Progression limitations in the endgame grind are disheartening and turning me/my friends away.

My friends and I don't mind the function of the maps, nor of the actual atlas itself, nor even of the atlas passives.

We don't mind the acts incentivizing us to optimize our builds and learn enemy attack patterns/dodge timing/positioning strategy.

We don't even necessarily mind the raw difficulty of stacking defenses, though honestly that's a real thorn in my side.

What we mind is the confluence of these things in a game which still throws wacky amounts of crap at us like PoE 1 does.
What we mind is the fact that learning attack patterns means nothing in a torrent of enemy attacks whose telegraphy barely matters at their speed.
What we mind is that having fun in the game and progression are often mutually exclusive.

I want to have fun with my builds and not amble around spamming spark all day. But currently a shock sorceress's only viable option is...that. And I still die frequently from getting stunned or frozen a single time, and I'm not going to find a second charm slot until what level?

There's a point where punishment for carelessness crosses the line into sadism.
I want to progress in my maps.
I can't afford to die a single time if I want to do that, much less try a juiced map (as if it were worth it to try that, with this abysmal currency drop rate and variety).
Why? Why one life?

We don't know what you expect of us in maps. We can't even benefit from party play because you can't revive allies in them.

The one life thing is, frankly, the worst offense. Why even open six portals regardless of party size? What an insult.
If you're going to give us only one life, don't make the breaches/etc in maps disappear when we die.
If you're going to force us to spend ten minutes or more per map, don't make it feel like we're playing Ruthless.

PoE 1 got the difficulty thing down. We got to choose our challenge.

This is just more grind for less reward. Removing the exp penalty on death isn't enough, and we don't even get that boon in maps.

We don't think this game is trash. It has a level of charm that PoE 1 hasn't had in a while, at least from my standpoint.

sorc are just essentially useless for end game now that they nerfed Cast on

other classes do it 10x as fast 10x as much survivability

rip my last week of playing lol

I think the OP has nailed it on the head. If GGG want to expand their customer base beyond those that played POE 1, then the current state of the game is not going to fly.

In their latest interview there was one glaring question missing, this being how many hours is a person meant to play in a league to complete the content ?

Even some of the top content makers have mentioned this. If it is going beyond 100 hours a lot of people are not going to bother. A lot of people will also be put off by repeating the campaign to try another build due to its length mainly down to map size.

I went back to POE 1 yesterday, dropped into delve and it felt so much better.

GGG are going to have to show some more respect for players time, or they might find a current competitor improves or a new one appears.

Also new players will be put off by how opaque some of the systems still are and how there is a lack of consistency in their implementation(I lament for the poor warriors).

yeah they unnecessarily changed things that worked perfectly well in PoE1 for no reason other than try to reinvent the wheel.

I'm sure they'll tune it in the future, but PoE1 had such a good endgame there was no need to change it. The original idea they had of PoE2 being only a separate campaign was perfect

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nitefox1337#3569 wrote:

This game is made from Diablo 2 psychos for PoEFanboy psychos.

Its evident that they do not want any Casuals playing their game or expand the game to a bigger audience.

Casuals will never tolerate XP Loss, Map Loss, Progress Loss in anyway.

As soon as Marvel Rivals is available AND working properly: PoE2 Uninstall until they fix the game or bring an easy difficulty for Casual Players who have other stuff to do.

I will tolerate some extent of losses, not the xp though. I really didn't like Jonathans take on xp loss "it keeps you where you belong", how the hell should I progress and improve if xp loss is keeping me in the same place. That just kills the game for me, I'm not going to lower tier for safe (not to mention super slow) grinding, I want to challenge my build even if I occasionally die. If you stop me from progressing that is game over in an arpg.

For the sake of accessibility the key area of improvement is communication between the game and the player.

Most of the tool-tips will have to change. Take the atlas passive tree and imagine you did not learn the game by means of watching hours upon hours of guides. Why would you chose most of these options? They all sound terrible with no upside mentioned to them.

People will have to get a message why they died not a message telling them what they already know: they died. e.g. Player 1 died from [MobName] [damage type]. These loot games put us in the loop of toxic self-improvement, but you need information to feed that constant self-improvement. Put the finger in the wound of thing you have not improved to much. instead of the current PoE experience of, oh well I died on some level 81 map in one hit, but why? Who knows?

the thing which never changed in ten years is every character ultimately devolving into an onscreen inferno of things just exploding for reasons you barely understand anymore. In this regard, the game is similar to the Vampire Survivors endgame. But instead of a 30 minute run to end at such a state, PoE has months of grind and most players will never reach that state. I think the trick here is not how most builds perform at level 90+ with god gear, but at the intermediate levels between 60 and 85. This is the area in which you suffer with a weak build, or have a breeze (especially with indirect fighting builds such as totems and minions)

If I had a gripe with the game, it is how I gear. Which means farming for currency and buying every items I use. Drops hate me, crafting hates me and is better spend on upgrading maps to farm more currency anyway. Do I have a sales tab? Sure? Do I have time to sell stuff? No.