Game needs a lot of work, but GGG can surely do it (if they want to?).

I never thought that I would come away feeling the same way about PoE2 that I did about the Diablo 4 open beta weekend.

Preface:

I completed 30-40 maps and attempted the 3rd ascendancy sanctum (which I failed with ~10% hp remaining, despite having 2600 honour + boon for 50% extra).

Diablo 4 was a game I felt looked like a fun campaign but had a massive illusion of any real choices on your character/gameplay, and few reasons to replay it (changes in gameplay experience).

PoE2 whilst not looking like that at first, seems to have many elements the same, and I definitely feel fairly beaten and downtrodden before things are really changing. This hampers any desire I have to even play a new character/try other things.

I played a ranger -> deadeye.

ISSUES:

Attribute starvation:

Attribute starvation causes multifaceted problems: I cannot equip the majority of gear I find, and I cannot experiment with any other main skills than the ones clearly intended for my region of the tree.

The end result is that I'm stuck desperately chasing pure dex armour, or hoping for low level bases of other types. I do not have enough attributes to experiment with any non pure dex main skills- which effectively locks me entirely to my weapon type/other pure dex weapons (there currently are none).

In essence It feels like my choices are already made for me, I can play with a small subset of bow skills, and use a small subset of armour pieces, weapon swap is basically off the cards because you cannot have a massively different 2nd tree- so once again I'm still missing attributes.

This is doubled down on by the barren loot drops, what little I find is quite unlikely to be equippable by my character- leading me to still have some items from act 1/2 when I hit act 3 cruel/maps.

Skills:

The Bow section has a mixture of utility and damage skills, some seem to clearly play better than others.

There are a few different damage types; poison, cold, lightning, 2 neutral (non converting) skills (tornado shot is utility) and 1 fire skill.

Lightning has the most options, is the clear pure dexterity choice in this game (indicated by herald), and is massively bolstered by the tree having the highest abundance of nearby nodes, and the most powerful ones (damage is lucky). It also has lightning rod from the start which is the clear 2 button synergy option for clearing (and even single target). Stormcaller arrow seemed ok, magnetic salvo comes along late- was great but heavy mana cost.

Cold has 2 offerings, freezing salvo is a nice burst button but not a main build around, and iceshot shows up a lot later, and takes ages until you can get tornado shot to work as something to play with it.

Poison: an entirely different style of build around- didn't experiment because respeccing costs way too much gold at my level to rework a tree. Didn't look particularly great when a friend was trying it- but could just be weak build/character. Could have been a weapon swap tree.

Neutral/ rain of arrows: Didn't live up to the hype, fuss to generate frenzies/ only really good on large bosses- no conversion means no return from lightning etc nodes on tree when bow is likely to be majority phys and other skills are converting. Cannot function as main skill due to overwriting the current cast if you recast it and taking many seconds to complete a full volley. Didn't experiment with the beyblade skill.

The end result is there are very few actual active skill choices I can make about the skills my character is using- the dex requirements of bow prevent me from trying other things, and lightning within the bow skill section is forced on me even further by the tree heavily favouring lightning, as well as lightning having the most options.

From the lightning skills I basically pick 1 of 2 skills + lightning rod, Ice shot simply lacks both passive tree and active support- and that's before missing intelligence requirements for herald of ice/frost bomb + cold supports and so on (frost bomb's exposure value is lessened by all the nearby cold nodes being penetration). Freezing salvo is a no brainer comfy nuke + freeze button that you press every 10-15s or so.

It is possible to get lower levels of other skills which have lower attribute requirements for utility, but that requires farming low level zones, which seems almost antithetical.

Defensive layers:

Ranger/pure dex is basically forced into evasion and has little room for anything else due to attribute gating- this means no access to actual hit mitigation, when bosses in starting maps can already hit me for 1.6k in a single skill- this becomes incredibly frustrating. Effectively I have to play like I have no evasion, because failed evasion check -> dead -> map over. This can be alleviated by wind ward on ascendancy but the difficulty/problems there are another paragraph.

The passive tree has utility based defences; stun threshold/ailment avoid, and even some max res/resistance in other areas, but early gearing and my section means I'm not even capping my res in maps and the tree does nothing to help with that.

