PoE 2 Early access - review from the standpoint of a semi-casual

Hello, GGG, and fellow gamers,

I would like to start by saying - Congratulations, Grinding Gear Games, and thank you for this great game you have developed! Keep doing what you're doing, have fun in the process, and be proud of what you have created and achieved!

Usually I am not one of the vocal people when it comes to game reviews and stuff, especially on the internet, however because I am absolutely loving the game so far(mostly), I decided to share what I think about it. And just to provide some context on what type of gamer and what experience I have - currently I am 180+ hours deep in PoE 2, leveled up three different characters to endgame and dumped one at the second ascendancy, I am comfortably farming T15 and T16 maps on my, but haven’t killed the pinnacle boss yet. I don’t have that much experience in PoE 1, I played for three or four leagues, but I have pretty decent experience in other ARPG games.

With that said, most of the points below you have probably heard of hundreds of times already, I just wanted to synthesize my thoughts and explain where my reasoning comes from. First let me start with the positives, which I believe most people will agree with:
1. The gameplay - amazing, incredible, marvelous. Especially in the campaign, it just feels good. The character movement is incredibly responsive, the skills feel impactful and look great, the combat in general feels extremely fluid.
2. The Bosses - in first place for a reason. Amazing job when it comes to the design, in both visual and audio aspect, simply love them. This is completely true for the campaign. When it comes to the endgame, I would be lying if I say I don’t want to see them more often in the atlas, however my main concern is that in my opinion they are massively undertuned. In most of my maps, they died in one stun/freeze duration (or combination of these two). Increasing their health and stun/freeze threshold would be a good start in my opinion.
3. The Campaign, just like bosses, is very well done. Enjoyed it a lot, even after 3 characters, I don’t mind at all doing it again on a few more characters. And yes, one may say “but what about a few characters in each league?” and yea, I would probably agree, but for now I just love it.
4. The Visuals, the audio design and the art direction - just amazing! Hats off for putting all of the gory and profane stuff in the game without a care what someone may say. We all know how touchy, to put it mildly, gamers and people on the internet in general can be nowadays.
5. Class diversity and design - since I haven’t played all of the classes and ascendancies (yet), can’t say for certain how I feel about all of them, but in general I think you guys did a great job here as well. Some of the ascendancies need some love, but overall I feel they all have a place in the community.

Now the negatives:
1. RNG, too much of it actually. I will try to make this as short and compressed as possible.
a. Crafting - I think that having only essences (which are not that common and in fact I have yet to find Greater essence) or some high end and very expensive crafting techniques as somehow deterministic options, is way too unreliable and honestly not fun. I think we need more such options. And honestly, I never thought I would be saying this, but I would prefer PoE 1 crafting instead of what we currently have in PoE 2. And yes, PoE 1 crafting is very complicated, and new things have been piling up on top of each other with each league, but I still think we need at least a limited number of predetermined options when crafting.
An example I can give is I have slammed at least 200 quarterstaffs for my monk, and actually just managed to craft one decent Rare, and by decent I mean having four desired affixes, but on mid tiers, like T4 to T6. But one very fundamental thing here I want to underline is that it feels extremely disappointing to constantly roll T1 as the first and/or second affix on white items that are 75+ item level and have no way to reroll or remove it (well technically you have but one Orb of annulment is like 3 Exalted orbs and is much more rare to drop in the first place). If we can have another version of the Orb of Annulment but for Magic items only, that would be amazing. And make it drop as often as an exalt or a regal.
Also, runes - they should not be a permanent thing on your items, just make them so you can put a new one in the socket and destroy the currently socketed one in the process.
b. I don’t even know how to categorize this, so stick with me for a minute - Trials of chaos pieces needed to open the Trialmaster door. Although this is a minor thing, it made me furious the other day. I swear to god, having to run the trials of chaos, which lets be honest, needs revisiting, over and over again until you have all of the three pieces, feels like a waste of time. It just feels like you want me to spend my time in there, because there is nothing else to be done in the game, so that you can keep me playing. And we all know that no gamer likes that. Considering that on top of the fact that you rely on pure chance for each run of the trials and pray to not be screwed by the afflictions you get, it’s just RNG on top of RNG, and creates an incredibly annoying gameplay.
2. Trials of Ascendancy - I bet you haven’t heard this one before, right? Jokes aside, based on the above point you can probably understand how I felt about the Trials of Chaos, now imagine that I would prefer doing that instead of Trials of Sekhemas. I think this speaks plenty for itself. In general, I don’t think the game should softlock (or in some cases hardlock) such fundamental character power, and more importantly - class fantasy defining aspect, behind such unfun, annoying and overtuned mechanics. I understand you wish the game to be challenging, but I think this is the one place you must absolutely not do that. Personally, I wouldn’t mind if I get no loot whatsoever when doing my trials, I just want to have fun doing them and not pull my hair out because I got “unlucky” with the afflictions and stuff. And just to make it clear, I did all of the trials on my monk with ease, but guess why? I just farmed gear and XP until I was 99% sure I won’t fail and need to run them again.
One idea that I think will be very much appreciated and personally think is very cool - make it so that during the trials you can have a taste of the power that is awaiting for you, i.e. basically allow the players to temporarily pick the ascendancy they want to try out and provide them with all of the eight ascendancy points to play with. This way the content will be much more approachable for new players and fun for everyone trying out the ascendancy for the very first time.
3. One hit kills and on-death effects - neither of these should exist if you wish to create a challenging gameplay. The only exception to one hit kills should be very well telegraphed Pinnacle boss or really juiced map bosses attacks (relative to your character power of course). As for on-death effects - this should not be a modifier, it should exist on only specific mobs and should be made completely clear visually, like the big abomination exploding guys. Everything else - the purple orbs that follow you, pools of blood left behind corpses, these should not be a thing. This is extremely important especially with the current design of how maps work, i.e. one death and you are out.

