I feel like POE2 is a 10 foot mozzarella stick

Preface: if you agree with "Doing something for no purpose is actively fun" or "I took me 17 hours to walk to the next town over, so it had to be challenging!" then this post is not for you. Leave your quick reply insults about how I'm mad cause bad now please, because it ain't gonna get better for you - just like the game.

Is this a rant? It turned out to be one, but I tried to put sections in here.

Overall thought: If you wanna be soulsborne, act like it. Otherwise you just half-bake the whole game and end up with a boring and an actively unfun mess.

Actively hostile design - but no reward
- No reward for succeeding; Limgrave tree sentinel can be killed with a twig fresh out of the gate if you're good enough -> you get rewarded with the Golden Halberd or you can ignore the boss because you cannot beat it right now to come back later
- Optional bosses in souls offer either unique interactions with the world, strong lore, alternative gameplay type weapons, just straight up upgrades or ALL of them; poe2 has nothing because power comes from either fully random gear acquisition with no power floor guarantee or from gems which cannot be outleveled
- Games like Escape from Tarkov rewards the player for their risk - you get to extract with the giga loot, which feels good

Maps and zones are series of tubes or open fields with mandatory things at the very far ends or in each of the four corners
- Only 2 options, an interesting design choice
- No way to traverse inside the zone more efficiently, even though checkpoints exist and could be perfect in-zone teleportation points
- Tedium is not difficulty

Normal monsters pose a higher skill challenge than bosses or rares
- Bad precedent
- Rares can be isolated and dealt with accordingly, normal monsters cannot
- "Improved AI and pathing" means you need to aggro, at most, three white monsters at a time to not get swarmed in the corridors constantly; stress and outplaying game design is not difficulty, it's cheesing the content
- Normal monsters moving at 3x player speed is not helping

No movement options at all
- Tedium is not difficulty
- Actively unfun
- Add some

I cannot move or dodge roll through glass bottles or urns
- If I can walk past something in real life, I assume I can walk past them in-game
- I cannot scale a tree effortlessly IRL, so I walk around it, but 3 glass bottled on the ground is something I am capable of traversing through or just stepping over - apparently not in-game
- Actively unfun

Boss fights pose a challenge if you are on the average gear curve
- Good, as promised, most of the time
- Except, if you were lucky, you will steamroll the boss and it poses no challenge
- No guaranteed floor of gear a player has before encountering said boss, see next section, is actively unfun

Random is not difficult, it's random
- Kill a boss, flip a coin, if you landed heads, you drop something else than currency, flip a coin again, if you landed heads, you receive more than 1 item
- Another heads, it doesn't get converted to gold, another heads, it chooses a weapon, another heads, it's a melee basetype
- Repeat rolls until you end up with a weapon that might ID into something you can use if you have the currency, which is not guaranteed either
- Variance in the boss loot table means you have 10% with a great experience, 70% being mostly okay and 20% who will have a miserable time with gear 20 levels behind the zone - pick ARPG or soulsborne gearing, don't mix them
- If you want people to have a uniform experience, you must control all aspect of the curve, not just one part of it

Gold does not cover the gap of itemization
- I got to use gambling 3 times in act 1 and start of act 2, this was without spending any gold on respecs
- RNG said no, didn't get an item I needed, I received nothing for my gold, I wasted my time
- Remove gold or make the curve of costs start 80% lower and scale up only after the storyline acts are done
- Tedium is not difficulty

Souls-likes allow outgrinding the game - POE2 does not
- If you cannot beat a boss, you go grind more souls and levels to have higher damage, endurance, whatever to just outgear the fight
- POE2 unable to outgear a fight because you cannot outlevel a zone or skill gems
- Just because you like thinking that artificial diffuculty is difficulty, it doesn't change the fact it was artificial and can be bypassed by the player

Soulsbornes have more than one option to outplay the game
- If you think that dodging with invulnerability frames is your only option in any soulsborne, you are self-reporting yourself for being bad
- If you say you need to "git gud" to beat soulsbornes, you are once again self-reporting for being bad, there are at most a few actually hard fights in any of the games, and none of them are on the main story, rest of the fights are either fair or you can just go out grind the challenge

Soulsbornes actively engage and award exploration
- I can go to a small cave far off the beaten path and find an item on a corpse, which is placed there by devs to act as a reward for me taking the time to wander around the lands
- In POE2 a rare box on the ground at the far edge of the Cemetery? that's right, 2 medium life flasks and 4 gold!
- RNG is not difficulty

You cannot procedurally gemerate fun
- Either you craft the zones to be fun or you let them be random and guarantee the outcome some other way
- Being unpredictable and thinking it is fun is the mentality of a gambler putting down their house down on red at the roulette table; 48.6% chance to get a 2nd house or you get to reroll because your character is now stuck because you lost too many RNG checks in a row with no way to recover
- Look at the bell curve and remove the bottom 30% of outcomes if you wanna make it all "random" to create some sort of a floor for itemization

