Feedback thus far from 50-ish hours (Trials are bad and GGG should feel bad.)

So I've now finished Act 3 and gone slightly into Act 4. I feel like now would be a good time to do another feedback thread on what I'm feeling at this point compared to the 20 hour mark. (No, it didn't take me 30 hours to clear Act 2 lol. I've been AFK for a good chunk of them all. That's just the number of hours Steam is telling me.)

Some of the problems I noticed earlier have been resolved, or are weirdly absent later on. So I'm going to over the points I made in my last feedback thread and if I think they still apply, along with new ones I've encountered. Strap in, cause this is gonna be a long one.

1. Loot feels off. (FIXED?)
The loot update, at least to me, largely fixed this problem; at least from a pre-endgame perspective. You get so many more rare drops and so much more currency from killing rare mobs now. It feels great, and a lot more how an ARPG should feel. I've only played a few hours since the patch dropped, but in that time I went from lacking everything but Orbs of Transmutation and Augmentation, to having multiples of every non-deep endgame orb except Alchemy. I've been inundated with rare item drops, which has massively boosted my Regal income. I still can't say if this is going to not be a problem in mapping, but at least from a campaign perspective and the notion of it being a turn-off to new players, this issue is resolved... with one exception. Support gems. Early game, you get spammed with them. After around halfway through Act 2 though, they just... completely stop dropping. Its weird. We get a massive over-abundance of skill gems, but no support. Whereas early game, its the opposite.

SOLITION: Please consider balancing out the rates of skill/support gem drops for campaign. It feels shit to want to try out a new build but just not having the supports necessary to do it.

2. Maps are WAY too big (In Act 2).
Last thread I gave feedback that maps partway through the game became massively oversized and obnoxiously sloggy to get through. I know that the waypoint change has been announced and they have said they intend to look at mob density. Both of these are good changes, but are not a replacement for just lowering the zone size of several areas.
However, in the time since, I've come to discern that this problem, strangely, only really exists in Act 2. Once you get to Act 3, map size goes back to how it was in Act 1, which IMO, was fine.
Once the waypoint change happens, I think map size in Acts 1 and 3 and any Atlas maps based on those zones will be fine. However, I do not think the waypoint change is an adequate solution to the problem of Act 2. Act 2's maps are just insufferably large and need to be reduced by a notable amount.

SOLUTION: Previously, I suggested 20-40% depending on the map. With the waypoint change, I change that suggestion to a flat 20%. But, something still needs to happen to prevent Act 2 from being an obnoxious slog.

3. The game is still very new player unfriendly, in very bad ways.
This remains entirely true. The loot change will help, but it won't be enough. There are too many problems with the game right now that make it unapproachable to fresh blood.
- The bloated map sizes in Act 2.
- The poor explanation of the necessity of survivability and resistances.
- Still having the PoE1 problem of not actually breaking down what kills you at any given time, preventing new players from understanding what they need to change to be able to take a hit.
- The INSANE difficulty of some bosses when you consider many players won't understand how to build optimized characters and won't be able to do enough DPS to kill these bosses in a reasonable amount of time. (Which weirdly, once again, is another problem that is largely NOT in Act 3 but was especially notable in Act 2. Seriously, was Act 2 just designed by a completely different developer or some shit?)

But the worst one of all is the abomination that is Trials. But don't worry, we'll get there. Oh, we'll fucking get there.

SOLUTION: Too many problems to really offer a single solution. These need to be tackled in a far more refined way.

4. Bosses are too bloated and too punishing for campaign play.
Everything I said in my last thread by and large still applies here, with the strange exception that for some reason, as stated in the last point, this eases off somewhat in Act 3. I'd really like to know who thought it was a good idea to have hyper challenging boss encounters in an earlier point where players are not as invested and more prone to quitting than there are deeper into the campaign. That person is not very smart.

Just to recap: I'm 100% for the difficulty. I just believe that it should be reserved for the endgame content, not the mandatory campaign content. New players should be eased into things and be allowed to have their muscle memory developed over time, not expected to go all fucking out at the very end of Act 1 after just a few hours of play.

SOLUTION: Reduce boss difficulty across the board for the entire campaign, having it gradually increase as you get to later Acts. Have the difficulty come later, and let the game "train" you to play against it. There's a reason Elden Ring doesn't open up with fuckin' Maliketh.

