Early access feedback after 195 hours.

I've now played for 195 hours and I think it's about time I leave some feedback of the game.

Let me start by saying that I love PoE 2, it feels like a vast improvement to PoE 1, more modern and I like the more actiony feel it gives by allowing me to use WASD. (it will be hard to go back to PoE 1 and not have this)

Okay lets get into it, I'll break it into sections.


Characters:

Overall my impression of the classes and ascendancies are pretty good, although some tuning to lower end skill and classes definitely needs some tuning, while some of the higher ones (looking at you monk) is just too easy to get online with zero effort.


Acts:

I haven't found any glaring issues with the acts maybe with the exception Act 3 being very over tuned compared to the previous 2 Acts, this repeats in Act 3 Cruel.
Going from Act 3 to Act 1 cruel feels like taking a high level character back to the Act 1-non cruel version.


The Gem system:

While I am a huge fan of the new way of linking skill and not having to deal with colors of sockets other than getting attributes, I do feel like the gems dropping at certain area levels is a huge letdown, I can no longer farm a map in an act a few times to get some xp for my gems and make my progression easier if I am stuck on a boss, which feels bad if you aren't running a build that can just roll over everything.

This would feel a lot better if we did a mix of the new and the old, for example letting us keep the fact that support- and skill gems drop as uncut,
but then they would always cut at level 1 and would need to be leveled.
(or something like this) so that I could actually get some meaningful progression from playing maps over and over, other than praying that one rare item drops that will save me.

Greater and Perfect orbs.
While I very much agree that perfect orbs should be rare, maybe even as rare as they are now, I do feel like Greater Jewelers Orbs perhaps should be a bit more common, especially as you move up into higher tier maps.


Gearing:

This is probably the biggest problem for me, the gearing and to and extend of that, the crafting system, feels shallow and almost forces me to pick up blue items to identify, use a few orbs and then trash it if it gets just a single bad rolled modifier, this doesn't feel good and is as others have put it, "Identification with more steps" I hope this will be addressed in the future
(I was certain I heard that the crafting bench would be back in the game, maybe it just isn't for EA?)

Getting your resistance capped feels much much harder, and I personally feel more pushed into saving all my currency and buying things on trade instead of actually trying to make anything myself.


Ascending:

I'm not gonna go into the Sanctum versus Ultimatum discussion, we all know these are league mechanics that has a massive gap between love and hate, so all I will say is, this seems like bold choices.

The problem here is the tuning most of all, being able to run a Sanctum floor 1-3 without ever feeling in danger at all, to then walking into Floor 4 and instantly being one-shot by some jar that shoots 5 million projectiles a second in a sandy beamlike death ray, feels pretty bad (i mean literally die, not lose all the honour) floor 4 certainly requires some tuning.


The same kind of applies to Ultimatum, though I feel at the moment this is a lot easier to get through because the mobs simply aren't as hard, it also feels poor that there's never an upside, I know thats not how ultimatum works, but the choices are SO rng that sometimes you just never have a lesser evil to pick
another issue I got with ultimatum is, why do I need special keys for the boss when in Sanctum I can just walk right in?

On top of these issues I think its way too late we get to have our 3rd and 4th ascendency, while this could be because of the tuning, level 70 something feels way too late when you also feel you need to over-level to beat the content.


Endgame:

This is a hard one so I will break it into a few sections.


Endgame - The Atlas:

I LOVE the new atlas, the feel of exploration, getting towers and having more of the atlas revealed feels very satisfying!
it's exciting when you see a cluster of towers that you can use to juice maps up with more than a single mechanic.

Towers, I'm adding this bit only because of a friends experience with them.
There's nothing in them, a few very easy mobs, no real mechanics and loot.
While i do know they are here to make me buff the rest of the atlas (which is why they aren't too much of a problem for me personally) I can see why others would think this just a mandatory "bad" map you have to run, to buff the rest of the maps.


Endgame - The Atlas Tree:

While I do love that I can spec into every mechanic at once, I feel it is simply too bothersome to get points for each, why do I need to get to tier 15 before I start building my mechanics up?

This makes it feel like the journey from tier 1-14 is pointless, a path I have to get through before the endgame starts, which in my opinion is why the acts are there. (besides the story of course)


Endgame - Waystones:

Oh boy, Waystones and tiers, this is probably the single most frustrating thing in the game. WHY does tier 15 Waystones drop tier 8 when I am fully specced into Waystones on my atlas tree?

