Early Access Feedback: Diamond in the rough filled with inconsistencies and an uncertain direction.

Hello everyone, first of congratulations to GGG for the successful launch of Early Access and topping twitch at 1.3m concurrent viewers and bringing SteamDB down.
I've clocked in, according to steam ~90hrs so far, mostly on one character and some glorious couch co-op going over every nook and cranny and I wanted to leave my feedback.

A disclosure I'd like to leave is that I am not a PoE 1 player, I was part of the beta in 2012, but due to major shifts in my life at the time I could not invest much time in it. I've tried different leagues throughout the years but I didn't progress much beyond early maps. Not because I couldn't, but because I didn't want to. Personally, the general bias towards ranged classes and abilities and the zoomy gameplay left me so unsatisfied and starved of actual class fantasy, identity and thoughtful play that I didn't really have a motivation to keep playing. Additionally the mechanics in general and the defenses in specific, I felt, could use a lot of streamlining since their complexity and abundance did not seem to provide more nuance, as most were mandatory. Their complexity only added to bloat and raising the barrier to entry (in case I wanted to convince a friend to play).


Having then seen all of the gameplay videos and interviews regarding PoE 2 and the simplification (not dumbification) of a lot of these systems and layers with the additional promise of much slower and more tactical, impactful and consequential gameplay had me very optimistic about my chances to greatly enjoy the second iteration of Path of Exile.

Anybody's free to leave their opinion and fill in anything that might have missed or an experience that I've not yet encountered.
I appreciate that yours might be different, so I implore you to enrich the discussion, not tear it down with remarks not conducive to constructive criticism. Though this feedback is aimed at GGG, so any comments should be made with the idea of helping them assess the accuracy of these statements and therefore the state of the game. After all the aim of feedback is a discussion between the players and the developer with the purpose of improving the game.

A little warning for anyone about to read - what's catalogued down below might sound somewhat negative, that's because it is, I find no purpose in empty praises and giving feedback that boils down to checking off "this works" and "this doesn't". Therefore I've only touched on what I think does not, with a positive mention here and there where I've felt that it might be needed or not necessarily be implied, especially in the context of the feedback I'm giving.

So you can assume anything I've not written about I view as at the very least fine, but generally good or great.
If I have to distill it I'd say that I love a lot, but not all of the game and find it inconsistent in its design decisions and the discrepancy between the expressed direction for the game in interviews and what we have so far.
I feel that what I've given for the EA has been more than adequate for what is there, but for the good of the game it should pick a direction and then make game decisions that enforce it, in the face of feedback if they have to. I'm fine with not being the target audience, even though I felt like I was:





(The feedback from now on is broken down into points and sub-points to aid legibility)

A/ Difficulty and Pace up to the middle of act 3 and GGG's initial response to feedback
1/ Pre-patches Item and Power progression felt incredibly solid, rare drops felt immediately impactful even when they weren't relevant as that would mean that I would be getting one step closer to a Regal Orb.

2/ Drops felt balanced and meaningful, initially.
I am unsure if I was one of the lucky few that had no issue with drops and items even if some of my gear was getting long in the tooth. Items never felt like the cause of slow down of my progress and rare items' drop rates felt appropriate and that made Regals feel very potent and useful.

3/ Changes to loot after 0.1.0c:
The later changes on drop rates, due to feedback given in/during the slowest acts of the game combined into an absolute shower of rares come the later levels. And while I'm certain GGG is trying their best to find a middle ground, the combination of when this feedback was given, the echo chambers in which some of it was circulated and amplified and the vast contrast between PoE2 and every other ARPG's drop rates, which were used as comparison to point out how 'bad' the drops were - are all at fault for what I believe to be an overcompensation that diluted the experience and direction of the game. I'm re-running the campaign in couch co-op currently and around level 14 most of our items are rare making encounters trivial and inconsequential. I feel conflicted about the changes to the drop rates in patch 0.1.0c:
"Monster Modifiers now grant higher amounts of Item Rarity and Item Quantity. This is most common on Magic and Rare enemies, but also affects Unique Enemies if applied through various Endgame Mechanics like the Deadly Evolution Keystone.
Increased the chance for Rare Monsters in Maps to have 3 or 4 modifiers."
On one hand it felt awful that in PoE 1 the strength of the rare monster really didn't guarantee better loot(from what I remember correctly), on the other it suddenly felt like there were rare drops around every corner which also throws off the power progression and game balance.

4/ What really was the problem with the lower drop rates and did one even exist?
The major complaint, or rather low-effort meme-ing, about the drops was not that they were impeding progress, but that they just weren't as bountiful as expected. To be fair the complaint was unmotivated in general besides a general theme of 'less loot is bad, because less loot is bad'.
The posts that were complaining about not being able to progress due to items didn't fully or at all disclose the detail of their weapon, skill and passive tree choices what was the goal of those decisions and what exactly gear-related they think was slowing down their progress.

