Gearing endgame is much harder than poe1

Seeing a lot of posts saying loot is too good now.

Compared to poe1 gear has a lot more slack to pull, virtually every peice of decent gear right now is 100ex+ because of this, and every day that number goes up.

First major thing you will probably notice is that because chaos res does not go negative base anymore, in fact its 10% base now or something from wuests, the devs have decided to litter every map with chaos dmg. You are not going to have a good time without it like in poe1, Id say its nearly mandatory. So thats a big vector of additional pressure on gear.

Second big one is lack of life and resists on tree. Gone are the days of getting survivability passively through leveling, yet you still will have to spend nearly as many points as you did on life nodes on defensive scaling nodes on the tree. The issue is unlike life, defenses on gear requires 2 good mod slots instead of 1, as you need flat + %. No resists on tree means again more pressure on gear.

Attributes, something most people ignored in poe1 outside of stacking builds. Even grabbing my 25 node etc. I have to get attributes on over half my gear to use my gems and a piece of hybrid gear im using requires 3 +20 or more str rolls on my gear. Again another new vector of pressure on gear.

We have a completely new stat spirit, that any build can benefit from which again more and more pressure on limited mod slots.

+to gem levels is plentiful as well on gear and ends up being one of the single most important stats completely bricking any item in some that doesnt posses them.

Its insane how much power is behind gear in this game. Upgrading my chest last night at level 88 gave me nearly 40% more EHP, the helm im working towards nearly 30% more, the curve from say 50ex worth of gear to 200ex to 1000 is just bonkers. I really don't feel like it was this bad in poe1 in terms of power curve from gear alone.

Xp is brutal, dying is punishing, and you will have horrible survivability until you spend 100's of ex on gear and there really is no way around. I dont mind it because im a no lifer, but I have a feeling in a week or 2 people are going to be having a terrible time in maps.

God help anyone in ssf,

Loot drops are good enough now besides jewelry which is still stupidly rare. Ive done about 70 maps and i just barely replaced a belt i found in act 2 normal. The belt is bad and im only using it because it has a lot of life and strength.

The problem with the game now is how gutted crafting is. It's worse than ruthless in poe1. If you play trade you realize you're wasting time and currency trying to craft anything on your own that you're better off trading. The way the game is now will kill SSF. It's just not fun slamming mana for the 10th time when you and everyone knows that life is insanely valuable to skip on any piece inc resistances. Without the bench gearing just isn't fun. Wearing a bad piece of gear just because it has the resistances you need isn't fun and this is further compounded by the lack of life and resistances in the passive tree.

Crafting was removed to help streamline things for new players which is fine. But runes are just extremely bland and theres nothing going on there, cant even remove them.

Which makes poe2 just mediocre among arpgs. Imo d2 mods like projectd2 are superior games because they added poe1 crafting to the goat that already is d2, making the game even way better. Gutting crafting is gutting the identity that poe carved out for itself in the genre.

Runes aren't even all that accessible till endgame when you can afford to throw artificer orbs into shitty gear just for the resistance runes. The only good thing about runes is melee can add 40% phys damage to the crappy weapons they find so that completing the campaign becomes half as bearable.

And again, gutting crafting has only just incentivized everyone beyond the top 1% of the 1% to treat crafting orbs as trading currency and not even experiment with crafting at all.

>runes are endgame