I would hesitate to correlate what’s being played with what’s actually good, maybe there are other spellcasters that haven’t been explored yet because a streamer hasn’t bothered to?

I’m playing black flame incinerate chronomancer, really fun build that’s not super meta for casters.

Basically time freeze a boss and 1 shot with incinerate, use ED/contagion for clear.

It’s unfortunate that this build concept really requires you to use black flame and focus on chaos dmg. I would prefer to run pure fire spells, but there’s just not any good clear options that can compare to EDC.

I’m playing Ice Nova + Eye of Winter + Comet totems with shit gear and deleting everything. Just because a popular steamer hasn’t made a build guide for it doesn’t mean it’s not viable.

I do agree that the game needs more skills, but I think people are too quick to discount the ones we have.

I’m playing someone’s Shaman Apocalypse build and it’s pretty decent (search for Lyrthos on yt). I’m sure there are many builds off meta that work well for all content but they’re just not popular since they’re not the best/fastest/strongest.

Game already has suficient spells to have good variety of builds. Besides the obvious numeric balance problem in the spells themselves, a lot of them requires you to have very specific conditionals to be playable.

Fusillade is a good exemple. Very strong spell if you play holding your mouse button without any duration and also bad if you plug and play it. Also this infusion BS scares players away because builds can easily be bricked or just be a slog

Agree with many of the sentiments here.

I know they have the philosophy of not liking numeric tweaks - but in both graves they have this large library of underutilized/unplayed skills, with animations, art, and other content already done. I find it crazy to not tweak/buff them until they are at least baseline effective vs. spending valuable dev cycles creating new things which fall into the same trap.

Just let me play something like fireball ignite, cold-DoT, or lightning blast. How can none of them be truly viable in an aRPG, at least at league start anyway?

Absolutely no mount or any other movement tech needed, that was one of the largest mistakes poe1 one did. You never actually move in that game, you leap, whirl, blink or dash

Self cast is kinda poor and due for some rework. Making ignite unique and exciting would probably help too

Yeah, I’m also not the biggest fan of the current state of spells, and I love caster builds in RPGs.

But there are just not enough GOOD synergies, infusion are either broken or extremely weird to play around, lighting spells are just way better metawise, every build end up using coc comet, and spark is just extremely boring

There are just not many clearing spells in the game. I’m very underwhelmed by the spell roster right now. Initially went caster on launch but just kinda hated all spells. I was liking Bonestorm but they nuked channeling spells with the movement speed fix. We need more clearing spells

Personally I think the Game needs Like twice as many usuable Clearing spells to feel good.

It’s not even just a spells problem. It’s a skills problem. Most skills are bad.

I’m more familiar with bows, but they’ve got the same problem. There are 24 bow skills, but people are only using about 5 of them. Rain of arrows? Spiral Volley? Magnetic Salvo? Toxic Domain? Most people haven’t even heard of these skills. 3 of those are level 13 skills that you unlock when you’re level 45 or whatever it is. Oh, and I almost forgot Detonating Arrow. Yes, there is a fire bow skill lol.

im playing liminal coil blood mage and the clear is insane, i wanted to play it cause it reminds me of power siphon from poe1 and if you have enough aoe on your blasphemy you basically clear a whole screen every right click, prob not that cheap to setup tho which is the biggest issue with casters

I’m really enjoying the screen clear for my arc/fs Stormweaver, but the bossing could be a little stronger. I can deal some great damage to bosses but I’m not quite strong enough to phase push through mechanics I hate.

I ran chaos fireball last season and it was very very fun. I don’t think it was changed significantly from the patch.

Most caster builds boil down to some form of CoC or archmage sadly. Those skills are so powerful that they kind of gate keep all the other ways of playing.

Having said that you can make a decent ed/cont build but most of those utilize fire skills converted to chaos for single target.

Plant skills work ok without CoC/ archmage but then ramp to 11 with those.

Yes, other spells are bad. To get the same damage attack skills can spam you have to do infusion nonsense which is so much slower.

Caster are in a rough shape imo, especially during campaign. All the martial class can just be faster.

Damage ain’t there besides the very few builds during leveling. Their tools suck.

I’ve tried fireball tactician it was so bad.. I swapped to supporting fire with no minion items and it was nigh and day. Cleared a full screen, better single target, better clear, better defence…

Basically there’s no reason not to just use ed contagion.

the movement speed penalty is insane for spells and makes things so boring

I think in large parts it comes down to the fact that the ranger side of the tree has most mobility related stuff which therefore makes it inferior to play spells unless you somehow solve movement another way.

Also most of the player power scaling currently comes from gear and not the tree itself so naturally attacks scale much better than spells given a good weapon.

The issue is people want spammable spells but infusion generation is a major roadblock to that and most spells feel like ass without infusions. The balance is just off for spells and there’s too much clunk with most of them. Personally I enjoy attack builds far more in poe2, but the opposite in poe1.

I’d love to run a fire build something about the idea of starting a wildfire seems fun, but feel like the options really just aren’t good for the base spells.

Basically fireball seems to be the main option which is just… Uninspired? Ember fusillade doesn’t really seem to be useful for clearing, fire wall also doesn’t really fit that bill, firestorm is good maybe, but is too late for me to want to lvl with it and I hate having to completely swap a build just to lvl.

I’m hoping that we get a few more good options and it’s something that sparks joy in the future. There’s so many cool abilities and ideas they’ve created that feel decently unique, it just feels jarring that sorcerer feels so bland and copy paste from everyone elses iteration of it.

I’m playing Chayula Monk with Black Covenant Ember Fusillade with Flame Wall. Lightning Warp for trash mobs. Almost finished with campaign - L60.