Off My Chest Frustrations

To preface these opinions, I want to state that I have more than 5k hours in POE since Prophecy league with multiple 100s and 40/40s. Similar for the time available, I have put in 150 hours into POE2 since EA became available. I love both games for different reasons and I am onboard with what I think the vision is for POE2.

However...

I am growing increasingly frustrated with the following things and they are steadily pushing me to quit until full release due to boredom or genuine rage:

* No Early Hideout

Experience // Not having a hideout early has made the trading process miserable. I had an experience where I went to teleport to someone who wanted my boots because they weren't as far into the game as I was at the moment. I had to leave my map in order to do this. It took a minute to load into the Ziggurat where he was. The trade took about a minute in itself because he didn't know to hover the item -- not a big deal. I could NOT find a waypoint to get back to my Ziggurat in the past... that's because this guy messaged me on the transition between Normal and Cruel and the Gateway at the ziggurat was taking me directly to the Riverbank. It was then that I realized I had to cruise through the ENTIRETY OF THE RIVERBANK to find a waypoint just to get back to where I was. I crashed when fighting the boss and it took a couple of minutes to get back into the game where I had to go through the ENTIRETY OF THE RIVERBANK again and kill the boss. By the time I got back to a waypoint, my portals to one of the few maps I had left had disappeared. I was livid.

Potential Solution // Give us access to a default hideout at the end of normal difficulty.

* Loading Jitter / Black Screens

Experience // Opened my first breach and was met with instantaneous damage and rolling in place with nothing around me. Died 3 seconds later. Mobs "popped in" to existence 5 seconds after I died. Lost my first and only T2 map.

Any time I open the U map, I am met with a black screen and several seconds before I teleport anywhere. This issue compounds on the first issue I have with the game (trading without a hideout). I would prefer a static image that is not lazy loaded into memory and is instead stored at all times.

Potential Solution // No lazy loading models into memory. Upon first loading a map, load ALL assets of all potential mobs inside of that map. Upon first loading POE, the initialization process should also include all of the act's maps.

* Single Attempt Maps

Experience // Due to poor play and aforementioned issues with loading jitter and lazy loading, I have had many deaths that felt out of my control (which are GOD awful when running high stakes maps like Trial of Chaos or Trial of Sekhemas. Would prefer if I could go back into a map at a cost -- it's already bad enough that I've lost a lot of the progress I've made toward the last level. I suspect this feeling is going to get more awful as time goes on as higher tier maps are rarer and it takes longer to level.

Potential Solution // Bring back 6 portals from POE1. If a cost is desired, have a cost associated with using additional portals for the same player.

* Map Sustain

Experience // As noted above, I lost my first T2 map and had to go back to T1 mapping (I've yet to find another T2 map, but have found several T3 and T4 maps... without wanting to run them because my current quest says to complete T2s).

Potential Solution // Allow the user to complete different tier maps out of order to complete the atlas quests if desired.

* Heavy-handed balancing without Compensation

Experience // People were abusing Cast on X builds very heavily. I was not one of the people who made use of millions of damage in an instant ... but it made my Cast on Shock virtually worthless and had no gold to respec.

Potential Solution // Every time a balance patch is released, give players (whether you think it will affect them or not) a free tree reset.

* Combat changing too drastically between beginning of game and maps
* 3rd and 4th Ascendancy

Other minor issues include:

* Inaccurate keys on act maps (U)
* Build scaling / meta chasing
* Ranged mob tuning

I've just lost interest in even writing this...

For the latter points, you can complete higher tier maps to complete the quests irrc. I think I was running short on tier 3s but had a glut of tier 4s (likely because of my Atlas passives and the Irradiation modifier from a tower). Running them still counted for my quest.

Thank you for that. I only have a handful of higher tier maps, but given that the lower ones were as bad as they were to complete, I'll be passing for a bit.

"Wasted" my T4 maps completing the T2 quest, as they do not count for the T2 quest and T3+ quests simultaneously. That felt really bad.