Theorycrafting a “Style Gauge” for POE2

A thought experiment involving theorycrafting a new game feature.

POE1 had the “Rampage Gauge” and the Rampage/Beyond League back in 2014 themed around it, so why not give POE 2 its own “gauge”?
And probably its own League for it so it has its own economy, similar to POE1 having the “Legacy of Phrecia” event as a more wacky out-there thing.

I do think POE2 having fancier animations for Skills makes it a better fit for the Style Gauge compared to POE1, at the moment. I do think getting POE1 updated with the newer animation rigs from POE2 will be a major boon.

If nothing else, it’s another number to try to make as large as possible.

This is of course inspired by the “style meter” from Devil May Cry.
Maybe POE2’s can have its own name like “Panache Gauge”, or “Fluidity Gauge”, or “Tasalian Tribute”.

For the purposes of this theorycraft, I’ll stick with “Style Gauge” and “Style Points”.

“Broad Stroke” ideas:
• The Style Gauge will be tied to Item Rarity, at the very least; getting your Style Rank higher and higher boosts the rewards that drop from enemies.
• You will still get the same amount of EXP from killing enemies, regardless of your Style Gauge.
• The Style Gauge’s ranks can be like “D, C, B, A, M (magic), R (rare), U (unique)”.
• Incorporating “Magic”, “Rare”, and “Unique” into the Style Rank would be funny. It might also be used to influence what item rarities COULD drop (or be "broken off of") a given mob/boss.
• Monster Effectiveness/Rarity could have an effect on how many Style points you can get – e.g. a high effectiveness resulting in lower style point gain? Though them being more dangerous and making it riskier to reap Style should be enough, without reducing how much you can actually reap from them.
• I have an idea where loot drops and/or Gold are “broken off” of enemies while they’re still alive, as you fight them and reap them for Style.
• The Style Gauge’s rank + score could also impact the Item Rarity of on-death drops, particularly for Rares and Bosses.
• The Style Gauge would start draining if you haven’t gained Style Points “Recently” – i.e. the past 4 seconds. While we could do it like the Rampage gauge, where it instantly goes to 0 if its timer runs out… I think it’d be better to let the Style Gauge drain down one rank at a time.
• There’s no one thing that provides a huge amount of Style Points; big bursts come from multiple small increases all happening in quick succession.
• Certain side-modes can have special interactions with the Style Meter - e.g. Trial of Chaos, at the end of each round can be used to record your "final style rank/score" at that moment. And that could affect the rewards you see that are up for grabs. Plus special audio lines and what not.
• Any special drops that come from killing a boss for the very first time (e.g. uncut Skill/Support gems) would not be affected by this.

This could have the effect where insta-killing stuff will get you minimal rewards, which can be fine if you’re not in the mood to pick up anything.

The idea is if you want to reap as many Style points as possible so as to boost your rewards and Gold, there’s a balancing act with regards to your damage numbers. Enough damage to get into a “hits to kill” range that you find reasonable, while still having plenty of opportunities to reap style points.

How to gain style points
• Hits from your Skills, of course. Though there would be diminishing returns if you spam the same skill over and over again.
• With regards to Minions, Command Skills would definitely grant style points, but I wonder what else with regards to Minions could grant style points. Finding opportunities to use Grim Feast can grant one or two style points, maybe?
• If a Skill has multiple hits, then if each one can hit an enemy, then each hit provides a style point.
• Applying ailments/debuffs
• Executing Payoffs on Payoff skills, or skills with Payoff supports equipped.
• Using a skill in a way that consumes at least one Power/Endurance/Frenzy Charge, or combination of them.
• Overgrowing Plant Skills and said Plant skills deal hits to enemies.
• Using Timing skills with Perfect Timing
• Applying a Heavy Stun, Freeze, or Electrocution with a Skill. Applying one of these on multiple enemies at once won’t automatically give you more style points. You get more Style if you interrupt an enemy attack with one of these, especially one that would deal heavy damage.
• Similar to this, killing at least one enemy with one Skill usage would get you a style point. Killing multiple enemies at once with one Skill usage would not necessarily give you multiple style points.
• Dodge-rolls to dodge Hits.
• Near Misses; physically moving and weaving around instead of using the Dodge Roll. Perhaps doing this while Sprinting can provide more Points.
• Using Skills that have movement incorporated in them to “dodge” attacks will also give points, probably more than using the Dodge Roll since you don’t have i-frames while doing this.
• Those previous three would provide a few extra style points for dodging a hit that would've actually killed you. "Avoid Death" and all that.
• As an example from those, if a boss/enemy has an attack with multiple hits (Forsaken Son’s spinning fire slash), and you dodge/“near-miss” all of the individual hits, you’d get more style points.
• Active Block with Shield, and Buckler Parries.
• Thinking about projectiles, maybe travel time/distance before hitting a target could affect how many style points gained?
• Individual Skills, including ones from Items + Ascendancies may have their own Style bonuses. E.g. The “Foresight” status of Hinekora’s Sight will give you more style points if you use it to properly “Avoid Death” from a specific hit that would’ve killed you.
• The Oracle's "Align Fate" skill gives you a style point bonus if you can use it to Empower a Spell and hit an enemy with said Spell.
• This is more a funny one, but Shield Charge could give multiple style points in succession if you: near-miss some enemies with it AND THEN hit something near the end of its animation, like weaving through a pack to hit something in the back row.

