A message to the devs

Dear GGG,

As somebody who has barely played PoE1 and have not finished the campaign because it was "Difficult" I genuinely implore you to not change the difficulty of PoE2.

Regardless of what people say and moan about, the biggest reason I've never bothered finishing PoE1 was that the difficulty of that game was based on numbers. It meant that I had to sit down and craft items to match resistances and just do a lot of spreadsheet stuff and look up guides on how to do a good build.
In my head, this is the most annoying and boring kind of difficulty.

In PoE2 however, the difficulty comes primarily from mechanics. The monster AI and the abilities they are using. It feels a lot more like a souls like boss or a monster in monster hunter which you have to observe, learn, and adapt to.

The difference is amazingly enormous, and I honestly hope that you keep to your guns and do not dumb anything down because people can't be bothered to get better at playing the game and would rather just stack numbers.

This game is feeling phenomenal. The way that it is slower and a lot more deliberate is fantastic. It means that I can no longer tune the game out while watching something on the other screen because I just need to do a skill rotation that simply clears the screen.

I love that this is not a PoE1, and I genuinely hope that it will stay that way despite the amount of feedback people moan about.
If people want to play another PoE1, well PoE1 is still out there....

That is all.
I love this game, and I can't wait to see its final form when you are done polishing it out and adding all the new options (Aka new levels and classes).

P.S.
Not having the screen full of rectangles with item names is fantastic also. Loot diarrhea was not fun either

Came here to post almost the same thing. Currently getting wrecked and i genuinely love how it forces me to get better at the mechanics.

PLEASE, please, do not make this easier, i think it is at a very delicate sweetspot right now.

And yes! It took hours to find my first necklace (of any rarity) drop in the game, and i very much prefer this to having to filter out 65,550 items i will never use.

I hope you folks at GGG stay with your gut feeling rather than giving in to loud voices, as it seems to be a very good one.

I fully agree with the main points of this posts.

Apropos of nothing, I just checked SteamDB and today's peak player count is higher than yesterday's.

https://steamdb.info/app/2694490/charts/

I think the game's hit, difficulty and all; massive changes to the way it plays are probably not coming. Minor adjustments, yes, but I have a feeling GGG will be staying the course on this one.

So you guys wanted Dark Souls, with it's cheap boss tricks hiding the fact that the game is actually pretty simple. OK.

"

NicknamesOfGod#1810 wrote:

Apropos of nothing, I just checked SteamDB and today's peak player count is higher than yesterday's.

https://steamdb.info/app/2694490/charts/

I think the game's hit, difficulty and all; massive changes to the way it plays are probably not coming. Minor adjustments, yes, but I have a feeling GGG will be staying the course on this one.

There is a lot of interest from tourists. There is some percentage of players that will play through the whole campaign once and quit like they would a typical single player game. They love it but will never come back for leagues because they never bought the game for that reason. All they see is that they got 40-60 hours of entertainment for $30.

"

Nagisawa#4090 wrote:

So you guys wanted Dark Souls, with it's cheap boss tricks hiding the fact that the game is actually pretty simple. OK.

I'm laughing so hard. "Cheap boss tricks"? You mean mechanics? What do you envision a boss to have if not a set of skills to hurt you with? Simple? Well it's not a 47-skill-Ninja-rotation from FF14...nor one of the raid bosses from it either...

Example:
You can just say you don't like dentists. You needn't qualify it...you don't have to say, "Look at you, with your silly little metallic tools and various stupid fluids! Rubbish work, silly gowned person!"

Things you don't enjoy aren't inherently stupid and quit treating them as such.

"

everygoodnamewastaken#0227 wrote:

"

NicknamesOfGod#1810 wrote:

Apropos of nothing, I just checked SteamDB and today's peak player count is higher than yesterday's.

https://steamdb.info/app/2694490/charts/

I think the game's hit, difficulty and all; massive changes to the way it plays are probably not coming. Minor adjustments, yes, but I have a feeling GGG will be staying the course on this one.

There is a lot of interest from tourists. There is some percentage of players that will play through the whole campaign once and quit like they would a typical single player game. They love it but will never come back for leagues because they never bought the game for that reason. All they see is that they got 40-60 hours of entertainment for $30.

That's an... interesting take. I could've sworn that PoE2 launched with only half its campaign because GGG switched to working on the end game, and very publicly made a huge deal of the fact they'd done that, and still got over a million people to pay $30 for early access to the result. Those are some hard-core "tourists."

You clowns do realize this is the campaign right? It should be hard... in the end game. It should not be this hard on the campaign. They need to make it waaaaaay easier and have more stuff drop. right now there is literally no difficulty curve, it goes 10-10-10-10-10 it should go 1-2-3-4-5. People don't play these games for the hard campaign, they play them for the endgame, so if you can't get to the endgame, there won't be people playing it.

"

NicknamesOfGod#1810 wrote:

That's an... interesting take. I could've sworn that PoE2 launched with only half its campaign because GGG switched to working on the end game, and very publicly made a huge deal of the fact they'd done that, and still got over a million people to pay $30 for early access to the result. Those are some hard-core "tourists."

I've seen normal people think this is everything from an MMO to a MOBA (?!) somehow. These players never watched a single interview or live stream. But they caught a glimpse somewhere the week before and thought it looked like a fun, single player game for $30. They bring none of the baggage or expectations all of us PoE/ARPG players have.

They weren't purchasing replay ability like we are. They will have that experience and then move on.