Hopefully helpful feedback, good and bad after 70h of playing.

I now have 70h of playtime in Path of Exile 2 and I’ve noticed quite a few things that I enjoy and some problems I’ve ran into. That’s a 4400 words feedback.

First a bit of context so that everyone is on the same page:

I like to express my thoughts in longer form texts so that they are made as clear as possible. If it ends up sounding like a rant at some point, it wasn’t my intention, I’m actually enjoying the game quite a lot.

I have 1,800hours of playtime in Path of Exile 1 which is paltry in comparison to some and I have never managed to kill the Shaper, Sirus or the Maven.

I only play SSF because I just don’t like interacting with people and also I never felt it was satisfying to get equipment from someone else rather than finding/making it myself.

My favorite league mechanics are Blight, Legion and the beyond demons in that order.

My least favorite league mechanics are Heist, Ultimatum and Sanctum with the one I dislike the most being Heist although I really like its many NPCs. I Hated the Lab as well but not because of the lab in itself but rather because my internet connection can be unstable and every time I did a lab, I had a 50/50 chance of getting disconnected before the end and having to redo the whole thing again which was greatly frustrating.

I haven’t reached the endgame of Path of Exile 2 yet, not because I can’t reach it but because I’ve been taking my time testing different characters and weird builds that came to my mind. I haven’t felt stuck at any point yet even though some places did give me trouble.


Now on to the things I like:

I like that you can choose which attribute you want on the skill tree now.
I really like that the game can be paused now and I’m pleased it remembers where we were so when my internet goes down or I have to step away from the computer, I don’t loose a mountain of progress.
The game runs great. I’ve had one spot where I had performance problems and one spot where the game crashed but aside from that it was smooth sailing.
I like how the map resets when we die so I don’t have to bash my head against a rare with an awful modifier combination until it decides to die.
I love how the skill gems work now, trying to socket and link your equipment before was awful.
I enjoy the rolls.
I like that my screen isn’t covered in pointless drops at every fight now, I think its more satisfying when you can actually pick up the things that drop instead of ignoring a vast majority of it.

I didn’t like sanctum in PoE1 because there were a lot of mages and archers attacking you from afar all the time and I enjoy tanky builds more than dodging so surviving sanctum was a true ordeal. Its way more manageable here tanks to the more reasonable enemies and the dodge roll. I can see myself doing it a lot more often.

I love the bosses, they are enjoyable to fight, they look great and they are challenging. I think the one that marked me the most so far was the chimera in the chaos trial. It doesn’t do anything particularly special and we’ve fought one before in the jungle but the way the arena is built with a bunch of layers and stairs made for a really fun fight where I had to dodge large AoE by running to another layer, pursuing it all over the place as it flew while dodging lighting traps all over. I had a great time.

I like the size of the maps because they look so good, it's awesome to roam through them. It also feels more realistic when the wilderness between your starting point and your destination isn’t the size of a small park in the middle of a city. I guess I’m not bothered by their length like some other people are because I enjoy the combat and it doesn’t matter to me whether I fight some monster in one cool location or the next cool location. The backtracking when you have trouble finding an objective could be tedious but since GGG already said we’d soon be able to teleport between waypoints that’s not an issue for me.

I really like the campaign we’ve seen so far as a whole and I enjoyed playing through it a few times. I never got bored of the PoE1 campaign and I like this one better so I don’t think I’m ever going to complain about its length. I’ve always liked that kind of universe as well and I already liked the lore so I’m enjoying learning new things and meeting new people after so long on the coast of Wraeclast.


The things I dislike/bugs I’ve seen with a bit more of an explanation for each:

The first thing is about the dodge roll. I like the recent changes that have been done to it, they were well thought and solved the problem somewhat but I think it was the symptom to something else and the dodge roll was never the true problem. Our character doesn’t move that quickly but many enemies do and can swarm you quite easily. Especially in act 2, in the lost city of Keth we can get swarmed by beetles before we can react if their spawn in the walls are too unluckily placed. The same goes for most enemies on the Dreadnought where they can just leap over you and trap you on a narrow bridge in between a rock and a hard place. In that kind of moments, the roll becomes useless, it’s a race to check who can kill the other first and while levelling, we (Or at least I) loose most of those. There’s a lot of really quick enemies in act 3 as well that have some tricks of their own.
My point is that being able to roll out of the encirclement better is good and all but those ridiculously quick enemies you can’t possibly run away from even when they are not hasted shouldn’t do as much damage as their much slower counterparts. I think being trapped wouldn’t feel as bad if the small beetles that can barely reach my ankles didn’t take a tenth of my health each bite. Moreso since they can bite me over twenty times in that one second due to their sheer numbers.
I think the changes to the roll are great but would have been unnecessary if the stats of some enemies had just been tweaked a bit.
I also think that some of the bigger slower guys need a buff. They’re so slow they’re unlikely to ever hit a ranged character unless they’re pushed into them by the smaller monsters, I feel that my mage should be punished for just standing at its feet like an idiot.

