EA Feedback - 84 Monk - 5d+ played time

Disclaimer:

PoE-2 is basically my first full try-out of the franchise. I have absolutely no idea how PoE-1 was or what are it's good, bad and ugly, I literally played like maybe 1 hour in PoE-1 and barely made it past the first town ( I don't even remember it's name, sorry! ).

It's a fresh game for me and that's all it matters at the end of the day (to me). I'm reading everyone's opinions in parallel, veterans and not of the game, I understand both sides and their issues and why in some cases people tend to go to extremes to defend a game they've invested years and they love. That's all fine and dandy.

But there's a couple of issues on a global scale no matter the player type that I'll talk about according to my opinion and beliefs.

Lastly for my intro, I consider this an actual "early access", which means 'alpha', not even beta, so I keep various reservations for the future and patches to come and I'll try to be as lenient as possible.

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Campaign:

It kept me absolutely entertained. I don't know the lore in general ( I suppose it kind of continues the story ), but I've talked with every npc possible that I found which was great.

The gameplay and the idea of needing to understand the actual boss mechanics to time-roll etc, or even with some mobs as well is a breath of fresh air instead of the usual I'll run through you typical aRPG style. Yes obviously there will always be class balance issues etc that can just walk while everything is dying, but for a person that had no idea what skills to pick even I didn't mind a 2-hour death streak until I time everything correctly.

My only issue campaign wise would be the trials. I think that they're placed in a wrong level/skill/timeline if you wanna call it. Most characters especially if they don't know what they're doing, they're gonna have a hard time getting their ascendancies, which might be fine though as it could be according to plan, but if that's the plan there's no point of having them there if we need way better gear or more char levels to go through them :) because they appear to be a 'part' of the campaign as we go through it so they should be done in time along with everything else. Apart from that, enjoyed every minute of it.

Also when I finished the last quest of the campaign, I pretty much ported back to the Ziggurat Encampment and it took me a while to figure out that Doryani was well still at the "past" needing an extra dialogue to get to the Refuge and the actual endgame. I was looking at my screen for a bit searching the Encapment trying to figure out what the heck am I supposed to do now ? Haha.

Maybe we need some kind of a forced portal there, or some other way cause it was confusing.

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Skills / Passive trees:

I don't have much to say here, everything looks interesting to me as a new player, a ton of choices both in the skills and the tree. Although I do feel that gear is more important than the tree itself. But that might be balancing etc which will eventually come.

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Endgame:

Going from act 3 cruel to a t1 map was a pretty steep change in difficulty. Don't ask me why, I have no clue, I pretty much speed-run my way through all cruel acts with my "act 3" gear just by bumping my skills and tree, but as soon as I hit the Atlas, I was dead meat.

I suppose it might not be that steep when we actually have 6 acts etc, hopefully.

The way mapping works, no problems there, I don't mind the whole concept with the Towers etc, I do have a couple of points though:

1. The randomization of the maps themselves needs to not be so 'random'.

An implementation of "if Crypt is here, don't put another 3 Crypts next to it" should be applied. I've opened a lot of areas by now ( currently doing t13 quest along with a ton of deaths, so changing paths ) and went kind of everywhere not in a strictly 'straight line' and I've seen Necropolis only 1 time for example.

I'm always ending up with Augury, Seepage, Crypt, Blooming Fields, Savannah which are the most prominent at least in my Atlas and it gets a bit monotonous.

I've also found like 6 Limestone Hideouts, 1 Felled, 1 Shrine and Canal is still nowhere to be seen. If we unlock a Hideout, then that map should either be a hideout that we don't have, or well a normal map like any other. There's no point of having the same hideout "blocking" our path and spending a map on it if we already have it.

2. The towers themselves need a clearer identification that they have tablets or not. I know that there's a "ring" on the map, but if you have like 4 adjacent towers you need to start understanding geometry to figure out which circle is for what Tower and the circle isn't really giving us anything. It makes the map even more confusing imho, we can already easily mouse over any map to read the affixes etc, we don't need the extra clutter. A clear simple indication on the tower itself should be more than enough. Make them with a red beam instead of a yellow, something as simple as that even.

3. The "citadels" that we're supposed to find, even though I'm not doing t15s yet, as the atlas is randomly generated from what I understand, they can be like 2 weeks away worth of gameplay. Is that on purpose? Maybe, but I think that since we're still dealing with "quests" they should be considered as part of the campaign, even though within the end game and the Citadels along with every other "non-map" feature of the endgame should have standard positions close to the starting point ( Realmgate, Reliquary etc included, and they should just be repeatable ), along with a fancy button to center our map back to the Refuge. I'm scrolling for like 5 minutes left and right trying to remember where it is at the moment.

I love the random-generation, but it needs some kind of easier movement, at the very least allow us to zoom out way more so we can scroll bigger distances with ease.

I don't mind the "xp loss" routine and "broken" map that we're going through, but I believe that the actual xp percentage way is wrong.

I'd be ok losing the xp that I earned within the failed map, but no more than that, everything deducted after that point is just discouraging especially when it happens 2-3 times and you end up losing so much of your overall progress on a level.

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Gearing / crafting / drops:

Up until level 60-70 I was pretty much wearing whatever I could find and didn't pay much attention to anything. May be a wrong tactic, but hey my character worked so.. why break something if it works, right?

After that point I decided to look into everything and pay attention to the drop etc also.

This is gonna be harsh, but it's the truth, I ended up making my own filter and hide everything apart from Currency or other non-gear goodies. The drops are like 90% trash, 5% with a couple of good affixes but for another class or build, and the rest 5% might've been for me but I was super exhausted on picking everything and throwing stuff away that I just preferred to bail.

