The game is just so incredibly boring IMO.

So, it's not difficult. I've one shot most bosses and pretty much figured out the rest, having now made it to cruel on a lvl 50 ranger. A handfull caused a handfull of deaths each and that's fine. But i just can't play the game anymore because it's just so incredibly tedious.

I can get over the frustration of one shot mechanics and learning bosses, though i do think training people to roll all of act one and then ending it with a boss that requires you to run a bit and then roll instead of panic-hitting the space bar is a bit cruel. But it's the only one that really gave me trouble in the end. Honestly, boss fights is the last part of the game that i've got a problem with by now.

The white mobs take ages to kill compare to PoE 1. Now, i never did mapping in 2000 hours of PoE1 play so i don't care for the zoomies. I always just leveled characters until it started dying in later acts cause i refused to build defense, then just restarted a new character to see new skills (and i was fine with that). I've seen the campaign of PoE1 more than most people with 20k hours, simply because i love building skills and seeing what happens. I'm fine with a slower walking speed compared to mappers.

Here, white mobs are bullet sponges that offer no challenge. The ONLY time, literally the only time minions take me out is if they overwhelm me with numbers and unfair mechanics - closing the distance rapidly en masse and then pushing me into a corner. It's unfair, because i can still react fast enough to try and shoot my way out of it - but i don't do enough damage to get myself out before i'm dead, which is a stat based limitation and not a skill based limitation. The dodgeroll change helped there, but ironically, it also trivializes that danger almost entirely.

Every other time, i blaze past white, blue and even yellow mobs without much issue. There's no danger or challenge, which is what the devs clearly tried to go for with the "souls like" approach. So instead, it's tedium. I don't understand why i'm forced to take so long on cannon fodder in a ARPG, while at the same time i can trivialize yellow mobs with electrocute and stuns. Killing everything *was* the AoE crowd control. Now i'm just playing backpedal simulator.

The design of trying to force players to use multiple skills instead of just 1 by slowing things down also just... makes things boring. It's really not hard to kite mobs over lightning rod arrows and then hit them with lightning arrow. But it does take 3 shots to lay the arrows down, then 3-5 shots to chain all the mobs to death. Rather than the PoE 1 method of.... just 2-3 shots of lightning arrow to the face. Again, just talking campaign here, since i literally never moved beyond that to mapping. I'm feeling like i'm playing the same game, dripped in molasses.

I'd much rather see white mobs health reduced by 50%, and blue/yellow health and speed buffed to make them actually a threat. I'm not against the souls-like gameplay! But this isn't elden ring, the pack density is VASTLY HIGHER, so going for the "every mob is dangerous so watch your back!" just doesn't work here. Which leads to this weird middle of the road where 95% of the time white mobs don't present danger; until you walk into an area with a fast closing ambush and they gank you. It's not fun.

Again i'm bored as a result because i feel like i'm playing a game that doesn't know what it wants to be. There's too many mobs to offer any real danger other than taking control away from players to nuke them - and then all mobs respawn. If there's any evidence that shows this game is just copying Dark Souls without understanding why those games have those mechanics, it's that.

WHY do the mobs respawn when the game's supposed to be about near endless grinding at end-game? Sure i like some challenge in the campaign - from *bosses*. If i first die due to some unfair pinning, and THEN i've gotta kill *all the way back to where i was*, i'm just frustrated, not *entertained*. It's supposed to be an entertainment product. I understand you don't want the campaign to be as easy to blaze through as in PoE1, but respawning the entire map just kills the feeling of progression towards said end game. I've made lots of builds that died lots of times in one specific map, and i can tell you, if those mobs respawned i wouldn't have been able to progress and i would've quit PoE1 long ago.

I never feel like my time is appreciated in this game, i rather get a sense it wants to laugh at me to feel good. When i die i feel bullied, not like the game gave me a fair shot and i simply messed up. When the game gives me a fair shot, it's trivial and there's no real challenge. Again, the game wants to be dark souls and PoE in one, so everything is supposed to be beatable almost naked, but at the same time, you're supposed to collect gear to get much stronger, so the bosses are trivial until they do one mechanic which is near unavoidable simply as a gear check (and mostly only on the act-end bosses too). Until you figure it out and it's trivial again. If there's a happy medium, this game ain't it.