Still about the dodge roll, the changes invalidated some of the attacks from a variety of bosses that were meant to trap the character. For example, Asinia the ghost consort in act one has an ability to trap you in a cage of bones before charging a big attack. Before you had to attack the bones to get out but now you can just roll right through. Geonor has a similar invalidated move and there are probably a bunch more I’m forgetting right now (Like the snake lady in act 2).

Moving on, the colossus boss, Zalmarath in act two. That guy is a real mess. His arena is busted even before he breaks off pieces of it. You can just walk off the edge and stand in the void, sometimes its also possible to walk on top of the boss’s head too. Its frustrating when you try to dodge an attack and the camera plunges into the ground to zoom in on the character that’s now under the arena and right back up again in a split second.
Also, I think the damage values of the boss’ attacks have been inverted somehow. When his attacks look like they should be really strong, like when he stabs the ground with the strength of both of his arms and his back or charges up a wave of energy after planting the sword in the middle of the arena, he does practically no damage. I’ve been able to stand in them without problem, not even needing a flask.
However, when he does a lazy scrape from right to left, he one shots me every single time regardless of whether I’m in the path of his sword or not. The hit box for that specific attack is nowhere near the actual sword so even if you feel safe by standing right next to him, you are not and the damages he does with that simple basic attack are just tremendous. I’ve never survived it on 3 different characters.
I like the flow of the fight and his design but his stats need to be checked I think. I should not be able to just stand in his big wave of energy like its nothing when there’s a clear spot for me to avoid the damage but die instantly to a lazy swipe. He’s by far the boss I’ve died the most against. I’d say approximately a third of my global amount of deaths are due to that one swipe. I guess most people dodge back instead of forward and so they don’t notice the strange hit box of the attack.

Next thing on my list is corrupted blood. When I did the trial of Chaos for my stormweaver, I had to be 8 levels over the recommended and take the test 17 times to finish it. Out of those, I reached the boss twice, the first time I met the bird and he killed me almost immediately with a tornado (I don’t have a real comment on that since I’ve never seen it again, I don’t know how you’re meant to deal with that) and the second time I fought the chimera instead and won in a very enjoyable fight.
Every other attempt ended with me dying in the trials from the unreal amount of corrupted blood effect being thrown at me.

(It’s an exaggeration, one time I got hounded by a naturally fast mana siphon/steals flask charges rare monster and couldn’t kill it. May I state just how much I dislike the mana siphon guys? I had no basic attack on my action bar and couldn’t back away from it due to its speed (again with the speed of enemies) so I had to rebind a level 4 firebolt mid fight and it obviously wasn’t enough to kill that thing faster than it could kill me.)

The problem with corrupted blood is that its really strong and unlike PoE 1 there’s no way to deal with it. We don’t have the pantheon for it, the skill on the tree and the flask effect to remove it are both gone so we just have to tank it. I guess there must be a charm for it but I haven’t seen one of those yet if there is, I haven’t seen one for the normal bleed either. With no way to resist it, all that corrupted blood being thrown at us in the trial is just deadly.
I’m not asking for corrupted blood to be removed from the game or even just the trial of chaos but I’m also pretty convinced that most people struggling with the trial wouldn’t find it as difficult if there was no corrupted blood in it.
I just don’t have a suggestion on how to make it more bearable right now.

Still, even with the abundance of corrupted blood, I like this version of Ultimatum much more than the one in PoE1 which I simply avoided like the plague. I still think that most of its debuffs are unmanageable unless you have exactly the right build for them and the rewards offered in exchange are truly pathetic but at least now you get ascendancy points from it and you get to fight cool bosses. That’s an improvement!

Next up, my two minor performance problems. I got a crash in Jiquani’s Sanctum but couldn’t reproduce it. There was nothing particular happening at that point, I was just walking around killing enemies as usual, they weren’t even rare or magic, just ordinary. I’ve also read that some people are getting banned as they get their level 40 in there so there’s probably something wrong on that map somewhere that causes an inordinate amount of calculation to happen all at once and makes the game crashes which could result in the cheat protection registering it as something like an auto clicker or a complex script being ran. I’m not an expert though, its just a guess on my part.

Second performance problem, Tor Gul, the Defiler. He looked really cool I think but I’m unsure because when I fought him, his bones flew all over the screen without connecting to each other and then as the dreadnought left in the background, the dynamic resolution turned my screen into abstract art to save my framerate even though I get over 100fps mostly everywhere else. My victory was mostly due to luck, I couldn’t tell what was happening at all in that fight. I haven’t had the occasion to fight him again since because I’ve experimented too much with other characters and you can reach the first ascendancy before him.

