Couch coop campaign feedback

Me and my buddy just finally finished the campaign in couch co-op mode.
I played PoE1 starting in Ambush league while for him this was the 1st ARPG.
I also played D2 a lot, D3, Grim Dawn, Last Epoch and love soulslikes. Buddy is a much more casual gamer.
I went with chayula caster monk, while for him we picked titan mace warrior (lol).
I've decided to write down some feedback and post it here, hopefully GGG finds it useful.

I will focus on the coop campaign experience as I think this is the most unique point of view I can provide without repeating what has already been said in this sub. I also leveled two more characters in the meantime, so I have went through the entire campaign quite a few times but didn't touch the endgame much yet. I will also try to focus on what we liked/disliked and how certain aspects of the game made us feel, rather than try to suggest solutions as I recall GGG stating they prefer this.

Game was great until this point, we enjoyed it a lot. I have some negative comments about new player experience and character progression. I played through the campaign more than once rather than jumping into the endgame, which is something I did not expect to want to do. I plan to go through the campaign with all classes actually. I am not sure how long this will last, but I am enjoying the campaign a lot. Difficulty felt challenging but fair, with few exceptions. Ascending was awful and too hard for campaign playthrough. Personally, I am also disappointed to see GGG forgetting lessons that were learned during PoE1 years and seemingly start completly from scartch. More on this in further sections.

We think the classes are very distinct and the class preview during selection is very useful for new players. This is a big improvement over PoE1 and over any ARPG I've previously played really. The only comment I would have here is the class identity feels like it's tied to weapon type, rather than to the class you are picking. I have a gemling legionnaire with the quarterstaff and I keep referring to him as "the monk" and my chayula caster is referred to as "lightning mage" because he uses elemental staff. If you have a quarterstaff your character will look, feel and play like a monk. The character is basically just the ascedancy bonus which is inconsequential in how your character feels. I think this ties to other posts in this sub saying characters are very railroaded into specific builds, and gem weapon restrictions are too much. I personally dislike it, and is perhaps something to think about before game releases.

On a side note - we picked warrior for him, to be a tank and have an easier time surviving. I picked a chayula caster, because instant mana and ES leech and chaos damage seemed an interesting idea with new Mind Over Matter. Needless to say, both ideas were garbage.

Act I is great, full stop. It's very climatic, very polished and does a great job of teaching a new player what the game is about. Some help for a newcomer to PoE would be helpful when opening the passive tree for the first time. A suggestion where to path, or an explaination of how gem tags work, would be good. As it was lacking, I had to provide it. PoE2 is already doing a great job for new players, but this is a pretty key bit of knowledge that isn't explained. Perhaps an in-game Exilepedia with more information, similar to Civilization games, could be worth it.

I saw a lot of people saying it is the most difficult part of the game, which I would disagree with. The difficulty felt fine. We wiped a few times on some bosses and had some random deaths here and there, but it was just enough to keep us engaged, but not frustrated.

We didn't like quest rewards in Act II. We already had a lot of skills on our characters and did not want/need more. We wanted to improve the skills we decided to focus on. Unfortunately game was showering us with new skill gems. I would like to see a Lesser Jeweller Orb or a Gemcutter Prism(s) as quest rewards somewhere at this point. Perhaps quality currency or an essence to start crafting a weapon upgrade which is very needed between Act II and Act III.

We also missed the Shrine of Garukhan more than once. It needs to be more visible, or at the end of an Act, before proceeding to the next one, a remainder to grab everything would be useful.

We struggled a bit with Jamanra due to lack of lightning resistances and I felt there was little we can due to fix it. There are no vendor recipes, there is no crafting (more on this later) and the shops don't offer basic resistance rings, resistances are gone from the tree and flasks and purity auras are also gone. We knew what our problem was, but didn't have any way to solve it.

We could not complete Trial of Sekhemas together and I had to do it on my own with each character. I personally feel campaign is not the place for this level of challenge. People want to ascend ASAP because ascedancy is a big part of class fantasy you plan for. I feel honor is an extremely bad system, and Sanctum as a whole feels like an entire minigame on it's own that shouldn't be a mandatory part of the core experience. It's just too different from everything else and requires re-learning the game in a new context.

We felt it was a bit too long. I saw players mentioning Utzaal often, but it's not a zone we would like to see shortened as it was very aesthetic. If Act III is to be trimmed by making maps smaller, I'd look elsewhere.

