It’s not about active skills, the limit is more often for persistent ones. You have to have a limit, it’d be too easy to make completely overpowered things otherwise. Also, what if instead of +1 slot, the unset ring had the implicit 25% more crit hit chance, or, 25% skill speed, or 20% more global defense? Wouldn’t it be a goat tier base? Well you equip one and then you have a slot for charge regulation for example, or a herald, or whatever you want that makes your character better. If they gave us a rune, that’d legit be super nice, I’m positive they’d limit it to 1 though. Or an explicit on a gear piece.

The limitation is fine. The real issue is unset rings.

They should stop doing those kind of implicit. Instead they should add a rune that gives you a +1 to skill limit. So you pop them on your gear as much as you need, so you can sacrifice extra mods for added skills.

Kind of agree, but we do need a limit. They could at least make it so you have an extra 1-2 per weapon set. That would allow some nice weapon set specialisation options

I get the need to have a limit because certain builds or playstyles could get out of hand, but there certainly should be more than the current 9. For me, it’s especially irksome when some of those sockets are buffs or passive skills.

1. I wish there were separate lists for active and passive skills. Maybe like a 7 active slots and 4 dedicated passive/buff/spirit slots split or something. Not sure on the specific split, but something like that where there’s technically more slots, but it can curb things getting out of hand.

2. Or, I wish there was something you could level that directly relates to potential slots. That way in the early levels you could have fewer slots and focus on the necessities, but later builds could gain slots and expand potential. I.e. Start with 6 slots and work your way up to like 12 as you increase [insert stat] through the campaign.

Either way, more slots, unset rings still have a place, and it remains balanced.

I often run into this issue whenever I’m trying to make an interesting build, playing the way developers envisioned - using a lot of shit for different situations, involved combos etc. Especially on monk.
I get that some classes can get away with using like 3 skills, but I don’t want to play that.

Imagine what we could do without limitations. There has to be a limit. I can see adding a few more slots. But unlimited could cause people to make stupidly OP builds.

I noticed some Path of Exile keywords in this post:

• Ex - Exalted Orb (Wiki)

^(I am a bot.) ^| ^(All acronyms) ^| ^(Suggest)

“removed altogether.”

yeah right buddy, keep on dreaming, not like this would fully break game

This thread is good a reminder that game design is a skill.

It’s simply a core design decision.
If it’s unlimited it will be hard to balance and will limit designing space for the game.

There is already ascendancy that can be extremely powerfull with unlimited gems
- Gemling. It’s the only ascendancy having access to the most powerfull deffensive elemental damage layer in the game
- Gives access to a lot of persistant buffs. These are designed extremely powerfull only because the skill gems are limited.
- We might even see uniques similar to Gemling ascendancy that might have synergy with gem slots. > Unset rings base although underused.

And I assume there are even more creative design ideas to put into the game balancing around this.
Having unlimited gems lots has lot of flaws. Skills should and will always be limited in any game.

TLDR.
It’s a core design decision.

for me the main issue is that there are conflicts between totally different kinds of skills that shouldnt compete with each other, because the situational/ utility and combo oriented options will always lose to raw (passive) power. Passive skills and auras should not reduce your active skill slots. For summoners especially, skillslots severly hamper the ability to build a versatile army, which is the promised fantasy.

The goal should be to provid slots for more options while limiting the stacking power you can get from them. Passive skills and minions are already balanced by spirit, let them be their own eco system. Active skills are limited in power by how many you can feasebly use due to cast times and opportunity costs. I dont know if limitless slots would actually create such huge problems, but i argue they should have multiple separate types of skills limited by their own logic instead of all of them competing for space.

GGG is going to add more and more skill and support gems which do interesting things. Part of character creation is to choose the synergies which fit best into your build, not to just use every single synergie gems give you. Limiting the amount of slots we have alloss ggg to add more intersting choices knowing we cant use all of them.

They should have some sort of system where instead of a tab you socket gems into the armor like runes are done currently.