Feedback after 2 weeks of playing from a long-time PoE player

For context, I've played PoE for over 10 years (no idea how many thousands of hours, but not a small number). I've completed many 40/40 challenges (with only a few carries for conditionals I didn't feel like doing myself).

Here is my feedback in no particular order:

* Charm slots really need to scale with Belt level (maybe have Advanced with 2 slots, Expert with 3 slots). Currently Charms feel really terrible. Solving Ignite / Shock / Freeze / Bleed is (nearly) impossible in PoE2 and feels bad. Having a mandatory +Charms mod on Belts is just as bad compared to when it was mandatory to have +JewelSocket on Cluster Jewels before the change.
* Augury map. Either greatly speed up the lever animations *and* make it so you can abort or just remove this map. Feels so much worse than every other map because of this one annoying mechanic.
* Addendum to above point: Mire might actually be worse than Augury which is hard to believe.
* Crappy leveling skills should be buffed. You should never be in a situation where your campaign feels terrible because you picked a "bad" skill. Campaign is more than hard enough already. And I didn't find enough skill gems that would have made experimenting easy to do (very much unlike PoE1).
* The fact that my guildies playing ES have 7 to 10 times more ES than I have Life might be a problem.
* The way the CastOnX mega-turbo-nerf was handled was atrocious, but you already knew that. You dumpstered what was probably the 4th or 5th best build and left the much better builds alone. Also, your approach to nerfing (in most cases) has almost always been way over-the-top; never the gentle touch, always the mega nerf-bat.
* Not being able to remove Runes feels terrible. The explanation that Jonathan gave made sense for the campaign, but feels terrible once in maps. I just "upgraded" one item and now my res are screwed because I can't switch out Runes in my gear. And of course no Harvest res swap or changing bench crafts.
* Ultimatum Gauntlets are super-annoying (the Floor 3 ones felt ok, but Floors 1-2 not; not been to Floor 4 yet). My biggest issue is that I have no idea where to go and what will get opened. Overall I do really like the re-worked Sanctum.
* Every time a rare mob dies, it looks like the corpse is about to explode, Maybe this is my trauma speaking, but please change the animations / sounds in some way to not scare me! Sometimes it does no damage and sometimes it kills you. Waiting 10s after it dies is not a great solution.
* Recoup is terrible. I mean, it feels really, really god-awful terrible.
* The World Map takes forever to load. No idea how that is possible unless it is calculating the largest primes while loading. I am a professional software developer and have been unable to come up with an explanation for why it could possibly take so long.
* When hitting [Alt] (to see the extra item descriptions), hovering a new item still shows old item description. You have to depress [Alt] and press it again to see the new item.
* We really need the list of builds that GGG considered OP and why so we can avoid playing them.
* Missing a Rare near the beginning of the map (especially very long linear ones) feels very bad. I literally spent 5+ min just walking back (I think I only had 10% MS boots at the time). I spent almost as much time walking back as I did clearing 99% of the map.
* I have played a lot of Trade and SSF (Softcore). I think that SSF in PoE2 feels really bad since all you have for crafting options is "Vision Crafting".
* Need to be able to zoom out a little more when in the Map view. It gets really big and hard to find things after a while. Also needs some kind of search feature.
* Not auto-refilling Flasks/Charms in town is just a tedious extra step that carries no weight, only annoyance.
* Given how enormous maps are and how slow we move, Shrines should last a LOT longer. The effects can feel great, but the duration not so.
* Alchemy Orb drop rates feel a little too low. So much so that you can't really use them on gear and need to save them for high-tier Waypoints.
* At endgame, (non-Unique) Flasks feel incredibly underwhelming. Charms even more so (see earlier comment).
* On some nodes in the Map in mountain areas, you cannot see the circle at all.
* Strongboxes having a mod for "items drop identified" feels really bad. On the bright side, Freeze boxes no longer kill you since the mobs don't spawn for another 20 minutes so the Freeze wears off before the mobs spawn.
* Which brings me to my next point: Strongboxes feel awful.
* In high-tier maps, Ailments feel like a big problem and Charms barely scratch the surface. Sadly, I don't have a Mirror to spend on a Dream Fragments.
* Citadels seem too rare. I've been doing T14-T15 for 40+ hours (with a decent build) and have yet to find a single one. Edit: I did eventually find some, but then did another 40ish hours of mapping with none. A guildie has mapped for 150+ hours and found none.
* Mobs with "Proximity" bullshit mod need to have a visual identifier. Right now, the way that I know that they have the mod is because I deal 0 damage instead of the Rare being dead and checking the mods.
* When maps are "Cleared" (all Rares/Uniques dead) there should be a better identifier either when you press [Tab] or some other way.
* Why does the anti-Freeze Charm require 80/80 charges to use once?? Other than spending half a Mirror on Dream Fragments (now a T0 I assume given the insane price), you are pretty much screwed if you get Frozen (other than pausing and leaving the map which is what I am forced to do).
* Lost Towers need more variety. You have to do some many of them and they get very boring after a while.
* Many Uniques are atrociously bad.
* Movement speed is MANDATORY on Boots (except for QotF). Mandatory mods are bad (see Charm slots on Belts).
* Please bring back Blessed Orbs. Given how rare Divines Orbs are, it would be great to be able to tweak Ring resists, for example.

As a final note, I am done playing PoE2 for now since the endgame got extremely boring and tedious. Being forced to run so many very long garbage layouts combined with almost never finding any Citadels really killed all the joy.

ok

I agree with every point. I am also doing break as it's pointless at this moment to play.