5/ Importance of paying attention to Quality of feedback over only Quantity
I saw a lot of genuinely good, high quality feedback - detailed and rationally explained, both in written and video form.
I can empathize with the stress GGG are under right now, however, for now I sincerely hope they not disregard the quality of the feedback against an easily reproducible quantity of a moaning minority. I think that everyone that plays and hasn't yet disabled global chat can confirm the many voices of dissent there that wish the game's challenge be watered down and therefore the game's original direction be completely changed. Some I can speculate due to personal insecurity, while others are open in their support of a 'rival' game, afraid that a competitor, still in early access might make their hundreds of dollars of cosmetics obsolete if their product is discontinued for not brining in unrealistic returns due to PoE 2. Some are just repeating like parrots. Few, however, put the effort to ask themselves why - at least two times in a row and even fewer to articulate it in some sort of consumable feedback. Please, let's pay attention to effortful voices, at the very least bots are very easy to set up nowadays and is the first thing an unscrupulous, exile-like hating company would employ. It's low cost & high efficacy.

B/ Currency and crafting
What felt off, especially given what was said about increasing its drop rate by 10x, was the currency drop rates. You do not get nearly enough currency as you do rares. You also don't get nearly enough currency to actually craft. Currency is still in the place where it was in PoE 1, it's being hoarded and used as a trading resource and unless drop rates are really 10x-ed and/or some determinism is introduced into the crafting, it will remain as such indefinitely. The current drop rates, I feel, would almost be enough if every Regal or Exalted orb's use was deterministic in nature and do not account for the fact that they are just a CHANCE of getting something useful. I tried using Exalts, but if felt horrible as I always got something that was at least mildly unusable and while I don't think PoE 1's crafting is the answer or was any better, replacing the ability to modify mods with bricking items and having to use a hundred bases is not any less tedious and is arguably more unpleasant. What could be done is a crafting model with variable specificity and proportional cost, where you narrow down to a certain number of item modifiers and the narrower the selection the higher the cost. That would remove the need to spam-click, currency to modify an item. (which was given as a major reason to remove PoE 1-style crafing)
For example: Excluding no affixes from the pool up to selecting
8 affixes in the pool would cost 1 exalt, then selecting every 1 affix fewer in the pool after would result in some kind of logarithmic cost such as:
7 would be 2 ex
6 - 4 ex
5 - 8 ex
4 - 16 ex
3 - 32 ex
2 - 64 ex
1 - 128 ex
This is obviously an example, but I don't think PoE 1 end-game crafting was any cheaper. That would also have an economic effect, as you essentially have a predefined cost for your perfect item from scratch so item princing for non SSF leagues would be substantially easier and much more stable. This might be a personal belief, but the cost of an item in the economy shouldn't be that far away from the cost of creation (taking into account the effects on price of supply and demand).
This also keeps the craft-gambling aspect for people that enjoy it as you can try to make an item with a bigger pool of affixes and if you're lucky you'd be able to sell it for much more than you invested, though chances of that should be balanced so as to not wreck the economy.
The Tiers of affixes can be determined by the tier of the weapon. That, however, introduces the problem of hoarding currency for late-game crafting only. To alleviate some of that the cost can be adjusted based on the item level, maybe it's an additive scale up to level 40/ or tier 1, then a much flatter logarithmic one or a fibonacci sequence and then something more aggressive as the tier of the item nears the maximum.

The rune system seems very promising, especially for filling resistance gaps(hopefully more things in the future), however, the current iteration where you can essentially soft-brick an item for all but one or two equipment and passives configurations by socketing it w/ a rune seem excessive. We should have the ability to destroy either the item or the socketable, that would allow either the socket's contents to adjust to new additions of equipment/passives or a single pair of runes to be reused when upgrading equipment, incentivizing using them early on as well, when equipment changes at a much quicker pace.


C/ Combat
1/ Combat felt very engaging, but more importantly tactile, they've nailed the feeling which is really hard and the very well executed WASD movement was a crucial element of that. I felt the need to stay spatially aware and try to predict my enemies movements so as to not get overwhelmed and used all of my abilities - until:

