Feedback after 150 hours of playing

For Context, I played Warrior, Monk, Ranger, Mercenary and Sorceress. All of them to maps, only one to T12+. Leveled with pretty much anything I could find, I don't trade a lot so is pseudo-ssf.
I'm gonna mostly highlight things that I consider problematic, if there is any good thing I may say is good, but most of what I'm gonna talk is the things that I consider can be corrected to make the game better.

DISCLAIMER. Everything I say here comes from a place of love for the game and me wanting it to get to a better place. I've been playing PoE 1 for many years now and I fell in love with PoE 2 just as quickly. There is no hate in any of these lines, is just me talking about things that are not really working right now.


1. Mobs are harder than bosses- Bosses are extremely easy compared to trash mobs. A rare monster with 2 defensive mods can take longer to kill than an act boss. I do know a lot of people had struggle with bosses during the campaing, but I think no one is going to disagree that bosses should be the hard thing, not white mobs surrounding you.
Rares should not be able to get 2 defensive modifiers as some of them directly brick builds.
Temporal Bubble, Lightning Mirage, Explodes Nearby Corpses, Volatiles, Mana Siphon, Siphon Flask Charges, Proximal Tangibility, Shroud Walker, all of them should be removed. No one looks at any of those mods and is like "Look how interesting it is to fight this mob". People have been saying this for ages and you devs don't want to listen.

2. Early defensive scaling is awful- Armour has no value at all during the campaing and even in maps it feels extremely lackluster. Evasion is the most ok of them to build early, is going to feel alright. Energy shield is awful to focus on early campaing due to stun treshold being based in your life instead of being based of whatever life or shield is higher, you get stunned every second and charms are a joke (more on that later).

3. Zones are massive- The starting mines in Act 2 are incredibly big and neverending. You have to walk so much with so little character movement speed that it gets tedious and a lot of people don't want to make more characters because of it. I know checkpoint travel solves a little bit of this, but is mostly a bandaid to not have to backtrack that much, not really a solution to how big zones are.

4. Uncut Skill Gems should allow you to pick lower level skills. If you find a level 10 Uncut Skill Gem, you should be able to pick a level 5 skill.
Uncut support gems don't show you in what skills they work if you are on the "All Gems" tab, leading to a lot of people making mistakes. You need to cut the gem for the pop up to appear.
Uncut Spirit Gems are rare in the campaing. They should be more common, you can't go from a level 4 Herald of Ash to a level 8 and skip everything in the middle just because none drops.

5. Bad Bosses- There are particulary 3 fights that I consider that are badly made.
First is the Colussus in Act 2. The platform is really buggy, some projectile skills target the air without hitting the boss, you can sometimes walk and your camera will jump all over the place, the targeting is completely messed up and things like grenades fall off the stage making you deal way less damage than you are supposed to.
Second is The Mighty Silverback in Act 3. His slams hits you if you are too close to him on his side and the roll has little to no animation and deals insane damage. I was able to take the slam multiple times, but one roll and I was dead.
And third is the Witch in Act 3. The broom phase, just remove it, trying to fight that boss as a melee character has been one of the most masochistic things I've ever done.

6. Charms are useless- The duration is awful, it should be longer. The charges per use should be lower alowing at least 3 activations at full charges. They should passively gain 0.15 charges per second. "Recover 4-6 life" prefix? Is that a joke?
They are the most unrealible piece of gear in the existance of Path of Exile. I have never seen something more useless in the time I've been playing the game.
If you are against a pack of poison projectile shooting mobs they are going to eat those charm charges so quick, even before you get to them.
Also, the "+charm slot" mod should not be a suffix, it should be a prefix. Not a single build is going to prefer having another useless stone instead of having at least 10% res.
I rather piano 5 flask than this.

7. Reforging Bench- I need to explain why this is bad?
I put 3 Topaz Rings with only a strength roll each, I get a Topaz Ring with 3 mods and none of them is strength. I know is early access and somethings may not be balanced or a little broken, but this is just non-functional. The only real use it has is for recipes.

8. Bleed should be applied to Energy Shield as well- I believe that this change alone will balance the disparity between life and ES, a CI character being immune to 2 ailments makes life inherently worse.
Also, there should be %life on the tree, I don't think ES scaling should be nerfed, I think life should be buffed. There is a total of +20 flat life and 6% increased life on the three. That should change.

