Impressions up to act 4

Hey GGG,

I've completed Act 3 in 24ish hours with a friend. Our characters are lvl 45 or so. We tried to defeat every boss and side quest in each zone, only missed a couple. We beat first ascendancy and are working on the second.

These are just my thoughts from a more maybe expert/advanced level player.

The good.

The graphics are absolutely insane in this game, we stopped frequently to admire the different things.
The boss battles are next level and feel rewarding when you finally beat them.
A lot of the new systems feel good and more usable than poe 1. We both felt like we could "customize" our characters a bit, make mistakes, refund and try again. Swap out gems to try something new etc.
Story is great! It's still a bit unclear how some parts go together, but I can follow the story in POE2 and understand what is happening and why for the most part.


The bad.

It took 24ish hours to get through 3 acts, with 2 good players who were moving pretty quickly. We got stuck trying to find the extra bosses and areas a lot, we grinded out boss fights and we had some setbacks where we had to traverse whole maps again to find the next zone because we entered a side zone and lost the previous map.
- This is far too long. The argument is, now that I have done everything once, I can skip most of the content and just run the main pieces. Theirs no way that Point A-B running is going to reduce it that significantly. To use your 28 hrs to campaign I believe, number. Thats reducing it by 10 hours for me.

Bosses are both fun and horrible. A lot of the times we died, we felt like it wasn't a skill issue but bad luck or unclear attacks. So many one shot abilities. I know we were both getting frustrated on alot of the bosses.

The maps are just far too big for such a slow character. This is probably where we lost so much time. Fighting group after group after group of enemies trying to explore the map and find that one small little pathway to a sidequest.

Combat is so so slow, my character (witch) didn't feel like I was doing much, just casting an essence drain and some aoes and repeating infinitely. It feels fine in boss fights, but open world it was draining and boring.

Respawning enemies on death. Omgosh why is this a thing. The amount of times we would die pretty far into clearing a map and then we would have to clear it all again to get to where we wanted. This was awful and stupid. I really hate this mechanic. It adds nothing, it's just frustrating.

Needs more useful support gems. This might just be a beta thing, but their was so few support gems to choose from and not all I wanted to use. The fact that I can't have duplicates of the good support gems sucks as well.

One shot mechanics. Just why?

Gear and crafting. Crafting felt obtainable this time around, but I didn't get enough currency to participate in this often. Regals were very rare. Then you need 3-4 exalted per craft if its going well. Gear though, the upgrades were so few by just finding stuff and even when the "upgrades" came, they weren't big upgrades. Gear felt bad the whole time and crafting was a great option to fix this but I couldn't do that either.


Ultimately, we finished act 3 last night and I asked my friend if he was going to do end game content as he wasn't big for it in poe1. He thought we were going into new acts for 4-6 but I told him they are not ready and we just have to redo the first 3 acts. He thought I was joking but I assured him and he got it after redoing the first tutorial zone.

Now in his case I think he was fine doing it again. So if that is the case, I will join him.

But my opinion is, I wouldn't do this campaign again. The overall game feels far too slow for me, its frustrating, it's boring for regular map enemies. I hear things about the end game that sound like the early game issues I don't like. Am reserving my opinion on that though.
This slow like Dark souls game is not one of my go to style of games for sure. But I love arpgs, I played and enjoyed playing D4 and it got better when they sped it up a bit and added xp into the game to level faster.
I do appreciate the game and what it is, I think it's unique in the genre right now, I think it feels good to kill the bosses, craft, upgrade your character, progress. But god is it slow. It's all slow.

I hope to see some changes that can make it quicker (like a base move speed update lol). I can't currently see me doing this levelling, for ONE character, every new league. Heck, I don't want to complete the "cruel" section at this time. I'm not looking forward to doing the campaign again.

Theirs something amazing and special here, it's truly an amazing game. But it's missing the mark for me to come back every season and play. Not giving up on it, but am hoping for some changes.

Have a good one!