The good and bad about PoE.

I've reached 1000 Hours in PoE recently. And while i realize this is only a modest amount of time compared to some of the more hardcore players, i feel experienced enough in the game now that i wanted to come just put my thoughts onto the forums about what i like and dislike about the game. There are a lot of good things, but also a lot of bad things about the game. I will spend more time focusing on the bad things in this post (because thats what needs changing, i don't need to point out the good things as much.) There are a lot of little things i would like to point out, just as feedback as potential places the game could be improved on. I don't want this post to be viewed as me just coming to complain, though. I am coming with legit feedback on areas i would like to see improvement on, not coming here just to crap on the game.

[Gear Diversity]
The first thing i would like to mention that jumps out to me about this game is the gear potential. The fact that gear has so many stats on it that are (mostly) all viable stats that can be used in some way is great and makes different playstyles feel actually different. This is the #1 thing that i think Diablo 3 failed on as it had watered stats down to really basic things. The fact that there are all kinds of ways to build survivability other than just "stack HP and resists" is fun for theorycrafting and build diversity. Evasion, Block, ES, Regen, Suppression, Endurance Charges, Etc, all fairly viable in some way or another.

[Skill Diversity]
The first pain point about PoE that jumps out at me is the large gap in viability between different skills. Some skills are just blatantly easymode and some skills are near impossible to really play with because of how the game is designed now. Namely, true melee skills are a pain in the ass to use unless you first build a farming character and can afford to overdeck your melee character so that its actually useable. This isn't because the melee skills are "bad" its because the game is no longer being designed with melee in mind at all. All of the newer content for quite a while now has been harder and harder and more and more dangerous to the point you just can't afford to get into melee range with an 'average' character a lot of times. You can especially notice this bad game design when interacting with Blight. You literally cannot fight the enemies in blight with a melee character, if you attempt to, you will just get deleted. The entire league mechanic almost has to just be skipped if you are playing melee or very short range. When they designed Blight they clearly just did not even consider this playstyle at all nor did they care that many skills just cannot participate in the mechanic at all. While i don't expect every skill to be equal, it could be a bit better. I don't think Melee skills need to be buffed as much as monster's 'danger potential' needs to be reevaluated. A lot of the insane burst damage from non boss monsters needs to be revised. I do not consider it good game design when once in a while you run into a rare that runs you down and attacks you at the speed of a DBZ villain. Every once in a while i will run into a rare that just deletes me and i cannot even figure out "how" it is doing it. I have 80% Resists, maxed Chaos Res, 6 Endurance Charges, and 30k armour and Molten Shell and still i just get randomly oneshot by a rare without the chance to even respond. This type of thing really needs to be toned down. Specifically the SPEED/BURST potential of monsters is too high. The only things that should be bursty are attacks that are telegraphed enough that you can tell that its dangerous. Not some random instant-smash that does 5k damage through all your defense. I do no find this to be fun to interact with. If i build my character to be tanky, i should expect to feel tanky. I would really like to be able to make a tanky true melee character that just slashes my way through enemies but it would be a pain in the ass to do. I would die more than other characters, and my clear-speed would likely be fractions lower than ranged playstyles. Lacerate WAS the closest middle-ground i had but it has gotten nerfed again and again and again to the point its not very fun to play with anymore, the huge negative attack speed modifier on it makes it feel like a slog to play with now.

[Buildcrafting]
Next, i think this game needs an in-game compendium. A help menu or something that lists every item base item, gem, and unique item available in the game. It feels kind of bad knowing that any new or even intermediate player can't REALLY make a proper build because they don't actually know what tools that have to work with. Everybody knows that a new player that comes to POE will almost always fail with their first few characters unless they just copy a build from online. And considering one of the biggest attraction points of this game is SUPPOSED to be theorycrafting, it doesn't feel right that theorycrafters are brought to the game and then forced to fail again and again and again because they don't realize that the passive tree is only like 10% of the theorycrafting and therefore they cant ever hope to succeed for a long time at making their own build. The game should be designed in a way that if a new player comes to the game interested in making their own build, that they should be able to do so, and be able to succeed at it. Not only will they not succeed, they likely won't even be able to get to act 10 before having to start a new character.
Most successful builds nowadays rely on very discreet items or item interactions to actually be powerful. Things like Templars using Ivory Tower to get to 20k+ ES and turning Energy Blade into a super weapon. Or a Cluster Jewel with some specific unique Jewels to go along with it. And these types of builds are basically what is required to play the game successfully nowadays, yet builds this powerful are near impossible to create even by fairly experienced players. So everyone is forced to just go copy the same 20~ builds from online every league.

