GaryOak's Endgame Feedback

This feels highly out of whack. My initial impression upon learning how punishing dying in a map would be was, "This is fine, so long as it isn't like PoE 1 in terms of overtuned 1 shot damage and 'cheap' deaths." Unfortunately, we have that in spades, especially in red maps. There are two directions I feel like design can go from here:

1) Mob damage is nerfed dramatically. Some abilities, such as the ones used by chaos mobs (the flowers/pods, the ground snakes from the Vaal casters, etc) need to be reduced by a factor of 10.

2) Give us PoE 1's 6 portal system back and perhaps reduce the EXP penalty on death.

Currently, we have way, way too much enemy damage and speed/pack size relative to player power, which feels tuned for a 6 portal environment, while we're in a scenario where we are forced to run maps heavily juiced by multiple Precursor Towers with multiple layered mechanics on top of each other, with map modifier magnitude nodes on your atlas tree, while running high-tier rare maps. Without this, sustain is borderline impossible. But dying once, which happens way too easily, costs you the time investment of setting up your map, and the valuable high-tier Waystone. I'll try to break down specific problems below, in point form.

* Mob damage scaling is ludicrous in red maps. It feels like it requires unobtainable defences in order to reasonably survive.

* Chaos damage is way too high and way too common.

* Enemy telegraphs NEED to take precedence over player effects. Deaths like this happen way too often with some builds.

* Certain effects, such as Volatile Plants, need to immediately expire when the parent rare mob is dead. Dying to Exploding Crystals is one thing, but dying to plant volatiles concealed by all the loot a rare drops, feels cheap.

* Tunnels and walls can obscure telegraphed effects. Dying to a single chaos pod from an archer because I'm running through a choke and cannot see the pod is frustrating.

* To further this, ranged mobs need to have their range reduced or the camera needs to be zoomed out a little farther. The reason is that it's unfair to die to a ranged mob's ability, when one of the key telegraphs is the mob winding up an attack (such as a mage casting meteor), when said wind-up occurs off-screen.

* Vaal Shades should have their scripting reworked, or the mob should be expunged from the pool. This is especially bad when they spawn as a rare with the Degen Donut, Volatile Plants, etc. Those effects persist while they dance around, immune to damage, and snipe you with a freeze wave. In general, they cause too much slow-down and are very frustrating to fight.

* Vaal mob types being native to Precursor Towers, which have annoying architecture, means the optimal strategy to run them is running them with white T1 maps. I feel this is a sign of flawed design.

* Ritual Circles need to be made around 50% larger and scripted to not spawn in terrible locations. As it is, the already too-small encounter ring often loses a significant amount of walkable ground due to the map architecture. These are suicide for most builds, and it's too easy to be boxed in by a swarm of mobs and being unable to avoid the chaos pods/volatiles that can spawn.

Given the high level of time and resource investment required, I feel making pinnacle bosses being only 1 attempt and they're gone is a massive mistake. The way it stands, I cannot justify attempting any of these bosses without watching a ton of videos and guides and massively over-preparing for them. 6 deaths, with the boss resetting to full HP upon leaving the zone, is completely fair, as this allows learning.

As it stands, it's smarter for me to find somebody else and "sell" my boss taxi rather than getting a single attempt at it myself, especially given how wild some of the bosses are. Losing what looks like hours upon of hours of setup to a single death just makes the content not even approachable. Making these pinnacle bosses aspirational content that are very difficult to overcome is fine, but at least give us 6 portals in order to give us a chance to learn the bosses.

Simply put, it feels like these are an entire tier above what they should be. Allow me to elaborate. The absurd tuning of these trials makes it feel like the requirements to satisfy your 3rd Ascendancy should satisfy your 4th. Either these trials need significant nerfs, or they should be restructured as follows:

3rd Ascendancy: 2 Floor Sekhemas or 7 Rounds of Ultimatum

4th Ascendancy: 3 Floor Sekhemas or 10 Rounds of Ultimatum

As it stands, getting all 4 Ascendancy points feels like a callback to that infamous video game journalist quote that claims only 1% of players can complete the Labyrinth. Except in this case, it's true. A full Sekhema run or a Trialmaster fight, to me, feels like pinnacle content, and gating your 4th Ascendancy behind them feels like a mistake. My proposal of shifting the requirements for Ascension back a tier for the 3rd and 4th makes achieving these more reasonable, as a 3 Floor/10 Wave run is still quite the undertaking at present, whilst preserving the difficulty of these pinnacle encounters. Over-nerfing Trialmaster or the 4th Floor would be a mistake.

ADDENDUM: Please allow us to change our Ascendancy. I am unsure what a fair mechanism for this is, but I strongly feel it should be added.