2/ Roll Changes:
The Roll change should've been: EITHER Player size = Zero OR small mob push-back - both is an overcorrection that leads to loss of much of tactical play and positioning.
Before the roll changes were implemented there was pleasure to be had of needing to think before and during every engagement, zooming was also less possible since you could zoom into a situation you couldn't zoom out of. Spatial and situational awareness was key and there was a general feeling of satisfaction of beating the odds. I will not discredit the feedback that it felt bad to be crowded and killed with no option of escape or fighting back, however that did NOT come only to the roll. On the one hand, yes, it felt very bad a big mighty warrior or a dexterous monk would get stuck by a small beetle and honestly small enemy push back should've been in the game from day one, however, the times when I got surrounded NOT due to actions taken in the last few seconds were incredibly few. That is to say, there were very, very few cases where it was not the player's fault that happened and with ONLY small enemy push-back those would've been reduced to zero. However, in my personal opinion, many of the more vocal players wanted PoE 2 to play like it's brother or competitors, just running in a straight line with no consequences for the path taken and could not comprehend how tactical errors taken seconds prior would result in their inability to escape their death in the current moment. This isn't that much different from bad positioning during a boss fight, however, the consequence comes almost instantly and therefore it's easier to connect the dots between your own bad choices and the consequence of your actions. What the two combined changes to roll resulted in was the removal of any sort of spatial and situational awareness requirement and the ability to run in a straight line, dodge-spam out of a tight spot and AoE blast the groups. Making all engagements trivial, removing the consequence of many tactical actions and dumbing down the combat substantially. There is currently no satisfaction or challenge present in outmaneuvering an enemy group and handling them swiftly, as just running around the map aggroing everything then dodging away from any crowding is much more effective. The problem of being surrounded and killed without a chance to fight back was correctly reported, however, as stated earlier, roll is not the only and arguably was the smaller issue and the changes to it affected combat drastically.

3/ Stagger and Stun Threshold
Stagger is something I've not seen talked about much and I personally believe it needs to be re-examined and possibly rebalanced. In a game where, despite the 41 minute long ZiggyD interview about fixing melee, close range characters are at a pronounced disadvantage, especially in certain trials and the majority of the bosses - we have stagger that can be inflicted from even small mobs. This increases the discrepancy between melee and ranged even further, especially because we have ranged monsters that inflict it en masse in act 3. I can't forget to mention the vaal soldiers that stab you repeatedly and you're staggered until the flurry is over and another few of those mobs a slight async between their attacks results in you get stagger-locked to your death. Those of you that know that stagger is lessened by stun threshold will offer it as a solution, however, stun sources generally come from slower, telegraphed attacks and can skillfully be avoided, therefore making the stat nice to have and something that can generally be compensated with higher skill of play and a charm. Stagger, however, is not the same since it's very quick, non-telegraphed attack that leaves you momentarily stunned and no matter how good you are as a player (and I'm a very CC heavy monk) one of these is bound to hit you at the wrong time and with the current '1/few hit death', limited access to passive tree defenses/life + large mob centric balance of the game that almost always means death for a melee. That would make Stun Threshold not a nice to have, but rather a must-have, which has been well documented through the years and games to be a very poor design decision, if it's a must have then it probably should be part of your class by default or have an equal representation in the ranged classes. What that means in PoE is that melee's who generally tend to need more defenses, NEED to take another one making the offensive gap between them any ranged characters even wider. At the very least the player, like monsters should build some kind of tolerance. The first stagger can be full strength, the second would need more 'staggering' hits to build up to and/or have less duration so that a stagger-locking scenario is made rare to impossible. Additionally, ranged stagger should be vastly reduced if not eliminated entirely it only affects melee characters that need to close the distance and while you can safely roll a certain distance the millisecond between your first and second roll gives a nice window to one of the 10 ranged mobs that inflict stagger to hit you. That is in the best case scenario, where you don't have to fight anybody else but them.

4/ The end of Slow and Tactial play
Originally this point was called "Act 3: The end of Slow and Tactial play" since this is when the combination of bigger pack sizes and rising player power culminated in the death of what's been advertised as PoE 2's identity. However, with the changes to aforementioned changes to loot, this unfortunately already happens in the middle to end of act 1. In all of their interviews and videos of the game GGG demonstrated that they wanted to move away from skill-less, one button 'zoom-zoom' gameplay into more engaging, slower-paced, combo-like one. However, and I'll acknowledge that this is early access and past the very early acts where they've spent the most time balancing, none of the design decisions taken support such a desire.
My personal example is: Past level 40 on my run-of-the-mill Invoker due to several factors which I will go into briefly, I am not incentivized, but rather punished for using anything but the fastest skill I have. Here's why:

4-1/ Mob density
In act 1 and 2, mob density and mob abilities were well balanced to the point where you could use distance as a defensive tool and pick on an enemy or two until you could capitalize on an opening with little risk. The relative increase in mob number/ density and cheap stat scaling (damage and sometimes speed) INSTEAD of/or ALONGSIDE with an increase in enemy abilities and behavioral complexity -combined with- enemy hp not scaling proportionally to their damage -and- the major lack of defensive / hp passives FORCES the player into only one viable playstyle. All damage and all speed. Due to the increased number of enemies pouring out of every orifice of the map distance and spatial control becomes futile, the increase raw numbers also increases ranged and magic monsters which you are forced to spam-roll if you are to avoid any damage and, again, the increase of number of enemies also increase the number of attacks per second headed your way meaning that any skill that takes longer to cast/ has a slower animation is simply not viable due to lack of defenses in all but several builds. Therefore the vast majority of players go full in to damage and speed and any substantial differences between PoE 1 and 2 are lost.
I wonder what differences, besides graphics, control groups unfamiliar with either game will point out if you'd show them a high level character doing maps in both.
To add to that, and I'll be getting specific about my class here, the first two acts' pacing and the general sentiment conveyed by Jonathan and Mark in all interviews is at odds with at least two of the monk's skills.
Ice Strike and Flicker Strike DO NOT belong in PoE 2. They are zoom-zoom incarnate, the very thing the second game was supposedly moving away from. They don't feel especially good in the context of the game as you have a certain pace of play before acquiring them that is, given the state of mob packs and general balance, vastly inferior to the absolute face-melting speed they provide, not to mention how out of place they look and feel. I could Wave of Frost and then Glacial Cascade for a nice combo, or I can hold LMB and in that same time hit over 12 times and explode 4 different packs with a skill that auto-aims, teleports and scales 3x(compared to wave of frost) and 2x(compared to glacial cascade) with attack speed. Meaning that no matter how many supports for Freeze Buildup I put on Frost Wave and its inherent large base - it's vastly inferior to an unsupported Ice Strike for the purpose of Freezing, simply of how many times a second it hits.
With the current state of the player, skill and monster balance GGG has painted themselves into a corner in regards to turning PoE 2 into PoE 1. Maybe they really can't or don't want to support two different games, because there would be no point in supporting two games that are the same in all but graphics, one of the major things PoE 1 players really wanted improved.
I have to say here that I have no issue in that, I feel like I've gotten my money's worth in my 90ish hours I spent on early access and there's currently quite a good choice in the ARPG market. What I find issue with is the inconsistency of what was communicated the game would be and what we currently have.

4-2/ Character progression's effect on combat
Just to drive the point home, character progression in interviews was expressed as an increase in the toolkit for engagement and problem solving, a.k.a. using multiple skills and varied supports. When asked if 1 skill builds would be possible, either Mark or Jonathan said that while they'd be possible, they'd result in much less damage. There's possibly some truth to that, but what was omitted is that you'd either be dead by the time you stack all your marks, curses and complimentary abilities or that you'd be doing so much damage either way it wouldn't really matter.

5/ Defenses and One Hit kills, Why is Punishment confused with Challenge?
Taking away a lot of defenses and almost all of life from the passive tree yet scaling monster and boss damage disproportionately to their health does several things.
For one it punishes melee that isn't majorly invested in defense and sustain the most and even if you are it forces a doubling down on ALL damage, because it's easier and safer just to down monster packs and rares instantly and boss in under 5 seconds than to have to deal with mechanics and some hits that have a different AoE range than their effects would suggest. Not to mention, from a game design and human psychology standpoint the One-hit-kill centeredness of the boss balance works to PUNISH you while you're trying to learn and feels unfun at best, and works towards making many players indifferent towards the game. An easy example is the tornado from the bird in Ultimatum, which you have to do for your second ascendancy. On one hand there's a good chance your run is bricked by horrible mods, on the other you need to do several rounds before you get to that boss even if you live through them. The move is very poorly telegraphed mostly because of the speed at which it happens and then results in an almost instantaneous death. By the time you ran enough rounds to get back to the boss you've forgotten what the que was, not to mention that the modifiers you have might prevent you from being able to even escape it (which again leads to trying to one-shot the boss or ground effects). That also applies to bosses in maps. The only reason difficulty works in Souls games is that you have infinite tries at the boss. So you can fail and learn and fail again, until you're a better player. Path of Exile 2's treatment of 'learning' is equivalent to trying to learn an instrument but every time you make a mistake (which initially can be measured in mistakes per second) your instrument is taken away from you for half an hour. So to accumulate 8hrs of practice you don't need 8hours, but possibly 8months, not to mention the compounding effects of player stress due to the steep cost of failing. I'm sorry to say but it feels as if GGG's game design team has a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why satisfaction is derived from Difficulty and Challenge and have trouble differentiating the two from Punishment.
For the ascendancy trials I honestly see no reason why the mechanics of each are not disabled for the boss fight as they make the boss encounters unnecessarily punishing and substantially unfun. You should challenge the player for the promise of power, not slap them across the face with RNG beyond their control. As when you finish ascending - you don't feel deserving, but lucky - and that is a sh*t feeling. I feel like I have to mention that some of the modifiers on those trials are at odds with the skill first, 1-hit-kill design of the game like getting a movement speed penalty in a game where you should be dodging everything -or- several instances of on-ground effects that result in an almost instant death in the only place where you can escape from the boss' AoE. The player's time should not be wasted with things out of their control, especially those based on RNG. For maps, either let the player repeat the map but reduce the loot by 1/3 every time they die - but giving them the opportunity to learn or find a mistake in their build that's causing them to fail -or- go back to giving half a dozen tries. The con of the second method is that it isn't scalable, for easier bosses 6 tries is too much for harder ones it's too few attempts to learn.
If things stay the way they are, players are FORCED, due to the massive hinderance on their ability to fail and repeat until success, otherwise known as learning, to spec into damage exclusively and just delete the bosses before they have a chance to be deleted themselves. On that end the boss scaling is, to put it nicely, out of whack. Give them more health and take away from their damage. Players desperately want drawn-out epic battles where you can have the time to either learn a boss' sequences or admire your own progress bobbing and weaving in an out of the boss' attacks. We want to see all of their mechanics and learn to skillfully play against them. Personally, after entering merciless (with a single exception) every boss I've encountered has died before the opportunity to display any mechanics, the freeze to nerf only affects subsequent freezes - doesn't do anything if they're dead after the first one. Freeze and stun on bosses should result in, say, a 30-50% slow down of their actions not in X amount of seconds of mechanic skipping. On the one hand CC has become the best and most readily available defensive layer on the other thousands of man-hours of design and animation are wasted when not a single special attack can be executed.
Failing to avoid a hit should not kill you, but put a dent in you flasks. There should be a cost, but that cost shouldn't be everything. What this creates besides everything already mentioned is the NEED and absolute necessity to have +life/es/mana(for those that scale es from that) on every piece of gear - not so that you're tanky, but so that you can barely survive if hit. As discussed in the Stun Threshold section, mandatory stats are a very bad design decision, here doubly so, because after a certain level, if the gear doesn't have life/es/mana on it it's worthless because it would make the game unplayable making all but a few drops actually useful.

