Absolutely disapointed -- This game is hard, and not in a fun way.

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Quizzlemanizzle#2632 wrote:

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z3mcneil#3966 wrote:

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Rexeos#3429 wrote:

return later more powerful.

That's not how it works in PoE2, and certainly not how it works in Elden Ring.

When a casual player meets Tree Sentinel and realizes it's there to troll them, it is ignored. The player then enjoys many hours of level appropriate content, maybe even changes his build, becomes much more skilled in the Souls games, then comes back to defeat him. Same thing with Margit.

In PoE2, especially in Act 1 and 2, if you're stuck at a certain boss, you can't respec, you can't try a new build, loot drop is horrendous, so what's supposed to be 'level appropriate content' ends up being a roadblock. This is how you make people rage quit. Even Asmongold rage quit as a warrior to play as witch when he realized he was wasting his time.

You can absolutely adapt your build to bosses and beat them or farm another level and beat them.
Did it myself and I am maps.

Asmongold is a bad barometer, dude quits every game that is challenging him.

I get you, but the respecing and adapt your build is limited to an extent and very expensive. In Wukong, you can free respec at any time, so if you want to try something different you can respec from lv1 against any boss. In Elden Ring attribute point respec is restricted to a certain amout per NG cycle, but you can also swap to a different weapon type and it's easy to maintain many viable playstyle options at the same time.

In PoE2, right now gold drop, currency drop and gear drop are all really bad, so even if you want to change things, there is an inherent time commitment behind it. I value my time simply too much because there are so many good and hard games already. At this rate I'll be gone in Feb to play Monster Hunter Wilds. This is not an MMO, not every aspect of the game needs to be so slow and grindy.

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z3mcneil#3966 wrote:

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Quizzlemanizzle#2632 wrote:

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z3mcneil#3966 wrote:

That's not how it works in PoE2, and certainly not how it works in Elden Ring.

When a casual player meets Tree Sentinel and realizes it's there to troll them, it is ignored. The player then enjoys many hours of level appropriate content, maybe even changes his build, becomes much more skilled in the Souls games, then comes back to defeat him. Same thing with Margit.

In PoE2, especially in Act 1 and 2, if you're stuck at a certain boss, you can't respec, you can't try a new build, loot drop is horrendous, so what's supposed to be 'level appropriate content' ends up being a roadblock. This is how you make people rage quit. Even Asmongold rage quit as a warrior to play as witch when he realized he was wasting his time.

You can absolutely adapt your build to bosses and beat them or farm another level and beat them.
Did it myself and I am maps.

Asmongold is a bad barometer, dude quits every game that is challenging him.

I get you, but the respecing and adapt your build is limited to an extent and very expensive. In Wukong, you can free respec at any time, so if you want to try something different you can respec from lv1 against any boss. In Elden Ring attribute point respec is restricted to a certain amout per NG cycle, but you can also swap to a different weapon type and it's easy to maintain many viable playstyle options at the same time.

In PoE2, right now gold drop, currency drop and gear drop are all really bad, so even if you want to change things, there is an inherent time commitment behind it. I value my time simply too much because there are so many good and hard games already. At this rate I'll be gone in Feb to play Monster Hunter Wilds. This is not an MMO, not every aspect of the game needs to be so slow and grindy.

There is a difference between slow and grindy and thoughtful and deliberate.

Grindy is repetitive, meaningless additions to time spent.

Thoughtful and deliberate gameplay is where you have a choice. You are presented with a problem, and you make a decision. What is it that I need right now? Can I push through this rough patch to get to my next ascendancy point? Do I get more spirit from an upcoming boss? Or should I hang back, try and find some more uncut gems from something that I can farm more quickly below me.

People are looking for all challenge and choice to be removed from their games, because their expectation is that games are to be smooth, linear progressions of uninterrupted scaling. Because that is what we have been given for the better part of a decade. Souls games are rather inevitable as well.

I think people forget the very early days of D2.

People had zero fucking clue what they were doing. Some people took months to get into Hell. That was fine, because there was actual interesting and meaningful gameplay choices (certainly for what else was possible/available on the market at the time) to be made.

This is a forgotten aspect of gaming that many are over the moon to see return.

