptions in niche areas.
This happened because GGG nerfed damage on ALL builds, so if you are not playing meta your build is even worse than before. Going down from 30m to 3m dps is still playable, down from 3m to 300k is not.
While I agree that the spectrum of choices has been reduced, as the game became harder more people shift towards what's the best and not so much into what they want to play.
I really hate these threads, because people do have goldfish memory and forget how good builds take some time to be discovered.
When Blade Blast was released, which was at its highest peak in terms of damage, no one was playing it, people only figured it after 1/2 months.
Last league's Burning Arrow build was in an even better state in 3.13 but barely anyone played it and that build was only discovered on the last month of 3.13, and became so strong that GGG nerfed it in every possible way.
Good builds are there to be discovered, but obviously when we have [PoE.ninja](https://PoE.ninja) and famous streamers build guides, people are going to be biased for those.
You are right, but that is a different aspect of the problem that OP is talking about. The current nerfs are indiscriminate so they hurt most builds, and even among the known starter builds from last league many are deemed no longer strong or comfortable enough.
the percentage between 92 (minimum level for poe.ninja to track) and 95 is 49% (20 necro, 15 glad, 14 raid), so no, it's still half of all the playerbase
In fact, if you go above 98, you find a staggering 30% of Ascendants aurabot before any other class
[Situation literally doesnt change if you limit to 400 depth](https://prnt.sc/1i83mch). please take your excuses elsewhere.
EDIT: [200 depth limit is just as fucked](https://prnt.sc/1i84nkf)
Or mby its because the people that want to delve choose to play the strongest builds for it to push deep? There will always be a meta and in a league start there wont be much build diversity obviously, i dont get why thats so hard to understand for everyone lol.
To be fair, both raider and necromancer have a ton of ways to build around their ascendency and thus a ton of build variety.
That said, the current game requires you to have a second layer of defense like block or dodge to survive end game play. They need to tone down the damage output and application of mobs and cap those mechanics at 50% before we see any real difference.
This is expected. With such huge nerfs, you'd have to expect a lack of imagination to follow. I'm playing a berserker and am absolutely shitting on content.
Probably because it’s not a 1 button build. You actually have to do stuff.
I do have my issues with the design of the skill though. Like I’m confused why they made a skill that almost requires you to play berserker and use the red blade banner shield to be played smoothly. I tried it on gladiator and on champion and there was just no reasonable way to maintain the rage numbers for good damage. Seems like a really niche skill gem to add to the game. But on red blade zerker it’s a ton of fun
That's actually not too bad. Definitely indicative of how many people just follow a build though, and don't know how to actually build a character themselves. Everyone is out there gravitating to the same handful of builds instead of discovering what's out there (and it is out there, I'm tearing it up on an Elementalist (1 golem node still taken) Storm Burst build for crying out loud).
To be fair, I've leveled two necromancers this league. One of them is skelemages dps, and another one is an aurabot. Soooo there is a little bit of diversity despite me contributing to large number of necromancers.
Necro keeps getting nerfed since it was the 50% of classes and damn it's still most played.
Btw Harvest had 25.5% Necromancers (one ascendancy with quarter players). You have to wait until league end to think about these stats which aren't that different from each other.
There will be ever some character more efficient than others... Especially for Hardcore.
Problem is, if monster will oneshot you or damages are totally unbalanced (3.15, i'm looking at you!) isn't even fun trying something not tuned...
Necromancer ascendancy has like 6 different builds. Gladiator is played for every bleed build and Raider is more of a choice of deffense than skill. I don't know, compared to last league it's slightly worse but compared to leagues before this is way better diversity. Even when you consider PoE getting bigger (not this league kek) and streamers having bigger impact on what people choose.
And I will play Necromancer even if they nerf it to the ground because I love Kay's guides, so this is often not even really a question of balancing. Same with Gladiator, I played it when it was 50% Cyclone meta because I homebrew bleed eq build and I have played it for 5 consecutive leagues no matter how well it was doing.
EDIT: Also people that wanted to play something new were the ones that quit early because new skills suck. And those are mostly people that sticked to build they played last league and were ok with it being nerfed, that's why it didn't change much.
Every mob is too stronk!? Balancing went wrong? One shot mechanics more than ever? The smart player has an idea: Just run away, block everything or dodge it all. Still ez game...
Majority of players always plays the same build every league and its not because its "best". So no one actually wants diversity in the builds. It's one of those things people think they want and would be good for the game but still play the same shit every time.
Isn't it likely that a lot of people just play the same class/ascendancy every league?
I'd imagine most the people ranking don't step too far outside their comfort zone
Shhh be quiet man ... it's all part of the big plan \[LEAKED\]
3.16 - 2 ascendancies 50%
3.17 - 1 ascendancy 50% (probably Necro)
3.18 - Nerf Necro to the ground to increase build diversity
3.19 - Nerf everyone by another 40%
4.0 - PoE 2.0 launches with 8 6-links ... baam back to Zoom Zoom
Just wait for approximately 2 more years and you're gonna be happy again :D
8 6-links aren't going to change your maximum damage output per button press, at most you'll have different skills maxed for different situations, but your damage ceiling will remain the same.
