PoE 2 Is For Tourists

Everything that made PoE 1 great is absent or understated in PoE 2.

While the enthusiasm around the game is huge, it is much like the initial wave of Diablo 4 players. Diablo 4 retained approximately 2% of those players after the vast majority finished the initial campaign. Most didn't even stick around for season one.

It really sucks that you have a community who absolutely loves PoE and rather than leaning into that and giving them more you decide to go in ... whatever direction this is.

Everything is too slow. It's not respectful to the player's time.

Loot doesn't exist. I dropped one unique in 30 hours.

Respec is still prohibitively expensive and would require hours and hours of grinding to fully accomplish.

Crafting doesn't exist. YOLO Slamming is the only method of crafting that exists outside of a tiny pool of very rare essences that can still be bricked by subsequent yolo crafts.

Ascension mechanics were somehow made worse by making them sanctum and a juiced up, even more broken version of ultimatum.

The vast majority of my deaths over 30 hours were getting frustrated and walking too far forward and getting pinned to a wall by enemies.

Bosses are cool, but unrewarding to farm past the first win.

Support gems are dropped far too sparsely.
Jeweler's orbs are far too rare.
I think I dropped like 5 alcs in 30 hours.

This basically means even yolo crafting OK gear is difficult and if you decide to change your character you are screwed.
Nobody wants to grind levels just to get through the acts.

I watched streams to see if the "endgame" was worth pushing through for and it looked terrible. Basically just the same thing where you come out of a map with two magic items and four wisdom scrolls (which are even more pointless than before)

Hope you all made your money off the wave of early access buyers, because your core audience who spent thousands of dollars because they loved and wanted to support PoE 1 won't be buying anything for this game.

My genuine recommendation is to unrelease the early access and take another year to completely rework the game and implement the things which were actually fun about your last game unless you want PoE 2 to be a ghost town before Q3.

Pretty sure the change from PoE 2 being an addition to PoE to PoE Deuce being its own game came from "feature creep." When Chris told us at Exilecon 1 what PoE 2 was going to be, the list of actual changes to be made to the game was short. I suspect that, as time went on, there were just so many additional "cool" things the devs (I'm looking at YOU, Mr. Rogers) wanted to add that the relatively simple revamp to PoE was no longer possible while retaining the original identity of the game.

And so we got... This. ='[.]'=

Yeah it genuinely feels like they made a whole game for people who grind Ruthless and SSF and didn't consider that maybe the 3% of their playerbase that played those modes found a completely different type of "fun" in the game than the overwhelming majority.

I think the party will last for about two weeks. Next weekend the Asmon viewers will start hitting Act 3 and quitting, or some other fad will emerge and people will go follow that.

The only people I see supporting the game's direction fit one of these criteria -

1. SSF/Ruthless Player
2. "It's ok so far, but it's not PoE"
3. "I remember back in the 90s when games deleted your saves"
4. "I just killed the ice wolf guy and it doesn't seem so bad"

It's terrible.

"Being disrespectful of players time".

This is maybe the best phrasing of critisism I've seen so far.
For players that can't put in ten hour shifts every day -most won't, what you do not want when sitting down a couple of hours, is getting from level 30 to 31 slouching through two maps, getting zero loot, constantly dodgerolling backwards.

That is not fun and rewarding gameplay.
If I want that, I'll go play dark souls again.

And it's a pretty good thing it's not PoE1 with number 2 instead.
Otherwise I'd won't be even touching it, for instance.

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eldheim#2436 wrote:

"Being disrespectful of players time".

This is maybe the best phrasing of critisism I've seen so far.
For players that can't put in ten hour shifts every day -most won't, what you do not want when sitting down a couple of hours, is getting from level 30 to 31 slouching through two maps, getting zero loot, constantly dodgerolling backwards.

That is not fun and rewarding gameplay.
If I want that, I'll go play dark souls again.

Yeah. I love dark souls and all the souls games. I would be fine with the boss fights in PoE 2 having even more mechanics.

The issue is 90% of deaths just being getting stuck behind trash mobs that spawned behind you and walking like a turtle across maps the size of Texas while getting ZERO loot.

Encountering a rare means MAYBE you get a basic orb, but you also have to kite him three rooms backwards just chewing through his health...

The game just doesn't deliver the fun at any point. I kept playing thinking it would improve, but it never did.

Dropped 1 Unique in 30+ hours btw lol

The game is straight up missing the build cooking that PoE1 innovated on, and went backwards instead.

We should have moved past the days of games with combos like "Cast Cold Snap on your Frostbolt to explode the Frostbolt". We have support gems. Why is there not a "Projectile Detonation Support" that lets you use ANY AoE skill to make ANY projectile explode? Everything is pre-cooked, locked down, and weapon-restricted, when the thing that made PoE special was how things were NOT locked down.

The game does not trust the player to cook, and instead the developers have pre-cooked all the builds and combos for us.

This is just 1 example, but when you start thinking about the skills and supports in this game you can come up with unlimited examples of effects that are baked into skills instead of letting us use mechanics to come up with our own combos.

I would even argue this is the entire reason Melee gets so many complaints in PoE1 even after so many balance reworks, because the balance is not the actual issue. Things like Blade Flurry should really be "Flurry Support" that turns any Strike skill into what Blade Flurry does now. PoE2 made everything work the way Melee does in PoE1 (the most complained about archetype in the game's history).

"

Xendran#1127 wrote:

We should have moved past the days of games with combos like "Cast Cold Snap on your Frostbolt to explode the Frostbolt". We have support gems. Why is there not a "Projectile Detonation Support" that lets you use ANY AoE skill to make ANY projectile explode? Everything is pre-cooked, locked down, and weapon-restricted, when the thing that made PoE special was how things were NOT locked down.

Um. We don't even have a good over half of the skills yet. It's absolutely no wonder that current possible builds are mostly on a very straightforward side.

I wouldn't be judging the depth of system just by current state of early access.

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just_dont#6539 wrote:

"

Xendran#1127 wrote:

We should have moved past the days of games with combos like "Cast Cold Snap on your Frostbolt to explode the Frostbolt". We have support gems. Why is there not a "Projectile Detonation Support" that lets you use ANY AoE skill to make ANY projectile explode? Everything is pre-cooked, locked down, and weapon-restricted, when the thing that made PoE special was how things were NOT locked down.

Um. We don't even have a good over half of the skills yet. It's absolutely no wonder that current possible builds are mostly on a very straightforward side.

I wouldn't be judging the depth of system just by current state of early access.

This is a game with a 5 year development cycle made by the most experienced ARPG developers currently on the planet. But now we have a game that needs to spend 1-2 years in early access to catch back up to the starting line, instead of being able to push the genre forward.

"Being disrespectful of players time". +9999

i have lvl 30 witch and lvl 55 ranger played more than 25 hours in weekend and it felt awful. every mob runs faster than me, buggy roll mechanic, all skills feels underperforming, ppl stuck 2 links skills cus of no jew orb drops. There is no loot at all. No Crafting!!!! where is the fucking Bench FFS!!! i hate "the close eyes and exalt slam" VISION. Why some skills espeacially good ones require lvl 52!!!!!!

If u make a really good poe 1 league now there will be no player on poe 2.