Act 1 Sorcerer Testing

Overall thoughts
Sorc was good in the 1st zone. Then damage drops off a cliff. Even with twink gear on my second character it lasted about another zone. The base GEM abilities just don't feel good unsupported. Played frost/ice based character first and then fire 2nd. Frost feels way better just due to the defensiveness gained from chill. Fire feels like it does the same amount of damage with no bonus of the survivability.

Skills
Like I elluded to above there is some "weakness" of abilities I felt as sorc. When I was playing frost I had a +2 to ice spells and spell damage on the staff I used for most of act 1. Even though I had 1 dead stat for lightning spells I used OOS and Spark, which was pretty underwhelming. Spark felt good as a first spell, but dropped off pretty quick.

Its unfortunate that there are no GEM-based projectile fire spells until fusillade (which I tried to support to make it more of a usable "spell"). Then incinerate is where it picks up again, so the likelihood of someone sticking to fire is very low. When you do get incinerate it feels super good to just blast fire and have actual visceral damage.

Elemental Skill Balance
Between ice and fire spells I feel like the damage range tiering was just forgotten about (lightning>fire>ice), and that any balance that needs to happen while FOLLOWING that tiering should happen in mana.
Ice "feels" good (chills/freezes) but the damage is MEH, which is expected based on the usual elemental damage ranges for it.
Fire feels MEH and doesn't really get ignites that often, may just be an A1 thing, but it feels super rare that you get ignites. So it feels like a worse ice-based caster because you don't get those long burst windows to pile into a boss. The damage of fire should be done while you are fighting via hits and ignites, not in burst windows like freeze or electrocute.
Haven't done full lightning based but there's only 2 ascendancies so not making a 3rd sorc just to test that.

Gearing
A1 gearing is brutal for staff based casting. The chance that staves drop is much lower than pretty much every other weapon. And then you have the 33% chance that its the staff you want the base skill of. For me like 5% of weapon drops I get are staves which makes it hard to craft a decent magic one early on esp when your staff is your ONLY source of damage mods. With the measly damage increases from gem levels there's no way to otherwise get spell damage, which railroads you on the passive tree to going for damage, and usually some cast speed.

Bossing
Until you get your lvl 4 gems bossing is kind of boring even fusillade which feels like a bossing ability is lackluster, mostly due to only being able to be used in heavy stun or freezes. One on character once I had a frostbolt/frost nova setup it felt decent, but I learned that unlike melee you just abandon your staff default mostly just due to ability bloat. And once I got incinerate on my other sorc that made me feel better in bosses. The A1 boss was definitely harder when trying to mix skill types to maximize utility from freezes/chills. It was easier to just ignore that those existed and just use 1-2 abilities. In both cases the fights were easier when not using 1/2 the skills we have by the end of A1.

M+KB Aiming
This is the first of my writeups for any ranged classes, but god what happened to m+kb control for ranged abilities. Feels like accuracy was added in the form of abilities just firing off in the wrong direction or not respecting namelocks. Already have this as a bug post/feedback because this can't be the way m+kb is intended to feel.

WASD
Tried one sorc with each and honestly some of the things I noticed on m+kb exist with WASD as well. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about WASD since most movement requires two sustained key presses and often the fingers you use to hit abilities are in use. I wouldn't be surprised that at any time someone is using an ability they are strafing away in whatever direction the key opposite of their ability key is. This is just due to literal physical restrictions of fingers not having phasing. So trying to use an ability on say 3 while going up+right is not an option so there's going to be odd skill usage behaviour due to the input being so reliant on one hand. There are reasons why most games which use wasd don't have any/few HOLD abilities, its because locking up usage of an entire finger is a handicap. With PoE 1 flask spam was done with 1-3 fingers in quick succession, WoW literal .25 second key presses. In PoE 2 I have to hold rolling slam for 2 seconds while trying to move. One of these doesn't gel.

TLDR
1.More staff drops in A1 pls.
2.Ice good feel, damage meh, just FREEZE
3.Fire feels meh, damage meh (ignite when?), skills meh till INCINCERATE
Usual M+KB input complaints for ranged abilities

Rolled a cold sorc after getting bored with a merc. Loving ice sorc so far - pushed freeze on the tree and gem support so freezing then shatter which is working well.

You'll have to buy your staves on trade site to keep your damage up so keep your exalts as odds of getting 5 damage affixes on a rare with crafting is extraordinarily low in poe2. Hell, getting 3 decent affixes is pretty damn low.

Fact is, the games gestalt is more like poe1 than most would want to admit I bet