Difficulty/Loot are fine

People, the game in early access. Adjustments of all kinds will be happening over time; it's part of the process. There's no need to panic two days into an early access process that's going to run for anywhere from six months to a year.

Also, I'm not a power-gamer, and I'm not part of any "git gud" crowd, and I'm not hating the difficulty. There are specific mechanics on specific boss fights that can use a adjustment, or an their AI, but I'm not convinced that difficulty needs to be nerfed across the board. PoE2 is tougher than PoE1, but it's not Dark Souls levels of hard.

As for the loot situation... loot is not the only thing happening in an ARPG (or at least, not in a good ARPG). This is the thing D3 and D4 get wrong. Loot is a big part of genre, and it's an important part, but it's not the only thing you're doing here. Remember, one the things that people complained about non-stop in PoE1 was that too much stuff dropped, to the point where it impacted the game's performance, and it was mostly not good or interesting.

"Moar loot" is probably not useful feedback, and GGG are unlikely to simply crank the drop rate or drop rarity in way that trivializes the gameplay they're going for. Are you finding that killing a boss, taking several attempts to kill it, feels anticlimactic if they don't drop unique items? Or would you rather they leave rewards as is, but tune the difficulty of those fights down a bit?

Por ejemplo... crafting on normal base items seems to be a big part of the design intent here, but regal orbs are a little thin on the ground creating a regal/rate bottleneck, especially early on. A few adjustments leap to mind which might help:
1. the drop rate of rares can be increased a bit; even if every rare isn't good, having more of them can be disenchanted to gain more regal fragements;
2. more regals or regal fragnments can drop, which would have a similar impact;
3. more gold can drop, which would allow us to gamble more for rate items which could have an less direct impact;
4. more rare monsters could spawn, with increased chances of rare monsters dropping rate items.
Easing the rare/regal bottleneck in the earlier stages of the game might help ease people into the later stages where the pace picks up.

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NitonFx#5985 wrote:

Oh so when the loot is fine i assume i have a client that just forgot to download it because i am in act 3 and only dropped a single Augment

Maybe pick up some blues and disenchant them? That's what I'm doing, and I have all the augments I need.

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PatrickFf#1965 wrote:

The hype week will pass, reality will set in and most won't play it and then how do they pay the bills?

That's an overly pessimistic take. People have been proclaiming PoE to be dead every time they don't like a league mechanic for years, and yet GGG still seems to be doing alright. PoE2's success has already exceeded anything they expected, and was almost more than they could deal with. I don't think the game is in any danger of dying any time soon.

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NicknamesOfGod#1810 wrote:

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PatrickFf#1965 wrote:

The hype week will pass, reality will set in and most won't play it and then how do they pay the bills?

That's an overly pessimistic take. People have been proclaiming PoE to be dead every time they don't like a league mechanic for years, and yet GGG still seems to be doing alright. PoE2's success has already exceeded anything they expected, and was almost more than they could deal with. I don't think the game is in any danger of dying any time soon.

we are talking POE2 and thy just annoyed the hell out of a lot of POE 1plasyers... so... UBISOFT used to think they were to smart to fail... then they annoyed their player base now they will go bankrupt.

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PatrickFf#1965 wrote:

UBISOFT used to think they were to smart to fail... then they annoyed their player base now they will go bankrupt.

That's one way to look at it. The other way is that Ubisoft stopped taking creative risks, putting out nothing but iterations on the same formula, while trying to milk a customer base for ever-increasing amounts of money for less and less content, and less interesting content, over time... while also spending hundreds of millions of dollars on every project... and are now going bankrupt. I haven't seen anyone else comparing anything that GGG is doing to any of Ubisoft's latest Ubigrind games.

Going 15+ levels with the same gear because of lack of luck or drops is not good for an aarpg, it needs adjusted.

I think the difficulty is fine. I play solo warrior and the only 2 bosses that were difficult were Draven and Ogham Wolf. I played a bit of PoE1 and I think the difficulty ramped up way too much after beating Kitava, it was insane. The campaign, which contains all the story elements and exploration, was easy as heck apart from a few bosses.

The loot is ok, I'm not sure if people forget that you can use orbs? I'm running around with an almost full rare set, I just upgrade stuff as I find it. I'm just not convinced that a lot of this feedback is coming from PoE1 veterans since the game (PoE2) is really not that hard. Maybe you're used to running maps with imba gear and you just import builds without understanding how your 1-button steamroll character even works???

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Enigmakr#1831 wrote:

Fine? I've got my first legendary at lvl 50/act 3, are you sure?
D4 has a lot of issues but early on, you can expect some legendary to tweak your build. Don't be delusional my friend

Same here, Act 2 and not a single unique drop. Had also only 5 socketed gear drops. Made another character to test it, dropped two uniques in the first two zones. Loot is either very uneven or the first characters are somewhat drop-bugged, no idea.

The difficulty is fine--the loot is not.

If you think that it is, you've gotten really, really lucky with loot. I have, so I know the difference. I know how wildly different this game feels if you have decent loot vs. if you don't, and how tedious it is to farm that loot on your way through the campaign.

They don't need to nerf enemies or bosses, but they do need to increase loot and currency drop rates significantly.

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AdeptusEnginus#0665 wrote:

...
The level of difficulty we're seeing in the campaign SHOULD be in the game, but it should be confined to the endgame, a bit deeper into the atlas. It should not be necessary to progress at a baseline level. That's a surefire way to drive away 99% of your potential playerbase.

I see this opinion a lot - that the campaign should be absolutely piss easy, drunken-fratboy-weed-party easy, mindless clickspam zergrush-the-campaign-in-an-hour-tops easy...and then all this difficulty should come in all at once in the endgame. Where the game ramps like a seaside cliff to the "intended" experience after letting players have a few hours of total freebie in the campaign.

Why are people pushing for this kind of bait and switch? Folks Got Gud in Elden Ring and it became a gaming icon. Y'all think that maybe the new game needs more than two and a half days to settle in and let people figure out what works before calling for the entire campaign to be gutted and rendered meaningless?

The entire game is supposed to be challenging, engaging, and fun. Not just endgame. Please discard the PoE1 mindset of the campaign being nothing but an unwanted gate tax on the Endgame Grind.

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fiddlebender#4936 wrote:

I'm just not convinced that a lot of this feedback is coming from PoE1 veterans since the game (PoE2) is really not that hard.

What are you talking about? Even the PoE1 veterans are saying that the game is incredibly hard, and they're the ones that have the most experience with it, and the fastest ones to grasp the mechanics.

But no, everyone just needs to "git gud". Such as useless take.

So far, the mushy or sluggish feeling while moving, the fact that some bosses hit a tad too hard and too often at normal difficulty and the loot scarcity are the main issues aside game stability (which is bad, crashing every 30 or 45 mjnutes, but in beta so understandable). You pretty much have to rolly polly for a few minutes if your dps isn't super high and you're playing solo.

Crashes/bug aside, I like what I see though. Bosses, are just a tad too strong for normal, but we need that kind of challenge for later on. That "issue" might be offset with better loot as I know that some people have no issues at all rolling over bosses (e.g. fights that last for less than 1 minute). So yeah, give us more rare and more rare mats, and better affixes on higher lvl items. ;)

I know that it's not in the spirit of PoE, but I wish we could set some affixes/damage type or skills priority for loot. Every unique I got is for another class (e.g. Witch spellcaster, a few melee armors while I'm ranged) and most rare items are useless with subpar or random affixes that everyone would find useless. Sure, I get some mats, but it takes a long time to get a rare at normal difficulty.