Visual Clarity

This game suffers from similar visual clarity issues as PoE1. In the slower paced and more difficult environment of PoE2 however it really becomes a glaring issue.

Sometimes an enemy will use a skill that looks like or is the same as a skill a party member uses. Other times visual effects seem to fight and it's not always clear which will maintain visibility. Chilled ground effects crated by the player look identical to ones created by enemies, especially problematic when they're both overlapped. Chilled ground effects completely cover and hide the spike trap indicators in the Trials of the Sekhemas. Flames and other effects are unclear exactly where they end; I've taken damage from things that didn't appear to touch my character at all. Falling rock effects aren't always clear exactly where they'll actually land. Some falling effects like the beams of light/frost the first act boss hide each other - causing me to attempt to dodge one by moving north only to get hit by a second one that wasn't visible. In various places the environment covers character and enemy models.

A few recommendations:
Take a page from lessons that League of Legends learned a long time ago: Outline the actual hit area of skill effects with a thin border on the ground. Color it green for ally effects and red for enemy effects (optionally blue for self effects).
Create consistent Z indexing for all effects that prioritize - Enemy Effects > Self Effects > Ally Effects.
Add a setting to allow the user to set a brightness/opacity for enemy/ally/self effects to allow customizable clarity.
Change the walkable regions so that the environment can't hide characters/enemies, or implement depth occlusion to make the environment transparent when a character/enemy would otherwise be hidden.


Edit to add:
Similar toPoE1, playing with summoners is frustrating. It's difficult to tell the summoned entities aren't enemies and I'm constantly trying to attack them.

Further, Magic and Rare packs are, as far as I can tell, impossible to visually identify without mousing over them. This leads to deaths when suddenly a pack has extra crits or some other mod you weren't prepared for when you've moweddown dozens of identical looking monsters in the pat two minuts.

Another area you can take inspiration from are SHMUPS (Shootem Up Genre). They frequently have thousands of projectiles, but the best ones work very hard to ensure readability.

For my own feedback, I haven't been able to tell a difference between my ground effects (which don't hurt me, like burning ground) from enemy ground effects which do. This is confusing and sometimes can be frustrating.

There are many ways to try and fix this, but given PoE constraints I would suggest some of the following:

Color. When I put a flame wall down and an enemy puts flame wall down, I need to be able to distinguish between them. If the enemy flame wall were a darker red (or had some other visual embellishment), that could help significantly.

Outlines. These should be more distinct and ideally also color coded. I sometimes have difficulty seeing ground effects of all kinds, which can result in sudden death that feel unfairly unavoidable.

Thanks for listening, and keep up the great work! I have been having a great time with the game.

+1