Maps have 4+ second levers for no reason
- Tedium is not difficulty, make them instant

Character moves incredibly slow compared to the vastness of areas and scaracity of content
- Tedium is not difficulty, make us move faster or zones smaller

No crafting currency to craft, despite promises
- Tedium is not difficulty, make currency drops uniform across all players or stop relying on it as a crutch

Itemization is the same as in poe1, with 90% less access to bases and item drops and no deterministic options to overcome issues
- Tedium is not difficulty
- Crafting bench fixed the early itemization in POE1, it actively made it digestable. Bench was the crutch you had because you couldn't design the game like you wanted; game is now like you wanted it to be and you chose to do nothing about the fluidity of itemization

No fallback options for itemization
- There is no guaranteed itemization outside of a simple runes and sockets, which both require high rolls in RNG to even find
- Soulsbornes have guaranteed itemization to create fair experience for all players

Mechanical skill checks often do not check skills, only luck in debris generation
- Dodge rolled 3 degrees to the wrong direction? You get auto-pathed to a corner instead of the hallway because there was a pebble that guided your roll despite you not wanting that to happen

White monsters should only be a challenge once
- Add more checkpoints and do not allow normal monsters to respawn inside the aggro range of a checkpoint
- Tedium is not difficulty
- XP and gem power is capped by zone level, not player skill or grind

Gold is looking for a place in the game design and it is still outside in the foyer banging on the doors to be let in any of the rooms
- For gold to have value, it needs to be scarce, so players cannot use it outside of a last ditch effort to salvage their character
- For gold to have a use, it needs to be plentiful enough to be of constant use if you want to try out other things or just move passives around
- Gold is literally neither of those things and doesn't provide the player with options, clutches or even a genuine use because you do not have enough of it in any case until you get to maps -> Gold effectively does not exist for your first character.

Staring at content creators, things do not change at the early endgame
POE2 is one of those shorts about mozzarella sticks being 10 feet long at a restaurant and we are only at the first 6 inches of it. There's too much of the same and nothing to wait for at the end of if because you already see what you are getting.

If you love cheese-stuffed bread, the game is great.

I prefer the flavour of something that was actually prepared well.

Yes, tedium really is not difficulty and your gamer ego doesn't become larger just because you like doing mindless things for no outcomes.

+1 Signed.

A lot of the complaints about the game could be fixed if they just dropped health pools of most monsters by 15-30% roughly.

I play a pretty strong build that carries a lot of the PUGs and even then its a lot of "Cast, Kite, Cast Kite, Back track a lot of the map because I kited a whole hallway as Chaos dmg ticked away."

recommend this post, bump

I will be frank, this whole situation reminds me of "No Man's Sky" release.

bump, sums up all the issues i feel too about this

Bump. OP just summarizes my thoughts after finishing act 4

Some good points in there I agree with. Also many opinions that are not facts yet treated like they are.

"

No movement options at all
- Tedium is not difficulty
- Actively unfun
- Add some

No, don't, because right now positioning actually matters, and meaningful ambushes can actually exist. Maybe some classes can get some, at a price. A price that isn't "I slot frostblink in for free and now I'm a magical space wizard who teleports around blowing up the entire screen." Adding movement options would probably ruin the game going forward.

By the way, what tedium is is simply an opinion. Many people would see any videogame as tedium.

What's actively fun is also just someone's opinion.

Man, OP just gets it. They get "all of it". Well said my friend, you raised all my major gripes in this one post, +1 from me.

+1 I super super super super super super agree with the hp nerfs to WHITE mobs, they dont need to take 10 seconds to kill a WHITE mob, its tedious unfun and unrewarding, they dont drop shit. they can gang bang u in a corner and u die.

pls ggg dont let this game die, its good just the hp is too high on mobs.

"

Normal monsters pose a higher skill challenge than bosses or rares
- Bad precedent
- Rares can be isolated and dealt with accordingly, normal monsters cannot
- "Improved AI and pathing" means you need to aggro, at most, three white monsters at a time to not get swarmed in the corridors constantly; stress and outplaying game design is not difficulty, it's cheesing the content
- Normal monsters moving at 3x player speed is not helping

I disagree wholeheartedly. You need to change the way you think about normal mobs, and start thinking about crowd control.
This is not a POE1 remake, and I hope to god you guys wanting it to be, don't get your way.

Normal mobs, to me, are so easy because I use CC. Rares and bosses on the other had, pose a challenge, as they should.
Normal mobs should not be tuned, they are already very easy to deal with.