Feedback thus far from 22 hours.

So I cleared Act 2 tonight, and I wanted to give some feedback as to what I've seen so far.

General opinion: PoE2 could well become one of my greatest games of all time. Its an evolution the ARPG genre desperately needed, and the things it does right, it does damn near perfect. The problems I have run into are primarily related to its ability to retain players in the long run. As it currently stands, I think the team went way too hard on balancing around a skill level that the average player simply does not possess. PoE2 as it exists is always going to be divisive within the PoE community as a whole. It is a fundamentally different game from 1. I think that's a good thing, and as long as GGG actually stays true to their promises of having 1 stick around, those who prefer each of the playstyles can be happy.

But, the problems that it does have, in some cases, are CRITICAL in their need to be addressed.


1. Loot feels off.

I prefer the new mentality of less is more. Its nice not having so much bloat on the ground that loot is obnoxious to parse without Neversink's filters. However, the claim before launch would be that we are expected to craft a lot of items, and that would come with a big increase in the volume of currency drops. Well, we got half of that. We're expected to craft a lot of items, but we didn't really get any more of the currency items we actually need Regal and Exalted orbs are the bread and butter of getting viable new items now, and we get a pittance of them while being flooded with Transmutation and Augmentation. It feels like GGG thinks that its reasonable for us to spend most of the game in magic items, which is kind of ridiculous. The difference between a just DECENT rare and a good magic is night and day. I got a rare belt drop very early, at like level 6. At 35, having just finished Act 2, I'm still wearing it. Belts still don't have any more sockets, so there's basically zero reason to replace it until I get one with better stats, which won't really happen until I find, or full craft, another rare.

As Jonathan said in one of his interviews, getting loot right is critical for an ARPG. Unfortunately, at least during campaign, loot is currently not gotten right. Maybe its fine at endgame, but that doesn't really matter if it doesn't engage you all the way there.

Solution: Regal and Exalted Orbs need their drop rates increased. That, or rares need to be more common than they currently are while campaigning.


2. Maps are WAY too big from the latter 1/4th of Act 1 onward.

It feels like the maps once you reach the village and beyond were built around the absurd levels of speed that PoE1 characters were capable of achieving, while ignoring the fact those levels of speed were cut out of the game. I had nothing to do today. I woke up at 8AM, and from around 10AM until midnight, I did nothing but PoE2 and a break to cook dinner. In that time, I only just managed to clear Act 2 start to finish, and the FIRST area of Act 3. And of all of that time, the vast majority of it was spent just slogging through areas. Sometimes backtracking ridiculous amounts trying to find a single map objective, only for it naturally to be in the literal one place on the entire revealed map I hadn't been yet, which took me 10+ minutes to uncover.
Its is absolutely ridiculous. There's no justification for the maps to be as huge as they are. Something like 40% of it ends up just being dead space. No real rewards, no engaging exploration, just slogging on trying to find your way to the next one.

Solution: Area sizes need to be reduced by around 40%. Cut the number of monsters and rebalance exp gained to compensate as necessary. This, IMO, is one of the key elements that NEEDS to be addressed. If you aren't absolutely in love with PoE2's combat (I am), this is going to feel like an overwhelming slog that nobody is going to want to repeat. I don't think I need to tell GGG of all people why its important to have the content feel good to repeat in PoE.


3. The game is still very new player unfriendly, in very bad ways.

There's a myriad of factors to this, but there's two of note that I really want to mention. The first here, the second warranting the next bullet point. The first is that the game is simply very bad at communicating the NECESSITY of things that need to be done to see success. An example would be the need for investing in Survivability, be it strength for more life, energy shield passives and items with such modifiers, etc. I've had multiple people in chat tell me about how I'm wrong about the fact you need to invest in survivability and that they're doing fine being glass cannons because "they're good at dodging". Anyone who knows PoE knows that's asking to slam your head into a brick wall at some point in the future... but, a lot of these people are brand new to the franchise. Especially coming from Diablo, whose last 2 games have completely disregarded the need to actively build any sort of defensive capabilities.
Worse beyond that however, is the need to combo skills. The game dumps you against the first boss with a single skill gem and nothing to work it off. This inevitably results in that boss being a slog. For some classes more than others (seriously, who on the team was responsible for choosing the Warrior's first gem? They need to be put in time out for an extended period of time while they think about what they did). Then, you're handed a gem to cut, and just dropped head first into the system as a whole, left to discover this need for comboing entirely due to your own inevitable failure.
So many people have complained about feeling like hitting like wet noodles in general, from the first hour the servers opened til now. I had an in-depth talk with another Mercenary today who got more than HALFWAY THROUGH ACT 2, basically being carried by his ability to dodge and lamenting how he struggled to kill ANYTHING. I hope he's doing better now that I've explained the process to him.