I preferred to keep my floors clean and tidy and only gather essentials and just go trade for any gear that I wanted from that point on.

Crafting materials are also super scarce (at least for me), running with 200+% rarity at some point didn't make much of a difference either (unless if rarity doesn't include materials).

So it was still easier to just go trade ready-made things, rather than spending my precious Exalted Orbs into a craft that again 90% of the time would be a failure.

There's also so many orbs, essences and this and that going into crafting that it's a serious headache for new players. Yes everything has a tooltip, but it doesn't mean that it's clear what it does. Not much of a problem though, it is what it is in this aspect, eventually everyone will understand what every single item is doing haha. It's just a big learning curve.

I recently realized that Catalysts for example couldn't "break" my rings, I thought that they might change an existing affix as well ( similar to how Vaals work ).

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Maps / design:

The maps are fantastic, I don't mind them being huge, although kind of annoying needing to run all the way back just for the last elite.

I really enjoy the design overall, but it needs some kind of clean up. There's maps that you can't even distinguish a mob from the floor pattern which well as you walk whistling in the air all of a sudden you realize that "something is running behind you" cause you completely ignored it...

There's also some maps that even though 'visually' you can walk from various spots, there's actually invisible walls which correspond to the minimap design.

An easy example is a forest-y map ( sorry I don't remember the name ) which consists of various hills. Well those hills "visually" can be just walked from all sides, but no there's only 2 entry points to move "through" the hill, which is kind of annoying. I'd prefer to only hit my head in actual walls rather than trying to figure out a design by looking on the minimap or needing to hit tab over and over again to understand where I need to go. Please note I don't mind the "open space" and exploration, it's just the invisible walls that I'm against where there's no visual queue to go along with them.

Lastly, Urns are seriously my nemesis and I've died from them a gazillion times because I was stuck rolling in the middle of them with no way out. Please just make them break just by walking into them, they are about the size of our ankles, they should be breaking by default, they're not boulders, they're just urns haha.

On maps like Crypt where there's corridors some times with like 15 urns I literally need to click all of them to just pass through or break those first to be able to reach the mob that is a caster on the other side and my poor melee skills that don't have any kind of 'magic' thrown of them well don't do the trick of braking them lol ( i.e. ice strike + charged staff breaks them, ice strike alone without the herald proccing, good luck ).

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Mobs:

Some mobs are definitely having a god complex and it's absolutely random. From my gameplay I can easily distinguish the Shades as well as a couple of fire-zombie dudes.

To make a point, I'm running t13s with capped resistances, 64% evasion ( after having Acrobatics + Protect me from Harm etc ) and a rare map with various weaknesses and I can kind of ignore the Shades freezing spikes no problem. I might get frozen fine, but that's pretty much it.

Same gear, running a tier 9 blue map with maybe a speed debuff which is irrelevant, same mob, I get insta killed for whatever reason.

This makes absolutely no sense. So nope, it ain't my gear, or my playstyle etc. Some mobs are just going wild for whatever reason when they shouldn't be.

In both cases we're talking about normal "white" mobs by the way, nothing fancy supposedly.

I can understand being 1shot by an elite or a boss etc, but trash are supposed to just be trash.

I think this needs to be looked at, unless if I'm missing some cryptic thing that isn't properly communicated during the gameplay ( i.e. a crazy debuff or something from another mob ).

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Graphics:

I'm running an i9-13900, 32gb mem, 4060 gpu, so there's no excuses. The game was crashing on every other map.

The only way for me to salvage it was to set everything to Low, Render Resolution at 50%, with reflex even off etc.

Not sure why the crashes are happening, but I haven't had a single crash since I down-scaled the resolution to be precise. The only thing that has been left untouched is multi-threading. Every other option is literally off ( even triple buffering and texture filtering etc ).

Even at this point within a Breach, the fps lag is immense and almost unplayable. And no there's nothing wrong with my machine, all other titles are playing absolutely fine on full graphics.

There's no excuses here, you want your own engine, that's commendable, but you need to figure stuff out here, I can't imagine how PC's with lower specs are handling it atm without simply freezing ( some of them are freezing according to forums ).

There's also a multitude of options missing from the graphics overall in terms of visuals, i.e. a permanent outline for our character so we can easily see them amongst 100 mobs. Or highlighting he enemy targeted etc. These are on/off options that are kind of standard in other titles. Just having a mouse pointer change in size isn't cutting it.

There's no support whatsoever for any kind of visual impairment as far as I could tell, I can't imagine a colorblind person being able to play while I'm even having a hard time distinguishing where a mob is as mentioned earlier. And I'm not talking about just a mere filter on top of everything, please do some research and if you make it happen, make it properly. Again it's your own engine, you should be able to do anything and everything you like with it :) .

Lastly, I'm playing on an ultra-wide, I'm not going to ask for an ultra-wide support as I know that this is usually a no-no ( although I never understood why as it's not affecting any other player in my opinion ). In any case my point here is that you're actually rendering even outside of boundaries and you're just black-framing the screen, which means that in my case or in any other ultra-wides case I suppose we're eating a bit of gpu/cpu power for no reason even if it's blacked out. See my screenshot that the Map waypoints are within the "black" area of supposedly the right side cut-off.



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Thanks for reading and the patience, whoever you might be, cause there's a lot of blabber for sure :) .

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Edit 1: some minor typos (pretty sure I missed more, sorry hah).

Edit 2: added image for the out of bounds graphics.