6/ Loss of EXP on death (Punishment of the Exile 2.0)
I don't think it needs mentioning, but loss of exp on death, first of all is an archaic mechanic that hasn't been re-examined for what it was used for and what it offers today, second it does not belong in a high-skill game and third with the scaling of monster and boss damage simply feels out of place as you're, with any skill-based game, expected to fail much more frequently. Multiply that by the stakes that you're already facing - losing the map's modifiers and add the TIME that you're already losing. Just that time alone is a punishment enough in itself, that's literally the player's life, you're just multiplying that cost based on how bad their build or current skills are. Overly punishing mechanics like these were used back in the day as a way to stretch a game that did not have that much content to begin with, as they forced you to replay parts to make up for what you lost. Later they were just copied as is without a question on what they did for the game, what problem they solved or what quality they contributed that was so important. As far as I'm aware the isn't a diegetic reason for losing exp on death either, so that's also not a reason.

7/ Full Map Respawn
This is another decision that's at odds with, for example the disproportionate scaling of damage on monsters. If that was a really fundamental design pillars (it's effects certainly are fundamental, as discussed above) and you count on the player dying somewhat frequently. Additionally I see no rational reason to respawn the entire map. Bosses need no explanation as to why, but monsters make no sense. You can start to out level zones so massively if you're really bad and instead of confronting similar challenge at your current power level you can skip on improving technically as a player simply due to out-stat-ing your opponents.


D/ Passive Tree and Respec
The Passive tree seems a bit watered down and spread too wide, it could be distilled and compressed. For example Grim Dawn's Devotions, which act like a similar system to the passive tree has individual focused clusters and a no pathing in the traditional sense. Each point has more weight, but due to less points there's less nuance, which is the advantage of having a bigger tree with more points to spend - as in PoE 1. PoE 2's tree, especially affected by the current state of everything else in the game feels like it's full of at least semi-mandatory Mid / Big nodes and the often times inflexible/symmetrical pathing lead to the feeling of the loss of nuance and low worth to each passive point. It's though as if removing and simplifying a lot of the games' defences (as should have been done) and removing life and the deprecated defense layers from the tree resulted in a substantial size reduction, so to not lose their trademark 'skill forest' it was diluted to add size back.

1/ Respec costs and who they hit the hardest.
I know respec costs have already been addressed, but the way they were addressed frankly spoke more about GGG's either stance or negligence on the matter.
Let's address a couple of facts - PoE 2 was meant to bring in a lot of new blood from retired poe players to people who've never played ARPG's and players such as myself whose love for the first game's mechanics and end-game but was outweighed by the pace of combat.
All three groups share one thing in common - a lack of (recent) PoE experience and while one might argue this is a different game, after having played a game one tends to notice and learn the quirks and tendencies of its designers, and since the lead game designers are the same and their approach hasn't radically changed either - PoE 1 veterans are at a much bigger knowledge advantage in a sequel. From those three groups the biggest one in terms of number of potential new players is the ARPG newbies, they're not only not versed in GGG's general approach, but the genre's mechanical history and current-day trends as well. They, for example, might not notice at all the difference between 'increased' vs 'more' wording, nor are they pre-conditioned in looking for hour long tutorials on order of operations and how damage is converted and calculated.
This introduction to player groups and their relative experience is a primer to a line of questions:
Q: Are respect costs too high?
A: Well, that depends on who they hit the hardest - what is their general amount of gold and how often do they have to pay them.
Q: Who do respec costs hit the hardest?
A: The true cost of respec should be multiplied by the number of times one respecs. Thus we can predict that the average respec cost generally rises with the inexperience of the player.

