Long feedback from SSF Chaos DOT perspective

I was playing POE2 from release on life based ED/Contagion build exclusively. Now I'm lvl 89, farmed plenty of endgame content and I will most likely stop playing for a while (maybe will push the character to 90, just for the beauty of the number, but not sure), so I decided to gather my experience with the game in a single post.

First a couple of words about me as I believe it's relevant to understand my expectations of the game.

I play PoE on and off since beta, exclusively on SSF (self-restricted SSF before an official mode releas) and almost always on HC.

Why SSF - for me there are two reasons:
1. I like to optimize my gameplay. In trade league it means that I would see all the activities only as regal-per-hour, select a single one which offers the most rewards and do only it over and over again, optimizing all the fun from the game in the process.
2. I'm "dad with kids and two-full time jobs", so it is hard for me to align my life with league release schedule. The beauty of SSF is that there is no market pressure, so you can start in the middle of the league and play only 5 hours on weekends and have the same experience as if you start on release day and play 8 hours every day. If anything, starting late may be a benefit as more bugs are fixed by this time. There is some ego boost which I enjoy if I manage to get to the top of the ladder, but it is pretty minimal and overall I don't see a lot of pressure to play on certain schedule.

Why HC? I like my game to have a conclusion and HC have a natural one. Also, I like to make builds myself and if build is not good on HC it just will die sooner, while on SC I can push bad build for a while, which is les fun than to kill it and to reroll for a new one.

In POE2 I started on SC as game is still in beta and loosing character to bugs is not fun and also, overall I wanted more experience with the game before switching to HC.

However, still HC SSF is the most important mode for me, so I evaluate my experience mostly from this point.

I was playing game more-or-less blind (I've looked at character tree and ascendancies to draft my build before playing, but I tried to ignore all videos and posts about the gameplay/builds).

As I played only one character, it is hard to separate universal things from build-related one, so I will not be trying to do this and all feedback is exclusively from Contagion/ED perspective.

Different bugs which I encountered certainly spoiled experience a bit for me, but I understand that it is beta so I will try to ignore them in this review.

Campaign

I liked campaign a lot, even though repeating acts on cruel difficulty was not fun (as far as I understand it will not be the thing on release as we will have acts 4-6, so it's not a problem).

Bosses in the first two acts were challenging and fun, but they became too easy since the middle of act 2. In act 3 there were only two somehow memorable bosses (monkey and poison lady with spearmen), the rest were absurdly easy and Doriani was the biggest disappointment. Animations were awesome, but most of his attacks while looking deadly did pretty low damage and it died on the first attempt with close to no effort.
Overall hard bosses in the campaign are fun and I would like them to be even harder (especially in later acts, act 1 was by far the most challenging part of the game for me). We can retry them over-and-over again and attempting-understanding-overcoming the boss cycle feels great and has DarkSouls like feeling (even though I killed most of the bosses on the first attempt).

Trash didn't feel good. At first, some monsters just looked imbalanced for the time of the game you encounter them (ex. fire crabs in the very first zone). Second, plenty of the time they were much more challenging than bosses and it feels weird. For trash mobs attempting-understanding-overcoming cycle does not feel good as there is a lot of randomness in what monsters spawn and what affixes rares/champions will have. I really don't like the fact that it's almost impossible to guess how damaging is or another ability just from the view/animation. There can be a statue with a huge smash which barely scratches you and the other moment there is a random monster throwing an axe to you which hits harder than most of the bosses abilities. I had many moments when damage was completely unexpected (in both directions, sometimes an ability looks like smth you should not survive and you are surprised when you tank it, the other time smth wich didn't look scary at all one shots you). I would really like if scary looking and / or slow abilities were the ones which hit you hard. I had a lot of problems with rolling, so I switched to Blink as soon as I got it. I know that roll was fixed, but by this time I got so used to blinking that I couldn't make myself to switch back.

I had mixed experience with map layouts, but most of the time I enjoyed them. They were pretty unique, however some of them felt a bit too large (especially in act 3). I would really like campaign maps to be designed to take 10 minutes at maximum, so it will be easier to stop the game and continue later. I've spent over half an hour in some and making a break during the map was too punishing as next time the layout will be different and the monsters will respawn. For more casual player it's important to be able to put a cut in the session in predictable time. Here I also want to mention that I liked pause a lot. While I understand concern of some players that it can be abused, for me this risk is 100% worse it. I haven't abused it myself, but I used it a lot, when I needed to do smth outside of the game and it felt really good, somehow compensating the problem of large maps.

