Feedback so far, Crossbow user part 2

Now I have gotten to mapping its time I update my feedback, below is the feedback from my last post, I will add my new thoughts or changes under each point and add anymore stuff I forgot later down.

The Not So Great
1. Dodge roll interrupts reloads, for an ammo mechanic where you already walk slower when reloading have a dodge stop that reload then have a delay once the dodge is done to start the reload again just makes it very punishing to use any skill with a longer reload time.

Even with the changes to dodge rolling this is still quite an issue.

2. Getting stuck by enemies, I often feel like I'm getting boxed in and pushed around by enemies. during the Act1 final boss during the mist phase I had to exalt slam my crossbow for dear life to get just enough damage to be able to kill the adds, as they were pushing me into the path of the wolf jumps. I don't think every single white mob should be able to slide you around like some limp noodle.

This has improved a decent amount with the new dodge roll changes but I do still get stuck at times and with rubberbanding it can sling me back between enemies I rolled out of.

3. Unsatisfying roll, Part of it is you can't roll through enemies particularly easily the other part is for some reason at the end of the roll when you start to get up it slows down your movement greatly making it feel really clunky.

This point still stands

4. Early ammo skills having 1 bolt, combined with issue 1 this resulted in very slow and low damage while just trying to get anywhere in act 1. Over time it got better as I got some support gems but even then the low ammo is still a big issue I find.

Even later game I've found it hard to get more ammo anywhere it matters, needing to get specific rolls on a crossbow to get at most an extra bolt or two make it feel like crossbow is probably very late game oriented, which isn't inherently bad just means gotta be prepared for it.

5. Groups of enemies having a dash/leap attack. There has been a few times where I have faced several enemies capable of leading or dashing at me and doing a decent chunk of damage, the main issue with this is I only have 1 dash meanwhile EACH enemy has one dash attack meaning I can't dodge them all a lot of the time which compounds with the issue stated in point 1.

I've found this to be less of an issue overtime but I am also clearing enemies with much greater ease meaning I probably don't have to deal with there mechanics as much.

6. Lack of movement skills, not having any movement skills or significant speed boost has made most of the act system so far a very slow walking simulator slog. It isn't enjoyable taking literally 5-10min to backtrack down the same area because I missed a boss or something else of note while trying to explore the map.

I discovered a single mobility skin only to realise for some reason it has a really high int requirement making it require much more investment for dex/str builds which feels a bit unfortunate considering one of the int oriented ascendancies already has demonform with its own better dash.

7. Wonky telegraphs, a good chunk of the telegraphs have delayed hits and it feels weird. Like the enemies that explode with fire after a time the ring slowly charges up then when fully charged still takes a second to detonate where normally in games you would dodge just before the ring is full as it would typically explode almost the very moment it fills up.

Still feels a bit wonky but with experience I'm more used to the attacks but still telegraphs arent always great.

8. Losing all loot on death, having the area instances reset AND the loot get deleted on death feels extremely punishing and discouraging it slows down the game greatly and if you happened to kill a boss or hard rare and died at the same time all your hard work is immediately undone on two levels.

This still feels super frustrating especially when I've died to rubberbanding more than once

9. Clunky skill combos, so far trying to combo skills such as armor breaker rounds or several types of grenades has felt very slow and clunky. the time to switch and then fire new ammo or switching between grenades feels too slow, when trying to fire a gas grenade then fragmentation grenade to get the bonus explosion takes too long to not only switch between them but also fire in succession. I feel like when swapping between them there should be a first shot bonus of it being faster or something of the like to reward combing well. I'm sure meta skills will change a lot when I get to them but thats just how its felt for the first 10 hours of gameplay so far.

The combos haven't felt like they got any better and recently I tried using double crossbow with weapon swap to see maybe having more ammo loaded ready would feel good but unfortunately when trying to swap between them and use them fluidly it just keeps forcibly swapping my weapon back to the first one.

10. Very tanky bosses, I feel like a lot of the bosses have been extremely tanky and I have been trying to keep on top of my skilltree and gearing, it feels like some bosses genuinely took 5+ min to kill. I'm not sure how much of this is actually bosses being very slow to kill and how much it is just either my gear/crossbows sucking.

My gears gotten better but I still feel like I lack a solid way to quickly kill bosses despite having a pretty decent crossbow for my level I got off trade and mostly damage nodes on the passive tree.

