I guess I'm asking whether the gems with higher base level requirements are unique skills that you'll use as main attack. Meaning: Am I going to be using my level 1 skill (albeit powered up) for the rest of the game, or will I start finding better skills?
For example, in Diablo 2 you get frost bolt to start, eventually that trees into glacial spike--which is essentially frost bolt on roids (and seemingly doable in PoE via support gems), however, I don't see Frost Bolt ever turning into Frozen Orb in PoE.
There are no worse/better skills. Each skill has its downsides or upsides and with proper gear, passive skill tree and some support gems each of those skills can be used as main weapon.
There is no Frozen Orb like in D2 but you can:
Use ice spear + fork + chaneling. That will give you spear which will split in two upon hitting first mob and each of those splitted spears will split further upon hitting next mob.
This skill will be high mana cost one but it will be vastly different than normal ice spear.
Them you can use ice spear + puncture which will puncture mob and fly further.
Also this is worth mentioning that GGG is adding new skills each 1-2 months so if you don't like few current gems with freeze power then maybe they add something different.