I’ve also noticed a weird clunkiness when pulling levers. When playing with WASD if you activate a lever and then try to leave before the animation is fully complete, you get pulled back to the lever over and over again as you step away. This is mostly apparent in the Matlan Waterways of act 3 since there are so many levers. Even after you think that the animation is complete, you must still wait a few second before moving if you don’t want your character to be glitched back to the lever. I think we should be locked into the animation until it ends or be allowed to leave but the game can’t seem to decide which one it wants.

A similar thing happens when walking around the portal to the past in the camp of the 3rd act. Your character can clip into the gears under the platform in a way similar to what happens in the arena of the colossus and is then reset back to were he was a step before. Using WASD around there is a very bizarre experience.

Then I’ve got a minor nitpick, I think that the way Alva gets knocked out before the fight in the Vaal city looks goofy. I think that the general needs to put a bit more strength in her knockout strike to be realistic. Instead of thinking “Oh no, Alva is getting captured.” I was busy laughing and I got killed as the fight started because I was too distracted. (As an aside I really loved that fight and how both this one and the act 3 end boss related to things from the first game, it was a nice touch considering all the time travelling shenanigans.)


Finally, I’ve got two sort of observations on things I’m not too sure I like yet.

First, the resistances. To put it simply, I personally think that they should have received the same treatment as the HP. Its basically mandatory to have resistances capped wherever you go or you just die. I think its even worse than the first game because you’re not being warned when your resistances are getting lowered and you just notice when you suddenly begin dying more than usual in an area with a larger density of that element.
(Speaking of, I don’t get why our resistances are getting lowered at all. It feels like the game is trying to negate my hard earned progression by lessening the impact of the gear I painstakingly acquired.)
Personally, I think the cap of 75% seems very arbitrary and I’m worried that once I get into the endgame I’m going to get one shot by random lightning strikes again like in PoE1 even with my resistance to it capped at 75%.

I’m more than happy to collect resistances on all my gear, its part of the game, but in PoE1 it felt like those capped resistances didn’t have the impact that they should have had and you had to rely on a bunch of other mitigation like “spell suppression” to survive elemental attacks.
We don’t have most of those anymore here and the increases in the maximum elemental resistances are pretty rare on the skill tree. I fear that even the tankiest people will be destroyed by the elements in the endgame.
Again, I don’t know what it looks like in endgame yet, maybe the elements aren’t as bad as in PoE1 here and I’m worrying for nothing. I don’t have an idea on how to solve this problem, I can only point at it. The best I got would be to just remove the increase in max resistances and move the cap from 75% up to 90% like for the armor but it doesn’t feel right somehow even if I can’t put my finger on why exactly.

The last thing I’m worried about is the build diversity. I overall like the changes made to the skill gems but they highlighted something I had not expected to see before playing myself. Even though you can use a lot more skills in a viable manner than in PoE1, the pool of them has been massively shrunk due to them all being locked to a weapon in particular. Therefore, in PoE1 when you brainstormed your build, you had what felt like a million choices and not nearly enough space to fit everything you wanted on your equipment but now the opposite happens and you have a lot of space and “nothing” to fill it with.

I put nothing in quotation marks because its obviously an exaggeration, every weapon has between 20-25 skills and you have 9 slots to play with but that means that you’ll have almost half the skills of your weapon type on your action bar at any time. I think it would feel less restrictive if they were split between blade and blunt instead, I don’t really see why we can’t slam the ground with the butt of a staff, a quarterstaff or a spear for example or why we can’t use bow skills with a crossbow.

I understand that not all skills are there yet but the addition of more skills won’t really change anything if they are all bound to new weapon types, they still won’t be usable by other character classes.

Of course, nothing is stopping me from equipping a completely different weapon in my second weapon set but then its the skill tree that is uncooperative.
Each weapon type clearly had a specific theme and some elements and statuses can’t be found in each of them. Therefore, those things aren’t found anywhere close in the skill tree of the corresponding class.
I could start with monk and branch out into ice magic to complement it by deviating into the Int section of the tree but picking up a fire slam skill would be pointless, “Exposed to the inferno” is the only fire node on the monk’s side of the tree, every other fire node is on the left side.
As a result, fire monk is not something I expect to ever see in the game.
I wish we could simply loop back at one end of the tree to the other side like in PacMan or at least that we had some transport nodes like in the Atlas tree of PoE1.