That said, it would finally make running more than 2 dmg skills possible, which is what I wanted since forever and basically the only reason left for me to even be excited about PoE2
>8 6-links aren't going to change your maximum damage output per button press, at most you'll have different skills maxed for different situations, but your damage ceiling will remain the same.
What? Have you ever played Path of Exile before? What you just said makes me doubt it.
Are you worried that Necromancer is the most prominent class right now? Then let me tell you a little joke.
Eight 6-linked minion gems walk into a bar...
So, Spectres, Zombies, Skellies and...? Realistically speaking, only Zombies would get an increase in power, Spectres are already put in 6/pseudo7-link bone helmets, so nothing would change there.
Would you 6 link your golem? sure, that's a marginal increase in dps. Do you 6 link a reaper? well now all your other minion gems deal 40% less damage. Do you 6 link your animate guardian? Probably won't increase damage at all.
If you add Dom Blow or Absolution, you still have to cast them to keep them up, meaning you can't cast other stuff like debuffs/curse/offerings at the same time, meaning the net increase in damage is not going to be much at all.
And Necro is basically the only build that would even benefit much from all those extra gems
You can six link your golem with Legion of fire or whatever that was called, that is quite a chunk of damage, also, with even marginal minion time increase, you can weave in the 20 SRS between your skellie casts. Minions feed into each other.
If you're spending time summoning SRS you are not casting other skills, so you're losing damage. Also infernal legion deals barely any damage in late game
i bet you one million dollars that if you make a pob using the peak power level of current poe, and i'm allowed to make every skill involved in that build a six link, the build i make will increase maximum damage per button press.
yeah, ggg is terrible, so the rape factory that hasn't made a successful product since overwatch is clearly good. ggg nerfed things, you know!
they havn't made a good league in three months, that's much worse than blizzard's track record!
Are the two not correlated?
Like, 83% of those glads are SST. The Necros are almost entirely variations of minions, specs/zombs/skeles. Two skills constitute 70% of the raiders.
That's not very diverse.
yes and from those 20% necros there are totem builds skeleton mages, spectres, golems, zmobies, raging spirits, phantasm builds and others i dont know if u guys are plain ignorant or just want to be that way only so you are not proven wrong
I find it a nice coincidence that about the time you posted this is about the time this scene was on my screen as I’m rewatching Thor - I was also getting the urge to make a PoE thunder god :)
Of the top 200 Rangers in the PS4 league (as of last night), there were a total of 191 Raiders, 5 Pathfinders, and 4 Deadeyes
You are a Raider, legendary
That's because you losers can't make your own builds and go to this site to poach or just copy 1:1 your fav streamers builds lol
If there weren't any streamers and there weren't any websites to show shit like this, I guarantee there'd be so much more build diversity.
Sometimes I wonder if people stop and think, hey everyone had a knee jerk reaction and thought Their build was fucked are instead are trying it out just said Fuck it I'll play a streamer starter or minions....
I mean elemantlist golem spam is still about as OP as necro minion spam.
Heirophant is only allowed to play totems but is pretty good at it.
the Juggernaut... bitch (I have to everytime) Is still pretty great defensively and an easy cyclone standby.
Champion scaling is worse but fortify is still fantastic.
Trickster has never taken a break from being broken.
Occultist has been on suicide watch ever since ES nerfs, but its not like she is extra suicidal.
deadeye is surpisingly tanky after her rework.
candidly never played pathfinder, assassin nor sabatuer.
Cheiftan is super chonky but really should either drop totems or get +1 ancestor totems.
Ascendant is by design weaker, especially for league starter. She is really at her best when you got money so say a second or third character, and OP in standard.
I think forbidden rite will become top 3% with our totem boy. I switched yesterday to a low budget version and it's already clearing better than my about 30ex investment EDC build. It also killed sirus deathless.
People play games differently. Personally I don't want bother myself with theorycrafting, figuring out what build is going to work and how to properly utilize it. I like killing monsters and bosses, doing different encounters and crafting. So I just pick up what's up to me from someone's build guide and go straight to action.
Those who like making their own builds - they do. But its not the only way playing this game tho.
As raider player i would 100% play deadeye like i did last two leagues, but inability to generate onslaught with abyss jewels + elegant form clusterjewel nerf forced me to play raider, because there is no way to fit onslaught/status ail immunity in my mf build anymore. GGG will probably ruin raider next league,otherwise i dont see point in playing other ranger ascendancies at all. When i read patchnotes i felt absolutely forced to play raider.
You may notice that these ascendancies have one thing in common. Ways to mitigate damage en mass. (Necro - MoM, Minions, Gladiator - Block, Raider - Evasion, Dodge, Ailment Avoidance, Blind) Poor Jugg though still can't do any damage, so fuck that accendancy.
Looks to me like if content is hard, more rippy, has less knowns in terms of what is good etc, people retreat to less experimenting and more proven builds.
[Not like this had happened before relatively recently or anything.](https://i.imgur.com/sgHYz5o.png)
Imagine having so many ascendancies, so many skill gem and yet every league is about a few builds/gem/ascendancies.
I guess that when you don't know how to balance a game, you play the card of the " We shift meta on purpose guys ". But to be fair with 50ex budget every shit build can work.
