My thoughts/feedback (as a 80 ranger 87 monk w/1600hrs PoE1 <240 Hrs PoE2.)

This Review may seem negative, but in general I am liking the game very much. Probably my main game for awhile. These points are largely area's that I would like to see improved.

Campaign Cons:
- The slow speed will not support interest in returning league/season mechanics.
- The difficulty curve is backwards. Cruel is far easier than normal. I don't think this should be made more difficult and make the campaign even more slow, but maybe reversed for the sake of "Flow". By cruel people understand the game mechanics a bit more, and can deal with the increased difficulty as opposed to acts 1-3 normal.
- I don't like the Act 2 caravan. It seems very load screen heavy. The area seems like the rest of the game which is just a plethora of choke points. I'm a new born claustrophobic.

Campaign Pros:
- The amount of bosses, their mechanics and visuals, are all fantastic.



Waystones (Maps) Cons:
- Feel a little more restrictive, you are less free to do what you want. You previously could pay chaos to play the game mode that you were interested in, that's gone and now you might need to traverse many tiles of content you might find unengaging.
- Builds suffer, there are no bosser atlas builds. There aren't guaranteed bosses per map to make these builds good either.
- Tiles get consumed and cant be repeated. This actually hurts because sometimes you'll find yourself searching for a title, or tiles, and wasting time finding what you want. The atlas that is complete is eventually wasted area to scroll through.
- Tower maps are quite boring, and the mobs seem tailor made to choke doorways.
- Precursor tablets have RNG to them if you are particularly looking for something, I expect this to be less of a problem as you accumulate them.
- Waystone Sustain is awful
- The map completion is worse IMO than poe 1. Kill the boss, they are well done bosses and we like them (add them to every map), but the rares maybe should be up to you. If nothing else because sometimes you have to backtrack through an empty map to get to them.
- One portal is punishing. If you die to a map, you've lost your waystone which is hard to sustain as it is, you've lost all of the map modes (boss ritual breach), you lost any precursor. And now you just have to clear a modeless map which you might dislike a bit.
- Biomes lead to duplicate map types run back to back which get repetative.
- Maps are EXTREMELY unfriendly to group play. If someone dies you just expect them to wait for 30 minutes while their group finishes?

Waystones Pros:
- The Atlas tree looks nice.
- Precursor tablets are a nice simpler way to juice maps opposed to scarabs.



General Cons:
- Areas feel a little tight and constrained, and it doesn't work well even with the enemy AI. Enemies either get stuck at chokes and are essentially the 300 at the pass of Thermopylae, or they surround you with two mobs and you feel stuck all of the time. This is paired with an added importance of "Dodge" which I feel is a failed attempt to mimic skill based gameplay from Souls-Like games, failed if only because in those games you didn't have to figure out how to dodge a mechanic while in a hallway with large enemies thats also filled with boulders and trees. Everyone is going to encounter one day the importance of clicking a meteor shrine, which is a near one shot mechanic, while getting surrounded, while getting blocked by environment, and only seemingly being able to click the thing from the sides in very close range. Elden ring didn't do well by putting you into a tiny box, and these maps can't be changed so easily.
- No one likes on death effects and they should be removed for the benefit of the game.
- The dodge roll seems lacking when trying to kite any enemy which might stun or freeze, as they just run as fast as you roll, and since movement abilities are largely gone this feels a bit clunky.

General Pros:
- Graphics are nice.
- Currency exchange is a win.
- Reforging bench is a win over vendor recepies for new players.
- Salvage bench is a win over vendor recepies for new players.
- The dodge roll introduces a way to expand on skill based combat.
- Frankly being able to post items in game without having to interact with an external website would be nice.
- In addition, which many may not agree with, in game auction house. I don't really care to have to invite someone to my group (who may not join) to have them come to my hideout (where now I have to restrict my map entry) to trade an item (which they may change there mind) and make me leave my map sacrificing a portal for a transaction which I might not value that much and breaking the flow of my map play. This isn't as much of a problem now but will become an increasingly larger problem when people devalue disrupting play for a sale they have posted which they find not worth taking the time to complete, or if I am in a trial that I cannot leave without ending the run. They would sell it to you for an exalted orb for example, but they don't want to stop what they are doing to do so, and now you have to whisper multiple people.



Crafting:

It's probably simpler for newcomers to get exposed to, but a net negative in terms of how useful it is now.

The whole system feels a little too gutted. I think crafting overall is a net loss compared to PoE1. Blessed orbs would be nice, if I have a bad implicit but everything else is great, what do I do? Things are missing.

I don't prefer how Augmentation orbs work opposed to PoE 1. I have several hundred of these now, but would actually use them if they rolled magic items.


Ascendencies:
Ascendency acquisition is bad. Tuning the trials will not make them better. The trial of Chaos and Sekhemas are both very tied to RNG and character build. In PoE 1 Sanctum (Sekhemas) was very good for Minion and Totem builds for example, so this was well known going in. Labs were at least close enough to maps which represent a more balanced mode similar to current end game for all builds.

Some ascendencies don't have a lot of interesting choices to them. I find Chayula particularly less workable than I thought it would be. Some of the nodes are less powerful than noteables in the skill tree.


General Thoughts:
I think PoE1 has a lot better flexibility and depth, which may be daunting for newcomers. Flexibility for you to play however you want to play. Depth in that you can continue to grow as a player the longer you play. However this dumb downed version may be a positive to have more financial backing for the studio. I wish though that there was a better way, such as tutorials, to ease a larger playerbase into complexities that existed in PoE1.

I think the biggest pros are:
- Boss Design
- WASD
- graphics
leaving out difficulty here has PoE1 has ruthless.

I think the biggest cons at the moment are two very incompatible systems:
1) a high importance on dodge and positioning
2) while constraining you with mob surrounds and narrow cluttered environments preventing you from achieving good positioning.
These two because I think they are fundamentals that are hard to change and they will likely fix the other problems such as ascendency acquisition.