9. Forcing Sanctum and Ultimatum down the throat is the worst decision you've made- This two are litterally two mechanics that most of the people don't enjoy, but still you force people to run this to ascend.
No one is happy with how you ascend. This should be a priority.
Ultimatum 3rd ascendacy should be 7 rooms.
Also not being able to reroll ascendancies is another really bad decision tied to this.

10. Refunding should be free for the first 3 acts- I don't think full free refund should be a thing, but it is still expensive to refund your passive skills and it doesn't allow experimentation early on, when you most need it.

11. Gold drops very weird- You may kill a mob and it drops 20 gold and the one next to it drops 500. I don't understand it.
Gold should drop more or the cost of items should be lower. A blue item is not worth 3400 gold. Lets be honest.

12. Crafting has no systems nor mechanics- The whole crafting secret right now is just be lucky 6 times in a row to get the item that you want.
Literally this has been the worst crafting experience I had in any game.
Essences don't make things better because there is very little deterministic possibilities.
Alterations should be introduced into the game, allowing you to roll magic items to at leas have an insurance that you are going to have 2 mods that you want instead of bricking your item in the first orb because of dead mods.
This is what causes items that have 3 good mods to be 10divs at least.

13. Dead mods- Thorns, Regen, Reduced Attribute Requirements, Light Radius, Reduced Duration of Ignite/Poison/Bleed on You. All mods that no one is going to be happy to see. Just get rid of them.
You decided to double down on THORNS by not having one chest piece for it but TWO and 4 clusters on the tree. What is wrong with you?

14. Disenchanting- Having to fill up my inventory with rares just to have a Regal every now and then instead of Regal Orbs being more common is one of the worst loot experiences ever.

15. Dopped gear is uninteresting- Is always so fun to find a good base in maps the floor and identifying it just for it to have 9% cold res.
Make low tier mods not being able to appear in certain level items. An item level 56 should never be able to roll 3 life regen per second.

16. Rarity should be removed from the game- The current state of pretty much no drops unless you have 100%+ rarity is just awful. Remove Rarity, make mobs drop more and rarer stuff. Drops right now are very boring and not exciting.

17. Let people switch runes- Just do it, make it delete the previous rune. But do it.
Also let people switch resistances on an item, the amount of items I cannot use because they have a resistance I already have somewhere else is awful.

18. Uniques are even worse than in PoE 1- There is only like 7 that are good, there is 268 uniques in the game, and less than 10% of them are good.

19. Remove party downscaling from the game- I know this one is probably going to be controversial, but I don't want to sit through another 6-10 hour campaing to level up a character. No one really wants to do that, let me be rushed by my high leveled friend with their full damage.

20. Attributes are lacking- Gems needing 205 of an attribute when is not an easy thing to get is bad desing. Having to choose between a resistance or 15 strength is one of the worst choices you can make a player do.

21. The tree is not really that good- Make Attribute nodes on the tree give 10 as they do in the first one and reduce the amount of travel points between interesting clusters.
Remove conditional damage and conditional defenses. Damage on tuesdays and defense on saturday is not fun mechanics. Just add reliable things all the time. Mostly in the defense department, I don't really mind some damage if x thing, but defenses not being at their maximum all the time is quite bad.

22. Elemental spells are the most boring thing in the game- The only real option is to play Spark or Eye of Winter. Everything else is underwhelming.

23. Chaos spells are thrash- Contagion being a single target skill instead of an AoE one makes it awful to play.

24. Feel should be improved all across the board- A lot of skills don't feel good to use, they have weird or very long animations and the damage or utility you get is not worth the effort.
Slower skills should do more damage, slower animation utility skills should be more significant.

25. Mobs push you too much- Any mob that has the slightest knock back ability or anithing that pushes you is really badly tuned. Everything moves your character a lot and you can lose control of it and that doesn't fell good at all. Examples are the rock crabs in Act 2, the giant skeletons in Valley of the Titans that fall, deal a lot of damage and sometimes even if you dodged out of the way they still push you and reposition you. Since I'm talking about Valley of Titans, the tornadoes deal WAY to much damage.

Sorry for the messed order, I wrote things as they came to my head.
This is all I can think of right now. There is probably more in my mind, but I leave it here. I hope the devs can see this and improve on a couple of this things.
Hope everybody has a great day, afternoon or night.
See ya.

EDIT: After a couple more hours other stuff came to mind.

26. Why caster weapons can't have runes? You already took Heralds and Fire/Cold/Lightning added damage supports from spells. Is crazy to think that the only ones who deserve a little more spirit trhough soul cores are martial weapon characters, even when the cost of some spirit skills from casters are insane expensive. Of why my caster can't get 20 life on killing an enemy. Is not like this is a range vs melee thing, because range characters can use those. The current state of spells is horrible thanks to this (alongside multiple other things, some mentioned earlier).