11. UI, A lot of the UI feels like its become less user friendly in an attempt to be new player friendly. For selecting support gems at no point was it pointed out theres a little button to be able to see all the option instead of a small curated selection, for ages I thought there was extremely limited support gems but it was actually just an option that for some reason is ticked by default. With the text being a lighter colour and in the corner makes it harder for me to see as I have trouble seeing different shades properly so when somethings a bit hidden like that it makes it quite hard. The cosmetics page feels just not great to use as a default, I think the poe1 cosmetics page was much better for quick changing and there should have been a button you could press to bring up the better view and have the current poe2 cosmetic page layout

Having the skill icons on your hotbar not show any useful info while hovering over them is quite annoying sometimes I want to quick check stuff without opening the skill menu, also having the cast without moving being moved to the damage part inside the skill menu is very user unfriendly.
Also not being able to see the party bonus to loot or monster HP easily is a bit annoying.

12. gold being more prominent, A big draw for poe1 to me was how all currencies were crafting materials and even trading with the in game merchants used orbs such as alterations and alchs. having my first buyable options from merchants in the game be gold just felt not great and feels like it makes poe2 lose some of that special poe charm.

still don't like gold

13. Lack of reward, killing a slog of a boss or a rare just feels like punishment as they don't really drop anything a good chunk of the time, if you get lucky you might get an orb. With no real crafting in place and only having slamming as an option this feels doubly punishing.

rewards are slowly improving in maps but definitely don't feel like im getting much risk vs reward, the new sanctum mechanic basically killed all the rewards it came with and made it slower which is just a double loss

Things I forgot

14. No real crafting, the crafting is now back to slam and pray which is just the worst type of crafting, with no benches or harvest ect it feels like im just waiting for chris wilson to descend from the heavens to hand me a well rolled rare.

15. Rubberbanding issues, a lot of the time when I touch enemies or roll into certain attacks I just rubberband back and its super punishing and feels quite awful all around.

16. Ascendancy, having a sanctum mechanic being one of the ways to get your ascendancy points while also making the game slower paced just feels bad on so many levels, not only are you punished for having slower tankier builds but your also punished because all the real loots been deleted from the mechanic. losing runs to rubberbanding and having tons of my honour drop while near full health just sucks. Sanctum should never be a required experience, it was very divisive on whether people loved it or hated it and often required specialized builds to be able to do it effectively.

17. Large maps, theres nothing wrong with a large map by itself but moving at a snails pace and sometimes needing to backtrack it just starts to feel like moving in mud.

18. Limited skillgems, Honestly having a limited amount of each skillgem and supportgem feel like a huge step backwards in diversity and build capability. I haven't seen any skills so far where ive been like woah that should be limited to one. I feel like this is simply a step in the wrong direction.

19. Lack of defensive nodes, In the passive tree losing the HP and ES nodes feels like your even more dependent on campaign RNG not to get oneshot, without decent rolls early armour and evasion also don't do a ton. to me it doesnt feel great but it might feel better once at true endgame.

20. Everything being the same colour, A really bad habit from poe1 which seems to have carried over is to make everything about boss fights the same god damn colour, the bosses, the areans, the attacks. for some reason a theme is picked and only one exact colour is used for 90% of the fight. I have partial colour blindess and a lot of the time I have trouble WTF is happening without doing a fight a ton of times because things are even faint or the same colour as everything else.
the lack of colour blind options is also lame.

The Good Stuff


1. Very pretty, the game looks much nicer now with stuff like burning ground being a nice and distinct fire and a good chunk of the cosmetics that are in the currently look great and have great reflections going on.

2. Poe lore, so far seems like a solid continuation of poe lore with some known names being sprinkled in.

3. Explosive shot for the crossbow feels pretty good and theres a few other skills that seem quite cool and have a good feel to them. once some of the clunkiness is worked out they will be brilliant to build around.

4. Having cosmetics and stash tabs carry over is a great sign of caring about the players.

5. Voice lines, the characters seem to have good voice lines and merc has had some good ones while out and about.

6. Actual difficulty hasn't been too high things are just a bit spongey, but overall challenge level has been fine

My best suggestion is get a character past level 55 and farm a few uncut tier 3 support gems. Then start a crossbow character and start with nimble reload support. Game changing.

yeah I wanted to go through and get a feel for the new stuff since ive played a lot of the stuff available to poe1