So the most abundant source of new players, the new ARPG 'converts' are taxed the highest with ARPG vets and ex-PoE players following second and current PoE players in the last place. In other words all three groups of new players are taxed the most for not knowing and trying to learn, those are also the players that might need the most gold to begin with, due to an inferior ability to spot the PoE-particular patterns required to get more from less and thus having to rely more or pure stats from equipment, therefore more money spent on vendor goods and more currency wasted crafting and trading.

GGG's solution, addressed only the late-game scaling of the respec costs. This addresses only the current PoE players and some of the Returning ones + ARPG experienced ones. It does absolutely nothing for the largest demographic of player - the inexperienced player who is trying to learn the game and often needs a full respec quite early on. If most complaints regarding respec costs came from the late game, it's not a futile exercise to try and deconstruct if it isn't a form of Survivorship Bias, only those who are still playing and had the knowledge to reach that far remain and not indifferent enough to complain - the newbies instead have been shot in the cockpit and fuselage and not the wings.

What I find worse is the lack of any justification in regards to having consequential respec costs in the first place. I specify consequential, because inconsequential or small costs can act as a gold/resource sink and that's a valid game-design purpose. What I've heard said, again from GGG's lead designers is they want the player to have to commit. Why? What is the purpose game-design wise for this commitment? What good does it do, because I can list you at least some of the bad that it does. Before I do so, however, let me say that people usually have a certain idea they're committed to when starting a character. You'll often hear 'Oh I just want to wave a huge fiery axe around and be built like a tank' it's only after getting smacked in the face with a game's systems, their limitations, what can and can't be done, what's optimal and what is possible for what exactly they want to play -do they lose their commitment to the initial idea and start trying to find either a middle ground or a completely different build so they can satisfy the game's requirements and not theirs. Players don't lack commitment(whatever unexplained value that has), games generally and understandably - have systems that are not all-encompassing and can't allow or enable equality for all permutations of a character. You can't have really good builds if you don't have really bad ones and everything in- between.
Now here's what consequential respect costs actually do, they:
- Gravely punish new players for not knowing AND for attempting to learn.
- Punishes intermediate players for experimentation and forces them to play it safe until they can afford it at end game when the increased rewards and new 'fixed' scaling makes it more viable.
- Force you into only the specific equipment combinations that work with them and don't allow the build to tailor to your drops, which you receive frequently.
- Result in spending, sometimes more, time not playing the game just so you don't bankrupt yourself.
- Reward a lack of creativity, lack of understanding of the game in its systems and a general tendency for following ready-made guides on builds.
> This is bad because this is the least 'stable' type of player with the highest 'flight-risk'. They have no appreciation for your game's systems its nuances and what makes it special, which is the core of the ARPG genre.
> This is the player a certain other game had cultivated and it's the reason that PoE 2's EA affected its population and even twitch viewer count in the way that it did.
Those two games are as different as can be, the former bordering on another genre with how dumbed down it is - but because all the average player does is follow a guide without inherent understanding of the game's systems and holds the left click and spams space from time to time - they start looking very similar. Again, speaking from a psychological and physiological perspective making a player learn an appreciate the complex system in your game during their honeymoon with the game makes them resistant to change and much less-likely to abandon ship for the next 'big thing', because learning is a very costly process and to compound that people get used to how things work and develop their preferences based on that. This is exactly why once a hardcore audience is formed, like PoE 1's, it's incredibly stable.

As a player with some PoE and a not insubstantial ARPG experience I had only 1 full respec and it was out of choice. I wanted a change of pace, but it cost me all of my gold plus a little more.
That left me at 800 gold on level 40-something. So I started selling the blues that I found. To my surprise the gold started piling up quick so I have to express my appreciation for the design decision that a player can choose to get more gold or currency.

