PoE 2 doesn't know what an ARPG is

Boss fights in PoE 2 are very souls like and if I wanted to play a souls like with challenging bosses then I would just play Elden Ring which is a superior game. GGG this time around doesn't understand the soul of a top down ARPG and what it means to blast through maps, tearing down large packs of enemies and destroying bosses with powerful builds. I feel that PoE 2 wants the player to feel weak and even worse, wants the player to feel slow. Bosses in PoE 2 are more so to punish players with their overturned health bars and one shot mechanics. It takes like 20 minutes to get a boss's health bar down to be low enough where he is almost dead only for the boss to cast his AoE attack that fills the entire screen and one shots and kills the player because the mobility in this game is so slow that it's inefficient to avoid enemy attacks. Health, armor, resistance, all that goes out the window when fighting a boss because they will kill you anyways when you try and face tank it.

I strongly believe that many years ago during the heightening success of Dark Souls, the executives at GGG were really impressed with what Fromsoftware had created that they had plans and concepts to make their very own souls game. But however their parent company Tencent commissioned them to make a sequel to PoE 1 so they had no choice but to make a top down ARPG until the devs thought what if they could try to make both games into one?

Some would argue that PoE 2 isn't really a souls game but I play most top down ARPGs going back to D2 and I have played most souls games and I can tell you that what makes PoE 2 souls like is the experience and challenge of fighting bosses in comparison to dark souls and in contrast to the top town ARPGs where your hulk of a character simply sees bosses at loot piñatas.

My point is that this style of combat is unnatural in a top down ARPG but works in a souls like and trying to do both could be seen as controversial considering how contrasting the two sub genres are from one another. Now in PoE 2 the results of a boss fight are more determined by skill rather than a gear check. Some people may find that fun but Elden Ring would be a better game for it.

I've been playing ARPGs since the original Diablo (24 years now, OMFG I'm old, send help) and PoE2 feels very much like an ARPG. It just doesn't feel like 3.x PoE1, or like D3 or D4, but IMHO those were all deviations from the classic form. For me, PoE2 is like coming home, and I've never actually played any of the Souls games so it's not like I'm on any sort of "git gud" bandwagon.

Having to manually dodge monster attacks is 'unnatural' in an ARPG? How is this any different from PoE 1 pinnacle boss fights?

I'm really puzzled why so many people call PoE 'souls like'? It's because the dedicated movement to avoid monster attacks is called 'dodge roll'? What if it was called 'Whirling Blades'? ...

I have the exact opposite experience - 99% of bosses in PoE 1 are irrelevant and finally we don't need to reach ubers, to have some satisfactory fights in a 'PoE - like' game :). We get them straight from Act 1.

PoE2 offers a freshly new way to experience an ARPG. WHen I saw the first trailers, I didn't want to play it. But while I now have 40h and got really hooked, I realised it's a surprisingly fantastic experience.

Bosses in campaign act 4-6 melted in under 20s, the first 2 acts were harder but respeccing 1-2 times helped a lot. And yes, it's ez to respecc, just sell a few magic items.

Currently I am blasting through t1 maps, with only 1 res capped. Maybe it's time to change your build in some way.

You want another cheap ARPG alternative, of which many exists like you said, where everything is the same as in others?

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morbo#1824 wrote:

Having to manually dodge monster attacks is 'unnatural' in an ARPG? How is this any different from PoE 1 pinnacle boss fights?

I'm really puzzled why so many people call PoE 'souls like'? It's because the dedicated movement to avoid monster attacks is called 'dodge roll'? What if it was called 'Whirling Blades'? ...

I have the exact opposite experience - 99% of bosses in PoE 1 are irrelevant and finally we don't need to reach ubers, to have some satisfactory fights in a 'PoE - like' game :). We get them straight from Act 1.

That is why I love this campaign. I can have a challenge and fun fight before I need to grind dozens and dozens of maps to reach end game bosses.

PoE2 definitely follows original ARPG formula quite closely (but not precisely, and that's good too), born in Diablo 1/2 times.

It's you who doesn't know what an ARPG is.

"ARPG" is a VERY wide term used for many different games. You keep talking about "Dark Souls" and soul-like games, but they are also strictly speaking "Action role-playing games" if we are to listen to several game medias and sites, so is the Witcher 3.

I heard on Twitter/X that we are supposed to use the word "Diablo-like" when it comes to Hack'n Slash ARPGs :P

We all have our personal ideas of what an "ARPG" is or should be. That doesn't mean we are right and have the objective blueprint in the matter. A genre is always evolving. The lates First-person-shooters are pretty far from Wolfenstein 3D.

In my honest opinion, POE2 isn't perfect (it still requires allot of balancing, fine-tuning and polishing), but this is what a Beta is for. Despite this, I think that POE2 is the best ARPG out right now by a long shot (including compared to POE1). I don't disregard the feedback being provided by the playerbase so far, but I hope that GGG doesn't make any rash design/mechanic decisions based on such limited gameplay time (of course baring obvious balance and exploit fixes). It's been 1 week and already everyone is zooming around melting bosses and screens of mobs. The game is not fundamentally too hard, it's just phasing or fine-tuning etc. Loot was a bit too low before, but now they have noticed and are working on this... everyone just needs to be patient.

I really wish GGG would require someone to demonstrate a grade-school-level comprehension of logical fallacies before posting on their forums. That way, people who actually had valid feedback would be able to leave it without it getting drowned out in an ocean of raw sewage.

For instance, this ENTIRE POST is a No True Scotsman fallacy, and it's ridiculous and asinine and has absolutely zero value to anyone.

Genuine question: why do you think that the changes to Path of Exile 2 (which you label as "very souls like") are "unnatural" and to paraphrase your title "are not what an ARPG is"?

I have been playing games in this genre and in the venn diagram of this genre for 25 years. That's easily over a hundred or more games in and around this space that I have personally played. They all vary quite a lot around several core mechanics and incentives that invite you to engage in similar but different ways.

This is not an attempt to devalue your opinion or feedback by weight of my experience nor is this an attempt to persuade you with my experience either. This is a genuine question. What about this is truly not an action roleplaying game?

To simply show you the space to which we are exploring here, here is a list of games which explore this overlap:

Avencast, Book of Demons, Children of Morta, Chronicon, Curse of the Dead Gods, Dungeon Siege, Ember Knights, Exanima, Hades, Helldivers 1, It Lurks Below, No Rest for the Wicked, Nox, Ravenswatch, ShadowFlare, The Ascent, Throne of Darkness, To Kill a God, Unepic, V Rising, Wizard of Legend

I'm intentionally ignoring the very obvious ones.

Among these games we have some combination of the following mechanics:

Dodging, Active Block, Parrying, Party Management, Twinstick Controls, Inventory Management, Gesture Macros, Bottlenecking, Resource Management, Class/Classless Progression, Namelocked/Freeform Combat, Pets/Mercenaries, Isometric/Third-person/Sidescrolling Perspectives, Player versus Player

Path of Exile 1 has spent many leagues exploring how it can bring it more and more mechanics of other games to expand what an ARPG can be. I should expect nothing less of Path of Exile 2 than to continue that trend. If anything, this incarnation is a welcome respite from endless clones of Diablo 2. Even within the Diablo series itself, each game differs quite a lot as you go from one to the other in terms of underlying mechanical incentives.

If you don't like it that's okay. That's even good; you have a preference. However, ARPGs can be a lot of things, and some people specifically like the direction of Path of Exile 2. Nobody is forcing you.