1.1.0 early access feedback, Act by Act

As far as early access games go, this one is in good shape but there is still a long ways to go.

So far, I've made it through Act 1 on my monk. I'll add new posts as I make it through each act, or more as appropriate if my tally gets too long.

I'll put my feedback into 3 categories: bugs & performance, balance and tuning (to include potentially buggy interactions of skills), and overall feel

Bugs & performance:

Starting with the worst: certain monster models fail to be loaded in in certain situations. They are still there, they are still attacking, but no model/shadow for the monsters. This appears to only happen when monsters are all spawned in together, when zoning into an area or when ritual or other similar sort of monsters spawning in a few packs at the same time. Of note, if the monster shoots projectiles, the projectiles are able to be seen (and the main way that I can pinpoint where the invisible ranged monster is). The mouse cursor hovering over the invisible monster will function corectly. Also, shock/cull visuals will function correctly and help a lot for keeping track of those invisible monsters. This happened about 3 times, twice in the Freythorn (ritual altars), and once in one of the cemetery mausoleums.

While most of the game runs quite well (100 fps/limit in safe areas, 60-90 in high-entity areas), there are a few sections of map where the FPS drops to single digits out of nowhere and for seemingly no reason. While in this low-FPS state, input was very laggy. Leaving the area will have FPS go back to normal, but re-entering the area sometimes does and sometimes does not fix the issue. I was not smart enough to write down the zone names or take a screenshot when this occurred, but it did occur about 4 different times through act 1.

Next one: visual bug when interacting with certain items.
(edit:img tag didn't work, link to screen shot here:) https://imgur.com/FiUslXX
When this happens, the "continue" is unable to be clicked, and the char unable to move -- fortunately, hitting 'escape' will close the box and things return to normal.

Last bug on the list - when talking to NPCs, the converstaion auto-moves to the next step when the dialogue finishes vice waiting for the player to hit 'continue'. I recommend adding in an option to wait for the player before moving to the next bit in the conversation, it helps a lot with those trying to read and understand the lore without having to talk to the person repeatedly (assuming they repeat the dialogue at all.....)

Balance & Tuning:

And here is where PoE2's current status really feels like a beta. I'll start with monster balance, and then tuning of player skills that I've used on the monk.

The monsters in the first three areas are really, really overtuned. Power wise, they are scaled for a character with a full set of blue and/or yellow gear at that level. This will clearly not be the case as the character is naked with a weapon and maybe 1-2 pieces of white equipment. This makes the initial start unnecessarily arduous and frustrating. Several of the monsters's attack patterns are balance around being a ranged character, and avoiding hits (and stuns) as a mostly naked monk trying to melee went very, very poorly. After switching to a spell set up, I was able to deal more damage faster while also being able to avoid taking damage.
Once around level 9/10, and with a mostly full set of blue gear, I was able to switch back to a quarterstaff set up and successfully do melee.

On a somewhat related topic: All monsters & bosses in Acts 1 & 2 that put chill/freeze/shock on you need to be rebalanced. For Act 1, all monsters and bosses with a %chance to freeze on hit need to be thought through better. It appears that the damage scaling is based around a character being res capped.... which in act 1, wearing mostly blue gear with a couple yellows and whites with t7/8 rolls is near impossible. Even with a frost charm, %freeze may as well be %chance for instant death in Act 1. Freeze should only be on bosses or other scenarios where the thing causing the freeze is a 100% chance of freeze (thematic to the fight) in the early acts.
The frost monsters applying chill and %chance to freeze NEEDS to be a mechanic introduced later on the game, when the characters can reasonably be expected to have resists and other tools available to deal with it.
Due to the low movespeed and attack speed of very low level characters, I would also recommend greatly reducing the max level of chill effects that are put on players in Act 1, and similar for Shock with how fast a character can die to white monsters. 30% more damage taken, or 30% reduced action speed in act 1 is a bit too much.... at least for melee characters that don't have many defense tools available.
The ramping up of difficulty as you get further in the game shouldn't have a very rough start that gets a lot easier around levels 6-10, and then starts ramping up again. That's a clear sign that the start is too rough.