The map size adds to that. I can't believe that movement speed was slowed down, quicksilver flasks and travel skills were taken out, AND THEN map size was increased by like 50%.

Every single map overstays its welcome. Every single campaign map i've played i was happy to be through when i'd fully cleared it. The devs don't seem to realize that, with the new map design/generation making it possible for bosses to be everywhere, there's alot of backtracking involved. Without movement skills, without flasks. It's BOOOOORRRIIIINNNGGG if i've missed just a little bit of the fog of war on the other side of the map, turns out that's where the boss is after i spent an hour clearing the rest, so now i get to walk ages for my trouble. After clearing an entire map for no reason (no need to grind when boss mechanics are skill based). They're not that interesting the designs of the map basically repeat the entire map. The vaal city was just one corridor after another. For ALOT of corridors.

Add mounts. How you're gonna so blatantly copy another game but refuse to add something like Diablo like mounts? Can only be used out of combat, get killed out from under you so you can't ride past mobs so it can't be used to skip and only to backtrack, increases movement speed by 50% while mounted. You can even sell more microtransactions! Just get me out of this tedium please.

The skill system comes ontop of that, and it's why i started writing this post because i just can't take it anymore. PoE1's gem system might have its flaws sure but it's 10 times better than PoE2.

I'm level 50 now on my main, just passed into cruel, and i've found ONE lesser jewelers orb. Consequently, at a time both in level and certainly in real-life playtime in PoE1 where i've got like 4 out of 5 pieces 4 linked, i now only have 1 3 link skill. Got the bright idea to use the currency exchange instead to buy more lessers. But guess what? That only improves my gem to 3 slots. I need a greater orb if i want 4 slots on my main skill.

ONE greater costs 23 chaos. I have 7. And like 10 skills to upgrade. At level 50. Days into launch.

*Get the FUCK out of here*.

Aside from the fact it's incredibly stupid i can't bring up the skills window like a spell book and i have to use a skill gem to actually see what's possible in the game. Aside from the fact i've got 1/2 a stash tab filled with active skill gems, with 3 spirit gems, and only 6 lvl 2 support gems left cause i had to use em. It is REALLY bothersome i can't just buy supports with currency whenever i want. But not being able to get links when that was *advertised* as one of the main features of PoE2, being able to 6 link everything - i'm out. It's too much.

Another big reason there being that the supports *suuuuccckkk*. Yknow i damn near quit the game in act 1 a while after i got the first support gem and i decided to go for scattershot on lightning arrow. Why does it drop damage by 50%?!

Like it wasn't boring enough having to put 10 shots into a crowd to take it down, lets up it to 12 by adding more AoE ability (?!). Same problem with chain. Where is the damage?! Everything is such a slog. And that's with keeping my weapon up to date, which is where all the damage is located anyways these days, so i never buy armor and am totally fine even at -5% lightning resistance.

And then i figure out i can hit the "all gems" button as well and i'm not limited to the recommended option, which as described, are stupid and suck. It took me ages to kill things when i added area concentration damage to lightning rod and scatter shot to lightning arrow. I swap those around - and stuff melts away. Sure it still takes ages to put 3x3 shots into the ground, but atleast then 3 lightning arrows take care of business. And kiting isn't hard i played WoW for a decade.

There is *wild* variation between what skills are useful where and when depending on supports, because the game again is trying to be 2 things at once. It's trying to be souls-like with defined linear skill trees based on weapons and a set rotation based on weapon properties, and it's trying to be PoE-like with its variation in skills and abilities. And it doesn't work.

What i'd recommend is just... just scrap the whole thing. Jewelers orbs are *dumb as hell*, you're locking your main draw of the game behind RNG, and badly tuned RNG as well. There should be no reason why i can't use eye of winter at level 1 honestly, that's just ancient design that's added in cause it's always been this way. The damage should scale, and it allows you to make the rest of the spells comparable in power from the start.

