Feedback thus far from 22 hours.

We need ways to target farm items, that's what made the difficulty in Diablo 2 manageable. There's nothing wrong with giving each boss a specific drop table that the player can exploit by farming them if they feel the need to.

For example, have each boss have a focus on different types of currency items, depending on the difficulty of the boss. Leveling uniques can be given to the toughest bosses (act bosses mainly). I think this will make the game a lot more exciting as you have something to potentially look forward to each time you kill a boss, even in the campaign.

Also, make exploration a lot more rewarding. They can start by making chests more rewarding and more farmable. I miss the chest runs I used to do in Diablo where I could find a map with a high density of chests and run around and open them for loot. There's nothing wrong with giving the player more options to progress their character, especially if they are objectively worse than being a good player and skipping them. As it is right now, there are way too many dead ends in maps with absolutely nothing there to collect and it feels really bad when you get unlucky and have to full clear a map to find a portal.

Changes like these could help close the gap between new and veteran players, so they can keep a focus on the difficulty without making the game impossible for some people.

Having played the Warrior through the first two acts and the first half of act 3, I totally agree with most of this feedback.

Especially the steep difficulty of the campaign. GGG has always said that with PoE 2, they're making the game they wanted to play. Unfortunately, it might not be the game their playerbase wants to play.

I don't mind the slower pace of the game, but the bloated boss HP bars and the insane tracking of their one-shot mechanics are really bad. IMO, PoE 1 did this well, where campaign Vaal Oversoul and Dominus had very well telegraphed slams that were slow and deliberate and got players to learn boss telegraphs. When this culminated in Sirus meteors or Eater slam or Shaper slam, the player had enough muscle memory and abilities in terms of skills and items to dodge them. With PoE 2, we currently lack the flame dash or the quicksilver flasks while the boss one-shot mechanics gained tracking, making this a much more lopsided affair.

I still love the game for the slower pace, and my warrior has been doing OK. However, certain bossfights still feel like bs though, for example the Mighty Silverfist in Act 3. With over 1k hp and a decent amount of armor, I got one shot multiple times by his slam as he came running full speed towards me each time. FWIW, I had 2 deaths on the act 1 boss and did the act 2 boss with 0 deaths, so I wasn't facetanking bosses by any means. However, my dodge rolls were fruitless against this guy who kept tracking me with his totem slam, predicting my dodge roll and slamming into it.

I do agree about the game being too hard for Average Joe and ending up in a niche for the souls-like enjoyers. Oh, and I have a separate rant about the attempted souls-like mechanics like rolling and hard bosses. Where the souls games get those right, PoE 2 at the moment does a cheap copy which completely falls short and misses the mark on what makes the souls encounters so engaging while making the PoE 2 bosses feel like a slog.

Yeah.
5k hours into POE1.
Beat all Souls and Elden ring games.
I have no skill issues at all, I only died once until end of act 2.

Was it fun? NO. I'm sure they'll make sure that map quests are clearly marked in each map so you don't have to backtrack 20 minutes in empty maps searching for a single thing -because that made me loathe D4 from the start. I hate it no less here.

Sanctum was the one single thing I did not want. There is a good reason for it. A lot of players want to play a tanky build style. Meaning you focus on defense not offense, and this game is no different. Except when you come to sanctum -you get punished for it! So you make a build optimized for survival, but can no longer use the build in sanctum. It's a piece of horses***t honestly.

Movement is way, way too slow for a game with no travel skills.
Up base movement speed by 20% for all classes.

This feels like you are playing ruthless mode on POE1. And I never find that fun. I will never find it fun in POE2 either.
IF that's what GGG is going for, fine. I won't play it. And I think 90% of players will agree with me. That's bad for the game. REAL bad.

To solve the campaign, boost movement speed by 20% and increase drops by 200% during campaign. Then you can go back to "normal" loottables if you want to.

I don't ever want to go through act 1 and 2 again. Not with another build, not with another league. It was twelve hours I don't ever want to do again.
And that is a huge problem.

"

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.

You're gonna notice area sizes bloat massively within the latter half of act 2. There are areas I was in where I looked back after revealing them all and realized they were at times twice the size of the average atlas map in PoE1. Its really fucked.

Like I said in the OP, it feels like they designed it back when this was still a PoE1 expansion and anticipated everyone having access to mass scale mobility, and then forgot to change it when they took that ability away.

Agree 100% with OP

Very on-pont, thanks

"

eldheim#2436 wrote:

To solve the campaign, boost movement speed by 20% and increase drops by 200% during campaign. Then you can go back to "normal" loottables if you want to.

I don't think boosting movement speed is the solution. The game is clearly designed to be slow and deliberate. If they boost movement speed to such a degree like that (especially since they're GOING to keep movement rolls on boots, you know it), we'll just end up back in PoE1 esk run-through-the-entire-map-skipping-everything days again. I already tried doing a run through an early map without movement speed on my boots and while tricky as I had to take care not to get bogged, the ability to roll plus the raw number of flask charges you get made it entirely possible. If we just had a free chunk of extra movement speed, the meta would quickly become skipping content.

That's why my solution was reducing area sizes, rather than increasing our own capabilities.

I also don't think just spamming more loot is a solution either. The problem is that not enough of the useful things drop, not that there's not enough loot in general. I really think that the best solution would be targeted increases on rares and specific currencies.

Aside from those two points I largely agree with the rest of your post.

"

Skilletor#0857 wrote:

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.

If they dont compete with D4 for their playerbase and they dont try to keep their own poe1 playerbase.... who the hell is going to play this game for the next 10 years?

To OP. I agree in most of your points.

Yes, loot needs to be adjusted... This is not crafting:

1) Constantly refresh vendors and hope you have enough gold to buy the rare item when it shows up
2) Gamble with the little amount of gold you do have

I am NOT playing that campaign twice in my lifetime if I have to walk all that distance again with no QS flask and no travel skill. Nope.