Mektuul fight was awful. We felt the DPS check was unfair, and something the game did not prepare us to expect. Our warrior had low dps and was built to survive because the game was pretty hard up to this point. We felt there is nothing we can do to overcome this at the time and skipped the boss entirely. Personally, I feel it was out of place and shouldn't be a thing in the campaign.

Quest rewards and items were awkward in places. The choice of one of three permanent buffs is very similar to bandits in PoE1. In Cruel chaos res was offered and to me, this is a repeat of Oak situation from PoE1 which felt like the obviously best choice from the three. The cauldron potion witch felt pointless. The statues that we can sell to Oswald were confusing - either don't make them green on the map (there is no quest or actual reward for it) or make them sell for much more and start a quest when we pick them up. At that point we had a lot of empty jewel sockets on the tree and no jewels to fill them. Perhaps jewels should either drop more often, be gambled at Alva's store, or be a quest reward from time to time. I could easily see a choice of one from three identified rare jewels as quest reward.

Viper Napuatzi felt too hard and unfair. I would like to see this fight significantly toned down. Similar problem to Jamanra, where we knew we needed to resist chaos/poison damage but didn't have a clear way of improving this for our characters. The fight is too mechanically difficult for campaign playthrough in my opinion and felt much harder than Doryani, which is supposed to be the final Act boss.

We skipped Trial of Chaos entirely for the time being as I did it with my another character before we got here. Similar comment to Trial of Sekhemas, it's just too hard for campaign and first two ascensions which should be natural to campaign character progression. I will however say, despite being extremely overtuned, it feels like PoE and I like it. Unlike Sanctum which feels like rouguelike bullethell.

We felt the amount of loot (after the loot buffs) was fine. I did not like the screens upon screens of garbage I had to sift through in PoE1. It was also easy for a new player, and when we actually got an upgrade, it lastet for quite a while to enjoy it. I view this as an improvement over PoE1. Crafting tips for new players are missing and without my assistance, my buddy would not interact with it. Picking up white bases to transmute+aug+regal in hopes of finding an upgrade is absolutely NOT obvious.

Weapons are in an especially bad state. It was extremely hard for us to find/craft upgrades with phys damage for our warrior and gem levels for our caster. These are very specific affixes that either make or break the item. Same with boots with movement speed, which is another repeated issue from PoE1. This brings me to my next point - crafting and trading.

After getting hardstuck at Napuatzi, we decided we need to step back and upgrade our warrior's weapon (it was from lvl 20 and we were at 40 something). We blew through all of our currency, all the gold on gambling and got nothing. This is absolutely a quit moment for a new player. We felt we have zero agency in the entire process and it was hard to explain to a new player why most weapons don't actually roll the one stat that makes them usable.

We had to use trade for an upgrade. This felt bad and very disappointing. Felt like we got beat by the game and had to resort to cheating. Bear in mind I knew about trading website, because I played PoE1 before and know GGG is weird about trading. My buddy had no idea and would just quit. For a penny we bought a weapon that instantly doubled our damage and that I don't see we will replace any time soon. I am extremely disappointed to see ZERO improvements to SSF experience, zero innovation on trading system and ten steps backwards with the crafting. With this one trade, we made all weapons in the Cruel difficulty, most likely, not worth picking up. We instantly felt using currency to craft is a waste and hesitated to use it from that point onwards. And we screwed up the difficulty curve that GGG is trying so hard to maintain. We wanted to make our own gear, and progress at our own pace, but there is currently zero way to do that. We feel grinding for upgrades should be at the endgame, not during campaign. Last Epoch has a great crafting system and an amazing idea for SSF/Trading options. I can't see why PoE can't innovate the same way, and refuse to believe this can't be improved. This is another issue from PoE1 where I feel we are back to square one, and throwing away years of iterative improvement. If it's a new game, and we are not supposed to be comparing it to PoE1 that's okay, but in this case, the SSF/Trading split should be rethinked in the context of the new game as well.

Lack of resistances and life on the tree feels extremely bad. We know our characters lacked survivability, for example during Napuatzi fight, but the tree didn't offer us any way to solve this problem. There is too much travel nodes with nothing in between. The notables have too many downsides (why do they even have any, we have uniques and keystones for that).

I agree with other posts, that the characters feel very railroaded into very specific builds. I would like to see this improved. I also feel the game is very heavily pushing us to combo attacks from the same weapon type. I feel like we went from one extreme of the spectrum (one button PoE1 gameplay) to another with again zero choice from the player. To me, this is a downgrade from PoE1.