Rutless is showing off all bad design choces of PoE

It feels like ruthless is doubling down on all PoE weaknesses while culling its strengths.

Main problem is how you are forced to deal with everything while having only a fraction of your DPS. It means that poor state of defenses is glaring.

"Tanky" character in PoE in 99.9% of cases means "can take a few stray blows". But ruthless forces you into close encounters. Without movement options you can't really dodge, even in rare cases of actually well telegraphed hits. Also, you are usually swarmed, so you just can't move. Movement skills are partially solving this problem (that is, when you actually have a safer place, because often the whole screen is a mess of ground effects and stuff).

Stuns, debuffs, ailments. You would have a lot of it. You are already slow, and also you are stunned, chilled, under temp chains and a ton of other stuff. And you don't really have options to deal with them because filling slot with anything ok-ish at all is already a fortune. So you are way to often robbed of control, making any failure feel like it is not your fault, but bad game design. Because it is so.

Flasks. Long ago I told that utility flasks should be permanent. Now, after using Mageblood I am 100% sure I was right. PoE is not the game where you do strategical choices. You need 100% uptime of everything you can get. And 2 seconds of quicksilver flask is just absurd.

Gearing. PoE has a LOT of boxes to check when it comes to equipment. You need damage, defense, and utility. And each league makes it more difficult to fit everything. It is most obviously felt with chaos resistance. It is used to be an extra, rare weak type of damage with rare weak ways to deal with that. But last years added a lot of very deadly chaos damage sources to enemies, but you still have little ways to build up defense. I made a fortune selling chaos res fractures on non-ruthless league - good base and high tier fractured chaos res can sometimes can be 10-15 divines!

Back in Harbinger league I got 40/40 with a 10 exalts character, now it is what you have to pay for a single base. There is way too much things to think about, and having it at random just makes it frustrating puzzle to solve.

Enemies and telegraphing. A single enemy can often have a good telegraphing and attack patterns. But...
- they are often coming in swarms
- there is way too dark
- they tend to use skills of the same colors as background, making them hard to see
- overlapping effects
- just a general mess of having too much on a screen
- way to short reaction windows
- long sequences where you must dodge with short windows to do damage
- overlapping area denials can give no safe place to move

I can continue this, but what is the point, really?