General Feedback for PoE2 EA

Dear GGG,

first of all, I am not native in English. Thus, please forgive me, if some parts might sound a bit clunky ;)
After nearly 100hrs in EA and nearing the christmas holidays, I feel it is time to voice my opinion of Path of Exile 2 to help steer the wheel in the "right" direction. Right is, of course, a very subjective term. The things I will go over below reflect my personal view that will differ from others in parts. Maybe some or a lot of the points have already be mentioned in other feedback posts. I have read some, but I will not exlcude anything just because I read it somewhere else. In my mind it is important that you can get a grasp of reoccuring criticism so you can figure out which parts of the game or which systems might need another thought and which parts are so controversial that there is not really a need to rework something.
Another thing I want to point out in advance: Giving feedback to a game looks almost always very negative for obvious reasons. You want to change points you dont like and thus, you typically just mention those. For that reason I want to start a bit differently here.

Path of Exile 2 is an amazing game already. I am having a blast exploring it and looking forward to try out the different "classes". There are a lot of things I love and I will list a few here.
1. The impactful feeling of skills is an absolute joy. From the sound they make to the looks of it.
2. I am loving the WASD movement as for me it feels a lot more relaxed than rushing my mouse back and forth while kiting and it allows me to more precisely position myself in boss fights.
3. Speaking of which, the bosses and their mechanics (if you dont kill them in seconds later on) are just fun. I might be a noob, but I needed an hour for the endboss of act 1 and was loving every second of it, because it was always my fault and no unfair design. I feel like that goes for most bosses in the game.
4. The graphics are absolutely stunning.
5. The voice-over is almost always on point and sets the right mood for the world of Wraeclast.
6. The monetization is one of the best I have ever seen and I never feel bad spending money in PoE. It just feels deserved.
7. The communication of GGG! I like the transparency you are going for in making design decisions, delaying something or anything else really. I like that you follow the words that Sven Vincke said at the game awards for a long time already. In every interview it is easy to see how you love what you do and love your product.

The list could easily be extended in more detail and with many more points. But its the critical points that can bring the game forward. I just wanted to first say thank you and praise in a very short and overarching manner what you have created.

Starting with the critical points I again need to make some disclaimer, so you can view my comments with sufficient background for evaluation.
1. I started with LA Ranger into EA and have almost finished the "standard" atlas points. Have to finish two more T15.
2. I started blind. Meaning I did watch a lot of footage before release but I avoided everything that would already theorize a build, because I wanted to created my own. I know that LA Ranger is very popular right now, but that is just the way it turned out. I could not have known the power of this build before.
3. I have about 1700 hours in PoE 1 and would consider myself still a beginner and more on the casual end of the spectrum. However, the LA archetype I played a lot and for that reason I started this in PoE 2, because I hoped, that my experience would serve me to overcome obstacles on my way into endgame.
4. Players are good a critizising but not in giving solutions. I am not a game developer, thus, I dont think I can see all the implications different solutions might have. I will try to reason my critic so you have an idea why certain points are disliked by me.
5. Some feedback I read was very aggressively communicated. I dont believe that to be a good way to voice an opinion. You are not dumb and you did not create shit. I would wish for some changes but that does not devaluate your hard work and there is absolutely no reason for insults of any kind. You have obviously poored your hearth into this game and I can see and feel that every step I make.

Crafting – First big concern.

I dont think there is crafting in the game for now which makes me very sad as it was one of the strongest selling points of PoE 1 for me.
When I reached the endgame my resistances where around 20% each. Because you need life on every piece, as it was removed on the passive tree, and the resistance rolls are very minor at the start, you have real issues to get resistance capped and have sufficient life for the endgame (ignoring attribute requirements for now). Even if you would be lucky enough to have in principle sufficient good items found, you will most likely be resistance capped for 1 or 2 but not the 3rd. You have to puzzles pieces together because you have no way of changing resistances on your gear. The runes also do not solve the issue as the impact felt a lot too small to overcome this.
For me this resulted in using the 5 Exalts I had left after campaign and bought a 1 Exalt piece for some main slots and getting Resistance capped. While I dont have anything against trading in general (I obviously play trade league), I find it to be no fun at all that this was my only way to get sufficient life and capped on Resistances to start the endgame.
And before someone tags along and points out that I can get some mods with Essences and that there are pretty strong Omens. You are right, but it does not change the fact that
1. you dont have that when starting endgame,
2. the outcome for the most part is pretty random,
3. omens are way too rare to overcome the lack of other crafting options,
4. Essences are also way too rare for the impact they have on your crafting process,
5. because even with hitting two good mods with Essences you still slam the remaining four.
I tried to create a lot of bows already and hit one good one with an alchemy orb for no reason. I believe most would agree that crafting is pretty much non-existent and we are playing an arpg like most, where you hope for the lucky drop. Which is the reason that I quit most arpg at a certain point when the chance to drop something useful gets too small over time.

