After 240+ hours into the endgame...
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Attention: I want to prefix that I understand this is an early access. I expect many hot topics to be in line for further development in response to player feedback. This is exactly why I am writing this; its just player feedback. I have 7000 hours into the POE franchise (that's not even enough to say your an elite player funnily enough) so I do have a "good and fair" understanding of POE systems.
After playing for over 260 hours on POE2, here is what I've observed the most: Rare monsters:, -Particularly the hasted siphon mana ones are too punishing for most builds. In the cases that you cannot delete them immediately or CC them in place long enough to kill them, for some builds this one instant kills you (namely builds running mind over matter/EDB or relies on mana to move around and set up combos). Stressing the fact that poe2 focuses on combo play, not having mana to do these via hasted siphon monsters who glue onto you is just breaking a good gaming experience and does not provide difficulty but rather unnecessary punishment. -On death effects feel overly consistent, especially when you try to run waystones and atlas strategies with "rare monsters have additional modifiers". This causes a gameplay that requires you to run away or be distant from any dying rare monsters unless your running much lower content than your capable. This might be relieved by future monster modifiers increasing the pool of options, but as of now, its a bit ridiculous. It feels like 8/10 rare monsters will do something on death. The visibility of these on death effects are not as apparent or telegraphed as you would hope. The only one I can think of is the large fat monsters who glow like lava for 3 seconds before exploding. -The on death visual for rare monsters where they explode and corruption tentacles come out seems to be a forced visual. I have noticed, even on a 4080 I9 processor that this particular visual ramps up both CPU and GPU work loads. It would be nice to be able to turn this off. Expedition: -Logbooks seem to be a little scarce, especially when your trying to find the pinnacle boss content for this particular endgame area. For most endgame pinnacle content (such as breach or delirium) you can at least slowly progress through splinters to eventually be guaranteed an attempt. This would be a great addition instead of relying on RNG to get logbooks, then RNG to have a boss encounter inside said logbooks. Perhaps an option to trade multiple artifacts for a logbook would be welcomed. Delirium: -Perhaps I have not mega juiced my towers and maps to see how many splinters I can get, however, as of now, by running T15 rare maps, some available precursers online and three emotions distilled on my maps for splinter drops, it seems it takes about 4-8 hours of grinding to get the 300 splinter mark for an attempt to simulacrum. This seems a little much. I believe the rarer emotions required for many of the amulet enchants are so expensive for this reason. If this is intended, so be it. However, if you want your players to have reasonable access to simulacrum content, I would suggest a higher splinter drop rate equivalent to breach. Sometimes I will get 8-15 splinters in one map which feels great, however, most times i get 1-8. this means I would have to run an average of 40 maps to get one single attempt to the simulacrum, not mentioning that I may very well instead sell those 300 splinters at their exalt ratio value instead... I want to experience this content and progress my atlas, but at the moment it feels less desirable compared to other content due to the accessibility. -The hidden monsters in the broken delirium fragments scattered across the map only activate when you come into close contact. Then, they proceed to push drag you 15 meters (if possible) away. This has to be a bug, if not, its not right. You have almost no agency or way to skill around it. I would suggest you remove the push back on them entirely, or have them activate much farther away. Citadels: -It may be incredible bad luck, and I hope so. After 6 days and 12 hours played, exploring the endgame atlas, I have now just found my first Vaal Citadel. If this is intended to be this rare considering it allows an attempt to the final pinnacle boss then so be it. You will however cause this particular content to be only accessible for a small portion of players. For a game that is heavily recognized for incredible boss fights in the ARPG genre, you would think you would want adequate accessibility for these fights. Over 180 hours to get 1/3rd of the completion for merely an ATTEMPT to fight the last pinnacle boss at tier 1 only is, in my opinion, way too long. If this is bad RNG on my part, I think it still remains a problem. Perhaps after completing the tier 15 waystone quest, completing additional rare tier 15 waystones could provide you one random crisis fragment. Perhaps completing other pinnacle boss fights have a 1/25 chance of dropping a crisis fragment. Perhaps special precurser emblems can point you to a directional tower that identifies at the