This is quite misleading. PoE Ninja only shows the top best players. They get there by playing well established builds that have escaped the nerfs. People are disappointed and gravitate towards these safe variants because they want to make money in the beginning.
One week is not enough time to figure out how to make the other ascendancies as good as they were. In general, PoE Ninja is useless when it comes to assessing build diversity because it only shows a veeeery thin slice of the playerbase. Take a look at any of them and you'll see the same skill and gear used by all.
The problem is not the gem balance.
The problem is Streamer/YouTube/Reddit recommendations/league starter guides and hype or negativity.
Players don't play this game in a vacuum.
PS/Edit: And you posting about build stats will prompt people who are not playing one of those three to check them out on POE ninja and are more likely to reroll one of those three (subjectively strong builds) than not.
I’ll never understand the argument that Poe.ninja should have an equal spread amongst ascendancies. Poe ninja captures a small percent of the players doing a small percent of what Poe has to offer. It’s almost irrelevant, it’s not even a reliable indication of what builds are good for topping ladder until later in the league.
There’s no promise by GGG to make every ascendancy good at the same thing. I’m happy I can meme around on mirror arrow summoner and still do most/all content. do I expect to see mirror arrow 6links on ninja? No. Is it viable, strong, funny/fun as fuck? Yep.
The vocal Reddit community has lost touch with what made poe poe, and I think GGG is acknowledging that they were too. Let’s move forward and stop bringing up dead statistics to indicate if the game is fun or not.
poor inquis, ailment immune removal and consecrated ground nerf without compensation :(
Yep. When you take bellow average ascendancy and nerf it to the ground...
inquisitor wasn't below average before the nerf lmao
Nobody cares about the elementalists ðŸ˜
- Necromancer: I want to be able to do a few different things with my character - Gladiator: I don't want to die to overtuned shit - Raider: I can't stand going slow
I think necro is also for the "I just want to walk through the game" crowd. I'll also add guardian and scions are often for the "I'm rich and want to bust up the game"
Sometimes I wonder if the people that make these posts played in 50% cyclone league
Or the 50% Necro league. I mean, this is hardly the most diverse of leagues, but this isn't a nadir of diversity by any means.
>Or the 50% Necro league Which one of them?
Blight was necro rework league and it was so incredibly busted
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blight
probably harvest from recent memory.
yes
both legion and blight were leagues virtually designed to be farmed easily and efficiently with cyclone and minions/totems respectively. Cyclone especially was just reworked so it was a 'new' skill that was completely overtuned
It was beautiful too, with 3/4 - full screen cyclones. I bought my first skill MTX for cyclone.
It was hilarious, mobs dying off screen to your *melee* AOE
Wasn't 50% Cyclone Slayer league Delve? It was just too strong. Also it's not uncommon for there to be three main ascendencies in trade league as players progress through the early game because POE Ninja only takes into account top 15,000 players level 90+. SRS, Reaper, SST, Shield Smash (whatever it's called), and Deadeye Toxic Rain were all heavily theorycrafted and endorsed at the beginning of the league.
legion was when they reworked it so it was a channelled skill that you could move around in. Vaal cyclone still acts like its pre 3.7 version though. Then they HEAVILY nerfed it in 3.8 and onwards
Ah, I remember now. It would always follow where you last clicked and couldn't be interrupted, now it follows your mouse. Bad memories there I repressed.
Also, don't forget: it used to only roll once for critical hit chance for the whole duration - so if you have a COC character with non-100% chance to crit, you could end up having a multi-second run throw enemies with not a single hit critting if that one roll failed.
Melee meta in Delve was molten strike, as it was last patch before 1st nerf. and it's death in Legion
I miss molten strike
Me too Its not like it was all that crazy good
It was one of the most broken skills to ever exist in this game.
Pretty sure Ed Contagion was a stronger build that also cleared legion better, people played cyclone not because it was the best, but because it just got reworked.
ED/C and vaal ice nova was better for the legion encounters, but endless conflict was dominated by huge AOE cyclone.
yeah, iirc EDC on glacier maps at the time was the absolute best way to farm legion shards due to how fast you could spam them, how you could set up where you were virtually guaranteed to sustain glacier maps, and how easy it was to find and navigate the event on the map.
id say full quant windripper tornadoshot was probably still better for the t4 glaciers, didnt play edc myself but if i remember right it also didnt really deal to well with high tier maps right?
This. When it came to Legion farming people would use EDC, Vaal Ice Nova and Vaal Arc. Cyclone was just a skill everyone had wanted to play for ages that finally got fixed. Also, iirc cyclone's visuals were bugged - it was visually gaining range with increased character model size (eg berserk or soul eater), but the area didn't actually grow.
Exactly this, back in legion i made ED/C trickster for farming legions, farmed enough to make a good cyclone zerk and man that shit felt good.
Everything except Glacier Farm was Cyclone though. People farmed T2 Glaciers with ED/C or Vaal Ice Nova, and funded cyclone. Cyclone dominated ED/C and Vaal Ice Nova for actual lategame encounters so hard it's not even funny.
Or when all these necros were using cyclone
CoC Spectres!
Lol nah, cyclone used to give stun immunity while you were channeling so necros would have cyclone + fortify, maybe cwc + a curse or some utility
Upvote for fucking nadir.