Solution(s): To the first point, I really don't have a solution, other than the game just outright warning you "hey dumbass, stack some life" or the like. For the second however, the game either needs to start off by handing you two complimentary skill gems right from the start, or there needs to be a new "tutorial" when cutting your first gem that tells you to cut a gem that compliments your first one, so you can see first-hand right out the gate how effective combinations and combos really are.

All of this however, compounds to the biggest issue by far:


4. Bosses are too bloated and too punishing for campaign play.

Now before anyone starts rambling on about "hurr durr skill issue", I beat the wolf on my second try. I beat the boss of Act 2 in about 4-5 tries, and sat baffled at the end at the notion that GGG unironically thought this was in any way acceptable for a CAMPAIGN FIGHT.

Bosses as a whole have too much health. I understand you not wanting us to roll over them, and I know that there will inevitably be builds that trivialize these fights (I've already seen one). But, the game shouldn't be balanced around the numbercrunching meganerd PoE1 fanatics who will min/max the fun out of everything. It needs to be balanced around Joe Average with a job and a family who only plays for 2-3 hours at most a day. And the reality is, if Joe Average walks into a PoE2 bossfight right now with his sub-optimal build, he'll end up taking 10 minutes to whittle down The King in the Mist's health bar. At that point, Joe Average is probably going to quit the game. This is bad, because the game needs Joe Average to be a success. The community needs casual players more than it needs hardcores.

Then, let's say Joe Average actually gets past act 1, and into act 2. Let's say Joe Average slogs past the health pools bloating further and further. Let's say Joe Average suffers the abomination that is Sanctum and even gets his ascendancy. Joe Average then gets to the final boss of act 2, and discovers he is basically the final boss of act 1 on 7 hits of coke. Joe average will not be able to clear him, because Joe Average does not have 500 hours in Elden Ring's endgame and cannot handle that level of ultra-punishing moment to moment demanding dodge mechanics while also maintaining any degree of reasonable DPS.

At this point, Joe Average quits the game. Bar none. Its going to be the problem of poorly optimized characters ending up bricked in Act 3 of PoE1 back in 2013 all over again. I genuinely cannot fathom that GGG thought that something in the vein of the finale to Act 2 was in any way acceptable for content that needs to be approachable by the masses. We're dealing with difficulty that shouldn't be seen until you're reasonably into the Atlas.

Solution: Campaign Bosses need an across-the-board health and reduction. Varying from boss-to-boss. Some should have their HP cut by something small like 20%, others may need to be as extreme as 40% or more. Some key attacks in certain fights also need their damage reduced, their wind-ups increased, or both. Some could also stand to have their tracking made a little more lenient. Seriously, some of these fuckers track harder than Godfrey.
The first boss of the first act should not have a mechanic that will potentially one-shot characters who have not heavily invested in life or ES (That stupid fucking comet dive that you can only dodge if you were already moving when he started the animation unless you've got hefty movement speed increases).
You can have your super demanding content, but it needs to be in endgame, not campaign. Campaign should be accessible. It should be a gateway drug to get people to stick it out into maps. Right now, it feels like you're facing down what SHOULD be endgame, from around 3/4ths of the way into Act 1 and damn near EVERYTHING beyond. This is simply not acceptable.

Sidenote by the way; that whole "maps only give you one death" thing? Yeah that's looking a LOT more like a problem now than it did before we got our hands on the game. Like, a could-spell-failure-for-the-entire-endgame-structure, kind of problem. I can't imagine running into repeats of some of these bosses and not being allowed to screw up even once after having to clear the nonsense that is the size of these areas first. Nevermind that I personally have a bad router that routinely causes my connection to stutter for a split second once every couple of hours. I can't wait for the day I'm in a pinnacle fight and lose hours upon hours of progress because an attack combo with a reaction window of 0.3 seconds 2-shot me while my internet was in flux.