Just give me a spell book where i can just drag and drop spells, please. If you want them to unlock over time anyway just go with the good ol' fashioned levels rather than RNG droppables. If this game takes any clues from Diablo it feels like Diablo 1 with its droppable skillbooks rather than the more refined Diablo 2. Though i'm just eating myself up on my sorcerer until i can finally get eye of winter, which is what i really want, so i'm playing 20-30 hours *to start having fun*. PoE1 was different because the rest of the skills were fun as well, even from level 1. Just have them level up with me, why do i even need to grind for skills AND grind for damage/defences through better gear?

Oh, the passive tree. What a waste. It's far too overcomplicated for the clearly obvious linear talent trees the devs desperately want to have. I don't feel i have much choice, nor do i feel it matters much, because the tree feels it's genuinely pushing me into a direction i don't necessarily want to go.

Just type in "Projectile Damage" in the skill tree search function. Or "Lightning Damage". Then realize i'm a ranger with 5 lightning skills. This is the flipside of the souls-like design of trying to squeeze high levels of skill into an RPG, and doing it poorly.

In PoE1 i knew glass cannons were impossible in the late game because you were forced to build defense, and i accepted that. But in PoE2, glass cannons are impossible because *everything* is a glass cannon. And everything is tanky. And everything does comparable, low damage. Because skill is a much bigger factor by design, so skill can also trivialize things. Until the devs don't want it to, at which point you HAVE to grind no matter how skilled you are, as some unfair mechanic *will* hit you, so you need defences to not-get one shot.

The only real specialization i have is shock and electrocute. Which is just the lightning version of Freeze. Which is just the cold version of Stun/Daze. Which is just the physical version of Pin. Enshitification through homogenization. I'd build damage to make it less boring, but as shown, the tree has little damage nodes for my build. Know the first actual damage nodes i took while building out the travel path? Higher bonuses from equipped quiver. The boring, but undoudtedly most efficient option, as my mage took +20% cold damage and that didn't seem to do shit, while i again don't have that many damage nodes to begin with.

Also, the ascendencies suck, atleast for the ranger. 5 passive skill points on the pathfinder, really? C'mon that's just creatively bankrupt. If i'm non-poison and i want pathfinder i have a choice between that or "speed unaffected by slows". Really?

Meanwhile Deadeye is basically a question of "do i want frenzy charges or not?" Which with their current design, no i don't. What do they even do? Doesn't look like they allow me to attack faster so what's the point? Oh to consume them like some sort of combo system? Using Barrage, specifically? Which really doesn't do that much more damage on a boss when i shoot 4 storm arrows into him instead of 1? Great. I just do the combo of electrocute-lightning mark-barrage-storm arrow spam because it's expected of me, not cause it feels good. Might lose the estus-battle if i don't stun the enemy, which is what the game now comes down to with slow-spaced attacks. Half the time i get hit on purpose cause i know the flask will heal me before the boss even goes into the next attack pattern.

It's not that i don't dodge, it's that i'm so bored and unfocused that i miss the dodge, cause it doesn't matter anyway. As long as i can take 1 hit it's an estus battle, and thanks to the new flask design, i have plenty of charges. Ofcourse i'm gonna run a flask with the mod that gives me a chance on hit to give a charge, and that gives more life back as well. Again, a clear clashing between the PoE design of being able to get better or more tuned flasks, and the souls design where the flask is always the same so boss health and pacing is based on the total amount of flask charges you have or are supposed to have at that given time. PoE has to take a wider range because flasks can be modded or not modded, both should be possible, so the better gear becomes more trivial, returning the game to PoE1 levels of triviality on bosses - but without the ability to kill them quickly and it's a slog no matter what you do. Even Doryani with his bullshit room wide instakill laser went down in 5 tries (cause i just started hugging him the machine, and as soon as i had that one figured out, the fight was trivialized again).

The short of it all is simply this: There's no catharsis in the game. I'm not getting the dopamine shot of the power fantasy that PoE1 is, and i'm not getting the fix of accomplishing something difficult against all odds like in souls games or how i used to feel after killing a difficult WoW boss. Bosses aren't difficult, just frustrating at times. The moment you figure out how they work the question becomes why should this take so long. Oh sure - the first time is fun, and i'll bet alot of reactions on the forums are basing themselves on doing the bosses the first time. But what after 20 times when you already know the mechanics?