The crafting system in PoE 1 is in my mind far superior.
1. You can already make use of it during campaign to get some resistances you lack.
2. You are able to create your own bare bones gear when starting the endgame, because you simply smack a life Essence on a useful base, hope for maybe one other good mod and hit the crafting bench with a resistance. Doing that on every slot gives you the option to just start the game.
3. Even without an Essence the chances of getting 1 or 2 useful mods with an alchemy orb are not that bad and you can craft whatever is missing.
4. The very best pieces of gear are crafted. And the system behind it is absolutely insane in the best way possible. If I want to craft a certain piece, it is already a lot of fun to figure out how to best craft that. And yes, I am no mirror crafter, but in PoE 1 I dont have to be. I can craft very good gear with a reasonable amount of farm.
In contrast for PoE 2, basically only the former mirror crafters will be able to craft something strong. There are already some content creators that have pointed out their steps in crafting, which resulted in every step costing over a thousand exalts, while still only have the rough estimated chance of hitting a desired mod by 1/30 or worse. This will never be a system that a casual player can realisticly interact with.

My strong wish would be to include the crafting bench again and go from there. I remember watching an interview with Jonathan where he went a bit into detail about the discussion they had about having a crafting bench or not and I think, if I remember correctly, the developers were pretty torn 50:50 to implement or not. I am very happy you always try things out, because sometimes its the only way to evaluate the effects. In this case, I think it shows that having a crafting bench feels a lot better, because it gives the player more agency in playing the game.


Endgame – Second big concern.

Again I think the endgame system in PoE 1 is far superior than the new one and the story of agency continues here for me.
1. The Endgame map is very hard to grasp because even after just finishing the questline for your atlas points you already start to get lost. It just gets too big and you cant look at all of it at once. Being able to zoom out more would probably not fix this issue because the map will extend further and further and you won't be ably too see sufficient detail anymore, if you would just zoom out further and further.
2. There is no sense of progression.
I love to see the whole atlas in PoE 1 and seeing clearly how I am progressing through, filling it out map by map and then getting the voidstones and favourite maps as well as the last Atlas points from invitations and so on. You can just see everything in one nice view. Since the Atlas is just endless there is not really a feel of progressing towards something and I miss that dearly.
3. After finishing your Atlas (in this case getting the passive points I would say), you can not just focus on something you want to play.
Since breach is very popular I will use this an example but this goes for any content you would like to approach that benefits heavily by having a set up.
In order to farm breach efficiently, you have to do the following steps (maybe even forgot something):
a) Search for an area with ~4-5 Towers in relative close proximity to one another.
b) Make sure that this area contains a sufficent amount of good layout maps for breach. If not repeat at step a)
c) Move to the towers without "destroying" aka playing good maps you want to use for breach farming.
d) Ideally clear out most maps outside your outer towers so the tablets you put in will buff actually the maps you want to farm breach on. (For radiating and actually breaches, not for the buffs that count for all in range.)
e) Farm your breaches on the juciest maps you can (and if you die to a random offscreen or late corpse explosion stuff, well that was the map then).

For each of those steps you have to run random maps you do not actually want to play right now. You just have to run them, to set up what you want to do. For a casual gamer this is insane and will probably take more than one evening. I know that the experienced gamer can do that more quickly and will probably just run Tier 1-4 Waystones very fast for the set up, but you still have to do that chore, you are just faster than the casual player.
The whole system takes away the player agency in what the person wants to do in the game and feels very random, because even if you find a nice looking area for some reason a lot of the maps are again indoor bad layout maps.
And yes, if you want to farm something like 50 breach maps with the same layout in PoE 1 you technically would need to farm the maps and the scarabs. However, you could buy that if you want to run the breach maps. And another player might like farming scarabs and will do just that. This option is non-existant in PoE 2. You have to do the chore to set up.

I honestly do not see a way to improve on the current system to get rid of this feeling of having to do chores and think the system needs a complete rework. However, I would be more than happy if you are able to prove me wrong on this one.
For this reason I will also not go into more details like the towers that feel just like throw in a Tier 1 to get it done quickly and probable changes to that or some of the map layouts or the need of backtracking to finish a map and so on. PoE was always about player agency and I first and foremost would love to have that back. With the current system I do not see how that can be solved.