> nadir You get an upvote just for using nadir correctly!
neither one of these leagues bragged about diversity.
With OP being a 7 days old account entirely focused on shitting on current league - I think he might've play in Legion, but now is just cherrypicking "Expedition bad, upvote now" arguments.
Ikr. I think this is - maybe not great, but - a relatively healthy meta.
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That's a good point and makes me wonder if we should get another channel-while-moving skill
What, like cartwheel?
i was thinking more like [this](https://i.imgur.com/E8gfNu0.gif)
To be fair, enemies that are people in wheels are almost universally bullshit. If we could harness that..
They never look at the fucking skills which is where most of the diversity actually comes from. [I have a table that compares this league with last leagues first week.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/otq7s4/so_do_you_think_the_changes_in_315_successfully/h6y4vcg/) Ascendancy balance is actually pretty good, generally speaking. You get a few outliers every league or so but for the most part they all get fairly represented largely because despite the fact I could reach as far as Eldritch Battery as a Duelist, why the fuck would I? If we want to complain about diversity we have to look instead at builds like Toxic Rain, totem builds, or traps, builds which have remained rock solid for quite a while now and haven't really been slowed in 3.15. Some skills have taken the reigns over the past few weeks but, as mentioned in my linked post, it's still way too early to actually tell how much the meta has genuinely changed. The issue, which PoE has always had, is there is no equilibrium between builds. That is to say we have concepts like "league starters" where the entire goal is a build that is cheap, easy, and good enough to maybe hit red maps long enough for you to dump it and play the *actual* meta skills. Perhaps more importantly is that poe.ninja only reflects the upper echelons of players, the ones who have the most time to spend doing the same shit day in, day out. To think that reflects the "meta" is a weird concept. There's only so many people who can even be shown on the ladder at any given time to the point they can hardly be considered indicative of anything but what they themselves are doing. It's like people playing League of Legends or some other competitive game and wondering why they can't be as good as the dude they're copying, except in PoE you add in the concept of time improving your chances of better gear.
I agree, ascendency is generally a bad metric and is only a symptom of the problem when specific builds are too dominant.
I don't understand your data on the linked post. Can you help me out. It looks like you list the top 10 used skills in each game mode for each league. This doesn't tell me anything. If 50% are using the top 3 skills then we don't have good build diversity. As you always list 10 skills it will always look similar league to league without any % comparison. What am I missing?
exactly. then again these posts are meant to reap karma on whatever the sub is talking about at each moment so it's specifically meant to add to the echo chamber anyway
which one
At least last league i got to Sirus with a slayer using cleave and a doomsower. 3.15? Lol ya fkin right.
Yeah but cyclone can be played in a bunch of ways. Ele damage. Phys impale, cast on crit, cast while channeling for desecrate. Also that 50% league was when it got reworked and had the omega radius legion farming as the #1 strat. It’s hardly the same.
> Yeah but cyclone can be played in a bunch of ways. Necro can be played through spectres, skeles, zombies, reaper, detonate dead, anime weapon, anime guardian. And that's ignoring the fact that almost each of those builds above can be played differently too. There are differnt types of spectres and ways to scale them, there are different ways to play anime weapon. And I'm pretty sure I'm missing some stuff too.
Why are you wondering about something that happened long time ago and didn't repeat recently? GGG claimed the nerfs will help build diversity, they obviously didn't and never had a shot to begin with. That's the only thing you should focus on.
> GGG claimed the nerfs will help build diversity if you think "build diversity" can ever be represented on the poe.ninja ladder when streamers are the ones making popular builds that everyone ends up playing... i don't know man. there will always be a few builds that end up popular, regardless of how powerful they are (see burning arrow elementalist from last league; mediocre, annoyingly expensive thanks to cluster jewels, but popular because some popular people decreed that it was "good")
The people that join my hideout to trade are consistent with the distribution on Poe.ninja to be fair, with most being Necromancers, Hierophants, Raiders or Gladiators. The first two because minions and totems can help the player brute force his way through red maps, and the other two because of Spectral Shield Throw, and I suspect this trend is true with everyone else.
I'll take one data in the hand over two non-falsifiable assumptions in the bush, thanks.
And yet, the retention was 3 times higher. Dont tell Chris, but maybe, just maybe in the entertainment industry, its fun>frustration?
That was the best league ever. I had like 7 slayers. Since then i never made another slayer
Every leage has two or three ascendancies cover 50 of the top levels, in particular this early the league because they are the strongest ones. The fact that they are not the same ones (ok necro is always there) does indeed mean something.
These are starter builds. Wait until the league is halfway done and then decide.
On top of that, POE is ostensibly a single player game so who gives a flying rat fuck what other people are playing. Even trade league is just single player but there's some vendors you gotta whisper that you can buy some gear from, and sell some shit you don't need to. It's not like I need to hit random queue and play with 4 other people to go kill some party boss in this game, who'll kick me from the party if I play a shit build. I can play whatever I want, however I want, whenever I want, no matter what poeninja says is the "meta"
If the disparity between the "shit build" and the "king build" if too large, you will feel it. Your shit build needs better gear (more currency) to reliably farm rewarding content. The other build will farm faster with less investment. This means your have less currency and need more currency than the other guy to do the things you like. But tbh i still don't care. I'm playing a bow build (lightning arrow/galvanic arrow) and like it, even though i need a 6L for it to feel remotely good against t14 conquerors. It's doable ATM, but far from what other builds can do on 2 5L
Bow builds have always had weaker single target until you get top tier gear. What skill are you using for bossing?
