EA feedback so far - skill preview clunkiness, melee & bodyblocking, tooltips, more

Inconsistent behaviour when equipping a skill you can't use vs when trying to equip new weapons

I tried to explain it on the images, but:
- You can equip a skill at any time, even if not meeting requirements, and it's clearly unusable by being greyed out. This is good.
- But, if trying the opposite - equipping new weapons while having a skill gem equipped - the skill doesn't grey itself out, or remove itself from your bar. Even if it isn't on your bar, you can't equip the weapons w/o first unequipping the skill gem. This is clunky as hell.

Particularly when considering how skill previews work.

Skill previews feel unnecessarily clunky.
https://i.imgur.com/Cu2fv6p.png
i) The preview doesnt work w/o clicking on a skill, but:
- you can't click on skill w/ "wrong" weap type equipped
- can't easily swap weapons w/o unequipping skills 1st
- this defeats the point of a simple preview.
ii) If i have to select a skill to preview the video,
- I shouldn't also have to hold alt to swap the skill tabs, the window should be pinned based on that initial click.

Tiers counting upwards conveys less information
in PoE1, when you have a T1 mod, you know that that's as good as it'll get for that slot, barring "T0" mods from essences.
- essence T0 is fine I think bc it's not a natural roll.
When you have T1 as the lowest, counting up, you don't fully convey what the maximum is. For some mods, the max is T8. For others, it's T6 or T4. This then requires you to have much more game knowledge, or check poe2db.
It removes communicatable item information from within the game, unless,
a tier max is indicated when you reach it, like "T8 (max)".
plz ignore this if so - I'm not in endgame yet.

Weap swap doesn't change your hotbars like in PoE1
This may be by design? But as a result of it being 1 persistent bar:
i) Can't keep separate setup of skills for use with your weap swap
ii) When you equip a new weapon it dumps its own default skills into your skillbar (like basic mace attack, chaos bolt, basic staff attack) and then when you remove it, the skill doesn't go away. It just swaps to the basic attack of your other weap instead, which you then have to remove. It's unnecessary anti-QoL.

Tooltips are too minimal
I didn't see any toggle for advanced tooltip descriptions or whatever it'd be called. Having 0 skill details on the tooltips beyond cast & mana cost is so frustrating. I don't like having to open my skill screen, then find it in the list every time.

Item loot key doesn't seem to do anything (Mouse movement if it matters)
I tried all 3 options. The only thing enabling it did was remove my ability to loot with my mouse. But I still couldnt loot with the button.

Reclaiming MTX pets doesn't properly work if owning > 1 equipped copies
(figured this one was a bug)
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3595032

early game feels a bit too hand-holdy
minor gripe: like in PoE you'd lock the player into the very first area until they equipped a weapon and/or skill gem. But that seems to have been extended to several mechanics in PoE2, e.g. being forced to equip skills I'm not going to use anyways / put things on my bar / slot a passive point before being allowed out of baby jail like pls no.

Melee does not feel like it's been fixed - still massive ranged advantage
Draven was really awful at first, but I think it was a combined issue of being undergeared (no drops), needing to back out & do consort 1st, getting good, and then also picking up more support gems + a totem.

Melee is so dependent on getting gear upgrades and w/o a crafting bench or much of the flexibility we had in PoE with vendor recipes it can get frustrating af. I went 20 lvls w/o getting better boots than magic 10 movspd 9 fire res. I went 13 lvls w/o getting a better weapon - including using all my currency on trying to make one, gambling for a staff (v. not worth), or repeatedly checking the npcs for base upgrades to mute | 1 prefix magic items to aug/regal. 0 drops.

Melee is forced into danger range but then not given anything special to make up for this added danger. It certainly isn't dps or leech if playing elemental damage. You take more dmg via proximity to the mobs, you're forced to deal with the awful hitboxes, bodyblocking, and your character not hitting things properly due to bodyblocking or the godawful autoaim. Not only that, but now we don't have the option to drop utility flasks for more health flasks.

The autoaim is so annoying with Temple Bell. It frequently drops offset to where I aim it, like away from my OoS when I'm trying to stack them on a mob, but often out of range entirely. Then even if its on a mob, when you go to hit it, sometimes you target the mob or a stray on the side and you dont trigger the bell. I expect that if I'm holding shift, I will attack in place - freely aiming, and not still attack a target, but it's not reliable. This was particularly evident at the kitava-like boss in A2 with the dagger and laser, where tempest flurry frequently redirected itself towards body parts I was not trying to attack.

Body blocking has been incredibly frustrating
By the end of A2 I've died about 90 times. Of these, I would estimate 20 to various bosses and getting good, and 70 to absolute bullshit like being body blocked. Too many lil beetles spawn around you? Can't do shit! Travel skills can get interrupted, get body blocked, and dodge treats bodies as obstacles and has no iframes vs AoE.

The big skeletons in the valley of the titans are particularly heinous in groups of 2-3, nvm when you get 6 in a pack. Their hitboxes seem to be so much larger than their graphic. Dodge having no iframes vs aoe means you still take dmg when you roll away from one of these, they still hit you 1-2 skele lengths away from where they landed, and you can't roll away from them if some are flanking you due to their hitboxes boxing you in, even if you aren't visually boxed in. They also do like 1/2 my hp bar in 1 stage of their fall. Then you're supposed to deal with a pack of these reviving while sand worms pop up from below, tornados obscure your screen and suction you in, and the lich reviving them is also casting other bs -- IN MELEE, where even standing still to cast enfeeble will be enough time to get you killed.

This is coupled with travel skill awkwardness: getting stuck on pebbles, requiring a target, straight up not existing (flame dash where).