Monk skill tuning - Things are mostly fine, but there are a few odd interactions that should either be better clarified by descriptions in game, or are bugs (hard to say which).
WASD movement + slam targeting -- There needs to be an option to have the monk make the slam IN THE DIRECTION THAT THE CURSOR IS FACING without snapping to current location of a monster near the cursor. Falling Thunder in particular is a somewhat slow slam...the location that the monster was when I started the slam is not going to be the location of where the monster will be when the attack actually lands. When I aim the slam infront of the monster's current movement path, it is very very annoying for the character to instead aim the slam in a direction that is different from the cursor (it snapped to the monster's current location, vice the location I wanted). This also makes fighting when completely surrounded with slams a LOT harder than it should be, as it will target seemingly at random a close monster instead of in the direction I want.
This inherent behaviour really needs to get changed, as it makes slam builds (especially while leveling where you don't have much attack speed) much harder and more finicky to use than it really should be.

Monk palm strikes -- The tooltip is misleading. It says you 'dash' to an enemy. The misleading part has a few pieces:
1 - it does not provide a distance requirement for the dash, or how the distance requirement is calculated. There is clearly a max distance, and from trial & error testing I can tell that it is based on an unobstructed ground path distance.
2 - Unobstructed distances vary. The distance gets shorter if there are monsters that need to be weaved around. It also does not go over hill/walls to higher/lower ground area that monsters can still be firing projectiles at you from.
3 - If you are completely surrounded and try to use the skill, it will target a seemlingly random direction in melee range instead of the monster you use it on that is further away.

Dodge roll and dodge canceling -- It looks like there are a couple of windows in a skill animation where the character is allowed to dodge cancel out of the skill.
If you use the dodge roll during a skill, the skill will continue until it hits the next available window before the dodge roll will actually go off.
With some of the tight and precise timings needed for the dodge roll, this means that
1 - you got hit by the thing you were trying to dodge away from because the skill needed another 1/4 of a second before it got to the dodge cancel window
2 - you just dodge rolled after getting hit, and many mechanics seem to be intentionally set up in the dark souls tradition of putting extra punishment on you for choosing a very poor time to dodge roll

Also, the dodge roll requires an unobstructed path, which means that it has all of the same issues as the palm strikes when surrounded.

With the unusual and unintuitive pathing interactions, it makes the slams, palm strikes, and dodge rolls feel good and feel like they are working well when there are monsters all on one side of you, or at short-distance range, and then EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE IT STOPS WORKING CORRECTLY WHEN YOU ARE COMPLETELY SURROUNDED. Which I believe is a less than desired outcome. Being completely surrounded should be scary and a bad position tactically, but the buggy and inconsistent interactions that make you skills not work properly shouldn't be the reason why.

Overall Feel:

The slower nature of the game, at least to start (we'll see if things ramp up like PoE1 does with zoom zoom), is a nice change of pace, but there are some challenges that the devs should think about:

1 - player speed vs monster speed.
The player is a lot slower than the monsters, most of the time, but also a lot faster than the bosses. It looks like a lot of this is tied to the melee vs ranged/spell aspects of the overall game design, but it still feels like 90% of the bosses are designed around a ranged character attacking it, with melee feeling like a bit of an afterthought. Hence, even with 0% movespeed, a ranged char can keep range on a boss. Monsters have a different design philosophy involved that overly rewards the PoE1 glass cannon style of build -- monsters are faster than you and will kill you very fast, so your best defense is to kill them off-screen so they don't have the opportunity to attack you in the first place.

2 - Pathing and skill interactions with obstructed paths
In general, it looks like a deliberate decision to make movement abilities require an unobstructed path. Which is a fine decision to make, as it means getting surrounded completely an actual issue vice something that can be frost blinked away from... but a lot of the skill interactions do a poor job of explaining this, and the speed of the monsters vs lower speed of the player mean that it is a situation that is going to happen. The skills need to work more intuitively, or give some sort of feedback to the player if the movement skill isn't able to get them to the target that the cursor is hovering on. The current implementation feels very buggy when pathing is less than perfect, and there is nothing that provides any warning or feedback when there are pathing issues when trying to use skills, dodge rolls, etc.


I'll add new posts as I finish each act, and put in additional feedback as needed. Hopefully the other acts are just more examples of the issues I've found vice new issues, but we shall see.

Act 2 done, and things are MUCH rougher around the edges -- you can really feel the 'beta' state of things here in several places.

new complaints to add to the list:
1. too many PoE-1 style ranged monsters that have zero cast time attacks. These monsters are clearly tuned against ranged play styles and using a strike dash to close distance with them results in the classic shotgun effect -- all of the ranged monsters attack at approx the same time, and all projectiles hit very quickly, and deal a large damage spike. These ranged monsters' projectiles also hit harder than the melee hits of other monsters, though less than the well-telegraphed slam attacks of the big dudes. This design philosophy for ranged-only encounters is an issue that got a lot worse in Act 2. The Vigil Apparitions from the Titan Grotto are a good example of this, as are the shades from the water goddess area.
While it is very inelligent to give all melee weapons a buff that reads "take 35% less damage from monsters in melee range", there are few other hotfix-ready solutions to the ranged-only design philosophy that seems to be what the game was designed around that could be implemented without a severe rework.