E/ Performance
The machine I'm playing the game on is bang on the recommended specs, it has generally been good, albeit inconsistent in places. I have a feeling that there's some serious optimization to be had, because when it's good it's really good and when it's bad it feels like there's a badly written shader or five somewhere that bring everything down. What I can say that may be of some help is that the drops in performance are not corelated with hardware saturation. My GPU or CPU are not redlining and the fans aren't near maximum RPM. I had to restart my game one time because any time there was an enemy ability was cast the game would drop from a stable and locked 60 to 24 frames. These effects did not cause any problems in the preceding hours of gameplay and after deleting the shader cache it's been somewhat more stable. There have been some weird stutters at times, but nothing I can reproduce and point squarely at. The Vulkan implementation is also substantially worse than the DX12 one. What I'm really disappointed with is the amount of time the Map screen takes and general loading times as that really breaks up the pace of play, I'm playing the game on an SSD of course, although the problem has been covered by many people and even meme'd. However, what's unfortunately even worse is the 25-40fps that I get in town, I assume because of all the microstransactions and aura effects like Ice armor. If the argument is that we can't have an option to disable them so as to imporove our in-town perfomance because players have paid to be able to show off, it's a moot point, people will b-line to maps and hang out in their Hideout anyway and it's just making campaign running miserable. Again, neither my processor, nor my gpu are at 100%.

F/ the Path forward
Because the game feels like a cocktail of contradictory ideas, both old and new and in some way falling back to into the comfortable shape of its predecessor I think the biggest mistake GGG can make is rush new content - classes, ascendancies, acts or end game. As it stands the game is wholly inconsistent. The first two acts and a half (especially before the roll and drop changes) felt exactly like what was promised and anything after the middle of act 3 felt right back to PoE 1. Under the pressure of the growing pains and the unreasonable expectations for this game to turn into something it wasn't supposed to be, GGG have so far moved one step forward, and at least 3 steps back and each further decision feels like the core of the game is slowly drifting back into familiar territory.
The combat, when it is well-paced and tactical was superbly executed, I think GGG has done the hardest, which is the general feel of the game - comprising of the animations, sound designs and most of the skill designs themselves (apart from the zoomy ones) What they need to do right now is choose a direction and take a stand, the player population will go down either way, it's just how releases are but the game needs to have a solid foundation and a general concept - a parti if you will.
If after the initial blowback GGG's not sure their original direction is something they want to continue on, so be it - but be frank tell the players you're bringing back speed and possible have a long conversations about the future of PoE 1 in that case.
If they've still not lost faith in their original idea, think about how to manage speed, cap the attack speed, re-work skills that feel out of place but also lower the damage across the board - player damage, enemy damage and boss damage especially, allow players to explode some white monsters near the end game, but Rares and Bosses should be encounters that make one think and tailor their approach.
The current two-game approach should go and by that I don't mean PoE 1 being discontinued, but the fact that PoE 2 is two entirely different games, depending on what point of the character progression you're on, that satisfy neither audience. For some the beginning may be at a snail's pace and then the end is better but still kind of slow, for others the beginning is immaculate but then it devolves into everything that contributed to them not raising PoE 1's average player count. There's probably even people that like it just how it is, but those I assume are the a rare breed since the game goes out of its way to contradict itself on fundamental levels.
A lot of work is done, but it is apparent that at least half of the development time this was not meant to be a standalone game. I will repeat that the first two acts feel stellar, possibly my favorite feeling early game in any ARPG and definitely my favorite combat in a game - full stop. But ascendancies are all over the place balance-wise, some of them like the Blood Mage seem thrown together in the last second and so does the end-game.
My personal assessment is that what's currently in the game should take between one and two years to finish, balance and make work, no matter how fast GGG works, changes need to be propagated to the players' clients so we can test and give feedback like this as this is a game far too complex to QA in-house. While 2 years for what's currently in the game might sound very conservative, especially considering half of the campaign is a placeholder, we have to keep in mind that the 'end-game' is its infancy, it's extremely rudimentary at the moment and its major flaws aren't yet raised, not to mention solved. Very few fundamental design decisions are taken an therefore its general direction seems open-ended, which is very dangerous in terms of wasting man-hours.
Providing support and feedback is what Early Access is for, this is why I personally choose to support games at this stage not only monetarily but also by taking notes during gameplay so I can produce a piece of feedback that's at least coherent. However, I do believe that once the fundamentals are in place adding additional weapons, classes and ascendancies will be able a much quicker and easier task.

In closing, I hold GGG in high regard and have high levels of trust and confidence in them but it feels like they are going through a patch of low-confidence, possibly amplified by stress, given the volume of poorly written and conjecture trying to pass itself as feedback.
As mentioned in the respec section they should remind themselves that a large chunk of their hardcore players will be the loudest opponents of any change as they're the most resistant to it.
Stick to your guns GGG and make us, but most importantly yourselves proud.

Thank you for the magic, now going back to playing some more :)

P.S. Couch co-op is phenomenal.

I really, REALLY hope GGG reads this whole post and takes it to heart. Absolutely incredible and thorough feedback. I second everything you've said here--THIS is the feedback GGG needs to listen to, if they don't want POE2 to ultimately just be a replacement for POE1 (which, I think, would be a major loss for both people who love POE1, and people who love POE2's early game design).