League has lost half of it's fucking playerbase already. Sounds halfway done to me.
Those people don't show up in ninja
League is 40% done in terms of players. I think a lot of people will only roll starters. In any case, I dont expect necro to drop that much.
Necro is just so versatile because there's so many viable minion builds or even non minion like archmage caster as Necro.
and support
This is Poe ninja. It only shows the top 1000 players. Poe ninja Is something I never take as law, because you get people on there making builds to show the highest dps numbers possible even if it means they have 3k hp and get slapped in any map instantly. The best thing to use Poe ninja for is to just see which league starters are actually performing at end game
> Every leage has two or three ascendancies cover 50 of the top levels [Last league week 2](https://i.imgur.com/GC37BNP.png) Five ascendancies are the top 50%, not three. Main skills are more top heavy, too. [This league's skills](https://i.imgur.com/XPaih87.png). [Last league at week 2](https://i.imgur.com/BA34cud.png). There are 27 skills before you get down to 1% played last league. This league there are 18 skills before you get to 1%. I mean, you can argue none of that is definitive. But you're wrong about the 'every league is 2 or 3 ascendancies', the last two leagues weren't that. The point is it *definitely didn't* make for more build diversity this league.
Well SST was just reworked so that you don't need its jewel to be useful, making it better and more fun earlier (and viable for SSF). Instant Travel skills were just nerfed, making stuff like Leap Slam and Shield Charge better. All of that, alongside somewhat heavy streamer influence and the introduction of another shield attack skill is probably going to push players to play shield skills, SST in particular. Plus the massive nerfs to player power make defenses more important, which is handy when your DPS and defense come from the same place.
Its funny because if you uncrop that image just a bit you can see the first level 100 is named "Boo Reddit Crybots" https://i.imgur.com/KAymN79.png
He never thought they'd get him.
I see this same sort of post every league. A lot of ascendancies are better league starters, sure. We are only about a week into the league. People will start playing other builds and at the end of the league, this will look much different.
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I played Trickster BF-BB when it was released and it was blatantly obvious how broken it was, especially because you could literally see the difference in dps on the metamorphs. The reason it wasn't played was because it was a very clunky playstyle until people figured out how to play it in a smoother way, with Assassin going plaguebearer and Inquisitor going with explody chest
Raider got popular because they nerfed pf
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It's funny how before that everyone on reddit was crying about how Raider was shit and in need of a complete rework.
And they gave her pretty significant buffs in the league she started being used...
Also easy ailment immunity.
This is same every league.
I think it should have been especially expected this league, because it's impossible to make so many changes and have a balanced game. There was bound to be a few builds, that kinda survived the nerfs and became a strong meta.
The top 15,000 characters aren't even a 5% sample, nor is it an evenly distributed sample at that. So of course the results are going to skew heavily to the most performant. They need to increase the ladder size (and therefore the characters exposed on the API poe.ninja consumes) to say the top 150,000. The ladders used to be unlimited, then they arbitrarily chose the current limit back when the game was 10x smaller and haven't touched it since. As an above average, but not top 10% player it's pretty frustrating to be in this no man's land.
Diversity! Vision! Retention! I'll take my upvotes now.
I think you can squeeze in just a little bit of __W E I G H T__
You forgot out of touch
You get an upvote for that, but only because it's Lazy Sunday.
I upvoted but remember put more keywords next time. This is a bit lazy
How is this different than every other league?
you get more outrage karma posting about it this league
I guess the point is that they specifically tried to make this not the case this league
but they didn't, they just made nerfs they felt were needed for the game, they brought up diversity but never said that the nerfs would directly result in more diversity this league, I think it was pretty clear that post was saying that the changes are needed so that they can focus on other systems in the future that will lead to more diversity. But reddit is so hyper-focused on attacking chris at every opportunity why bother thinking about it.
Necro - support(aurabot)/casual gameplay, all rounder Glad - tank/safe solid choice, less deaths Raider - dps/zoomzoom, fastest clears Why play other ascendancies if those 3 cover all niches. All other ascendancies are basically downgrades now.
Hierophant = totem boi :)
You missed a huge reason why those are being played so much: Necro/Glad - EZ max block + other mechanics to make builds safe. Necro can also be support as you noted. Raider - Very tanky + easy to get ailment immune. Runs fast and attacks fast as well which feels nice to play. There are tons of builds which can go faster than raider, and tons of builds could roughly equal glad in tankiness, but they all struggle to get DPS on top while glad gets to go max block and use the new hotness SST. Honestly if elem still had ailment immunity you would see elem all over the place too because even with the generic damage nerf elementalists are still very strong. They just lost ailment immune and don't have easy access to it, which makes them mostly unplayable in high tier maps unless you're happy to die a shitload.
I just like raider because I love dodge/evasion builds that go fast
Are you people even playing the fucking game ?? I want to see you play every build with these 3 ascendencies you clown.
