My Experience playing so far

I think the atmosphere and pacing of the campaign is great. Areas are beautiful, sound design is awesome. It was actually challenging in a good way for the most part on first playthrough for me.

However, some areas are too large, artificially increasing campaign length. Back-tracking is not fun if you missed something, but these are minor issues for me.

I have played the campaign twice, once as a Mercenary and once as a Witch. Classes felt vastly different, which I liked.

Sadly, this is where the fun stopped for me: Endgame. Some of the problems I am experiencing could be solved by relying on trade, but I simply do not enjoy trading for gear at all. I am also playing on GeForce NOW (which works great btw), so external tools are not really a solution and price checking is a huge pain.

"Crafting"

- while PoE 1 crafting was getting out of hand with all the currencies, the new system is just gambling with terrible odds
- permanent runes make it actually quite difficult to switch to new pieces of gear, because fixing resistances got a lot harder to do or you brick some attribute requirements on skills or gear while progressing (I do not get the decision to not allow us to replace runes in sockets at all)
- basic crafting currency is just too rare (I am not willing to play boring content for hours to get a a low amount of spins for the exalt slot machine)
- and yes, I could go farm a certain beetle for hours, but I already have a job...

Mapping

- I like the delve inspired endless expanding map, but I absolutely dislike the loss of agency for me when deciding what content I want to engage with
- I am forced to run boring maps with terrible loot in layouts I do not enjoy (especially while using minions, which get stuck everywhere)
- worst offender for this are towers for me, absolutely abysmal
- because currency is so rare, upgrading waystones is not possible for me on a regular basis (stuck at mostly running blue ones with 2 modifiers)
- waystone drop rates are terrible for me, meaning I have to run that same content on lower levels, which is even more boring and even less rewarding for my time invested
- Atlas tree progression feels way off. Collect hundreds of splinters to encounter a boss to finally unlock 2 points???
- gameplay just completely devolves to PoE1 style damage racing. All battle tactics are just irrelevant, you either nuke the whole screen immediately, or some multi projectile mobs murder you (at least this is what it felt like to play as a Mercenary for me)
- a build that does not achieve this, is just a bad build and should not be played
- boss fights become irrelevant, because they just immediately die or are frozen forever, etc

Ascending

Might just be unlucky for me, but I did not like Sanctum in PoE, and now I am forced to play it for ascending. I think Sanctum and Ultimatum are great for optional endgame content, but forcing every build to go through these RNG-heavy modes is just not it.

Why is the same mistake repeated in PoE2 of having to run some gauntlet to ascend? Running lab in PoE was not fun and neither is this version for me. Actually, it is even worse, because lab was very easy.

Why is ascending not a natural part of campaign progress? I complete an act, I get a point, after act 1, choose your ascendancy? Final 2 points could be an epic multi-phase boss fight at the end of the campaign to get to the Atlas.

Punishing mechanics

First off, I think most punishing mechanics are archaic (the argument that feature xy was present in D2 is just irrelevant for me; and yes I played D1-3)

- 1 portal: it warps the way I play the game, and not in a good way. I never relied on the "6-portal defence" and I hate dying, but I also play on GFN, so sometimes there is a little lag across a multi hour session and if it happens at the wrong time now, I am just screwed. So now I lose XP, the map and I can't even go back in to beat whatever had the audacity to slay me (or cheese me with some on-death effect I could not see or react to, because of the non-existent visual clarity in PoE?!? :D)
- so for bossing you are supposed to grind forever to find the 3 citadels; die to the boss on your first try; find them again? no thank you
- for me it would be great if you could use your 6 portals, but everything still alive in the instance just resets to full health again

- XP loss: what is gained by gating people from reaching level 100? It is already a significant grind to get there, all you accomplish is me not trying to push limits, because I need to play overly safe or lose hours/days of time invested; since XP gain in PoE2 is much slower, this is just way worse than before

- On-death effects: they were cheesy in earlier games and still are, additionally there are many cosmetic on-death effects, which deal no damage at all. I don't think they add anything positive to the gameplay.

- Skill lock-in: I also see it as a punishing mechanic to not be able to switch skills. You removed colored sockets just to replace them with an even rarer orb, which locks me into a skill even more! Maybe upgrade the slot and not the gem?

- Ascendency lock-in: I can't try another ascendancy on the same class without re-running the campaign?

Quality of life

- Why do I still have to pickup hundreds of splinters? Maybe Breach, Expedition, and Delirium could at least consistently drop all their rewards at the end of the encounter? Then the currency could at least be stacked and not scattered across the map.
- auto-pickup for these would of course also be a solution, but for some reason this will probably never be added (even though some things were auto-pickup in PoE, but not anymore)

- Many affinities are missing for stash tabs. It seems easy to implement, just allow me to select every base type there is and assign them to tabs

Balance

I tried to avoid mentioning things I would classify as balance problems, because it is early access and bound to change. So things like Life/Armor vs ES, Damage of certain skills, freeze, and MF are obviously not balanced, but that is to be expected.

Disclaimer

All of this is just my opinion, I am not a game designer nor do I claim to know which design choices lead to fun experiences for a majority of players.

All I can say is that I am not having fun with the current, very early version of the Endgame and I just stopped playing it. As mentioned earlier, I do not mind grinding, but when I feel my time spent is just being disrespected by putting artificial difficulty walls everywhere, then this game is just not for me, which is fine. Sad, but fine. I wanted to like it, but I just don't.

I am relatively new to PoE in general and only started playing during the last 2 leagues. I think PoE 1 is a great game, but it does have lots of issues for me. I don't like basically running through an easy and quite frankly boring campaign for every new character for hours, but the endgame makes up for it. Some mechanics are not fun, but you can just choose to not interact with them, which is great. I got both my characters in those leagues to lvl 100 and I don't mind a bit of grinding along the way, as long as the basic gameplay is fun.

TLDR

Great campaign, stopped playing endgame on both characters. Not enough agency; way too many punishing mechanics; too much time wasted on meaningless and unrewarding grinding

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Sorry for very long post, but I wanted to provide some feedback, because the game has huge potential in my opinion.