Wind ward is okay, but it's 1-time use vs fast hitting little shitterlings.
I'm not opposed to spirit replacing mana reservation, but there's not enough sources of spirit for melee in early game now, particularly with the bugged quest. Like you get 1 herald and that's it, until you can luck into another 30 from chest/ammy. I don't understand the patch notes that said the items drop off mobs because my quest is greyed out but I don't have the 30 spirit from it still, and I never found the quest item.


Staff anims + anim cancel feels iffy, Killing Palm awkward
Not the fun anim cancel, the one where the mobs hit you mid-attack and cancel your windup hit despite having an anti-stun charm equipped.

Killing Palm does both less dmg / slower dmg than your default quarterstaff attack (which has an aoe swipe too)
- really annoying trying to last hit with it.
Particularly when it teleports you back into packs of mobs, which then kill you before you're able to use the charge due to bodyblocking or being stuck in a slow anim
- if you last hit multiple mobs with it in 1 attack, it only gives you charges for 1 mob.
- you can get bodyblocked during the teleport: you dash to a mob and something else moves into the LoS -> get stuck in slow anim punching nothing (no charges) or get stuck between a bunch of bodies unable to use skills.

It's much safer to not use it unless you're able to pick off singles, but you want to have the charges for packs and the sometimes long stretches between packs since the maps are insufferably huge at times means your charges fall off even with +duration nodes.

I think it would feel much better if the attack wasn't so slow, but it's both slow attack + coupled with the fact that your default does way more dps that it's also a matter of preempting the default attack's next swing in order to get the charges and not kill stuff by accident. Just really clunky and doesn't make for a coherent, feels-good playstyle.


Dying before the hp globe empties
maybe it's just exacerbated by the launch day load but I find that I keep dying with like 10-20% hp remaining in the globe, where the respawn box pops up before the life is visually gone or the blood effects around the edge of the screen have rendered.

Mouse movement feels floaty
Might be too many players lag related idk? My latency was stable at 38ms though, straight line. It feels like I'm skating on ice or something, there's momentum or something where my character will slide around the screen beyond where I've clicked. It's manageable but it's not precise. This weird momentum immediately stops when I press shift to toggle attack-in-place.

Please disconnect map zoom from the size of text labels on the map
when I play at 0-15% ish zoom (map zoomed out) it scales the text size down to squinty tier too.

Please allow for the quest updates to be disabled (toggle)
It's so annoying having a ! on screen that adds nothing. I'll open the quest menu if I get lost, I don't need a constant queue of notifications. But maybe new players want/need it - just let us toggle it thank you.

Why the well?
I distinctly remember an ancient PoE interview or dev talk where y'all were talking about not making ppl talk to neo-Akara because it was pointless busywork, and yet here we are talking to a well in town to get our flasks back. You've already sort of solved the portal "abuse" to get flasks refilled by limiting portals - I don't see what having a well adds, apart from extra trips to town bc I've forgotten. Please revert to refilling upon entering town.

Forcing sanctum for lab is god awful
I don't know how you could look at lab and be like, the players don't like this? let's give them something worse. The complaints about lab were about the rng nature of the enchants and having to run them a billion times to get what you wanted, not the layout of the lab itself. The honour system invalidates HP.

Zones not contiguous
Thematically I don't mind it too much in the desert since you have the concept of a moving town, but that was one of the parts of PoE I really liked: you physically walked to the next zone, you saw how areas transitioned, it wasn't a themepark linked together by teleports and waypoints etc.

No difficulty ebb/flow: always "on", just sometimes more bullshit than not
It's okay to have bosses that filter players, or gate you behind learning mechanics, but it feels like every zone every boss every trial is a constant uphill struggle - there's no blood aqueducts comfy linear downtime, there's no trash mob concept. The trash mobs (largely due to bodyblocking) have been deadlier than the bosses and getting to the bosses as qstaff melee incurs more deaths than the bosses themselves.

The zones feel way too large and so much backtracking is incurred at a much slower pace.

Pathfinder ascendancy seems kind of an afterthought?
There's little flexibility for multiple build styles compared to the other ascendancies, or PoE.
Poison has 2 dedicated nodes, but if choosing elemental or bleed concoctions, there's no additional support nodes like poison has. This then pigeonholes you into 3 of 5 remaining nodes. The 5 skill points feels like flavourless but necessary power boost, but anti-slow, conditional movspeed, flask charges, and flask 'overleech' are so low power.

Similarly, while it may be too early to judge Infernalist and Chronomancer, it feels like they're all in on the gimmick and don't quite match up to the flexibility of the other ascendancies or of PoE's. Like Saboteur was clearly a trap/mine ascendancy, but it could still be used off-class for blind, aoe, pyromaniac QoL, triggerbots - build enabling on its own, and CDR iirc. It had a theme but it wasn't forcing the player to adopt that theme.

Blood Mage being forced to take Sanguimancy as a root node effectively means we only have 3 choices amongst nodes. Additionally, due to the lack of readily available leech, I don't want to take the node until I ascend for the 2nd time and get non-physical leech that can apply to spells. It straight feels bad.

Infernalist has both a higher %age of nodes dedicated to the gimmick, but also its remaining nodes don't really have much standalone identity. You've got 3 reserve 25% of x nodes, a 20% damage shift thing, and crit dmg RF.

I know it's EA / adjustments will be made / more to come etc, but it just kinda feels like a lot of what made PoE interesting - the flexibility - has been watered down in various ways between ascendencies, flask changes, more restrictive weapon typing. I'm sure I'll still enjoy the new PoE it's just a bit idk, bittersweet.