Now, for the new stuff. I'm gonna be honest, I may get a bit heated before the end.

5. The Narrative is poorly portrayed thus far.
For as much as Jonathan went on in the stream about how ya'll went so hard on trying to make a compelling narrative at this point... you really need to hire a proper narrative director. The world building of PoE is fantastic. Its always been cool, but always lacked in depth. Now, you're doing a good job fleshing elements out, making us interested in learning more. That's all good.

But then you're doing things like the following. Note that what comes will technically be a spoiler, so I'm going to have this entire section covered with spoiler for brevity's sake. I don't think it would actually matter to the vast majority of players... and, that's kind of the problem.



Okay, that's enough rambling about narrative. Let's get on to the real problem. And oh, I've got a lot to say here.

5. THE NEW BIG ONE: Trials are an abomination against the good name of the LORD God on high and will be cast into the lake of fire along with the devil and his angels.

Holy fucking shit guys. Holy fucking shit. GGG. I love you. I know you're good at what you do. You've made content I love, you've made content I hate, you've made content that I'm lukewarm to. You've always known, at the very least, that all flavors of content should be OPTIONAL in some form or another so that people who don't like it, don't have to engage with it.

And so I am forced to put forward the question: How did you fuck this up so bad?

Trials are horrid, in every sense of the word. I already had my reservations about being forced to play fucking Sanctum to ascend. I already mentioned briefly in my original feedback about how much I hated having to do it in Act 2. But as I get deeper into the game, and ESPECIALLY now that I've had the "privilege" of contending with the utter abomination that is New-Ultimatum, I can't let this affront stand any longer.

First, let's go over Sanctum. Sanctum is iredeemable. I'm sorry to whatever one dev insists that Sanctum is their magnum opus. The same one who surely insisted on making it Maystay in PoE1 too which inevitably resulted in it being barely engaged with because nobody wants to deal with this crap. But as the OVERWHELMING feedback on the matter across every community hub, these forums included, will show you: We, the players, LOATHE Sanctum. As it currently stands, we will always loathe Sanctum. There is nothing you can do to make us not loathe Sanctum as it exists right now. You either need to go back to the drawing board and accept that some elements of it need to be thrown in the fuckin' trash, or just finally let Sanctum as a whole fucking go.

I'm sure there's a small contingent who think that Sanctum is the best thing since sliced bread. They are NOT worth the amount of people this matter will cause to drop the game entirely because of having to deal with this bullshit, I promise you.

The pinnacle sin, the raw element that has always, and will always make everyone hate Sanctum no matter what you do, is Honor. Honor does not function with PoE2 just as it did not function with PoE1. And I say that as someone who managed to clear his Trial of Sekhama on-level with only about 15-20% Honor Loss, 100% of which was from the boss at the end. I'll admit, its "better" this time around than it was in 1, but that doesn't make it good, tolerable, or even remotely fun. Content being clear-able does not make content enjoyable. I've already had one friend drop the game over Sanctum, and I suspect two more will follow. Sanctum is simply not enjoyable and will not be enjoyable no matter what you do, so long as honor exists in its current state.
I'll even go so far as to admit, aside from the obnoxious "death crystal race" rooms, the actual design of Sekhama is not bad. The traps are fine, the enemies attack too fast when you factor in Honor but would be fine on their own. The boss that I've encountered, was fun. If it weren't for honor, it would just be a better, more straight-forward Labyrinth with a roguelite twist on top. That would be great. Honor, makes it not great. Honor makes it insufferably stressful and unfun.

SOLUTION: The only conceivable way I can see Honor being permitted to continue existing is if its a per-room thing. That is to say, you are not at risk EVER of being chip-damaged out of honor over the course of a run. Honor is specifically just there to force you to perform well in a specific room, and refills IN FULL between each room.
Or, the far easier solution and likely far more enjoyable solution: Yeet that shit into the stratosphere and just let Sekhama not be Sanctum. Leave in the Slay The Spire esk room structure, debuffs and buffs, and let the only thing that ejects us from a run, just like Labyrinth, be death. No more Honor, infinitely more fun.

Now, onto the second travesty against the good in our world: Trial of Chaos.