27. Spirit cost is too dispar- Some skills like Ghost Dance should be 60 Spirit but is 30, then you get Archmage at 100 Spirit and Blasmephy at 60 per curse. I would say that some of them need to be balance. When the better defensive auras are so cheap to have, is jus better to run those instead of any damage one. Also, supports should all cost the same, I don't get why Vitality is more expensive than Clarity and so on.

28. Ascendancies are wrong- Some ascendancies are horrible, HORRIBLE, and have mostly no use in almost any scenario. Right now there is no reason to go any other thing than Stormweaver + Archmage if you are playing ANY elemental spell. The only reason to go Pathfinder is just to play any of the concoction skills, but nothing else. Deadeye is just the same, 0 interesting things in her, 0 changes that makes me want to play her. There is no reason, at all, to go Acolyte of Chayula, other than to go against the current, Invoker is just better.
In comparison, both Mercenary Ascendancies are stupidly broken and super interesting. And Warrior is a really big contender to be at the top of the best ascendancies in the game.
All this without addressing any of the big disparity in power each ascendancy has in terms of power per node.

29. Some of the targeting is really bad- Sometimes you put the mouse over one enemie and use things like Contagion, Killing Palm, Shattering Palm, etc. and it targets a completely different enemy. I get that maybe for the palm skills could make sense that you can't dash to a group of mobs, but Contagion is a purple thing that comes from the sky, so it should go to the place I'm marking.

30. Mobs having way more movement speed than the player- Is just wrong, in a lot of cases the only option is to just run away from a pack and you can't do that because their base speed is way higher than yours. On top of this, debuffing skills that you can use to slow enemies o deal damage in a big area are usually very slow to use with big animations that will let you be attacked by whatever is in front of you. The runaway from mobs experience is one of the worst things going on in the game. The little beetles that explode with lightning are super fast and you are NOT gonna be able to outrun them, they are going to catch up with you.

31. Post-Death mechanics need to be removed- It's been years since we say this without any real address to it, that is why I didn't include it in the original post. But is been way to much of this lately. Just remove them, nobody is happy or interested about the fact that a mob explodes after you kill it. So many deaths occur because you want to pick something and some body gets exploded by an off-screen rare mob with Explodes Nearby Corpses. Just, please, just remove it. Its going to make everybody's experience better. Making a monster deal damage after death is a way to say that you didn't find a way to make the mob interesting to fight.

32. One portal maps- No one likes this. And if you do, please, tell me why? I really want to know.

33. Stash Tabs- Please hurry and add the missing tabs. I already bought a map stash tab, we know how they function, why is there not a version for Waystones. The same with the Soul Cores and the Catalysts. And I swear to god, those tabs already exist in PoE 1, don't even think about making people buy one of those things again. If you do, there is going to be a huge uprising.

Thought I would mention after skimming through your post, before I reply to more of the bulk of it...

You can toggle party downscaling in the options. And it's a nice addition to the game tbh. When you have a new friend start playing late, you can join them and not ruin their experience, but still get to play with them. And so should you choose, can turn it off and delete stuff if you wish.

Also note, that the lower level in the group will get much less experience if you aren't downsynced. Sure you'll carry em through but they'll be quite under leveled after all is said and done.

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Sanktusdub#4305 wrote:

Thought I would mention after skimming through your post, before I reply to more of the bulk of it...

You can toggle party downscaling in the options. And it's a nice addition to the game tbh. When you have a new friend start playing late, you can join them and not ruin their experience, but still get to play with them. And so should you choose, can turn it off and delete stuff if you wish.

Also note, that the lower level in the group will get much less experience if you aren't downsynced. Sure you'll carry em through but they'll be quite under leveled after all is said and done.

I know about the toggle, is just not the kinda toggle I want per se. It works great when you want to experience the campaing for the first time and invest yourself in the story and lore. But after my 7th character I just want to be rushed tbh. Is 10 hours to map every time, is just too long.
Just have another option that lets my character get carried at full exp and full damage by my level 70 friend who can just smoke the campaign.
Creating a new character is a bigger chore in this one than on the first. At least the first one had good leveling skills and items that you could use to rush a 4-5 hour campaing. In here I had not seen a lot of people do less than 8 hours to maps even with twink gear.
I know is kind of a bratty complain, but I think that the option being there would make a lot of people actually want to play more characters. I have a couple of friends who usually make 5 characters per league in PoE 1, but now they don't want to create another one and just stick with their first one because is a long campaing. And as someone who did create multiple characters, I get that.