PoE1 as a catharsis simulator was made, *specifically*, because Diablo 2 characters break that game engine if you play it long enough. Literally, an Amazon with 2x 50% to trigger lvl 49 poison nova rings on hit, and enough attack speed to throw 17 lightning javelins at the same time, that split into 20 lightning beams each on hit. I knew one guy who had that cause he played the game for 12 years, and when he would attack, my game would freeze for 9 seconds only to display 9 seconds worth of frame in the following 1 second. And that was "one of his shitty chars". Now THAT was cool.

So in the beginning, in PoE in the beginning cause i played that beta too, there was alot of stupid shit like unlimited flicker strikes. And later multistrike heroic leap. Roflstomping mobs into oblivion. Naturally some things had to be nerfed a bit because it shouldn't crash the server, but PoE always tried to get as close to those D2 engine breaking feats as possible. Because that was cool. Honestly, taking multistrike heroic leap out was the beginning of the end, because that's when PoE stopped being about silly fun and started taking itself seriously.

Leagues changed PoE forever, and the game now is just a farming simulator, where people try to speed run in 3 months the same effects as that one guy had after 12 years in Diablo 2. And PoE2 changes it again, where it'll be the same farming sim, but now slow and boring, because rather than finding ways to do things the devs didn't intend - we're subject to their every whim, and anything breaking will be nerfed, because this game "has to be ""difficult"". I've watched the top twitch streams to see if higher level play was any different but no, it's just people that walk slow, and still clear a map with trivial ease.

So i say Devs make up your mind. EITHER abandon the whole idea of league based design and give me a soul-like game with actual insane difficulty, that i can play for 10 years to get better and better at, with my reward being to get stupidly, gamebreakingly strong - or go back to the speed-run-farm of PoE1 and make the game more cathartic to play so i can zone out again, and focus *entirely* on individual skills - make skills great again. More customization to do more strange things that wipe out screens of mobs in new and interesting ways. Then make the few mobs the game tells me that are supposed to be difficult, actually difficult. The new campaign and shiny graphics are more than enough to keep me playing for another 2000 hours to try out new stuff.

Right now, i can't zone out because something might actually kill me if i don't kite stuff, but every second i do pay attention i'm bored out of my mind because the game is trivialized when figured out - and this really isn't my first rodeo in RPGs. Even while watching videos on YouTube at the same time, i'm more bored playing this AND watching youtube, than just watching youtube and putting my full focus there. Don't think that's ever happened before.

So again, please, decide what you guys want. Catharsis, or Difficulty, and then *actually* focus on that. But honestly, i'm probably just gonna quit, because current progress will be wiped when the game goes live - no problems with that, not my first rodeo - but i seriously do not want to level through the campaign again as it stands now. I'd rather do it once in standard after launch to see what the game has to offer, then maybe come back for content patches for like a day or two... but that's it. As it stands, ironically, even when it tries to be souls like there's no soul here.

Oh, and no - i'm not "gonna go back to PoE1". Again, i've seen that campaign hundreds of times. I was looking forward to the new campaign to do it all over again. The graphics are gorgeous, the atmosphere is perfect, think the voice acting's great, music's great. Game deserves awards when it comes to the visual/audio aspects of the game, no doubt. Much praise. I started out fully invested but i ended up turning on YouTube only cause it was either that or turning the game off to do something more stimulating all together.

So if playing through it is a chore, i'll just do it once, and never again. Don't think that's the developer intention.

Finally - your experience may vary. Just cause i'm bored doesn't mean you have to be, nor does it reflect on you in any way if you aren't. I know it's early access, i've been around, that's why i'm giving my feedback now rather than later. If nothing changes, that's no love lost, i'll find something else to play no worries, i'm an adult. All i'm saying is so far, for me, the game's been a big disappointment. Not cause i'm not open to new experiences, but because i wanted to love this game, and i find myself hating it instead, and forcing myself to play. If the manner of play now is what the developers intended... well i guess i'll just have to wait for the game that is to PoE2 as PoE was to Diablo 3. Cause PoE2 doesn't "get it" anymore. Again, all IMO (and i'm nobody so who cares).