2. boss critical hits. These get quite stupid, quite fast. When getting hit by most boss abilities, they tend to take 60%-75% of my max life. Crits just mean that I randomly get 1-shot and have to start the fight over when I would've otherwise been able to tank the hit to deal more damage (joys of melee).

3. Adding to monk slam targeting, there are number of bosses whose main hitbox follows a hand or other appendage than the torso of the boss...which makes the slams fire in odd directions, even though they usually still are able to hit the boss. The Titan boss is a great example of this, and where the problem is the worst.

4. Deliberate anti-melee mods on rares: siphon flasks turned into a siphon aura, shocked/chilled/burning ground, hinder aura, nearby enemies cursed, nearby enemies have reduced armor..... these are terrible from a design stand point, and ranged chars only have to bother with the mechanics they bring when combined with temporal bubble. These effects, nearly across the board, need to be reworked -- either to be on-hit mechanics, or spawning the timer circle on the character vice on the monster (make ranged folks have to keep moving as well!). These mods were created from a ranged-playstyle stand point, and are stupidly punishing to melee in a manner that feels clearly unintended.


Points to reinforce:
1 - being surrounded completely, or trying to run past a monster/group that completely blocks pathing through a narrow area is bad. And while it is intentionally this way, it does make for a lacking experience when monsters either leap-slam over/behind you, or are spawned in behind you and in front at the same time. The situation would be more manageable if they had less hp, or their attacks had a wind up, or had reduced stun....but the current situation makes it feel like you are fighting the technical limitations of the pathing engine and not fighting the monsters.


Skill tuning-wise, falling lightning becomes much, much, MUCH more useful once you unlock tempest strike and can generate power charges without killing blows. This is a game changer that makes the lightning slam monk really come alive, and increases the fun factor by a lot. Additional attack speed also helps with this greatly.
Meanwhile, the true-melee strike style skills are terrible. Less damage than the default melee attacks in most cases, and more importantly, much less range than the slam. The only usecase is dealing with the bug swarms, but in every other area it is much worse. The melee strike / strike combo skills need some love, badly.

Also, the dodge roll. I was expecting to see some stuff on the tree, or as belt/charm mods, or otherwise to improve or alter it -- but I have not seen anything. With the dodge being a core mechanic, I was expecting it to be something more than a boss fight interaction. The utility of the dodge roll doesn't really keep pace with monster leap slams and such, so it's exclusively a mechanic for dodging boss abilities. I would love to see this iterated on a bit more, extra distance, faster animation, or altering it to be a flame dash / cartwheel, perhaps a cast on dodge trigger... there are options. For an ARPG with stats and scaling, the dodge roll seems very much left out in the current implementation.

Just want to say thank you for a constructive feedback thread is a sea of "this is too hard/I don't like it" threads.

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but the current situation makes it feel like you are fighting the technical limitations of the pathing engine and not fighting the monsters.

What's mad about this is that it was resolved so well in PoE1 and yet in PoE2 getting stuck on geometry seems to be par for the course. I have had more deaths to getting caught on a corner, on a pot, or on what seemed to be a mattress than I have had deaths to bosses.

Excellent feedback. I agree with a lot of your points. 10/10 for beta testing gigachadge energy.

I will be rolling a monk soon and will try to think about these things as well as I progress.

Generally, I also agree that, especially on some archetypes, the first 10-12 levels can feel very punishing, while others feel very smooth. Obviously, there is some explanation in the idea that we as the players haven't found the intended interactions for skills/combos in some cases, but I think more could be done to improve this pitfall.

The ice-skating / space gliding nature of the mob pushing is also another thing I think needs some love for sure. I completely agree with the devs that phasing should not exist, and that getting surrounded should be highly punishing, but the exact way that mobs the same size as me, sometimes even smaller, just having higher velocity means they push me around as if I weighed nothing, makes for a very jarring experience. Losing control of your character when you make a mistake is fine, having a mob charging quickly at you, with a hitbox that often doesn't respect my lateral momentum trying to dodge out of the way, feels pretty jank. Rounding/smoothing the hitboxes, adding more weight to the momentum of our characters, not sure exactly what the solution is, but there is definitely some improvements that could be made to the feeling of these interactions.