Campaign

I do not have much complains here. I enjoyed playing through the campaing. Obviously I would have preferred to do act 4-6 instead of 1-3 again, but I know the reasoning behind it and support your decision on that completely. The following points I noticed and could potentially be worked on:
1. The layouts especially in act 3 are in times extremly long. For me act 1 is the best one in terms of length and layouts and I would love to see you shorten some of the layouts later on to be a bit more in line. Since you are playing slower than in PoE 1, it would make sense to have the maps at a reasonable size.
2. As mentioned above, the crafting bench would go a long way to improve the experience.
3. While I think it was a good idea to get rid of vendor recipes, the funcionality is missing a bit. For melee it would be extremely helpful if you could guarantee at least a %phys on a weapon. Since melee is hard to balance with lucky/unlucky drops and vendor offers, I think that would help to get it a bit more consistent. With having such an option, the difficulty could be designed around having the latest available weapon base with a %phys.
4. It was said in an interview that there are several "special" rewards, like skill points, that if you miss out on them, the game will try to recover you on the following maps somehow. For skill gems, I did not have an issue whatsoever, but the jewellers orb is a different story. I was late in Act 3 Cruel when I stumpled upon a reddit post concerning the jewellers orb. Only then I learned that I could have had one already in Act 3. Maybe I was just unlucky but the game certainly did not help me recover from missing that.
Generally speaking:
In PoE 1 you slowly progressed the amount of links during the campaign with more or less having 5/6 links for the endgame.
I would like to have this also a bit more consistent here. Finishing the campaing with a 4 link on every skill, most likely, and then starting white/yellow maps you will get slowly to your 5 link. From a progression feeling that makes a lot more sense to me. The 6 link can then be relatively rare. And yes, the vaal option would need to be removed then, but I think that would improve the system and vaaling could still get an extra level or quality over 20%.

Gearing / Passive Tree

Those two points do interact a lot, thus I put them together here.
1. A lot of passives points feel like absolute filler nodes. That is a pretty early critic as new builds are constantly being explored as of now. So take that with a grain of salt. However, I feel like I will most likely never use a lot of the very conditional passives or all the flask nodes for example.
2. Getting rid of life nodes within the passive tree because they were pretty mandatory and not obvious to a newer player is correct. However, this now leads to an absolute need of having a high life roll on your gear (Playing without ES).
3. Same goes for resistances that are gone from the tree.
4. While having the option to choose the attribute you want from the travel nodes is very nice, the amount feels small compared to the gem requirements. If your mainskill needs dexterity, then you have already trouble incooperating a dex/int skill to a higher level.
5. Points 2-4 lead to a very heavy gear pressure. You basically need:
a) High life roll
b) High resistances to cap
c) Missing attribute (yes either dex or int in this example, but still one of those)
d) Probably spirit on amulet or body armour
e) Movement speed for boots (without the travel skills, it is absolutely mandatory)
And all this with basically just random gear as you can not craft anything to eleviate some pressure and react flexible on a new drop. Even a happy nice drop most likely requires you to carefully replace 1-3 items, by buying them, to mix and match the correct attributes and resistances.

For me it seems, that you just have shifted the mandatory points from the atlas tree onto mandatory mods on the items and I do not see the benefit in that. Quite on the contrary, it feels very hard and restrictive to gear the character now. Not sure if putting life/res back in the tree is the best solution here or if there are other smart ideas to solve this.


General smaller points

1. A higher skill gem should be usable to create a lower level skill. I have plenty of skill gems >T15, but I can not use them on my alts, because they will create a T15 skill. I will benefit from a main a lot anyway with jewellers orbs and gold. I do not see a point in restricting this downwards.
2. I am almost certain that you will not charge players for a waystone stash, because there are no maps in PoE 2 but adapt the existing map stash for that. I think that would otherwise result in a massive loss of respect within the community. As said, I think you will not make that mistake, but felt its worth mentioning.
3. Why can I port to the trial of chaos on the right side of my map, but not to the other?
4. The trials to ascend are way too hard and build dependent. Since those points are very essential for all builds, it needs to be doable on level for a more advanced player and maybe overlevel a bit for a beginner. I tried the second ascend in trial of chaos with 8 level over the zone, reaching the boss after ~10 minutes and then dying to tornado instantly. I went back with 15 level above and just two shot the boss. I dont think thats how it should be done. Also still not tried to ascend the forth time with level 87 right now, because I dont feel like doing sanctum for 45 minutes to get to the boss and then maybe just die because I cant learn the fight without first spending 45 minutes again.
5. On death effects are present in various forms and various delays and there are death effects that dont do anything. It just feels annoying to wait before the mob pack you just killed, count to 3, and then continue. In one map I died because the effect seemed to have been delayed (maybe due to internet connection), and appeared around 5 seconds after I killed the pack. I dont think on death effects are bringing anything good to the game and should be removed. The mob is dead and I can continue.
6. Corpse explosion are sometimes extremely quick. I am not sure about the name of the caster that explodes stuff in a small red circle. The annoying thing is that you do not even see the caster, run forward onto mobs you just killed to loot and the second the dude appears on the side of my screen the explosion is already on its way. This happens so extremely quick that it is sometimes almost impossible to avoid. I know git gud, but I think those are a bit overtuned. I already play a fast ranger and can not always manage to escape.
7. Is there a display of the effects of playing in a group? If I missed that, then my bad, but I did not see anything so far. I would like to know whether or not playing with someone is impacting the game and how.

I think this Feedback is already a bit long so I will just end it here. If you truly have read until this point I want to say thank you for valuing my opinion to try and help improve the game. I want to once again stress that you created a marvelous game and you (including everyone contributing to this gem) should be very proud of the result. I also want to say thank you for your moral compass and for appreciating your players.

I wish the whole team a very well deserved christmas break and looking forward to many more years to come enjoying your games.

All the best,
Paarthurnox