Gearing felt bad. Most of the slots were upgraded only once or twice during the full campaign and this upgrades came from vendors or gambling. I believe this improved, but I haven't leveled a character once it was. I liked the fact that content is not balanced around max resists, however I'm afraid that this means that with reasonable gear campaign would be insanely easy (I'm not sure if this already the thing after drop chance rebalance). I've dropped a couple uniques during campaign, but they looked extremely bad and I couldn't imagine even niche scenario where I would be able to use them. Part of gear problem is, probably, due to my build as Contagion/ED does not care about most of the stats we have on the gear. It does not crit, cast speed is not important as these are duration spells and mana is not a problem as you do not spam spells. I believe I used only two wands during the campaign (moreover even in maps I upgraded it only once). I didn't feel like I'm gated by gear quality but the fact that upgrades were so rare and their source (vendors) was so boring made the whole gearing procedure feel dull. Due to scarcity, difference between dropping a good gear piece and not is so huge, the I see no point in racing events.

Skills felt weird. I don't understand, why contagion is lvl 1 spell and ED is lvl 3. I can imagine using ED without contagion (for bosses or, with chain support for everything), but I can't imagine scenario when I use contagion alone. Contagion default behavior is bad. It is almost impossible to hit the same monster with both ED and contagion (partially due to weird contagion targeting). This is solved once you add unleash support to contagion, but it took me some time to discover this solution. Unleash is basically mandatory support for contagion (it is close to unusable for clear without it and it is close to useless in single large with any setup). I see no reason why have a mandatory support and why it is not baked into the spell itself. Best of ED supports (drain ailment and minion pact) are really hard to use before Dark Effigy and overall, before Dark Effigy the build does not feel good. If the idea is that we should play something else at the start and chaos dots are only midgame+ thing, it would be much better if contagion and ED would be moved to the same tier as Dark Effigy.

Talents are really interesting. ED build is one of the best to utilize weapon swap and once I realized it I had a blast building. Respect were a bit too expensive (especially due to the fact that vendors/gambling is the main gearing source and it competes with respect for gold).

I liked both ascendancies a lot. They were challenging, yet interesting and pretty different from the rest of the game. Attempting-understanding-overcoming cycle is at best here due to infinite repeats. Ultimatum has problems due to boss imbalance, but I didn't feel it during the campaign one.

Map progression
Waystone acquisition felt good. At no point of the game I felt locked from the progression due to missing on the next waystone level. Atlas quest mislead me a bit. It should say "complete map on Tier ... or higher" I've done way more white maps that I should before I realized that I can do the quest in higher tiers. My build survivability felt great till the high yellow maps, so I didn't feel the need to farm for gear upgrades. Most upgrades still came from vendor/gambling, and a couple from drops. In red maps there was a noticeable difficulty spike, so I farmed for a while in T10-11 maps for gear upgrades (my goal was +3 level wand and fixed resistances). I was able t find the wand and max all non-char resistances, the gear aquistition process was extremely weird. Drops were relatively scarce and mostly useless and vendors were rarely changing their inventory as level progression slowed down. Almost all the gear came from gambling in the following process:
1. Buy a bunch of gear,
2. Augment/regall all of it.
3. If there is something with awsome stats - divine.
4. 3-1 recalled gear to get rates with more affixes.
5. If there is something with useable stats - divine.
Dropped gear was also used for 3-1, but impact was minimal as drop rates are low. Really hated expert/advanced gear, as they made visual selection of loot for 3-1 much harder. Hope that gear tiers are placeholders for the future. Expedition helps a bit, but it is, more or less, the same gambling.

Runes are very annoying. For SSF the fact that we can't replace them felt insulting. It made gear upgrades extremely frustrating as resist balance was almost always ruined and a single rune in the slot you were upgrading was not enough to fix it. We dropped a lot of them, and it felt really bad to have 20 runes of fire resist and at the same time to struggle with fire resist as you can't replace the runes. This is the main reason why I, basically pushed T1 - T10 in the campaign gear and farm in T10 for the full "set" upgrade, replacing all gear slots at once.

Map layouts are bad. There are good ones, but many are awful. They are hard to navigate and you have to backtrack. There are many narrow corridors, which monsters can't navigate and it leads to really strange gameplay when you kill packs who just stare at you from behind the door/pillar they are too fat to cross. League mechanics in narrow corridors are completely broken.

Elite chasing as the map goal felt bad. A lot of backtracking + some of elites are annoying. Prowling shade with liferegen is almost insulting, it is invisible most of the time, health to full in the process. Going invisible cleanses all the dots, which makes them even more annoying. At least affixes on average felt weaker than in POE1 and there were no "immortal" elites.