I’ve attempted to experiment with a strange build just to see if I could make the current setup work for something exotic. I’ve attempted to make a melee witch, not too complicated, a lot of slams use fire (or at least they did in PoE1) there’s a lot of fire nodes near the witch start, we’ve got a neat cluster with “Taut Flesh” (15% of phys damage recouped as life) and “Loose Flesh” (15% of Elemental damage recouped as life) for efficient defense and we can use the totems as minions with extra spirit to spend on some fire aura buff or another.
I was planning on taking the infernalist ascendancy, and use the “Pyromantic Pact” to replace mana and combine it with “Mind over matter” for a lot of survivability.
I’m sure everyone that knows how all of these work can see that it didn’t work already.

First disappointment, totems aren’t minions, only allies, so all the minion nodes around are useless and the closest totem clusters are both 18 nodes away using the highway so totems are a bust in the first act.
We’ve got a few physical damage clusters meant to be used for phys spells that we could reach but they’re getting us further away from the melee clusters.
The mace cluster we can just forget, its 29 nodes away through the highway.
Lucky us, we can invest heavily in fire rather easy so we can get those and both recoup to survive until the ascendency and then refund the recoup cluster to get halfway towards our melee and totems.
We have minions too in order to distract monsters while we chip away at them with our inefficient attacks.
Shout out to the big fire cluster on the left that’s split in two, it really helped. The MVP ended up being the support gem that makes the warcry bleed the enemy. (I think it inflicted corrupted blood but I can’t remember and I have no gems laying around to open the gemcutting menu and see all the skills)
(By the way its frustrating being unable to open that menu without an uncut gem, you can’t plan anything)
I killed most bosses in act 2 with only that bleed cry and igniting them once in a while, it was the only things I had that dealt damage.
(I was very tanky though, aside from the oneshot colossus, there was basically nothing that could kill me.)
All the melee skills were falling off hard because I couldn’t reach the melee clusters yet but ignite on our 1 fire ability and the warcry were enough to push us through with the protection of many a weak minion to distract the enemy.

The trial wasn’t too bad, I had heard horror stories about melee and the trial but with a few levels over the recommended and our only effective abilities being mid range, it was perfectly possible to do and took only 2 try (I lost the first to being cornered in a time trial and being unable to reach the next crystal in time).
Sadly, I had to give up on the character shortly after because “Mind Over Matter” did not in fact work properly with the infernal flame. I could have changed it for the dog and gotten some extra survivability from it but at that point it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to spend all 8 ascendancy points without harming the character more than it helped.
The most appealing node was the conversion of received elemental damage in “Altered Flesh” but it came with Physical turning to chaos which is the absolute opposite of what I’d want for a melee character with so much physical resistance and reserving our life was much less appealing if we couldn’t use “Mind over matter” as an extra layer of protection.

The conclusion was that I would have to redo this all from scratch and go for blood mage instead for the lifesteal.
Aside from that, the thing to note was that I’d have to wait until approximately after Act 3 to reach any real damage increase cluster for me from the witch starting point. So you’d need either a lot of dedication or a massive stack of gold to respec the whole tree once you’d have enough points to switch from a temporary build to the desired melee witch.

Alternatively, I guess we could try Sorceress stormweaver with a quarterstaff which is much more straightforward but defeats the purpose of trying something unconventional since the monk’s part of the tree is right next to us and both use primarily ice and lightning.

All of this to say that even though this new system looks much more open, it is also much more restrictive. We don’t have access to every type of status from every weapon or everywhere on the tree, there’s a clear intended set of abilities we are meant to use and deviating leaves us at a disadvantage in the short/medium run. (I don’t know for the long run, I haven’t reached endgame yet.)
I can use a wand and a scepter on a mercenary but switching to using my crossbow will de-spawn all my minions and my spells will do no useful damage, they’ll just be there as a utility tool to inflict a debuff like shock or a curse.
Finally, each weapon has a single cluster for it and it can be quite far from your starting point since all of them are at the very edge of the tree.

In reality, I’m satisfied with what we have and I can tell I’m going to play a lot of this game but we’re really close to something truly great, we just need an effective mean to branch out of the path laid out for us without culling the potential of our character. I want to try awkward unexpected builds, that’s something I enjoy doing a lot but the barriers are quite hard to cross right now even though it looks like they’re not even there at a glance.


In conclusion:

At a glance I seem to have a lot more to say about what I didn’t like than what I liked so far but that’s more because what I don’t like is much easier to pinpoint and put into words than what I like. My global opinion of the game so far is very high and I plan to upgrade my supporter pack during the holidays.
GGG did amazing work on this and I can’t wait to see where this goes next. It just needs a bit of polish here and there and a few balance tweaks I’m in no way qualified to to give advice on.
I don’t have an opinion on all the respec gold cost debate, I’m the kind of person to just start a new character anyway. I'd rather leave those for who it's an important matter to discuss it between themselves.
I don’t plan on staying here to argue about anything I've said with anyone. As stated at the beginning, I don’t enjoy interacting with people. I simply came to give my honest feedback to GGG.