very least a direction to head towards a citadel area. Rarity: -Rarity is too powerful and destroying the economy. Especially with uniques such as gravebind rope cuffs. Diminishing returns on this, in my opinion, is heavily needed to avoid large disparities in the economy, as well as the ability for groups of players to streamline the best items in the game. Part of the best feelings you can get in an ARPG, aside from becoming very powerful, is to get that chase unique item after a considerable grind. In my opinion, rarity should only, at best, double your chances to get higher value items. Having 5-10x the chances to get higher value items is beyond overkill. Endgame Atlas: -Apart from previously mentioned above, the inability to zoom out after exploring for over 180 hours, causes a confused mouse dragging experience to find certain areas your working on. I believe this could be a simple fix. Allow us to see a lot more of the atlas by zooming out, or provide an overlay that allows us to fast focus in extremities of our explored endgame atlas. I cannot begin to imagine what this will feel like in a month from now. -As an experienced POE player, it was easy and expected for me to understand what to do right after ACT 3 cruel. But I can tell you that's certainly not the case for new players. The amount of people that I chatted with who had the mindset of "endgame is boring, all you do is grind waystones" made me observe something valuable to mention; -I feel like the average new player has no idea that Xesht, We Who Are One is currently ruling the twisted domain or Olroth, Origin of the Fall is lurking in a Kalguran Tomb or The King of the Mist is actually still alive and waiting for your audience or that there's simulacrum if your willing to become so delirious... This is partly because there is nothing except for a couple quest lines on the right side of your screen to teach you and youtube videos if your patient enough to find. A simple overlay screen with endgame introduction/instructions, potentially voice acted would make a huge service to new players that explains the following; -All the endgame side content (Breach,Delirium,Ritual,Expedition) and HOW to progress towards fighting their pinnacle boss content. This is massively important because new players WANT a reason to become more powerful to play these amazing boss content. -Tower layouts feel bad. First of all, entering tower rooms from a small bridge with no line of sight on monsters feels like opening a front house entrance door in a fps shooter with 25 enemies aiming their weapons at you. I find my self shooting projectiles from the bridge into the room and rolling backwards until I feel there's enough enemies that died to proceed inside. This is just a painful experience and does not feel like difficulty that rewards. I find myself throwing low tier white maps in the towers just to find the large staircase as quickly as possible and get the precurser emblem slot for my endgame. -I personally would like to see more unique encounters. I am sure this will be future content over time. -The Augury map is horrible. I don't care about the layout, but these forced 3 second lever interacts that lock you in place is insane. Yes, I know, you can kill all the monsters first, however, that doesn't stop the burning ground placed perfectly in front of the lever. Also, these levers just bring back a hated feature from D4 dungeons; that alone should be enough to change this. Simply having the interacting a one click business and continue moving would fix this issue. Gearing and crafting: -I have an opinion, and its a hot topic, but I believe there is no crafting in poe2, only gambling. This will probably change in the future, so I am not horribly worried. Yes, I have tried essence "Crafting" but it is not nearly reliable enough. The ability to "craft" one single suffix, let alone prefix on gear like in poe1 would be a massive benefit to players solving problems in poe2. Problem solving is fun gameplay if your given the tools to do so. -I cannot replace runes. If I grind all week to afford a good item and then socket runes inside of it based on my current character situation, tomorrow when a new situation arises, that entire week of grind just created another problem. If we can't craft suffixes on our gear to fix resistance, mana or other problems, then give us the ability to replace runes. I don't care if its another currency item required to do so. Vendors: -Not a deal breaker by any means, however, here's what it looks like when going through three tabs of collected gear; 1) fill up inventory 2)Talk to Doryani to identify 3)check the salvage bench to see what has quality for scraps/stones/shards and then check to see if you actually want to salvage that item. 4)Go to Ketzuli and disenchant the appropriate items for more shards after checking their stats 5)Finally open the sell/buy and make gold. Repeat 104 times. My opinion, remove the disenchant NPC option and allow the salvage bench (rename it if you want to) and make disenchanting give you all possible breakdown results. This way you just have to check your identified gear, save the ones