Thank you for taking the time to read all 8k words of this and thank you for the kind words.

I hope that despite how the forums and bumping work, other thorough feedback can rise to the top instead of what generates the most traffic - often being the most controversial and 'edgy'.
I'm currently in Endgame 114hrs played and my feedback is the same but amplified.
Combat pacing gets even worse, interestingly enough after clicking on one of those 'Acceleration totems' I found the perfect walk speed (w/ +10% MS boots).
Again, I'm not against higher speed in general, just the speed of engagement.
I believe that a walk-speed boost across the board, for both players and monsters the game would remain as balanced but would cure a lot of the traversal woes.
The drop rates just showering you with loot everywhere and having to use multiple portals to take it all in per map - does not feel especially impactful (as GGG stated their intention for it was), and yet currency is just as hard to come by as ever. Therefore crafting is disincentivized, especially multiplied by the removal of many of the more deterministic factors.
I was thinking of going over all of their interviews as I mostly remember what statement was made where and juxtaposing it with the current state of the game, in video form. However, I do not think I can spin in it in any form that would make it non-negative and instead constructive and helpful - as my only desire is for the game to succeed based on what it was meant/intended to be ,according to the game director's own words, and not get melted down into a slightly iterative replacement for PoE 1.

There are several things I'd like to add.

1) Magic Find
This is a horrible mechanic which cheapens out the game. You don't need to look further than marketing and advertisement to see that the best brands never discount, because the perceived price and more importantly value become that of the discounted product and not of the full-priced ones. Brands like Supreme have built their entire model on artificial scarcity and never discounting. Last I was more aware of them the prices of their products were even higher outside of their stores, not lower.
How does that relate to Magic Find? It's very simple, the way our perception works most of the time would dictate that the instance of the highest possible x% Magic Find on a character, that doesn't impede their ability to do the end game will be come the new de-facto floor. And so anything above 0% Magic Find is not Better, but rather anything below this theoretical floor is worse. Subconsciously, if let's say this floor is 267% MF, the base drop chance then becomes -267% in a player's mind.

2> Some PoE1's players trouble comprehending that Slower Combat does not mean a Grindier game.
"End game is about farming and grind, if you make it slower how much more time would it take!"
Is an actual statement, paraphrased slightly, that I never thought I'd read. Some of the PoE1 players have spent so much time playing it, that they see everything through the lenses of its systems and mechanics. The speed of the engagement is co-related with the time spent grinding ONLY if the loot remains balanced towards many very fast ones and the game isn't thoroughly balanced and capped (where necessary, like attack speed) to prevent you from zooming. We could have several much smaller and longer engagements that individually have a higher yield

3> Many PoE 1 players feeling right at home.
This should tell you quite enough about the state of the game as it pertains to its relationship and similarity to its predecessor. If I can categorize the game-design type posts in the Feedback section into two groups, they would be:
a) People who are baffled by the dissonance between GGG's well-communicated and documented intent about the game's direction and what the game transforms into past the first 3 acts.

b) People who see nothing wrong and their only input is about micro balances.

On a Forum Thread about the continental drift in the game's direction, there was a repeat 'reply-er' from the latter of the two groups that would spam every other comment with:
"Well, PoE 2 isn't as different to PoE 1 as you think it should be, why were you under the impression it would be?"
To which one can respond with any of the pre-release interviews, ZiggyD ones come to mind the quickest. One can even add the gameplay trailers, but I don't think I've seen a PoE 1 gameplay trailer that was representative of the actual gameplay.

Ground effects, On-Death effects and Legibility
I urge GGG to rethink why On-death effects even exist - apart from the cases that are clearly designed and telegraphed. The only thing they contribute is another 'con' against melees and an instinctual roll from their players after downing an enemy.
Ground effects and their legibility were not supposed to be an issue, because of the much slower pace of the game. However, the pace is not slower and in times is as fast if not faster. As someone who specializes in freeze - my own ground effects i.e. chilled ground or anything that freeze leaves behind - I oftentimes find enemy ground effects covered.

Prevalence of AoE damage and its effects on the Dodge Roll usage
I'm running the Buff that stacks 3 stacks of extra evasion which are lost on Hit. They almost never go down, while my health does. I've almost been killed with all 3 stacks, meaning that the only REAL source of damage is AoE & Ground Effect (which is just area-constrained AoE). The 'non area-constrained' AoE includes On-death effects and all of the actually dangerous Boss hits.
Dodge-roll as we know, does not protect from Ground Effects or AoE unless it is used to get away from them, so besides the people who are spamming Blink, a dodge-roll replacement, everybody else is incentivized to just zoom and/or make their character as tanky as possible because the number of monsters at any one time that cast on ground effects or have an AoE On-death effect takes skill and tactical thought largely out of the game and replaces it with situational RnG.
This then becomes a main factor of the PoE1-ification of this game.