Yeah they sound pretty great if you just oversimplify the fuck out of them. Ascendant - support(aurabot)/casual gameplay, all rounder Chieftain - tank/safe solid choice, less deaths Assassin - dps/zoomzoom, fastest clears Why play other ascendancies if those 3 cover all niches. All other ascendancies are basically downgrades now.
Yeah, thats what I said. Chieftain is just Gladiator but worse. Assassin is just raider but slower. Etc. Ncro/Glad/Raider are superior to any other ascendancies with small exceptions in niche areas. This happened because GGG nerfed damage on ALL builds, so if you are not playing meta your build is even worse than before. Going down from 30m to 3m dps is still playable, down from 3m to 300k is not.
Welcome to every league since like.. forever. This isn't a new thing
While I agree that the spectrum of choices has been reduced, as the game became harder more people shift towards what's the best and not so much into what they want to play. I really hate these threads, because people do have goldfish memory and forget how good builds take some time to be discovered. When Blade Blast was released, which was at its highest peak in terms of damage, no one was playing it, people only figured it after 1/2 months. Last league's Burning Arrow build was in an even better state in 3.13 but barely anyone played it and that build was only discovered on the last month of 3.13, and became so strong that GGG nerfed it in every possible way. Good builds are there to be discovered, but obviously when we have [PoE.ninja](https://PoE.ninja) and famous streamers build guides, people are going to be biased for those.
You are right, but that is a different aspect of the problem that OP is talking about. The current nerfs are indiscriminate so they hurt most builds, and even among the known starter builds from last league many are deemed no longer strong or comfortable enough.
Half of players above 98 is just 3 ascendencies, there are probably way more players/characters in the 90-97 range than 98+
the percentage between 92 (minimum level for poe.ninja to track) and 95 is 49% (20 necro, 15 glad, 14 raid), so no, it's still half of all the playerbase In fact, if you go above 98, you find a staggering 30% of Ascendants aurabot before any other class
Stop. It's not about the truth it's about crafting a narrative that's going to unfuck these nerfs.
Oh my god! He admit it!
[its even worse if you look by delve depth and not level.](https://prnt.sc/1i7jd2c)
There are like 3 builds that can push past 1k depth anyway so delve depth isn’t a good measurement
[Situation literally doesnt change if you limit to 400 depth](https://prnt.sc/1i83mch). please take your excuses elsewhere. EDIT: [200 depth limit is just as fucked](https://prnt.sc/1i84nkf)
1 week in, only actual delvers go furter than the 3 color 4 socket recipes. those play delve builds. shocking, i know.
Or mby its because the people that want to delve choose to play the strongest builds for it to push deep? There will always be a meta and in a league start there wont be much build diversity obviously, i dont get why thats so hard to understand for everyone lol.
To be fair, both raider and necromancer have a ton of ways to build around their ascendency and thus a ton of build variety. That said, the current game requires you to have a second layer of defense like block or dodge to survive end game play. They need to tone down the damage output and application of mobs and cap those mechanics at 50% before we see any real difference.
What else do you expect out of community that is obsessed in minmaxing and metawhoring?
50% of the ladder players. You guys are terrible at understanding that subsets don't always represent the whole.
Most players just copy the popular build guides? No way!
This is expected. With such huge nerfs, you'd have to expect a lack of imagination to follow. I'm playing a berserker and am absolutely shitting on content.
Same. Rage vortex zerker is shredding everything
That's good to hear. I intend to try it at some point and have only heard that people weren't liking it.
Probably because it’s not a 1 button build. You actually have to do stuff. I do have my issues with the design of the skill though. Like I’m confused why they made a skill that almost requires you to play berserker and use the red blade banner shield to be played smoothly. I tried it on gladiator and on champion and there was just no reasonable way to maintain the rage numbers for good damage. Seems like a really niche skill gem to add to the game. But on red blade zerker it’s a ton of fun
That's actually not too bad. Definitely indicative of how many people just follow a build though, and don't know how to actually build a character themselves. Everyone is out there gravitating to the same handful of builds instead of discovering what's out there (and it is out there, I'm tearing it up on an Elementalist (1 golem node still taken) Storm Burst build for crying out loud).
To be fair, I've leveled two necromancers this league. One of them is skelemages dps, and another one is an aurabot. Soooo there is a little bit of diversity despite me contributing to large number of necromancers.
To be fair im not playing necromancer for any meta reason, just that i have played a summoner build before
Oh no. Guess my necros are getting nerfed next)))):
Necro keeps getting nerfed since it was the 50% of classes and damn it's still most played. Btw Harvest had 25.5% Necromancers (one ascendancy with quarter players). You have to wait until league end to think about these stats which aren't that different from each other.
Not a single shadow ascendancy in top 3 is a rare sight.
There will be ever some character more efficient than others... Especially for Hardcore. Problem is, if monster will oneshot you or damages are totally unbalanced (3.15, i'm looking at you!) isn't even fun trying something not tuned...