Again, bravo to the great writeup, and thanks for letting me use it as a springboard to mention a little of my own feedback :D

(edit: thank you both for the kind words! I've seen sooo many people treating this as if it were an early access release of a finished product and not a beta. While I had hoped it would be closer to a finished product for the 3 acts, my experience going through them showed me that GGG needed some better feedback, and so I took out the notepad to mark things down as I go. I hope the feedback is useful!)

Act 3 complete. overall, the least polished act, with zone size set to maximum and the path through it set to serpentine labynth to pad out each area a fair bit past where they outstay their welcome. That said, the last two bosses are easily the two best fights in the campaign, beautifully executed, fun to fight, and incredibly polished.

Overall thoughts:
The additional movement of the monsters, especially the ranged monsters, further shows how and why the pathing algorithms need a do-over when using the monk's palm dashes and dash strike abilities. The dash attacks will only land consistently on monsters that are stationary or moving TOWARD you. Anything else and the palm dashes will nearly always miss, and even the dash strikes (with 6 ft of extra melee strike range) have trouble. And that's before the oddball behaviour of the dash attacks snapping to the wrong target if the path is windy or there are a lot of things moving around at the same time when the monster density starts to get to perfect slam coverage territory.
As things get faster, the underlying issues with the engine show themselves more.

Another general point, I think that Act 3 for tier 2 support gems is a bit too late. I hit the cap in support gems in act 1, and it's not until the nearly very end of act 3 that I get the tier 2 support gems -- recommend reworking how this works out, maybe split things into 4 tiers instead of the current 3 so players can have more support gem combinations to experiment with earlier. The play style is very much stagnated with character growth limited to number-go-up since act 1, as by the end of act 3 you are probably locked into one or two options for skill gems viable without needing a respec.

Due to the number of items that I feel need to be addressed in Act 3, I'm going to break things down zone by zone for topics in Act 3. Minor spoilers beware, though I tried to hide the big things. you have been warned!


- Jungle & Venom Crypts
The poison snakes on a corpse that mimic the Piety dungeon shooters need to be reworked. Their projectiles are slow and easy enough to dodge...at range, but they have 0 wind up and their damage is noticeably higher than any other attack on comparable level/hp monsters that it makes pushing up to even 1-2 of them a leathal endeavor. This is incredibly disappointing, as the monster that they pay homage to WAS IMPLEMENTED IN A WAY THAT DOES NOT HAVE THIS ISSUE. The wind up and locking of orientation before those snipers go off in PoE1 is done to keep the monster a high damage, yet balanced against both melee and ranged playstyles. The snake iteration with much, much slower projectiles and an instant-wind up prior to the projectile being launched is a step backwards from PoE1 in a way that leaves my scratching my head.

-Azok Leader
The zoom zoom on the broom broom thing is pretty cool, but please think in more detail how the broom phases should work. The current implementation of slams especially makes it quite challenging to smack her during the broom phases, which is fine, until she gets on the broom a 3rd time and then the pity system kicks in and she magically falls off her broom for me to start the next phase. The illusion works for ranged builds, but when she moves too fast for my dash strikes to land, it breaks the illusion very fast. Everything else about the fight is perfect, but the opener need a bit more of a bone for melee to function as intended.

-Chimaera fight (all variations of this boss that unfortunately gets reused in a few places)
The invulnerability phases are too damn long, and the boss uses them way too often. When 70% of the fight is waiting for him to land, it kills the enjoyment, and when 2 minutes into the fight and he's repeated the same 17 second immune to damage flying around ability four times (even if there are slight variations), it makes the fight drag on in a bad way as he spends more time in the air than on the ground. Please speed his butt up, and keep him in the fight longer between using those abilities. The current state makes for a very lackluster and boring fight experience that honestly defeats any hope for enjoyment of the fight as you watch your power charges expire.
Also, when the Chimaera lands after each of the flight phases, the AOE slam animation goes off when he does not do a slam as he lands. Please adjust the fight and visuals to match up, one way or the other, so he either slams when he lands or doesn't.

-Blackjaw
several of his aoe hits (jump slam, aoe slam(s)), look like their hitboxes are a bit bigger than the visual on the ground for what it showed the aoe to be. relatively minor issue, but please check the hitbox sixes for this fight!

