Thoughts on PoE2 coming from Diablo

I'm really enjoying my time with PoE2, and plan to continue playing, but there's some room for improvement.

For some background on the type of player I am, I come from the Diablo side of the genre. I tried PoE1 quite a few times, but the gem link system killed that game for me. Never made it to maps there, but I'm at maps now in PoE2 and still having fun.

Pros:

1. Absolute best bossing in the genre. I was truly blown away by how many awesome boss fights I got to tackle while doing the campaign. Being able to pull them a few times back to back to learn the mechanics was very rewarding and fun in a way that ARPGs have never satisfied me. I play a lot of MMORPGs and PoE2 is the first time I've felt the level of satisfaction I get from MMOs when it comes to learning fights and improving not just through my gear, but my skill as a player. I almost can't overstate how big of a win this is, and it's the #1 reason I'll continue to play PoE2 into the future.

2. Skill gem system is an enormous upgrade from PoE1, and feels way more interesting than the D3/D4 skill systems.

3. Shockingly (to me), I find build craft SIGNIFICANTLY easier in PoE2 than I do in D4. The passive tree is simultaneously more interesting and more intuitive than the paragon board in D4, and more importantly I can open a skill gem - explore the skills that will be available to me, and plan a build around those skills in a very intuitive way. In Diablo 3/4 your build power mostly comes from the affixes on your gear, and that makes a blind playthrough very difficult as you don't know what all affixes you'll find and how to best put them together when planning your build. Respeccing over there may as well be free, so it's not a big deal to change plans constantly as new gear drops - but it feels bad and is invisible to the player while in the early stages of planning a build unless you look things up ahead of time. At no point in my PoE2 playthrough did I feel like I had to change plans because there simply was no gear to make my build work (compared to D4 where plenty of skills just don't have powerful enough affixes to make them scale into the endgame). Everyone always said that you need to follow a build guide so you don't brick your character in PoE1 and I was expecting the same here, but was pleasantly surprised to find that buildcraft was actually very intuitive. The memorable shapes on the passive tree make remembering what I want to do very easy (heading to this shape to pick up these nodes is easier than trying to plan out what I want to do on a giant grid of squares in the paragon board of D4).

4. Campaign was a blast to play through, and I look forward to playing through it on future characters. Diablo has moved away from leveling via campaign, and I'm glad they did due to how their campaign works (the amount of sitting around waiting for NPC RP in the D4 campaign would kill my desire to do that over and over again - there's almost none of that in the PoE2 campaign, I can just push forward and fight enemies and it feels great). I get why people want to skip campaign and feel like they can just jump straight into endgame, but personally when the campaign is well done I have more fun leveling that way than "adventure mode" alternatives. Last Epoch is another game where it feels great to level new characters because the campaign is just as fun as endgame for me. If an "adventure mode" alternative is introduced I hope it's not clearly the better choice and campaign stays viable for leveling without feeling like you're gimping yourself.

5. Overall the game plays incredibly well on controller. My biggest complaint in D4 and Last Epoch is that so many builds just don't play well at all with controller (it feels like every good pet build in Last Epoch requires casting spells on your minions to function, but targetting them is virtually impossible with controller). Casting while moving and kiting mobs feels really, really good. Not sure I can go back to being completely rooted in place while casting to be honest, it truly feels like the first next-gen ARPG. Dual stick works good for the most part to fix issues where it's targetting something I don't want to target, but there are still some situations that crop up where I wish it would target differently. As a deadeye my biggest complaint here is how frequently I'll be kiting mobs an inch away from me and my guy decides he wants to shoot his shotgun skill at a mob all the way across the screen doing no damage. I think an option that says "prefer targeting nearby enemies" would go a long way. Dual stick allows me to play around it, but the game is much more comfortable in situations where I only need to worry about the left stick for movement.

Cons:

1. Loot needs work in my opinion. I've checked out a couple of streamers who are in T15 maps and loot seems plentiful, perhaps even TOO plentiful. However, throughout the campaign and now in low tier maps (I'm working through T3 maps atm, but just ran out of maps). Throughout my campaign playthrough finding upgrades was incredibly rare. I'm in T3 maps at the moment and have virtually no resists (at least they aren't negative). My biggest feedback here is that exalts are still entirely too rare in the early game. I've gotten to the point where I don't even bother crafting gear, throughout my entire cruel campaign I got a whopping 4 exalts. Crafting while leveling may as well have not existed at all (and that was post-loot-buff leveling). I get that it's a trade based game, but it feels absolutely TERRIBLE to use exalts on gear that'll almost certainly not be very good when you can so easily trade a single exalt for a huge upgrade. I'm still trying to stick to SSF (I traded 3 exalts for a pair of unique electrocution gloves since they seemed incredible for my build, and they were - but other than that I'm SSF and plan to stay that way). I honestly think the situation here is that the drop curve needs to be adjusted so that low tier maps and the campaign are more rewarding but T13+ maps aren't (or are even slightly reduced).