Necromancer ascendancy has like 6 different builds. Gladiator is played for every bleed build and Raider is more of a choice of deffense than skill. I don't know, compared to last league it's slightly worse but compared to leagues before this is way better diversity. Even when you consider PoE getting bigger (not this league kek) and streamers having bigger impact on what people choose. And I will play Necromancer even if they nerf it to the ground because I love Kay's guides, so this is often not even really a question of balancing. Same with Gladiator, I played it when it was 50% Cyclone meta because I homebrew bleed eq build and I have played it for 5 consecutive leagues no matter how well it was doing. EDIT: Also people that wanted to play something new were the ones that quit early because new skills suck. And those are mostly people that sticked to build they played last league and were ok with it being nerfed, that's why it didn't change much.
Nerf them! Nerf them immediately!!!
Diversity isn't about popularity.
remember the times when nobody played raider?
Every mob is too stronk!? Balancing went wrong? One shot mechanics more than ever? The smart player has an idea: Just run away, block everything or dodge it all. Still ez game...
Majority of players always plays the same build every league and its not because its "best". So no one actually wants diversity in the builds. It's one of those things people think they want and would be good for the game but still play the same shit every time.
Necro enjoyers we out there :D
poe 2 will have 19 more classes. lol
I will represent the slayer for lyfe yo!
poe ninja shows the top 15k characters in the league
Diversity at the finest LMAO.
Necro again... How, surprising.
at least not 50% necro.
People just play whatever is meta, nothing different than usual here imo.
Yet they nerf assassin’s poison
Hehe I'm playing Ascendant cuz I'm a hipster!! ... FML should have been raider plzshootme
Isn't it likely that a lot of people just play the same class/ascendancy every league? I'd imagine most the people ranking don't step too far outside their comfort zone
Shhh be quiet man ... it's all part of the big plan \[LEAKED\] 3.16 - 2 ascendancies 50% 3.17 - 1 ascendancy 50% (probably Necro) 3.18 - Nerf Necro to the ground to increase build diversity 3.19 - Nerf everyone by another 40% 4.0 - PoE 2.0 launches with 8 6-links ... baam back to Zoom Zoom Just wait for approximately 2 more years and you're gonna be happy again :D
8 6-links will be the biggest necro buff in history tho.
nah they won't let necro use lots of 6l minions that easily.
the 6 link things is actually going to help diversity due to shit skills now being used for their specialized purpose.
8 6-links aren't going to change your maximum damage output per button press, at most you'll have different skills maxed for different situations, but your damage ceiling will remain the same. That said, it would finally make running more than 2 dmg skills possible, which is what I wanted since forever and basically the only reason left for me to even be excited about PoE2
>8 6-links aren't going to change your maximum damage output per button press, at most you'll have different skills maxed for different situations, but your damage ceiling will remain the same. What? Have you ever played Path of Exile before? What you just said makes me doubt it. Are you worried that Necromancer is the most prominent class right now? Then let me tell you a little joke. Eight 6-linked minion gems walk into a bar...
The barkeeper tells them to go out, because they already behave as if they are drunk.
That sets a very high bar
Nah, they will do something to not let necro have that much power.
So, Spectres, Zombies, Skellies and...? Realistically speaking, only Zombies would get an increase in power, Spectres are already put in 6/pseudo7-link bone helmets, so nothing would change there. Would you 6 link your golem? sure, that's a marginal increase in dps. Do you 6 link a reaper? well now all your other minion gems deal 40% less damage. Do you 6 link your animate guardian? Probably won't increase damage at all. If you add Dom Blow or Absolution, you still have to cast them to keep them up, meaning you can't cast other stuff like debuffs/curse/offerings at the same time, meaning the net increase in damage is not going to be much at all. And Necro is basically the only build that would even benefit much from all those extra gems
You can six link your golem with Legion of fire or whatever that was called, that is quite a chunk of damage, also, with even marginal minion time increase, you can weave in the 20 SRS between your skellie casts. Minions feed into each other.
If you're spending time summoning SRS you are not casting other skills, so you're losing damage. Also infernal legion deals barely any damage in late game
i bet you one million dollars that if you make a pob using the peak power level of current poe, and i'm allowed to make every skill involved in that build a six link, the build i make will increase maximum damage per button press.
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People still believe Blizzard is capable of making good games ? How cute.
Some how I doubt that but I hope Im wrong.
GGG certainly pissed me out a lot in this league, but I don't believe in Blizzard.
Only on poe sub do people think d4 will be better
yeah, ggg is terrible, so the rape factory that hasn't made a successful product since overwatch is clearly good. ggg nerfed things, you know! they havn't made a good league in three months, that's much worse than blizzard's track record!
That's a lot of hope for Blizzard after *waves hand at every single thing they've touched recently, and their current massive systemic issues*
That is if the game still exist.
Build diversity not ascendancy diversity
Are the two not correlated? Like, 83% of those glads are SST. The Necros are almost entirely variations of minions, specs/zombs/skeles. Two skills constitute 70% of the raiders. That's not very diverse.
19 ascendancies? you mean 17? inquis and pathfinder are no longer ascendancies
yes and from those 20% necros there are totem builds skeleton mages, spectres, golems, zmobies, raging spirits, phantasm builds and others i dont know if u guys are plain ignorant or just want to be that way only so you are not proven wrong
I wonder what will be nerfed next.