I agree, the game is not balanced and the game experience is quite disappointing and frustrating. This is especially true for the minion build, which I was particularly looking forward to.
It's no fun being stuck at the end of Act 1 with no chance of upgrading the minion's abilities, numbers or equipment to do reasonable damage. I've maximized all available damage boosts including passives and the gems I've gotten, but the minions still have the punch of a wet sponge.
The wizard feels a bit stronger (but still way too weak), but handling it with the mouse is almost impossible because the character keeps moving while I have to let go of the mouse to cast a spell. This is just deadly against bosses.

Overall, the game is not fun with the current balancing. It has so much potential that is overshadowed by a frustrating experience.

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xavier66666#5433 wrote:

I agree, the game is not balanced and the game experience is quite disappointing and frustrating. This is especially true for the minion build, which I was particularly looking forward to.
It's no fun being stuck at the end of Act 1 with no chance of upgrading the minion's abilities, numbers or equipment to do reasonable damage. I've maximized all available damage boosts including passives and the gems I've gotten, but the minions still have the punch of a wet sponge.
The wizard feels a bit stronger (but still way too weak), but handling it with the mouse is almost impossible because the character keeps moving while I have to let go of the mouse to cast a spell. This is just deadly against bosses.

Overall, the game is not fun with the current balancing. It has so much potential that is overshadowed by a frustrating experience.

I have said this in several places on the forums, but I'd just like to reiterate, minions are incredibly strong I absolutely decimated the A1 boss with skeletons after reading about how impossible that boss was with summoner archetype.

Yes... They die. They take 5 seconds to respawn. The 50-60% uptime they have, they pump insane damage. I wonder how many people don't realize that the minions have active abilities tied to them.

Using corrosion on the sniper skeletons makes for insane boss damage.

The boss spawns adds? Okay, get ready for me to Unearth contagion powered scorpion fiends while you have your armour shredded from my sniper skele. Say bye to your HP boss.

I am now in "Act 5" and the game became much easier, guess the combination of overtuned early game scaling and undertuned drops" made it such a bad experience (if you dare to use a not overpowered skill of your liking)

So GGG has to either nerf act 1 and 2 or simply do what was promised: Give us the crafting currency we need!

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xavier66666#5433 wrote:

I agree, the game is not balanced and the game experience is quite disappointing and frustrating. This is especially true for the minion build, which I was particularly looking forward to.
It's no fun being stuck at the end of Act 1 with no chance of upgrading the minion's abilities, numbers or equipment to do reasonable damage. I've maximized all available damage boosts including passives and the gems I've gotten, but the minions still have the punch of a wet sponge.
The wizard feels a bit stronger (but still way too weak), but handling it with the mouse is almost impossible because the character keeps moving while I have to let go of the mouse to cast a spell. This is just deadly against bosses.

Overall, the game is not fun with the current balancing. It has so much potential that is overshadowed by a frustrating experience.

WASD is so much better, the game engine and combat are clearly designed with WASD and controller in mind. I'm not saying I like it, just what it is. I played with K&M for 3 minutes and changed to WASD and never moved back.

Even as a ranged class, try to move as much as you can. Some of the one-shot mechanics, coupled with tracking, are pretty hard to react to. If you stand still a lot, the average player's reaction time and 1 dodge may not be enough.

For minion damage, the game clearly wants players to use skill combos as much as possible to do damage. For example, the skeletal archer's poison cloud explodes when ignited, this explosion insta one-shots entire packs of white and blue mobs in act 1. They don't want us to 1 button spam, but they don't communicate the NECESSITY of using combos to deal damage clearly enough.

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z3mcneil#3966 wrote:

I get you, but the respecing and adapt your build is limited to an extent and very expensive. In Wukong, you can free respec at any time, so if you want to try something different you can respec from lv1 against any boss. In Elden Ring attribute point respec is restricted to a certain amout per NG cycle, but you can also swap to a different weapon type and it's easy to maintain many viable playstyle options at the same time.

In PoE2, right now gold drop, currency drop and gear drop are all really bad, so even if you want to change things, there is an inherent time commitment behind it. I value my time simply too much because there are so many good and hard games already. At this rate I'll be gone in Feb to play Monster Hunter Wilds. This is not an MMO, not every aspect of the game needs to be so slow and grindy.

If its Warrior you have issues with, the standard starting combo of Rolling Slam + Boneshatter when monsters have yellow balls clears entire mobs efficiently, especially with Herald of Ash on top of that. Also the standard attack is actually a decent source for single-target damage, which Warrior lacks early on.

