Having to go through the campaign on every character actively makes it a worse experience.

At first, my general thoughts on the campaign

IMO the campaign in intself is fine if maybe 1-2-3 acts longer than it needs to be. Bosses from a4 onwards (+the reworked a1) are competent-good-very good, depending on the boss. Combat with regular enemies is meh, though, but i suspect that's largely because of experience gain incentivising you to skip past most enemies, not the encounters themselves.

Now to the ways by which the need to go through the campaign on every character makes it a worse experience

1) Start with the obvious: repeating the same thing over and over gets boring really fast, especially if you do it rather frequently.

So, however good the campaign itself may be, it won't feel as good if i'm doing it 3rd time this month. And even next league the campaign will probably feel worse because you'll be more bored of it, because you'll have had, lets say, 2 months to rest from the campaign, not 3, and, also, you'll have done it multiple times last league, not once.

2) Going through the campaign on a 2nd+ character feels pointless, because you aren't achieving anything, aside from leveling this particular character.

On your 1st character there are reasons to go through the campaign,other than just leveling your character: getting better gear and access to harder content. Yes, they arent good gear or hard content in absolute terms, but relative to a baseline of ~0 this is still progress, and a rather significant one.

On your 2nd char though; The hardest content you have access to in this league is probably somewhere in maps, whatever currency you have in your stash can probably buy or craft gear that is significantly better than what you can acquire going through the campaign. So the only reason left is just leveling. Which, for me at least, is a rather bad reason for playing.

3) The campaign has to be designed around both a first-in-a-league playthrough, and leveling a 2nd+ character, and also keeping in mind multiple relatively consequtive playthroughs. Which ultimately makes it a worse experience.

The campaign can't be short, it's the storyline, after all. But because of (1) and (2) the campaign has to be completable quickly (or you'll just gett sick enough of the campaign, or bored enough of your character to stop playing). Which means, that PoE has game design choices that, intentionally or not, let you get through the campaign faster than you, perhaps, should be able to:

- Experience gain is such that most enemies you encounter can be skipped. Which means that killing them is a waste of time. Which means that you are incentivised to not kill enemies in a game that is, in a large part, about killing enemies. Which isnt fun.

- The existance of powerfull (for their level) leveling uniques means, that there are, broadly, 2 possible player power curves: that of a player who doesnt have leveling uniques, and that of a player, who does. But you can only balance enemies around 1 power level. Which, in the case of PoE, means that those people who use leveling uniques are overpowered for the areas they are going through. And, at least imo, being overpowered makes the combat a lot less fun. Which, in turn, makes the campaign a less fun experience.

Some/all vendor recipies should also probably be in the previous point, but i wasn't sure about including them

And as an ending, a couple of possible changes to implement

Option 1: alternative ways of leveling

- Make the campaign progression shared between all characters in a league, so that we could farm whatever areas we want for leveling 2nd+ characters
- A boss rush
- Endless delve/heist/...
- Probably some other options i didn't think about

Preferably implement multiple options and DON'T MAKE THEM ITEMS/... WE HAVE TO FARM/FIND

Option 2: Make both campaign and level (up to lvl 68) progression shared between all characters in a league (while, possibly, making leveling take longer)
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* For both options the actual implementation should probably involve multiple characters sharing the same life, so that if you die on HC you would actually need to level the standart way again. (or maybe not, i'm not a HC player, so have no idea if it would be neded or not)

Thats why std exists among other things. Leagues are for competition...first 100...first to maps etc. Thats why they run a ticker tape at bottom of screen when leagues start and everyone every class starts at zero. Solution is there why try and buck system?

Competition in leagues is a by-product of advertising the leagues for micro transactions. The leagues are not by happenstance scheduled quarterly and the only 2 ways to make money here (so far) is leagues and streamers.

No campaign would ultimately mean re-rolling map levels into single digits. That said, the campaign is very old and tired. So much so that even when they reworked it ~5 years ago, they simply copy and pasted tiles (acts 5-9 are 1/2assed). You get a strong feeling that there's a lot of spaghetti code going on, especially since the development of Path of Exile 2 can rightfully be mistaken for the "development" of Cyberpunk 2077.