I feel rewards scale pretty well, to be honest. I noticed a lot of loot and map drops while running appropriately juiced red maps with a sound strategy. The primary complaint I have is the "smart loot" system needs tweaking. I don't know why I'm being inundated with Advanced bases in red maps. I'd rather see a single Expert base per 10 Advanced, and just not see Advanced drop at all. I'm nowhere near familiar enough with what goes on under the hood here to provide a suggestion.

However, I can say I feel like a loot filter that hides a substantial amount of drops is mandatory once the player starts climbing up the map ladder. As a consequence, I wish the game had an in-game loot filter design interface akin to Last Epoch's. Even if it lacks the flexibility of Filterblade, it is still mandatory once you reach the endgame, and I know Path of Exile 2 is making a concerted effort to eliminate the need for third-party applications.

Breach loot needs to drop in a "fountain" around the player upon completion of the encounter akin to Delve and Incursion from PoE 1. This saves the player having to click numerous times in order to collect all of the individual Breach Splinters that drop, and also aids visual clarity, because we won't be seeing item labels cluttering the screen during a hectic encounter.

One last thing I'll say is that Runes absolutely need to be replaceable. I'm fine with the fact you cannot un-socket runes or Soul Cores in an item, but I detest not being able to delete existing Runes/Soul Cores by slotting in replacements.

Currently, affix tiers are backward. It's quite jarring to not know what the highest tier of an item is just by holding down alt. T1 should be the max possible affix tier, not the lowest. Another thing, is why are the affix tags obfuscated? As it stands, with the current functionality, I am required to go to poe2db.tw in order to look up what a max roll is, and what tags everything has (relevant for Essences). Referencing back to my previous paragraph, this indicates an issue. I actually checked my options menu a couple of times because I thought I had "detailed tooltips" disabled. Furthermore, the font colour could due to be altered in order to increase legibility.

If a build is significantly nerfed in a patch, then every character with a nerfed gem equipped at the time of the patch should receive a one-time free respec, that is voided if they level up and allocate another skill point.

This issue hasn't yet affected me personally, but I feel this policy should be implemented for the sake of people who have been hit by without-warning nerfs that are part and parcel for a beta. We shouldn't need to keep a million gold banked up in case we get randomly nerfed in the middle of the day, lest our characters are completely bricked and we're forced to reroll. Midday nerfs during a beta are completely fine, but it's unfair to not compensate affected players with a one-time full tree reset.

I found endgame mostly fun until red maps. At which point, it was punishing to the point of completely draining my enthusiasm. Until I reached this point, the best single-word summary of my Path of Exile 2 experience was "euphoric." Nearly every one of my deaths going into endgame were not frustrating at all, because I almost always knew what mistake I made. In red maps, it was straight back to PoE 1's classic "what the hell killed me?" and being forced to use Shadowplay recordings to run frame-by-frame forensics on why I just lost a huge amount of investment and time seemingly out of nowhere.

PoE 1 "gets away" with those hyper-fast deaths induced by crazy scaling and screen clutter due to 6 portals and logout macros existing (and player power being high enough to delete screens of mobs at a time), but due to how punishing the sequel is, such frenetic "out of nowhere" deaths should not be a thing. Dying to a telegraphed, obvious 1 shot mechanic (y'know, the Executioner's anvil from the heavens) is fair game, but a single chaos pod or random ground effect obfuscated by a player's own skill effect or the map terrain has no place with such a punishing infrastructure.

The high mob damage and how fast random damage kills you is antithetical to the slower, more deliberate design pillar of Path of Exile 2 striving to make moment-to-moment combat more meaningful.

I absolutely adore the endgame aesthetic and theme, but it does need a lot of balancing. That's completely okay. Until alterations are made, I'm shifting my focus to playing other builds and pushing them until I reach my frustration point, then it's off to reroll once again. This is not a typical PoE 1 league, and it's foolish to approach it as such. So I'm primarily focusing on playing a variety of builds and having fun in lower-end content, even though I typically beat the highest level of content in every ARPG I play (including 7/7 Ubers in PoE 1).

Hopefully this feedback is useful. I endeavoured to be constructive and objective, while omitting class/build related issues, as those belong in another post. Ultimately, it feels like the design is trying to simultaneously walk two diverging paths, and the game itself is face-planting on account of this. Either direction is fine, but please pick one and commit to it. All that said, this game's balance and polish are leagues ahead of contemporary ARPGs that call themselves fully released, all the while this game is in its first significant patch of beta. That alone is astounding, and I do not want my post to come off as overly negative or anything without acknowledging just how good a product PoE 2 already is.

Thank you.