This just isn't fun, the feeling that the only real way of sustaining tier 15s currently is if you hit jackpot with a good tower cluster or if you exclusively run bosses, a thing that is supposed to be optional, just isn't good.

I feel there should be a lower limit of perhaps +1-2 -1-2 on tiers, so that you at the very minimum in a T15 map get a T13, sure then I can combine them into 14s, its still annoying, but it will be better than getting maps so low that I get zero from running them.


Endgame - Death Penalties:

While I completely agree that dying should have a downside like we have in PoE 1, I do feel that perhaps GGG went a bit overboard in PoE 2.

The stable penalty of losing xp when you die (though 15% feels harsh) is understandable, it hits everyone with a :/ dang feeling, but its easy to recover and move on.

This is how it was in PoE so many of us think its fine.

HOWEVER.

When we start stacking death penalties, it starts feeling a lot more rough,
PoE 2 currently has 4-5 penalties stacked on top of each other:
We lose XP.
We lose the map because we only have 1 life.
We lose the loot because the map close.
We lose the mechanics in that maps on the atlas.
We lose a Waystone that feels hard to sustain.

This is simply too harsh, especially if we also count that you get zero chance to practice on bosses in something like Breach.


Endgame - Difficulty:

The start of maps can feel a bit rough and you do get one-shot occasionally if you aren't abusing the heck out of Grim Feast (which is way too good).
But once you start climbing the tiers you quickly realize something is off.

The mobs get stronger yes, they can now one-shot you even more often with on deaths, lightning storms or whatever, this isn't a huge problem, you need to build your defenses and dodge and so on.

But mobs doesn't seem to get much tankier at all, if you can run a T1 map, you can almost certainly run a T10 if you just avoid being hit.

I don't know if this is the intention, but it feels weird to me.


Endgame - Downtime:

This is more of a suggestion than feedback, We got our Hideout, which works just fine, but after having played The Settlers league in PoE 1, I feel like maybe we could have a samey kinda upgrade system for our hideout.
Doesn't have to give player power (actually it shouldn't) so that it is completely optional, but would give something to do after you burned your brain out for 15 hours running maps (yes I know I should just go outside, shush)


Game... Systems?:

Again I am sure this isn't the intention, but it has to be mentioned that while dodge rolling feels pretty good (especially after we can push small mobs and have a player size of zero) it does feel very bad when this goes in the opposite direction.

Collisions on party members in party play feels HORRIBLE, you rubberband around, get movement locked and can't use certain abilities like shield charge because you hit your friend and is stopped dead in your tracks.

This also applies to monsters that is able to move your character, this simply shouldn't be a thing unless its a large boss like the one in the forge map, it makes sense he would push me and its part of his mechanics.

But those rolling beetles that will push me across the map or a swarm of small scarabs that all try to occupy the same space i stand on all at the same time, making my fly around making me miss super slow rolling slam attacks and such feels horrible and can even at times give some bad motion sickness because you move but the camera stays put until it realizes you are gone and the snaps back to your character.




Phew, I hope I managed to avoid rambling and typos all the way through this, so now there's just left to say the mandatory Sorry for bad English and Thanks for reading.

Well said

One update to endgame mechanics!

Strongboxes, these feel way too slow, the PoE 1 version felt much better with all the mobs spawning at once.
Now I feel like I just stand around and wait, while dodging projectiles the box itself shoot at me.. not in the monsters from the box thats scary, its the box.

"

taima7700#5783 wrote:

One update to endgame mechanics!

Strongboxes, these feel way too slow, the PoE 1 version felt much better with all the mobs spawning at once.
Now I feel like I just stand around and wait, while dodging projectiles the box itself shoot at me.. not in the monsters from the box thats scary, its the box.

Agree. The mechanics the box has are terrifying and same is true for ritual. The risk vs reward isn’t there, either. With the difficulty and time consumption of ritual and boxes right now they would need to guarantee an exalt minimum or something for me to really consider doing them

Update to the gem system:

Starting a new character with a bank full of gems is nice of course, easy access.

But I really think the gems itself should give more of a clue as to what level you can use them on.

At the moment, you look at a gem and it says level 15, but that is gem level 15 and isn't even close to the level you can actually use it on, which is level 64.

This makes it frustrating having to go up and down in tiers in the bank until you finally figure out what level of gems you can actually use at your currently level.