Why I asked Steam for a refund, and how that could have been prevented

This is not an ARPG, it is a souls-like game, only much worse.

I say souls-like for the same reason everyone else does, because ones own actions are plodding and mechanics are one-shot.

Although I use WASD it does not feel good because every cast pauses while moving. Having true movement would solve the plodding character.

Mechanics are one shot because there is no telegraphing. I've heard this word used by GGG and apparently it's not understood. The player needs to know what's going on in the fight in order to make decisions. That has to be done in two passes

(1) they have to see what's going on
(2) they need to learn to predict outcomes from what they see.

I guess I'm meant to just panic when I see a boss pause, emote, or wind up, because I don't know what's going to happen until it kills me. Then I have to memorize it and redo the fight like some sort of 1980s arcade game.

There is no learning process when failure to see what's going on leads to immediate death. A workaround is to raise boss health, and have the early uses of a boss mechanic do reduced damage. If the player cannot guess at what is being telegraphed, don't kill them immediately. Let them learn by being hurt with the understanding that it'll sting a little more each subsequent time they get hit.

This will likely make things too easy for good players, so I recommend if a boss takes a certain amount of damage over a certain period this mechanic is silently reduced or abandoned.

Personally I think all campaign bosses should have charge attacks which do percentage damage, not flat damage.

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The next problem is how muddy everything is. This isn't just an art direction (which is bad) but a decision on individual skill gems. They all look the same. There's an unnecessary crescent and then a color and then some sort of muddy texture. They all look the same. Even two of the colors are close.

In the game field, I was once killed by The Nothing, and I had to learn to not have fun and instead keep moving because there was no way for me to know what would happen next. I'd have to roll all the time just in case. I then learned that I was killed by the dark purple that appeared under the dark brown.

Another time I died from a lightning storm. I thought I was fine because I could see I was in a safe spot. Apparently there might have been a slight twinkling under me which I must have been standing on and covering.

I simply cannot distinguish things when they are all the same color scheme. I recommend GGG have some devs take their glasses off and play to see what I mean. Don't play it at 60 fps and fiddle with settings to see what'll happen with them.

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None of my microtransactions were available. I thought this would be the case. Are they unavailable for the early access but available for the release? At least for portals? This made me nervous because I would have rather started fresh with a different account and fresh Steam account (for streaming) had I known my microtransactions wouldn't be supported.