that have promise, and then salvage all or sell all. This would be appreciated quality of life. Trials: -I personally love the Sekhema trials but not so much as melee (other than permafreeze monk for obvious reasons). This may be an unpopular opinion, but I don't believe this requires much attention as there will be a third option to ascend on full release (hoping its heist or the return of Izaro in some fashion!) Many players do not realize how easier and more manageable relics make these runs. Pro tip: Get as much sacred water as you can and buy all the boons you can, avoid random afflictions as they can brick your build/run and if you manage to buy all the boons from the merchant he will repeatably sell "cannot be damaged" as an option, gg. -The Trial of Chaos. Oh man... Its fun if your build is crazy. Otherwise you better roll these following debuffs; fire turrets, lightning turrets, buffs/debuffs CDR, can't slow monsters, blood globules. The reason I write this is because most other debuffs you choose are really, really rough. Aside from that, Balak the player arena destroyer is crazy over tuned. That tornado is compensating for something. Just a damage balance here will make doing this trial alone somewhat feasible. Campaign: Firstly, absolutely great fucking campaign. I read all the lore and NPC discussions, beat the 3 acts 21x now and I'll be getting some more. For anyone who hasn't done a full read/lore dive through the entire 3 acts I highly recommend the rich stories/backstories GGG provides. You would be surprised what you find out about the Azak Bog and the Apex of Filth ;) The literal only complaint I personally have is the confused broken state of that damn time portal in act 3. The amount of times I've been teleported to the River Bank (Cruel) and killed the Miller for no reason other than getting lost apparently is astounding. This needs to fixed. Thank you so much for this amazing game. Last edited by DevouredSun#1415 on Dec 26, 2024, 3:29:43 PM Last bumped on Jan 4, 2025, 3:38:26 PM
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Ive been playing for a similar amount as you and my views are almost identical and I think youve explained them very well.
Overall theres just little to no crafting and most of the end game "keys" are just too scarce | |
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+1
would also add that the new atlas tree feels a lot less fun as you dont get to invest into it until very late when running pinnacle encounters I know the reasoning behind it is to remove need to constantly respec, but maybe another approach would be to duplicate the weapon spec passive tree system, and allow to dual spec the atlas tree, while selecting tree 1 or 2 in the waystone ui before opening the map |
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" POE1 has multiple atlas tree configurations available at the map device, I am sure this will be looked at to transfer over to poe2. Further more, because POE2 is early access and the endgame is only 7 months into development, I believe the endgame atlas tree will certainly see some love. I do agree that the current atlas tree, particular the base atlas tree is missing just a few more points for me personally to make waystones feel much better. With only a respec option to change your play style its not particularly what I would call "fun" to be respecing the atlas all the time for different outcomes. Last edited by DevouredSun#1415 on Dec 26, 2024, 2:05:33 PM
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240 (or is it 260?) hours in and you dont know you can completely avoid the mana/flask degen from the blue circles? Bro...
Step 1 is to self reflect.
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Re Citadels, I have the feeling they only start spawning X units away from the Burning Tower thing. So if you explore everything around your start location in a giant circle (like I did) it takes forever to find a one, however once you have progressed far enough out from the center, they start spawning every screen or so.
I think if you were to just pick a direction from the start and head out, you would start finding them much sooner. Could be wrong but that's how it feels to me. |
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Finally a good feedback from a PoE experienced player. I'm new to the game (110 hours of PoE and 160 of PoE 2) and i'm having a lot of fun playing, but i can totally see all your points as imporvements to the game!
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" 240 in the endgame and about 20 in the campaign on my main character my dude. As ED/CI/MOM mana flasks doesn't do anything. If this information helps you understand your welcome. |
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" Thank you, I have indeed made a wide circular exploration from the start, however it was 10+ screens in diameter each direction.. I will now test your theory since I've found my first! |
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" Thanks for the reply, I am always stoked to hear people enjoying this amazing arpg! |
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