GGG desperately trying to reinvent the wheel and ending up with a square.

GGG's "vision" is a bunch of boomers thinking d2 is the untouchable game which totally is not flawed to hell and back and people totally love d2 because grind, d2 was never popular because people enjoy a good rpg where you put the game down after beating the final boss or making a new character and enjoy the rpg mechanics.
Grind was always an afterthought for those who want to play more and focusing on that has been the detriment of many arpgs. "Just suffer for some hours then the game starts!"

Never really played that much of PoE1 but what i played, it felt great.
Many options, gem slot system felt great, even early game play was great.

However, now that i came to PoE2, i see why so many people are dissatisfied with it.

- Early game play feels boring
- Gem slots are great but unlocking them takes ages
- Crafting is basically RNG. I rather farm 50x and know what i will get than have a 2% change of maybe getting a decent variant of it.
- (Campaign) map size would be okay if you had a quest marker of some sort. Sadly i had to run to the other side of a cleared map more than once, just because the goal was just in that one corner i didn't bother to check and i passed 5m from it.
BTW: why do i have to re-explore a campaign map each and every time i enter it? Bad memory?

Overall the game could be great, sadly it isn't due to many design changes and decisions i cannot understand.

A questmarker.. or landmark which helps to identify direction if i overlooked a fragment would be nice. Was there a zoombutton on ingame map which at least clearly show up unrevealed landmark.. sometimes i had to check all angles till i noticed one boss being overlooked ( i assume this exists somehow.. but in the first playthrough i overlooked a detail here and there and walked walked walked through emptiness).

Someone mentioned he hated poe1 crafting due to spamming currency. Remember the options to craft 6 link or 5 link with 1 button? This was not restricted behind a drop... you could earn it or save up for it. Or gamble and use lesser currency but you was more in control of your outcome

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Storylyne#1859 wrote:

A questmarker.. or landmark which helps to identify direction if i overlooked a fragment would be nice. Was there a zoombutton on ingame map which at least clearly show up unrevealed landmark.. sometimes i had to check all angles till i noticed one boss being overlooked ( i assume this exists somehow.. but in the first playthrough i overlooked a detail here and there and walked walked walked through emptiness).

Someone mentioned he hated poe1 crafting due to spamming currency. Remember the options to craft 6 link or 5 link with 1 button? This was not restricted behind a drop... you could earn it or save up for it. Or gamble and use lesser currency but you was more in control of your outcome

Utterly insane that they got rid of bench crafting.

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Xenus_Paradox#7530 wrote:

"

Storylyne#1859 wrote:

A questmarker.. or landmark which helps to identify direction if i overlooked a fragment would be nice. Was there a zoombutton on ingame map which at least clearly show up unrevealed landmark.. sometimes i had to check all angles till i noticed one boss being overlooked ( i assume this exists somehow.. but in the first playthrough i overlooked a detail here and there and walked walked walked through emptiness).

Someone mentioned he hated poe1 crafting due to spamming currency. Remember the options to craft 6 link or 5 link with 1 button? This was not restricted behind a drop... you could earn it or save up for it. Or gamble and use lesser currency but you was more in control of your outcome

Utterly insane that they got rid of bench crafting.

I think it's even worse they replaced it with Runes and then made those stuck in an item as soon as you used them. It's such a boggling choice because it makes loot feel even worse now. "Oh yay, a good item dropped, but equipping it means I screw up all my resistances on the spot and I only get 1 rune socket to attempt to fix them, guess i'll have to get an entirely new set of armor to use this ONCE NEW PIECE OF GEAR, or sell it and trade for better things". We're back in trade is the solve all of gear.

Back to d2 hole punch without rune words, recombinator and exalt spamming on 100s of gambled bases via gold. Feels lesser appealing to me.

Re:
Utterly insane that they got rid of bench crafting.

>> you dont need to use it but it was really useful.

I played a lot of D2. 10 years of it. This game doesn't have what made D2 great: modding. That's right, the player community made D2 great. New items, skills, etc. Why there are no sets in this game is also strange to me if they are professing D2 love.

Anyways, I agree with the sentiment that you play this once and you are done. The game ends after the acts when there is no more story. The experience from start to act6 end is great. I've done it 5 times now. But that experience doesn't translate into endgame at all.

200+ hours, many T15 maps with multiple characters, and now I'm just going to stop. Gave it a good try, but they are going to have to do some major game-changing things to PoE2. Hopefully they are ingesting the feedback during their break and they address things. Not just armor because some streamer made a video, but see the dozens of threads with hundreds of replies from unique accounts all saying the same thing.

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Storylyne#1859 wrote:

Back to d2 hole punch without rune words, recombinator and exalt spamming on 100s of gambled bases via gold. Feels lesser appealing to me.

Yeah right now crafting is a sham. A waste of currency in almost all cases since it's a pure RNG fiesta. Might as well put on a bunch of IIR on a Stat Stacker since that seems to be the vision atm. Loot drops will feel terrible otherwise.

I can understand modding support.. some mods were good in my eyes, some played by others. Comes always with the risk of splitting communuty.. but if a version is at risk of being discontinued and only mod support with ingame shop enables maintanance.. its like it is.

I would rather favor this approach over discontinuation of poe1. It was what made the company successful and funded this other poe game.

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Storylyne#1859 wrote:

Back to d2 hole punch without rune words, recombinator and exalt spamming on 100s of gambled bases via gold. Feels lesser appealing to me.

Re:
Utterly insane that they got rid of bench crafting.

>> you dont need to use it but it was really useful.

I expected for an RPG they would have done something really interesting with crafting but when Jonathan spoke about transmutes and exalts being the process it didn't sound fun from the outset.