Should there be specific things happening that can instantly deduct points? If we don’t give it a “Rampage gauge timer”, and instead have it decrease one rank at a time… that would allow for penalties that take away Style points, but there shouldn’t be too many of those.

Examples for Penalties:
• Dying sets your Style gauge to 0.
• Getting hit will cause your style gauge to start decreasing early, and also deducts points.
• Getting Heavy Stunned, or Frozen, or Electrocuted cause your style gauge to start decreasing early, and also deduct points. Maybe not more so than getting hit by standard stuff; being unable to do anything for a few seconds is enough of a punishment.

There should be very few distinct penalties that actually take away style points.

Additional Notes:
It's about spotting opportunities for style points, and capitalizing on them when practical.
As you level up and get new Skills/Supports - buff your numbers, these can create more opportunities to reap style points, but capitalizing on as many of them as practical does still come down to your execution, so that’s how you get stronger alongside the Style gauge.

I don't necessarily think utilizing Weapon Swap should inherently give you more style points. That said, if you figure out how to use Weapon Swap to either create opportunities to reap Style points, or more easily capitalize on those opportunities, or both, then Weapon Swap doesn't need an inherent style bonus.

We could also do a thing where every area you’ve been to will track your style statistics.
For a given area instance, you see... the cumulative total of style points you got, plus the highest style value + rank you reached. You can re-run instances to try to push your character's “high style scores” higher and higher. While Endgame maps + non-campaign areas will be tricky to do, it’d be easy enough for Campaign areas, to the point where you could probably even host tournaments based on this “style scoring”.

Anyway that’s all I want to say for this first brainstorming session of this idea.
More posts can be made to dig deeper into the idea.

I do think more thought will be needed for how to tie the "style gauge" to Item Rarity (maybe not Quantity, so as to avoid a glut of drops). But using it to influence drops so that you have some more direct agency over them is an important idea.

>Hits from your Skills, of course. Though there would be diminishing returns if you spam the same skill over and over again.

For this, we know there are certain Supports that grant some bonus based on "number of different skills you used in the last 15 seconds" (Varashta's Blessing), or "10% increased Cast Speed for each different Spell you've Cast in the last eight seconds" (Rapid Casting III)

The "number of different skills used prior to using skill X" could definitely be used to at least avoid diminishing returns.

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Also with regards to the Style Gauge, I do think that while the total number of points you can earn is uncapped, the Style Gauge itself will have a cap.


Figuring out how the Style Gauge's rank interacts with Rares/Bosses for their drops will also be good.
The whole "breaking off loot/drops from enemies" is definitely something I want to dig into more for this, perhaps for that above thing too, with Rare mobs and Bosses.

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Hm...
Maybe instead of one global Style Gauge, each individual Rare/Unique mob gets its own Style Gauge for you to fill up. It can be repeatedly filled up to "break off" a non-guaranteed loot drop, or batch of drops, or Gold, or a combination of that stuff, from that mob. Sorta like POE1's Incubators.

WHAT gets broken off would depend on your "Style Rank" for that Rare mob / Boss, however it's implemented.
E.g. in the beginning you'll get "lower-style-rank drops", but by building up the Style Gauge, you can start getting Rarer drops broken off from the Rare mob, or Boss.

Filling the Style gauge uses the same rules as described up above.

And from there, in terms of statistics, you can get your total Style Points + your mean Style Points/Rank from all the Rares/Bosses you fought, in that area Instance (showing the mean style points/rank will be important to showcase your consistency in getting good Style, if nothing else).

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A global style gauge that applies to everything would be simpler, but what makes that work in the Devil May Cry games is that when you encounter enemies, you're stuck in the "room" until all the waves of enemies in it have been cleared, and then your final style score/rank for that room is saved, the style gauge is reset to zero, then you move on to the next enemy room.

In POE2 specifically, the only time you get that sort of thing is in the Ascendancy Trials, where each room you enter has a specific mission to complete.

So what variation could be done to make it work for something more dynamic like POE? Especially in Endgame where some bosses can roam around the given map level. Those Boss-spwaning Summoning Circles, the Silent Cave having a bunch of random bosses, and the Phaaryl Megaliths being a boss rush.