Bosses are weird. Most of them are too easy and many times I was surprised when I was slammed by ability just to realize that it hits weaker than attacks from white monsters (that's another problem, some of them are way overpowered, ex. Vaal Axe-throwers). Monkey and Big Statue boss are the two bosses that actually often kill me and they feel bad. Monkey moves have random delays, unclear indication of AOE area and it is on a small arena, so pretty often it's impossible to get behind him. Statue boss forward dagger push is fast and has unclear and unexpectedly large AOE area. While it is possible to adapt and learn this moves, it does not feel good. Dark Souls attempting-understanding-overcoming cycle does not work there as you can not retry the boss. Going to act version of the boss just to learn the moves feels boring.

League mechanics feel great, beside the fact that they are often bastardized by the map layout. You can have rituals where you can't move at all or breaches which bare spawns 20 monsters.

Waystone affixes felt boring and at this point they more or less didn't matter at all.

Third ascension point was challenging (probably a bit too challenging), but it will be changed with 3d trial and I hope it'll feel as good as the first two. The fact that 3rd point in sanctum is so much earlier than in ultimatum was a bit confusing. I've finished a couple of 7-trial ultimatums before realizing that the fact that they don't give me ascension point is not a bug but intended behavior.

Towers are really annoying. They are challenging as there are dangerous packs you can't see due to walls and unrewarding. No reason to do them on tiers > 1.

Single death in a map is ok. In general I don't care too much as I'd prefer HC anyway and will definitely switch once I'm more familiar with the game and it is more stable.

Blink is almost essential as while dot damage is enough to oneshot most of the packs, it take some time to actually kill them. Going around the packs is impossible in narrow maps and ability to blink behind it and run to the next one speeds up clearing a lot.

Endgame
Waystone sustain feels good. Affixes are extremely unbalanced. There are pretty devastating affixes in red maps and all they add as a bonus is more waystone drops (which I don't need as it's good enough as is). The difference between well-rolled map (many qualit/quantity/density affixes) and bed-rolled map (no positive affixes, insane defense/offense increase) is huge. I'm not sure if I like it or not.

Gearing feels awfull. Tiered rare system is interesting and I got a couple of great pieces, but they are not for my build. Upgrades from gambling are highly unlikely at this point as they are low level. Even white bases for chancing/crafting for particular slot are rare. Currently I have stacks of all currencies, except mirrors and perfect jewel crafter orbs, millions of gold but I don't see any meaningful way to convert it into gear improvement, so I'm just hoarding. I have a chase unique in mind, but I dropped way more chance orbs than bases for chancing (and I can get even more by disenchanting trash uniques). I've dropped a couple pieces of gear but I hardly see that I will have any significant gear improvements to the gear set I equipped while farming T10. I believe I had less than 5 upgrades form most of my gear slots during my way from lvl 1 and first auto f the campaign to lvl 89 and T15+2 maps on max atlas boss difficulty.

4th ascendancy point is hard and I like it. Ultimatum does not feel good due to requirement of multiple runs and duplicated keys. In POE1 we got rid of requirement of different randomly spawned attainment for the 4th lab. I can't understand while we are back there with ultimatum keys. Ultimatum bosses are very unbalanced with tornado-bird being the only challenging one. Chimera boss is extremely annoying as it is vulnerable 80% of the fight. I've farmed a lot of lvl80 ultimatums, corrupted rewards are useless, souls are very nice (if only we had gear to equip them to). Sanctum is nice and I like the fact that we can farm and 3-1 craft relics to make runs easier. The last boss have a bit too much hp for the point where we can/want to encounter him.

Citadel-chasing feels extremely bad. The worst experience for me was to find Iron citadel and then spending a couple of days to find connection to it (I had to travel about 5 screens to the east and then 5 screens back to reach it).

League mechanics would feel good if not for the awfull map layout. Finding layouts you like and particular mechanics is hard.


Mana felt bad, but I managed to solve this problem by changing my passive tree and overall I liked that it is an additional challenge to solve during building. One part of the solution was to down level some of the skills and it is not fun. To farm lvl1 gems I had to create mule characters and spend fresh jewelcrafter's orbs. I'd prefer if there was a more reasonable solution for gem downgrading.

Respec cost is almost non-existent at this point and it's fun to try different build variants.

Overall I'm going to stop playing now as I don't see any way to get reasonable character progression at this point (gear upgrades are close to impossible, levels are slow to get and really low impact at this point). Will make a break for a couple of weeks or even a month and then will continue, most likely on HC.