-Vaal City
Drowning Orbs are a little bit overkill with this area imho, but managable once you figure out the trick to them. The trick to those stupid orbs needs to be made available to the player in a more direct way. The notably different drowning orb mechanics compared to PoE1 should be given some amount of heads up, as that mechanic breaks convention when enemy casted spells in multiple ways.
Also, if this area could be downsized by like 35%, that would be great. It's a very rough area, and the slow from the vortexes makes the smaller monsters in the pack surround the player quite well without the drowning orbs also chasing them down.

-Molten Vault
Foreground objects block sight of the game area, hiding monsters, equipment, and the player. Some of the objects go transparent so you can see the game area, which I believe is the intended effect, but there are a handful of routinely used objects (crane-arm looking things mostly) that do not and it makes this area challenging in the "I can't see crap" sort of way vice the ARPG style of fighting monsters... which compounds on the pathing issues to an extent.

-Apex of Filth
1. the Rejoice! and a few other lore pieces are not voiced, which made me sad to see.
2. The monsters that continuously heal 15% life/second when their minions are near them SHOULD NOT HAVE THE "minions respawn continuously" MOD! That is absolutely overkill, and it looks like an oversight to allow that mod into the yellow tier monster mod list for that specific monster.
3. It looks like there are some voice lines missing with the mushroom quest, as it was very unclear how many mushrooms, or the fact that I was suposed to gather them for the non-hostile doedre or what. In addition, the animations that repeat three times in a row despite requiring you to gather all three before putting them in look like this quest was half set up to allow them to be brought one at a time, and then later changed to do them all at the end. It's wonky, and the scripting needs a bit of work to clarify how things are supposed to work.
4. Once the main quest objective is complete, the reforging bench is magically available, yet there is no NPC dialogue or tutorial notification or anything about it becoming available.
5. This area could do with a 20% size reduction imho.
6. As a point of reference, the spell casters that run away from you and then cast spells at you are handled well in this zone. I'll point out the later area where they really aren't....

--Waygate activation
DAMN IT, GGG, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE MAKE ALL OF THE NPCS HOLD OFF ON WHAT THE PORTAL DOES UNTIL AFTER THE PLAYER'S CHARACTER GOES THROUGH AND THE PLAYER HAS A CHANCE TO FIGURE IT OUT THEMSELVES. SAVE THE NAME OF THE REVEAL UNTIL THE BOTTOM OF THE PYRMID! The lore folks in town that all had new things to say once the gateway opened ruined the surprise of what it did, and that really irked me. Please change things to not ruin that reveal! it's one of the better surprises in the story revealed in the beta so far.


-Utzaal
1. Several vases and baskets are mislabeled as chests. This usually happens in the cluster with 1 exit to the street, and one exit facing the river/waterway.
2. Golden idol provides no feedback on whether you complete the quest correctly by selling the item for gold, or if there is something else possible to do with it. I recommend adding a side quest that clarifies what the player is expected to do with these to avoid confusion (and holding them in your inventory until the end of the act).
3. A one-off occurrence bug for me, the atziri chant caused audio to break. when audio was broken (no sound/mustic/etc. but a weird humm was playing on loop), character voice lines that would normally be posted in local chat were not, likewise the error message when trying to use a skill when out of mana and the visual over the character's head when trying to use a skill when out of mana did not show. Logging out did not correct audio, but closing and reopening the game did.

-Final dungeon area
1. This entire area was designed with the philosophy of the player using a ranged character, and melee is heavily, heavily punished in a bad way.
1.a - refer to point before, but monsters that are FASTER than a player with +15% movespeed boots that are ranged and run away from you make for a pretty terrible gameplay experience. There are the cannoneers, the gunners, and the lich spell casters that all do this, and make this gauntlet much harder than it really should be.
1.b - the leap slam monsters also have a very fast melee attack combo that hits fairly hard, clearly intending to punish a ranged character that failed to dodge roll away from the leapslam, but it compounds the problem in 1.a to make this the clear winner of the anti-melee design competition. Which is a shame, because the act boss is very well designed to be balanced between ranged and melee play styles in one of the most fun boss fights in the section of campaign available in the beta.


From what I would expect, the scaling through cruel acts 1-3 will be about the same as the rest, only the player will have a lot more synergy so it will be an easier experience.
I definitely want to reiterate that the levels 8 and lower areas are heavily overturned, and need to be made easier to account for the lack of equipment that the players just starting out will have access to.

I probably won't make another update with feedback until I have some time to chew on maps for a bit, though I will be taking a bit of a break as I've burned myself out a bit on poe2 for the moment with paying it 26 out of the last 48 hours.