[Information Tools]
Most of all, the game needs a Death Report given to you when you die. You should be given a report of what hit you (and what type of damage it was, etc) in the last 2-3 seconds or so before your death. This way players can actually see WHAT THEY ARE DYING FROM AND WHAT DEFENSE THEY ARE MISSING. Did the enemy have resist penetration or something? Did they have physical def overwhelm? Did they crit? I assume specific monster "attacks" have properties like this and are not always visible on their mod list and that is why some attacks just delete you and you don't know why.

[Bleed Rant]
Also; Monster Bleed is too strong. The fact that i am basically FORCED to get immunity to bleeding should not be a thing. You can't afford to stand still in this game most of the time, so if you aren't bleed immune you basically just die from bleeding instantly. It feels like no matter how tanky i make my character nor how much regen i stack it is never enough. Bleeds will kill me. Bleeds need to be nerfed hard. Being immune to bleed should be a bonus, not a necessity.

[Blight]
BLIGHT. I would really like to see Blight mechanics get updated. I love tower defense games and i like the idea of interacting with it in PoE, but so far almost every Blight Encounter i have had has been more annoying than fun because of how it is designed. The roots spread in FAR too many directions, forcing players that want to interact with Blight to focus on small corridor maps. They really need to go back and rebalance blight so that no matter if the map is open or closed, you only ever get like 3~ root branches max. On top of that, the blight mechanic does not give the player time enough to even think. As someone who was new to it, i don't even have time to learn what the hell is going on before i lose the encounter. I am like "Oh, there are towers i can build, i wonder what this one doe-" [GAME OVER]. There isnt even enough time to read the tooltips before you lose the encounter. I would like to have a few moments to plan a tower strategy out, rather than being forced to just spam down a bunch of towers at random because there isn't time to think.
Also, as i said above, melee characters can't really interact with Blight because the monsters in Blight are designed to do tremendous damage if you try to get in their way. This needs to be changed. They can't really make the monsters deal less damage (because then blight would be easy because you could just stop the enemies by facetanking them.) So instead they should probably just make the enemies not attack the player at all and continue to walk towards the Blight, so the test is if you can kill them fast enough or not. Maybe some specific monsters can spawn that will fight you.

[League Mechanics]
So far the best league mechanics to interact with for me is Expedition, Delve, Heist, and Old Harvest (before it got watered down).
Expedition is fun because it has more to it than just "Push the button and kill the horde" which is like 90% of other league mechanics which i find boring. I am already killing hordes of monsters all day long, if the league mechanic is just "Kill a horde" then it basically isn't adding much to the game. Finding Expedition Logbooks and taking my time placing down charges and getting well rewarded for it is fun for me. I get tired of the speedrunning mentality of PoE so anytime a league mechanic can make me slow down and take my time (and then reward me well for doing so) is a good thing. This is the same reason why i think Harvest League was my favorite league. You were well rewarded for taking the time to build and plan out your garden rather than just going from map to map and pushing a button and killing a horde. Delve and Heist are both excellent because they add entire side content that you can spend your time on rather than mapping. I really want to like Syndicate as well because it seems like it has a fair amount of depth, but the UI and explanation for it leaves you just confused. I get the idea that i want to find the Mastermind, but i have no idea how to tell if its better to gain intelligence or raise/lower ranks of specific Syndicate members because the game does not tell me what rewards each member will give me. So rather than fun i find it just annoying to interact with because its too convoluted.
League mechanics like Strongboxes, Ritual, Breaches, Legion, etc are all pretty bland and boring to me. (Not to say some of them aren't very rewarding, but that doesn't make them fun to interact with.) They are all basically the same thing: Walk up, click the thing, kill the monsters, get reward. Its kind of bland. Crucible is not fun to interact with, but at least it does have unique rewards other than just currency and more items so thats at least something.

[League Challenges]
While i understand league challenges are supposed to be challenging, i feel that the majority of them are just way way way out of my league. I have put way more effort this league into attempting to get the challenges done and i have not been able to get past 10 challenges completed. The majority of these challenges require content to be done that i assume 95% of the playerbase never even reaches. I feel like the first 50~% of challenges need to be a bit easier to unlock so that average players can get it done and the last 30% with the most epic rewards should be set aside for the most hardcore players. It just feels a little wrong with how many hours i have put in this league and still the majority of these challenges look completely impossible to even touch.

Theres probably plenty of other things i could bring up but i can't think of any that are important enough to mention right now. So thats most of the major areas that i wanted to give feedback on. Overall i enjoy the game. But it has a lot of pain points that prevent it from being even more successful than it is. It is a very difficult game to get into and the average player is likely to be turned off by the game rather than hooked into it. A lot could be done to make the game more casual friendly without removing difficult endgame content for the hardcore players.