There are other, far more minor problems, but the range from utterly low priority to being far more personal in terms of opinion (I hate Sanctum. I don't want to play Sanctum. Ever. I hate the fact ya'll made me have to play Sanctum to get my ascendancy. Why did you do this? I hate you for it.). These issues above, at least in my opinion, are make-or-break issues for the game. Especially the matter of bosses. You just can't have a game as boss-heavy as PoE2 is touted to be while making the bosses such a slog to get through save for the crunchiest of number-cruncher builds. That's a surefire recipe to drive away the majority of your players.


This post has been largely negative but I do want to emphasize one last thing before I go off to sleep: I love the game. I really do see unfathomable potential in PoE2. The combat is absolutely peak. I love the skill design. I love the whole feel of chaining abilities together to explosive and extravagant results. I don't even mind the difficulty on a personal level. For as demanding as these fights are, being a soulsborne vet, I've had fun challenging myself to clear them.

But, I want the game to SUCCEED, and as it currently stands, I'd be willing to bet the 40% of casual players who don't bounce off the game at the end of act 1, will 100% bounce off the game at the end of act 2. If they can even stomach slogging through the continually bloating area sizes to get there in the first place.

Please, GGG. PRIORITIZE fixing these things. These are problems that would lead to poisonous word of mouth that will be difficult for the game to shake for years. I'd genuinely hate to see people skipping out on this experience just because of these boss-walls being too much for most to handle.

Sorry for any spelling mistakes. I need to get to bed and don't really have time to go over all this right now. If anybody has anything they want to ad or counter me on, I'll respond to them tomorrow. Cheers.

Agree with ALL of this feedback.

I agree that currency/rare drops need a buff imo. Alchemy drop rate seems too low.

I agree that it would help if they communicated in some way the necessity of defensive stats like resists.

I think map sizes are good so far.

I'm only in act 2 but the bosses from act 1 were amazing and fun to fight. I like to dodge roll but it does seem excessive sometimes, perhaps some of it is from not knowing the optimal time to dps versus dodge roll. Too early to tell like most of my points.

It would be nice to have more options for main damage dealing skills for warrior from the early game. I like the combo gameplay. I also think movement skills should be more prominent.

"

Then, let's say Joe Average actually gets past act 1

Well, I can't even reach the boss. I am terrible at roll dodging, so I can't play this game. Which is sad because I love how GGG has cleaned most of the PoE1 messy stuff. I am a chill guy, I want to make builds that require little action skills, because I don't enjoy this part at all.

So I guess this game is maybe not for me.

They talked a lot about combos and it does look good on paper. I look at my skill tree and I see the various ways skills can work off each other and it looks like a lot of fun.

However, you rarely have the chance to pull off anything more than a 2 skill combo. Every boss is "do two skills, dodge/run away, start your chain over again...

2 attack skills and a crowd control or escape skill...its really a 3 button game, 4 if you count the spacebar.

It looks like GGG has the framework for a great game but they didn't actually play it.

Nicely said.

Nice post, couldn't agree more with 2nd point. We lost quicksilver, we lost movement skills, but the maps have gotten much bigger and many of them feel like a maze. Its pretty much my only real gripe with the game at the moment.

I agree. Would like to see changes addressing all of this.

The insane thing is that I dont think GGG wants "average Joe" as a POE2 player. Im starting to realize that they only want the hardcore grinders that are going to spend hundreds, and even thousands, in the shop. Its very clear that they have no intention of trying to compete with D4s playerbase.

Great feedback, don't have much to add. Just wanted to repeat a point u made.

I also hate sanctum and have no interest in playing it. Having my least favorite mechanic become an ascendancy mode was the thing I disliked most heading into the game.

I prefer ssf, although a decent auction house would probably fix that. But, point is, I'm guessing I'm going to be compelled to do it considering how frugal loot drops are, and it's going to suck. I probably won't be able to just skip it as ssf without being lucky or be progressing significantly slower.

With that said, game looks like it could be amazing and I hope ggg is truly looking at this as an actual early access that will require a lot of changes (even major ones that don't necessarily fit their initial vision of the game).