10.


I don't understand much of what GGG is doing here. I will limit myself to one thing.

This is EA so far so good. Why does Respec cost so much gold? And I mean especially the initial phase, the campaign. If you like to test all classes and do unconventional things with them, like I do, you are always broke.

EA, as I understand it, is there to do unconventional things. To try things out. And no, I'm not going to bring a character into the endgame. I don't have the slightest interest in doing that right now. I think at this stage you want to get all kinds of data, find all kinds of bugs, and so on and so forth.

To put it bluntly, that alone is a completely stupid decision for me at this stage. We can forget about economic data from this period anyway, given the circumstances.

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Dimarsul#3064 wrote:

10.


I don't understand much of what GGG is doing here. I will limit myself to one thing.

This is EA so far so good. Why does Respec cost so much gold? And I mean especially the initial phase, the campaign. If you like to test all classes and do unconventional things with them, like I do, you are always broke.

EA, as I understand it, is there to do unconventional things. To try things out. And no, I'm not going to bring a character into the endgame. I don't have the slightest interest in doing that right now. I think at this stage you want to get all kinds of data, find all kinds of bugs, and so on and so forth.

To put it bluntly, that alone is a completely stupid decision for me at this stage. We can forget about economic data from this period anyway, given the circumstances.

I don't really mind respecs having a cost, it is just too high during campaing. But it is needed to have a cost so we can provide the feedback so they can fix this. It would be stupid to make it costless and when the game launches 1.0 it costs 10k per node. You need to get the feel of the cost and how much gold a character makes to balance around that. Last Epoch has a really good balance between the cost and how much you earn. But in here you have a bigger incentive to grab items off the floor to sell them to vendors to get to respec, thats kinda weak.

Exactly. Respec costs are too high in the campaign phase. Especially the remark that you have to sell items to have gold for the respec is spot on. Respec doesn't have to be completely free, but in my opinion the costs are too high in the campaign phase.

forget yellow mobs with 2 defense modifiers why can a white mob 1 shot me when i can face tank a boss

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Khirasier#3915 wrote:

forget yellow mobs with 2 defense modifiers why can a white mob 1 shot me when i can face tank a boss

So true!! I'm having a lot of trouble with projectile mobs, they either stun-lock me or just shot 350 projs that deal 15% of my life each.

Also the white mobs with slams just chew through life bars.

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Vic5Vicious#7214 wrote:

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Khirasier#3915 wrote:

forget yellow mobs with 2 defense modifiers why can a white mob 1 shot me when i can face tank a boss

So true!! I'm having a lot of trouble with projectile mobs, they either stun-lock me or just shot 350 projs that deal 15% of my life each.

Also the white mobs with slams just chew through life bars.

So far the Act 3 multi-projectile tentacle mobs are the worst offenders:
- They deal chaos damage, which deals absurd amounts of damage considering the point in the campaign as you'll have at best 1 chaos res ring, if even that
- Multiple projectiles which straight up stun-lock you to death if one of them manages to hit you
- And if you play a class that naturally neither has additional life due to strength not being a main attribute, nor uses evasion-based items, you're doubly screwed, because ES granted by items at around lvl ~20-40 is very pitiful

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Merwise#2613 wrote:

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Vic5Vicious#7214 wrote:

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Khirasier#3915 wrote:

forget yellow mobs with 2 defense modifiers why can a white mob 1 shot me when i can face tank a boss

So true!! I'm having a lot of trouble with projectile mobs, they either stun-lock me or just shot 350 projs that deal 15% of my life each.

Also the white mobs with slams just chew through life bars.

So far the Act 3 multi-projectile tentacle mobs are the worst offenders:
- They deal chaos damage, which deals absurd amounts of damage considering the point in the campaign as you'll have at best 1 chaos res ring, if even that
- Multiple projectiles which straight up stun-lock you to death if one of them manages to hit you
- And if you play a class that naturally neither has additional life due to strength not being a main attribute, nor uses evasion-based items, you're doubly screwed, because ES granted by items at around lvl ~20-40 is very pitiful

Yeah those ones are crazy! But the ones in Ogham Manor, that shoot projs if you are far and do a chaos beam if you are close to them. At level 14-16 they are head to head. Mostly because they do physical and armour is meaningless for most of the campaign. And if you focus on Es your stun treshold is low as hell.