Early Access Feedback - Level 75 Invoker Monk

After a week of playing in early access, I wanted to take a moment to gather my thoughts and provide what I hope is useful feedback.

As of writing this, I am currently a level 75 Invoker Monk, farming T4s with my own homegrown Ice Strike build.

First off, I am absolutely loving this game. Despite being Early Access and having some flaws, the game is incredibly fun. Thanks for producing such a high quality product! Below I will be providing my thoughts across a number of different categories.

Monk Class
I’ve wanted to play this class ever since it was revealed, and it has been so fun to play. The fluidity of the combo skills (Ice Strike & Tempest Flurry) are especially nice. I didn’t think I’d like Tempest Bell, but I was wrong. The skill is amazing and has given me all kinds of ideas of ways to build around it.

The class gets really strong as the game goes on, but the early game is rough! Glacial Cascade is very cool conceptually, and it appears to be the go-to for many monk players in early game, as melee is simply too dangerous early on. However, the damage for the skill is just really poor. Even when you land it perfect, it’s still very underwhelming.

The next part of the class are the Palm skills. They are iconic, and each have some cool themes, but they are a bit clunky in their current state. The first issue is that they are way too slow, even on my monk with 4 APS, it still feels slow. I feel that the attack speed multiplier (penalty) is just a bit too much. But functionally, it feels like the range is way too small. I routinely find myself thinking I can “dash” to an enemy with my palm skill, only to be left performing the animation in place. Ideally the strike range would be increased, however if not, can we just prevent it from performing skill all together? It is also disappointing that the skill cannot be used to traverse terrain. It feels you should at least be able to traverse some pieces of terrain, ie, low walls, rocks, etc. Overall, they have massive potential, but are clunky at present.

Combat
Overall combat feels good in the sense that it’s smooth and fluid, and the addition of dodge rolls is awesome! Having to use strategy throughout the campaign was absolutely awesome. The sheer number of bosses that have big attacks and cool mechanics that we need to be aware of and to dodge is great, and makes it so satisfying when you finally beat that difficult unique or boss.

The game however doesn’t just feel punishing to melee, it actually feels anti-melee. The sheer amount of effects that simply prevent you from even being in melee range are absurd, and they simply deal too much damage. Even when stacking multiple defensive layers, they can still take you from 100% to 0% in under a second. That combined with the absurd number of on-death effects presently in the game push melee toward a Path of Exile 1 style of gameplay where you just want to focus on massive range and/or projectiles. Speaking of on-death effects, I think I speak for the majority of players when I say that they just don’t feel good. As a level 75 monk currently working my Atlas through T4 maps, and I’ve got over 150 deaths, and I’d venture a guess that at least a 3rd of them are from on-death effects. They are just overtuned. Sometimes they are too fast, sometimes the AOE is too large to escape, and most of the time you can’t even see them with the rest of the screen clutter. This leaves you as the player with diving in to attack, then rolling away, constantly. It’s okay to play like this on occasion, but with the prevalence of these type of effects, I find myself having to play like this all the time. Please fix this.

It also feels that we need you to bring back movement skills. I’m not saying they need to be on the level of the PoE1 skills, but we need something. I understand that you want us to feel the pain of allowing ourselves to become surrounded by enemies, and I think that it does add to the strategic element of the game, however having some form of movement (even if on very long cooldowns) feels needed. Also, it would allow us to traverse terrain, which is something that feels sorely missing in PoE2.

Story
I absolutely love the story in PoE2! Everything is great from the opening cinematic to the storyboard style cut scenes between the acts. I love the dialogue by all the foes we face, and I want more! I can’t wait to see what’s next once you release Acts 4-6. With that being said, I still have no idea who my monk is. What’s his story? Did I miss something? I feel I know nothing about him.

Progression

Trials
Everyone has voiced their frustrations over the trial mechanics. I won’t belabor the point here too much. I actually like the design that you’ve implemented, and I’ve actually farmed some of each just for fun. However, they are over-tuned in their current state. I don’t think I was able to accomplish my 2nd ascendancy until I was 60+ and trials 3 & 4 are nowhere in sight right now.

Maps
The new Atlas is so cool! Being able to navigate the map as you see fit is awesome. That combined with the endgame contents (Ritual, Delirium, etc) all being baked into the map gives the player agency that GGG always talks about. I’m not at the point yet where I can farm the contents I want as much as I’d like (I’m hoping this improves) but I love the direction! Map sustain is the only problem so far. I’ve purposefully focused on Waystones on my passive tree, but getting Waystones of the appropriate tier is still a work in progress. I have a feeling this will work itself out as I continue to progress, but it’s been a bit of a slog just to get to T4.

Gearing

Uniques
I’ve had about 10 different unique drops so far in around 50 hours of gameplay. I’m not sure if that’s high, low, or on par. However, the quality of the uniques has been largely disappointing. Most of them just don’t seem very good. Either they are on very low bases, have bad stats, or their special functions appear underwhelming. Honestly, this reminds me of vanilla Diablo 3. I hope this changes drastically.

Drops
The drops themselves feel great in terms of the quantity, variety, and especially the currency. However, the quality of the drops is poor. Getting usable rare items hasn’t happened for me since early in the campaign. I am finding plenty of desirable bases upon which to craft–which would be good if the crafting was good (more on that in a bit.)

Shops
Fortunately, the shops were a very valuable source of item upgrades to pick from. I found myself going and checking all the shops every single time I leveled up and this was my primary source of item progression. Which is helpful, but it doesn’t feel very satisfying. You can find some good bases upon which to craft— but again, crafting isn’t good right now. The shops also don’t seem to be helpful anymore once you hit endgame.

Crafting
We know that powerful items exist, we see them popping up on Reddit and YouTube. Many of these items were something that dropped with a few good mods and had some lucky slams/corruptions. So we know it’s possible. A cursory visit of the PoE 2 Trade site confirms as much, but crafting in its current iteration just isn’t good. Gambling has always been a big part of the PoE game design, but this has taken it to the extreme and it doesn’t feel like “crafting” at all anymore. If you are lucky enough to have an item with good mods or a nice base, you just close your eyes and slam Exalts in hope of something that doesn’t suck. The complete absence of any form of deterministic crafting just feels bad. I know there are supposed to be some higher tier Essences that allow some form of deterministic crafting, but I’ve yet to see any (and the minor essences are awful).

Today I was so excited when I landed an Expert Gothic Quarterstaff base with a good crit chance roll. I was able to add a good added phys damage. Then I regaled it and landed a whopping 20% attack speed. I was absolutely thrilled at this point, because I had three slams to land the only mod I needed. The following three slams landed me cold damage, stun, and some trash. I was so disappointed, but I went ahead and added two sockets, before corrupting it. Then I vaaled it in hopes that somehow I’d land increased physical damage. Instead, the corruption just reduced my added phys with a lower tier version, essentially bricking the item.

This sucked and made me want to walk away from the game. In hindsight, I should have used Chaos to try my luck at rolling off some of the bad mods, then I could have slammed again. This was my mistake, and I wish I hadn’t vaaled it. However, I still maintain that this isn’t good crafting design.

We NEED some form of deterministic crafting. I also believe it should be limited. My suggestion, we should have access to a crafting bench, but perhaps it can be restricted/limited. Perhaps it’s time-gated, or has a limited number of uses per day. A simple currency solution could be bypassed by trade, so that might not be the best solution.

Overall, I’m absolutely loving the game, and hope this feedback is helpful making an already awesome game better!