Hyperbole aside, I'm going to admit right off the bat: Trial of Chaos is NOT fundamentally flawed like Sanctum. It is just, woefully, woefully, woefully overtuned. And also technically botched. I spent at LEAST three hours of my time during Act 3 trying to clear Chaos on-level. My experience, went as such:

- Get to the boss with three insufferable modifiers. Die to modifiers instead of boss.
- Start run again. Crash halfway through.
- Get to boss again. New boss, don't know it. Die to not knowing mechanics. Have to start an entire new run.
- Get to boss again. Crash 4 seconds after engaging.
- Start run again. Crash instantly.
- Start run again. Crash halfway through.
- Start run again. Crash 3/4ths of the way through.
- Get to boss again. Crash 4 seconds after engaging.
- Get to boss again. Die to modifiers instead of boss.
- Start run again. Kill myself 2 rooms in because the game decided it would be a funny prank to only give me modifier choices that I know are going to completely brick my run.
- Get to boss again. Crash 4 seconds after engaging.

Notice the problems?

Now to be fair, I went back and finished my Trial today, deciding to ultimately just let myself out-level and trivialize it over suffering through doing it the "intended" way. Today at least, I didn't crash or have any technical problems. Its entirely possible the hotfix that addressed some crashing fixed it. But, holy fucking shit man. How did you guys let it go live in this state? It felt like it wasn't playtested at fucking all. I didn't even mention the FPS drops and general shoddy and unstable feeling, which I have not gotten ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE GAME outside of Chaos.

And the balancing, my god. It so miserable. What mentally unhinged developer thought that "Every single hit poisons and bleeds you" is even remotely fucking acceptable? What about "Your resistances go down by 50%?" Not to mention all the old modifiers under classic "Arena" sanctum have been made utterly insufferable, like the lightning runes used to take so much longer to actually go off by standing on them... back when we moved at twenty times the speed we do now, yet now go off rapid-pace? Or god, the statues. Why does taking the petrified statues ONE TIME make it so that my room is spammed with like FORTY of the fuckin' things?

The reason Ultimatum in PoE1 worked is because all it ever was, was an arena that you had to survive in for a time. All of the modifiers could be methodically designed for that one scenario and make that one scenario as engaging as it could possibly be. In this new variant, it feels like you just took a lot of the modifiers and slapped them into the new iteration with no real thought as to how they would interact, like "Ehhh they got dodge roll it'll be fine lmaoooooo". Well, it ain't fine. Its horrible.

SOLUTION: EVERY. SINGLE. MODIFIER. Needs to be tuned down. Except like, the grasping vines on hit one. That one probably needs to be tuned up, because it does fucking nothing. The whole point of Ultimatum is supposed to be temptation to push a little bit further for better rewards. As it currently stands, just the first 4 rooms in this new iteration are more stressful than going all the way in old Ultimatum, because the initial iterations of these modifiers are COMPLETELY unreasonable in their impact. To give an example, the petrification statues mod should be like, 1/4th the number of statues it has right now. Then, just like in Ultimatum, each room finished should "prioritize" feeding you the option of getting higher levels of the ones you already took, so you can get more and more petrification statues until they're filling up to the level they are now on the MAX taking of the mod.

Honestly? Do that, and Chaos will be fine. Fun, even. If Chaos wasn't so over-bloated in overtuned mods, I could 100% see myself prioritizing it as an endgame pillar. The concept, is fun! Its just way, way, way too much right out the gate right now. The idea that you expect people to do LONGER runs to get later ascensions is insane. Like I said initially, unlike Sanctum, Chaos is not fundamentally flawed. Its just massively, MASSIVELY overtuned.

That's all of the real elements of note to mention thus far. But, I would like to put forward one more concern I now have:

???. One-Death limit seems very problematic for the endgame.
Experiencing the abject hell of having to spam Chaos over and over and over, and having to start over from scratch after every death, makes me extremely concerned about something I was already concerned about: This stalwart mentality the devs have towards the endgame content all being "one fail and you're out". It might not be so bad for the individual maps, but for bosses? It really does seems like it will stonewall the vast majority of players from having any desire to really engage with the Atlas.
When I went back to Chaos today, TEN levels over the zone level, I fought a boss I'd never seen before. A lightning bird thing. Up to this point, I'd only gotten to see two bosses in Chaos: The Blood Bird, and the Chimera, the latter of which being a repeat of the one we fight in Campaign. Fighting the Blood Bird was already annoying for much the same reason; the fact I had to go through 10-15 minute re-runs of the trial every time I wanted a chance to learn its mechanics. This was further compounded by all the fucking crashing, but even without the crashing, it would have been extremely obnoxious to have to gamble on getting a good set of manageable modifiers. And this is on the content where our coin ISN'T USED every time we fail. In most cases, just going back in won't even be viable because you won't have more coins to burn.
So anyway, going back to today: Fought this lightning bird. Not a difficult fight + overleveled. However, partway through it does a mechanic with almost no buildup where it turns into a giant tornado and deals UNGODLY damage to you as long as you're inside its radius, which you will be if you're nearby (which you will be, because its how to stop it from using more annoying attacks) if you don't know the tell. In otherwords, the first time you do this fight, you're almost guaranteed to die and kill your coin off an ENTIRELY cheap mechanic that you literally cannot see coming until its already killed you if you're either nearby for the sake of bait/dodging its melee attacks... or, you know, a melee, who don't have a choice in the matter.
This makes me really uneasy about the idea of this being a thing for serious content, and especially, God forbid, pinnacle bosses. The idea of us having to go in blind, fail, and spend who knows how much time just to try again, just sounds like a miserable endgame structure. Just having to rerun a guaranteed trial is frustrating enough just because of the raw time commitment to get back for the next attempt. Its like classic Dark Souls run-back times except extended several-fold. And at least those were brainless and not really stressful.
I'm not going to 100% say its definitely a problem since I'm not there yet. But, I am anticipating it greatly now whereas prior I was at least giving it the benefit of the doubt. If it really is like this throughout the whole of mapping, it is non-negotiable that this needs to be changed. Bosses need to go back to giving us a set number of attempts via portals or the like. The idea of spending as little as a half hour, much less potential hours, vrying for just the chance to go back and die again while I learn more mechanics, seeks to assassinate what desire currently exists in me to engage with the Atlas at all once I reach it.

But, that's a problem for then, not now. For now, that's my feedback thus far. Hope it gives some insight. I'll probably do one more big feedback post once I hit the Endgame properly and get a perspective of what mapping is like in its current state.

"

First, let's go over Sanctum. Sanctum is iredeemable. I'm sorry to whatever one dev insists that Sanctum is their magnum opus. The same one who surely insisted on making it Maystay in PoE1 too which inevitably resulted in it being barely engaged with because nobody wants to deal with this crap. But as the OVERWHELMING feedback on the matter across every community hub, these forums included, will show you: We, the players, LOATHE Sanctum. As it currently stands, we will always loathe Sanctum. There is nothing you can do to make us not loathe Sanctum as it exists right now. You either need to go back to the drawing board and accept that some elements of it need to be thrown in the fuckin' trash, or just finally let Sanctum as a whole fucking go.

This.....

Preach

Lets just leave both Sanctum and Ultimatum in PoE1 where they belong. Experiment failed, delete them and come up with something NOT worse than the content they are replacing. The game is not even out yet and I'm already feeling the league bloat.

I fully aggree on the last 3. Tirals are horrible. Espacially when you try and do your third one. Everything is overtuned and unfun. I see no point in leveling to 80 before doing my lvl 60 trial and even than probably fail a couple of times. I just tried a level 63, level 64 and level 65 Ultimatum on my level 73 Character and everytime I had to choose between absolutely abysmal debuffs, resulting in mobs 10 levels below me (!!!) oneshotting my 50% Armor, 2k Life, 60% res Titan or beeing shit on by the debuffs during the Boss.

And 1 Portal on Maps is just riduculous in the current state of possible maplayout & monser-combinations.
I frequently encounter groups of shotgunning chaoscasters/archers guarding doorways in indoor-layouts on white/blue T1-T3 Maps, when you have a wooping 10% chaos res. Yeah, I rahter play another char through the campaing than deal with that shit.

Game overall is fantastic, but Endgame and Trials need way more love.

"

h3xd#1039 wrote:

Lets just leave both Sanctum and Ultimatum in PoE1 where they belong. Experiment failed, delete them and come up with something NOT worse than the content they are replacing. The game is not even out yet and I'm already feeling the league bloat.

I really don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Trial of Chaos conceptually. It just needs to be tuned down. Sanctum, yeah like I said in the OP. Fuck it and chuck it.