Some aspects that I have mixed feelings for.
1. Maps overlay and objectives notifications - this may be slightly controversial, but I like the maps design and overlay, even with their size. What I dislike is that objectives are shown when you are on top of them basically. This is particularly true in endgame maps, especially with the fact that currently the Rare monsters are the objectives inside the map. Fast and easy solution in my opinion would be to show the objectives at least 2 screens away from your character. Thus we won’t need to backtrack and search for them nearly as much as we currently are.
2. Loot during the campaign - here is what I hear from a lot of people and streamers when somebody asks “I don’t have any decent drops and also I have no currency to craft, what can I do?”, the answer usually is “Do you check your vendors regularly?.” Although I think that vendors should have good items sometimes, I can say for sure that they should not be the main source of decent loot during the campaign. A side note - I think that if the items in stock refresh on a timer, say 30 minutes, is a much better approach than on each level up. The early game loot could be mostly fixed if we had deterministic crafting options. This way no currency buff nor item drops buff will be needed.
3. Zooming through endgame maps - although the level of zooming is nowhere near PoE 1 from what I can see, with very few exceptions, I still think the game is going waaaay too fast sometimes. And I understand that a big chunk of the playerbase likes that, and I agree, I don’t think the zooming is the main issue here. The zooming type of mentality and gameplay does not allow for any type of challenging content. Currently the most common thing that kills players in high tier maps is on-death effects, which I already addressed above. This is nowhere near the concept of challenging content, it just feels like it is there only because it is the one way to actually kill players. Although I cannot provide any relatively good solution to this, if you want to create challenging game, this should be drastically changed. My opinion is just make maps a means to an end, i.e. - a piece of content, necessary for your further progression, where the aim is enabling you to fight and defeat a challenging boss. The zooming part will still be there, it will be fun blasting screens of monsters, but the rewards from doing them should be much lower in comparison to the rewards of defeating the boss. This way you won’t need to balance the maps content that much, and focus mainly on one of the main strong suits of the game.
4. One death per map - honestly, I don’t mind that at all. I just don’t want to die to an exploding thing-y on the ground, that is obstructed by a model, or skill effect, or whatever. So yeah, once again, on-death effects = killer of fun.

And to finish this off, let me say once again, even though there are a decent number of negatives in this post,I enjoy the game incredibly so, I know it will keep getting better and better, and I believe the future is very bright for both the game and its players!

To everyone who spent their precious time reading this, I wish you all the best, for you and your close ones, and happy upcoming holidays!

Sincerely yours,
Anucki