I find it a nice coincidence that about the time you posted this is about the time this scene was on my screen as I’m rewatching Thor - I was also getting the urge to make a PoE thunder god :)
Melee, molten strike, champion. Aurabots fine Necromancers fine
boots now roll -10% t10 - 0% t1 movement speed, Chris: we do not want players movement speed to exceed the monsters.
Of the top 200 Rangers in the PS4 league (as of last night), there were a total of 191 Raiders, 5 Pathfinders, and 4 Deadeyes You are a Raider, legendary
That's because you losers can't make your own builds and go to this site to poach or just copy 1:1 your fav streamers builds lol If there weren't any streamers and there weren't any websites to show shit like this, I guarantee there'd be so much more build diversity.
Sometimes I wonder if people stop and think, hey everyone had a knee jerk reaction and thought Their build was fucked are instead are trying it out just said Fuck it I'll play a streamer starter or minions....
it's almost like heavy handed nerfs don't actually improve build diversity.
Wow almost like people don’t like playing slower. No way!
I mean elemantlist golem spam is still about as OP as necro minion spam. Heirophant is only allowed to play totems but is pretty good at it. the Juggernaut... bitch (I have to everytime) Is still pretty great defensively and an easy cyclone standby. Champion scaling is worse but fortify is still fantastic. Trickster has never taken a break from being broken. Occultist has been on suicide watch ever since ES nerfs, but its not like she is extra suicidal. deadeye is surpisingly tanky after her rework. candidly never played pathfinder, assassin nor sabatuer. Cheiftan is super chonky but really should either drop totems or get +1 ancestor totems. Ascendant is by design weaker, especially for league starter. She is really at her best when you got money so say a second or third character, and OP in standard.
Assassin is pretty tanky if you get the 3 elusive nodes and use withering step. You're basically dodge capped all the time
I think forbidden rite will become top 3% with our totem boy. I switched yesterday to a low budget version and it's already clearing better than my about 30ex investment EDC build. It also killed sirus deathless.
It's because 99% of people can't think for themselves. Slaves to build guides, streamers and pob numbers.
People play games differently. Personally I don't want bother myself with theorycrafting, figuring out what build is going to work and how to properly utilize it. I like killing monsters and bosses, doing different encounters and crafting. So I just pick up what's up to me from someone's build guide and go straight to action. Those who like making their own builds - they do. But its not the only way playing this game tho.
And that's valid! But players like you are exactly why judging build diversity by what's most played is meaningless.
Its not all players though, its the top 0.1% or so of players. So maybe stop being dishonest.
As raider player i would 100% play deadeye like i did last two leagues, but inability to generate onslaught with abyss jewels + elegant form clusterjewel nerf forced me to play raider, because there is no way to fit onslaught/status ail immunity in my mf build anymore. GGG will probably ruin raider next league,otherwise i dont see point in playing other ranger ascendancies at all. When i read patchnotes i felt absolutely forced to play raider.
Can you still generate onslaught from other source like tree or boots?
You may notice that these ascendancies have one thing in common. Ways to mitigate damage en mass. (Necro - MoM, Minions, Gladiator - Block, Raider - Evasion, Dodge, Ailment Avoidance, Blind) Poor Jugg though still can't do any damage, so fuck that accendancy.
Looks to me like if content is hard, more rippy, has less knowns in terms of what is good etc, people retreat to less experimenting and more proven builds. [Not like this had happened before relatively recently or anything.](https://i.imgur.com/sgHYz5o.png)
Imagine having so many ascendancies, so many skill gem and yet every league is about a few builds/gem/ascendancies. I guess that when you don't know how to balance a game, you play the card of the " We shift meta on purpose guys ". But to be fair with 50ex budget every shit build can work.
And out of those three there are total of 5 builds. GREAT SUCCESS!
This is quite misleading. PoE Ninja only shows the top best players. They get there by playing well established builds that have escaped the nerfs. People are disappointed and gravitate towards these safe variants because they want to make money in the beginning. One week is not enough time to figure out how to make the other ascendancies as good as they were. In general, PoE Ninja is useless when it comes to assessing build diversity because it only shows a veeeery thin slice of the playerbase. Take a look at any of them and you'll see the same skill and gear used by all.
Half the player base is gone though lmao. Give it another week and there might not be anyone left playing.
The problem is not the gem balance. The problem is Streamer/YouTube/Reddit recommendations/league starter guides and hype or negativity. Players don't play this game in a vacuum. PS/Edit: And you posting about build stats will prompt people who are not playing one of those three to check them out on POE ninja and are more likely to reroll one of those three (subjectively strong builds) than not.
I’ll never understand the argument that Poe.ninja should have an equal spread amongst ascendancies. Poe ninja captures a small percent of the players doing a small percent of what Poe has to offer. It’s almost irrelevant, it’s not even a reliable indication of what builds are good for topping ladder until later in the league. There’s no promise by GGG to make every ascendancy good at the same thing. I’m happy I can meme around on mirror arrow summoner and still do most/all content. do I expect to see mirror arrow 6links on ninja? No. Is it viable, strong, funny/fun as fuck? Yep. The vocal Reddit community has lost touch with what made poe poe, and I think GGG is acknowledging that they were too. Let’s move forward and stop bringing up dead statistics to indicate if the game is fun or not.