2. Waystones need to drop more, at least early game (not sure the situation for high tier maps). There is currently a bug where sometimes when you open a map and try to travel to it you get disconnected and lose the map - with maps being as rare as they are at the moment this feels incredibly punishing. It also seems to wipe what's special about the nodes on the atlas (like boss, breach) so you get hit with a double whammy.

3. Skill balance is all over the place, but I'm sure this is very much a known issue and just an artifact of it being early access. No real need to elaborate here. I leveled as lightning deadeye and my biggest complaint was low single target dps until I got the final tier of skills and unlocked the magnetic salvo skill. I then switched to crossbow when I got a good crossbow and it feels fantastic (similar build to ds lily - the lightning shotgun skill and the lightning machine gun skill that procs on shock). Easily my favorite build I've played in any ARPG recently.

4. Minions is essentially forced to take raging spirits, which means the only way to play minions is to play with a screen full of fire. I started minions since that's the theme that always attracts me the most, but I got tired of staring at fire walls not being able to see the ground pretty quickly. I hope eventually we get some good builds that aren't built around raging spirits, but only costing 30 spirit to summon 10 of them it feels insane NOT to take them. Heck, even an MTX to make firewall and the raging spirits blue instead of red would go a long way toward making the build more fun for me personally. Happy to pay for a pallet swap here.

5. Dying in maps feels perhaps a little too punishing. I think this is mostly an artifact of waystones being difficult to find. I don't really mind losing what's on the atlas as much as I mind losing my waystone, and I feel like if properly balanced it should be the opposite.

6. Trade is too powerful due to how bad gear drops are. D4 has trading as well, but it's incredibly easy to avoid because gear rains from the sky as soon as you leave town and the bosses make finding specific uniques incredibly easy. Personally I think PoE2 is SIGNIFICANTLY closer to where I want drops than D4. It's incredibly boring to feel like your character is "done" day 1-2 of a season and then the rest of the season is about chasing tiny, incremental improvements to the exact same items. Please, please give me more exalts so I can try and craft my own gear more. As it stands right now using exalts to craft just feels like throwing away currency I could be using to buy upgrades. It honestly feels just as bad as the D3 auction house situation where the "correct" way to gain player power was spending all your time flipping items in trade instead of just running content in hopes of getting gear yourself. The amount of loot dropping in t1-3 maps so far feels fine, I just wish I had more exalts. I have a ton of the mats for rolling magic items, but even if I get a good magic base set up it's pretty much impossible to craft it further in hopes of getting an actually good piece of gear. From what I understand this is entirely resolved (maybe even too "resolved") once you are in high tier maps, but getting there feels pretty bad.

7. Too many stats feel mandatory on gear. Particular pain points are movement speed on boots and charm slots on belts. Luckily I got a belt I'm really happy with today (+1 charm slot, and really decent other stats), but finding decent boots feels way too difficult. Due to the way combat works movement speed isn't a "nice to have" the same way it is in other ARPGs I've played. It's simultaneously the best quality of life stat line AND the best defensive stat line because 20+ movement speed makes getting out of the ick so much easier. I wish MS was just implicit on boots to be honest, finding good boots with no movement speed they're basically just bricked. Feels bad :(

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Overall this seems to be shaping up to be truly an all time great game. I have some issues for now, but seeing as how it just launched in early access I'm getting "this is the worst the game will ever be, and it's already one of my favorite in the genre" vibes.

Classes played:
- Infernalist to the sun room in act 3, then shelved because I got sick of staring at firewalls but living without raging spirits felt like gimping myself too much since they're essentially free to add to the build.

- Monk to about level 30. Early game felt pretty bad, but as soon as I got ice strike it started to feel really good. Very exciting to pick this character back up and continue, it seems like there are a ton of fun build goals here with power charges.

- Deadeye leveled as lightning arrow now running as lightning crossbow. No real notes here. Banger class, it feels like it was perfectly designed around the whole "move while casting" thing. Excited to level a new one and try the frost arrow build now that it's been buffed a bit.

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By far my biggest complaint about the game as it currently stands is that gearing up through "shopping" - both in town and via trade - is entirely too powerful compared to finding gear yourself or crafting gear yourself. It makes ignoring trade feel like you're playing wrong, not different. I don't mind slower progression, but the exact same currency that's used to RNG craft is also used to trade so every time I try to craft an item I just feel like "well... I could have traded those exalts for a huge upgrade and instead I tossed them into the ether never to be seen again in exchange for a bricked item."