Week 1 Feedback General Gameplay and Warrior Titan

poe2 week 1 feedback v0.1.0d:

I want to start by congratulating Grinding Gear Games on their biggest launch so far, and on making one of the coolest games ever made. It is a little rough and incomplete, and I am so excited to see it grow bigger and more polished. Most of my feedback here is going to be design critiques, so I wanted to start with something positive. I love PoE2, and I am having a blast. I hope you can address some of the issues I outline here.

The TL;DR:
-The increased Death Penalty is cool, but it needs to be fair.
-Respec should probably be a little cheaper.
-Improve visual clarity for DD, homing bombs, on-death effects.
-Non-boss enemies should telegraph unblockables as well.
-Ascension trials are pure suffering; paying for carry on TFT is the best option.
-Rare Enemies need more visual identity.
Warrior Titan feedback:
-I love being tanky.
-Primed for stun is a weird and clunky mechanic.
-Animation locks don't feel right in a game where all ranged abilities have strafing.
-Shield Canceling is weird.
-Many Melee skills get canceled unintentionally by back-walking
-Hammer of the gods should not go on cooldown unless the attack comes out.



-The increased Death Penalty is cool, but it needs to be fair.
I like the higher stakes of campaign and mapping with death resetting zones or losing maps and bosses, and if that is how the game is going to be then I feel like I need to be able to expect to die almost never as long as I play skillfully and have an appropriately strong character.

-Respec should probably be a little cheaper.
I like how easy it is to access respecing. I think this can be a more elegant solution than what we have in PoE1. I do think you could lower the cost. There are plenty of gold sinks, and you can create more in the future. Right now, it is painful to adjust the build at end game.

-Improve visual clarity for DD, homing bombs, on-death effects.
The wonderful high level of detail and particles combined with how dark some things are results in too much visual noise to identify danger such as a Detonate Dead or a volatile dead / seeker bomb about to explode on you.

-Non-boss enemies should telegraph unblockables as well.
The red flash and accompanying SFX for a boss doing an unblockable ability is effective communication when given enough time to react. I would like to be afforded the same for normal enemies, since their slams and such can be just as dangerous and not look like slams sometimes.

-Ascension trials are pure suffering, paying for carry on TFT is the best option.
I did not enjoy a single moment of any ascension trial I did, whether I succeeded or not. Like many people, I did the first two trials before the first set of adjustments. I am currently level 75 and stuck on 3rd ascension. My build is tanky, and slow, and I'm fine with being slow, but it makes the trial of the sekhema feel unwinnable. I haven't found an inscribed ultimatum in days. I do not like Sanctum, nor the Trial of the Sekhema. I'm fine with that content being there for players that enjoy it, but I don't want to be forced to interact with it. Right now it feels like I have to do Trial of Sekhema, and I'm being punished because my build is terrible for it.
I know that in the future the 3rd ascension will be given to us in a quest just like the first and 2nd, but right now it feels awful to be stuck and unable to try new things with my build. And, I don't want to go on TFT and pay someone to carry me through Trial of Sekhema, but that feels like the best option right now. I can easily make the money to pay someone to carry me, but I would prefer to beat it myself.

-Rare Enemies need more visual identity.
Unless they have mana siphon or something similar, it is very difficult to tell where the rare is in a pack. This needs to change, especially because some skills require a lot of precision and timing. eg Perfect Strike.

-Flask leech rare enemy feels unfair in a game where you have forced us to use our flasks more.

-Mana Siphon rares feel terrible in a game where it is much harder to have a mana solution on some builds.



Warrior Titan feedback:
-I love being tanky.
At first I struggled because it is hard to be tanky early on, and you are using skills that kind of expect you to be tanky, due to how slow they are and the animation locks in melee skills not allowing you to dodge the hail of blows and projectiles by back-pedaling. Later on I was able to become thick and build block-chance and now it feels really good to be able to wade into a pack of enemies with confidence. I am excited to continue experimenting with skills and builds while being a tank.

-Primed for stun is a weird and clunky mechanic.
The abilities that can make use of primed for stun are strong indeed, but trying to use them in many scenarios feels terrible. in party play, I can never reliably land a boneshatter if my team mates are attacking as well, since the 'primed window' will be lost before I can hit them and I lose out on DPS as a result. Why should my damage be dependent on my allies not attacking? Makes no sense.
There is an inverse synergy on the tree for Warrior with stun. Boneshatter is one of the most effective clearing skills early on, but if you get too much stun build up on the tree, you can no longer use it because all your other attacks will heavy stun most enemies, resulting in essentially a loss in DPS. This is somewhat awkward to fix in the build, and a new player might not understand how to fix it at all. Later on, as Titan, the stun build up once again becomes good with the crushing blows node. Very strange progression problems, I don't like the way it feels to level Warrior.

-Animation locks don't feel right in a game where all ranged abilities have strafing.
A bit case by base, but a lot of skills that have animations locks don't feel like they need to. Molten Blast, Boneshatter, Armor Break, a lot of melee skills have long animations that prevent free movement and feels very strange. Abilities like Sunder, Leap Slam, Rolling Slam, and Stampede make sense that they work the way they do, and feel natural to have animation lock.

-Shield Canceling is weird.
Did you know that you can cancel the recovery animation of many melee skills by raising your shield? If you raise and lower your shield immediately then you cancel the recover and can begin free-walking. This technique became muscle memory for me already because it improved my speed and survivability so much to be able to throw out boneshatter then start advancing immediately. Much more effective than dodge rolling to cancel the recovery. If this is intentional design then I guess I will just get used to it, but it seems to me like it would be better if you just let any recovery animation be canceled by free-walking if shield-cancelling is going to exist. It seems strange that melee would have a much higher input execution skill level than other classes just for basic movement.

-Many Melee skills get canceled unintentionally by back-walking
This can cause unfortunate things like accidentally cancelling an attack while trying to buffer walking out of the way of a projectile. It feels very bewildering, like "why didn't my attack come out?"
Perhaps another reason why strafing should be allowed during some melee attacks.

-Hammer of the gods should not go on cooldown unless the attack comes out.
For an ability to have such a long cooldown, as well as such a long startup, and animation lock, it would be really great if we did not lose the cooldown by dodge-rolling out of the startup animation. I can accept that the mana will still be spent. I understand that is just how the system works, but please consider moving the cooldown to when the attack will come out.


GGG you have my praise and respect. Lets keep making this awesome game better!