Sustain: the sustain options on the tree are very watered down- small amount of regen or flask bolstering, it's understandable that GGG didn't want to trivialise them to have fun boss fights. But when I have very limited options for defences/no options for hit size mitigation, sustain offers limited appeal vs just taking every damage node I can to hopefully minimise the attrition. Leech seems incredibly hard to attain, especially when my skills are mostly converting to elemental.

Ascendancy:

probably been ranted about elsewhere:

forcing sanctum and ultimatum on the playerbase early is atrocious with the currently size of the negatives. Difficulty will vary wildy from build to build/run to run.

My first clear of sanctum was trivial, but I know many struggled (especially more melee).

the full sanctum run also takes forever (like 1hr) i was level 74 when attempting and it level 70 for the final zone. The final boss seems to be terribly designed for any window of uptime. The fact that my next attempt is gated by 1hr of sanctum + probably having worse boons is a horrible prospect.

Sanctum is not content I enjoy in PoE 1 (i'm convinced most who do like it, only do so because it is/was consistently very rewarding), and the prospect of 1hr + per attempt at that miserable boss is not exciting, let alone the fact it will probably be higher level than before due to me being in higher tier zones.

Ultimatum: the bosses are brutal when you encounter them, the rain from the chicken seemed to murder me, and the tornado was total death if on top of you- which with no movespeed boots was unavoidable if iI started close- This can be doubled down on by the zone aoes options and so on. I ended up having to get a massive weapon upgrade and overlevel quite a bit before I cleared ultimatum.

Have not attempted to 10 trial ultimatum, but given the difficulty of the story one I have extreme reservations.

GGG really needs to dial down the difficulty of the early 2 trials, and honestly maybe even the later ones for ascendancy 3/4 ( or at least fix the scorpion so there are some more windows to hit it for a bit during its endless swipe -> slam -> dual proj x4 -> burrow spam while you get chipped by darts pattern chain. Clearing the drowning sand debuff is just icing on the cake on top of that).

Items:

Not a lot to say here;

Give us more currency or give us more rares- the vision of picking up whites, transmute augment and then doing nothing wears off fast (except in the rare case it's really good at which point I use some of my precious few regals/exalts), perhaps loot is better deeper into maps- but early maps feel worse than levelling and I'm already beaten down by the process and inability to replace gear I had from act 1/2 normal (without trading). Expedition does seem to help a lot, but access is limited and it's a worry if the playerbase is exhausted before getting there.

Mapping:

Kill all rares is terrible, leads to the same horrible experience of running around giant map trying to find last mob (till you tick under 50 and discover it's another 2-3minute walk away), exactly the same frustrations as the giant levelling zones with non obvious value side content- that you will skip almost all of when levelling again.

Early mapping mostly feels like levelling, there hasn't really been a transition in experience or loot- my character has mostly the same gear, plays the same, feels the same, and still picks up white items to transmute + aug.

Map boss balance: damage seems way off, getting flattened by 1.6k + hits right after maps on a class that has no real access to early hit size mitigation is beyond offputting...

Map mechanics:

Expedition: seems easy, gear at vendors helps a lot if applicable- loot all artefacts is annoying, unlikely to see early reroll currency-> need logbook to gear further hampers this otherwise cheat code.

Breach: infinite mobs spawn on top of me near instantly to trap me, very rippy- no reward, inability to move out of the mobs without getting murdered (if you even have a skill that lets you do so) leads to very feast or famine damage/clear checks- often left till i "cleared" the map, often died seconds after opening.
Perhaps make it so that the claws cannot spawn against walls to give more open space- mine often had over half the retreat paths restricted by default.

Delirium- mostly seemed fine, rippy but not in the 20 mobs surround you instantly nature of breach, movement speed/character strength massively restricts how far you can get early on- not sure if we'll get fast enough later for a difference.

In summary:
attributes heavily restrict choices of skills and gear you can wear- leading to a rough levelling experience and feeling like I have few build options.

Passive tree seems to double down on this, rather than offering enough ways to branch out, similarly doesn't offer much in the way of hit mitigation options and is mostly on the side type effects or chasing damage.

Early mapping feels like an extension of levelling and some aspects like boss damage are woefully overtuned.

Ascending is a total mess, the first two should take some large nerfs due to the wide variance of a run/how much builds vary- perhaps ggg can leave 3 and 4 difficult and we just accept that we're stuck on 2 for a long time- 3rd floor sanctum boss is total ass.