"Dodge roll constantly or die and start over" is not fun for me.

I don't really like the dodge roll/one-shot gameplay in PoE2. I'm just waiting a month until they eventually see the loss of hundreds of thousands of players, including those with five or ten or more supporter packs to their names, not playing the game, and getting a phone call from Tencent to change it. They changed PoE1, and they will change PoE2. Principles are all well and good, but ego, insecurity, and principles don't create money.

I think one misconception I hear from the "opposition" is that I want the game to be "easy" or as "zoomy" as PoE1, but I just want the game to be tailored to what I actually find fun about ARPGs. When I am constantly dodge rolling and trying to avoid one-shots for 10+ minutes, I am not having fun. This is doing something I don't find satisfying or enjoyable, even if I win. I find the most fun in customizing my build, finding and swapping gear, and that sort of thing. If I am stuck on a boss, smacking my head against a wall, dying all the time, I am honestly not doing the things I like for long periods of time. And that's the rub with the difficult boss fights— even if I win, I don't feel satisfied. I feel hollow, and I just look back on the fight and really hate it. I never felt like that in Diablo 2 or PoE1.

The biggest problem with the dodge roll mechanics in boss fights is that it actually dramatically diminishes your customization in the game. In the moment where you are forced to dodge roll, nothing else matters—you are not attacking with skills, your defenses don't matter, etc. You either execute the dodge roll, or you don't. Everything else other than the dodge roll doesn't matter. It takes all the strategy and planning out of the game and makes it more about just being a brutal, punishing action game. In a game where your choices are supposed to matter, in that moment where you are asked to dodge roll—and it comes up way too much for my liking—none of your decisions that you made up to that point honestly matter. "You dodge, or you don't and must repeat it from the beginning." Not fun.

I'd play pure action games with no RPG mechanics at all if I wanted to play a game like that, but I don't. I haven't played those games for decades because I don't like them.

Have you tried adding something defensive into your build/equipment?

There's health/regen/en. shield/shield/evasion/resistances and a few other more rare forms of increasing staying power.

If you add enough of those, you won't really need to dodge roll most of the time.