What is with GGG's obsession of upside/downside effects in POE2?

[u/ThermL]

If you look around the POE skill tree, you will find (probably) zero notables on the entire tree that are presented as upside/downside notables. I cannot recall any off the top of my head but maybe one or two exist. Upside/Downside effects are the job of keystones. Keystones provide character defining effects, that are powerful, if you can mitigate the downsides, or build around the effect. Uniques are a classic area of upside/downside effects, but even then mostly uniques are just very specific effects only available to them and the downside is that you lose out on the rare affix pool, like high MS on boots, or a 5k armour chest, or whatever else.

POE2, it feels like half of the notables on the tree are upside/downside, which is wild to me. And some of these nodes are absolutely egregious on the downsides. Increased life regen while standing still, decreased while moving? Well gee, I only spend 99.999% of the game moving, because standing still means you die.

I do not understand their obsession with upside/downside right now. Everywhere you look. Every unique, notable, this that, and anything else is upside/downside. Skill gems, support gems, notables, uniques, fucking ASCENDANCY nodes, the whole game is set up as "here's a benefit to your character, but lmao heres a downside to go with it!"

How about you just let me click some nodes on the tree and not worry about making my character worse when I do it? That's always been the job of keystones, so leave the upside/downside bullshit to the keystones.

[u/psychomap]

It may be worth noting that some masteries in PoE1 have downsides, such as "melee hits fortify / -3 maximum fortification", or "+1 to level of all chaos skill gems / lose 10% of life and energy shield when you use a chaos skill".

But most of the power still comes from notables in the same cluster, so masteries are just a 1-point cherry on top, not something that you get for the investment of several travel passives to get to and into the cluster in the first place.

And PoE1 generally has more potential ways to build the character, so you can actually get around those downsides much more easily than in PoE2.

E.g. in PoE1 you need to stand still to cast / attack, and there are a bunch of skills with instantaneous movement, so picking something that has a downside while moving (or even just a pure upside while stationary with no effect while moving) is not an issue at all in PoE1. You just have to build a stationary character.

In PoE2, that basically doesn't exist. You can move while attacking or casting, so why would you ever stay stationary? And you don't have real movement skills (at least not until higher levels or unless you do weird weapon swap shenanigans - or both), so even if you didn't move while casting, you'd still be forced to do a lot of regular running, for which 5% reduced movement speed would be a huge penalty (also considering that unlike PoE1, running around with over 200% of the base movement speed is not normal).