The standard Warrior playstyle is stunning monsters so you can use finisher moves that do extra damage or other stuff against stunned or about-to-be-stunned monsters. You feel like you're playing a really aggressive bomb detonator. Boss damage for Warrior is unfortunately low compared to other classes. Even Alkaizer had relatively low boss damage before he found the really broken combos.

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z3mcneil#3966 wrote:

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xavier66666#5433 wrote:

I agree, the game is not balanced and the game experience is quite disappointing and frustrating. This is especially true for the minion build, which I was particularly looking forward to.
It's no fun being stuck at the end of Act 1 with no chance of upgrading the minion's abilities, numbers or equipment to do reasonable damage. I've maximized all available damage boosts including passives and the gems I've gotten, but the minions still have the punch of a wet sponge.
The wizard feels a bit stronger (but still way too weak), but handling it with the mouse is almost impossible because the character keeps moving while I have to let go of the mouse to cast a spell. This is just deadly against bosses.

Overall, the game is not fun with the current balancing. It has so much potential that is overshadowed by a frustrating experience.

WASD is so much better, the game engine and combat are clearly designed with WASD and controller in mind. I'm not saying I like it, just what it is. I played with K&M for 3 minutes and changed to WASD and never moved back.

Even as a ranged class, try to move as much as you can. Some of the one-shot mechanics, coupled with tracking, are pretty hard to react to. If you stand still a lot, the average player's reaction time and 1 dodge may not be enough.

For minion damage, the game clearly wants players to use skill combos as much as possible to do damage. For example, the skeletal archer's poison cloud explodes when ignited, this explosion insta one-shots entire packs of white and blue mobs in act 1. They don't want us to 1 button spam, but they don't communicate the NECESSITY of using combos to deal damage clearly enough.

This!!

The second day I played wasd and died a lot less. But it was considerably more boring. The first day I rage quit. The second day I bored-quit. I won't spend time on the week to try it more. Honestly it wasn't fun enough for me as-is

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diego_garber#0088 wrote:

I've been playing PoE for years, and I have thousands of hours in the game.

Today I played PoE2 for ~5 hours and rage quit.

I failed to kill the act1 boss 10 times, i have 22 deaths, and honestly........ it's NOT FUN.

You joined in 2017 sweet prince. You have years of experience in PoE1 that is a game that most veterans of the original PoE left because it is TOO EASY.
You're not good at the game, the issue is not within the game.

Just if you wonder, I've killed the act 1 boss on my first try. Get good zoom-zoom boy.

I’m jumping into this thread to share my two cents. Full disclosure: I haven’t read all 80 pages of comments, so I’m not sure if this has already been said or whether my thoughts will resonate, but here goes.

I haven’t played much of Path of Exile 1, but I’m a seasoned ARPG player coming from games like Diablo 3, Diablo 4, and others in the genre. I also love Dark Souls and other Soulsborne games—they’re amazing in their own right.

That said, my expectations for Path of Exile are very different from what I expect from a Soulsborne game. In PoE, I’m looking for an experience similar to PoE1 or Diablo: the chance to craft a unique and powerful character, clear the screen with satisfying explosions, and get that dopamine rush from discovering cool quests, engaging stories, and, most importantly, exciting gear (not to mention gear that actually matters).

My main issue with the game isn’t necessarily the gear—or even the lack of it. It’s the way difficulty is designed. Soulsborne games are hard in a smart way. Their challenge comes from clever mechanics, unpredictable boss patterns, and the need for precise execution. Here, however, the difficulty feels frustrating and unfair.

Take bosses, for example—looking at you, Lachlann. They often kill me in a single hit while my damage feels negligible. I’m stuck endlessly dodge-rolling and chipping away at their health, which doesn’t feel rewarding or meaningful. Worse, it’s hard not to feel like I’ve made a terrible mistake with my build. But after watching YouTube guides and comparing my setup with other players—specifically as a Monk—I realized my build is very similar to what others are doing.

This kind of difficulty isn’t fun. It’s not fun to feel underpowered. It’s not fun to spend five minutes dodging, landing minimal hits, and then getting one-shot. If the goal is to make the game hard, focus on smart, engaging design—not lazy mechanics like reducing player damage, inflating boss health, or cranking up their damage output. That approach feels tedious and uninspired.

Right now, the game feels schizophrenic. It’s trying to straddle the line between being a Soulsborne-inspired experience and a traditional ARPG. And honestly, it shouldn’t be a tough decision. The majority of the player base is here for an ARPG, not a Soulsborne clone. Focus on what PoE does best and lean into that identity.