Another PoE1 Vet Disappointed With PoE2

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Seraphgrim#2718 wrote:

- **Quest rewards are still terrible**

This is a trifle, but quest rewards were something acknowledged in PoE1 to be not very good, and GGG did very little to make them better in PoE2. One of my favorite ideas here is to re-use the Tiny's Trial mechanic from Betrayal without timers (PoE1's Tiny's Trial shouldn't have them either). Let players craft a weapon of their choice in Act 1, introducing them to crafting currency (50 Exalts and 50 Chaos) and letting them experiment while hopefully being a little better set up for Geonor. Let them do the same thing in Act 2 to make an Amulet, but maybe incorporate better currencies like Essences and Catalysts. Do this throughout the campaign to introduce crafting mechanics and create some bad drop luck protection.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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Seraphgrim#2718 wrote:

I quit mapping pretty quickly in large part because of this, and its a pretty inexplicable decision in my opinion. I choose to not play Hardcore for a reason. I pay my XP penalty - why should I lose a map/waystone too? Especially given the lack of visual clarity and a "death log", how am I supposed to learn and get better?

Ironically if you have 6 portals you will NEVER bother to learn the game because you don't have to. You can just brute force the content with 5 deaths on every boss. Unfortunately this was the playstyle of many PoE 1 players who never actually bothered to learn boss or monster mechanics for this reason.

And the only reason on death effects kill you (except invisible Volatile crystals that are getting fixed) is because your build skips 99,999999999% of all other monster mechanics by killing them before they have any time to do anything else at all. You feel like every monster has an on-death effect because those are the ONLY effects you have to worry about.

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The procedurally generated world map that requires a loading screen? Someone thought that was cool, at the cost of UX. Levers? So immersive and realistic! The well? Immersion! New Atlas? Cool and immersive and also a total mess of ideas that detract from core gameplay. These are all decisions that you’d expect a younger, newer design team to make in the pursuit of “the coolest, most immersive ARPG ever”, and then to have to roll back as they realize that the UX costs are too high. You would expect a team with the benefit of 10 years of experience to make better decisions. While GGG is bigger than they were 10 years ago, their leadership should certainly be leading them to avoid these obstacles with their hard-earned knowledge.

Between this and the very closely related problem of “implementing problems that we already solved once before” (magic find, melee feeling terrible, map/zone design, etc.), these seem like huge glimpses into the leadership and foundational philosophies of PoE2. I pointed out several times in the prior topic that PoE2’s design wasn’t based on implementing solid guardrails against intractable PoE1 problems (loot, visual clarity, etc.) but instead on an attitude of “trust us, we won’t make the same mistakes because we have a clean slate and we know better”. That trust required that they avoid those mistakes and nail many of these things on the first try, leveraging those 10 years of experience, which they failed to do. As a result, they threw away resources on implementing bad design, they’ll have to spend more resources in implementing better design, and the iterative design process is starting out from a disadvantage that it never should’ve started at.

As a player, I also have 10 years of experience from Path of Exile (granted, I spent good chunks of that away from PoE), and one of the things I have from that is a recognition of GGG’s stubbornness on “the vision” and refusing to give in to player feedback regarding UX and QoL improvements. At least from the player perspective, it seems like it took multiple consecutive bad leagues to finally force GGG’s hand on a lot of those issues. Failing to live up to their “trust us” assurances and seeing them double down on “the vision” at the expense of historical experience and player feedback makes me really doubtful about how good this game can possibly turn out for 1.0 release, given that they’re likely to keep sailing in the same direction in pursuit of the “the vision” before they even start to turn the boat around. With the nature of Early Access and the fact that we’re all bought in already, it’s hard to say what could constitute PoE2’s “reality check” like PoE1 got from Archnemesis/Sentinel/Kalandra that they needed to make some serious changes. I think there’s a real good chance that it turns out to be 1.0, which would be a disaster for GGG.

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GODOFWARSANCHEZ#4574 wrote:

Another person who did not play the game comments on crafting, there is crafting, it allows to targetly roll the affixes. I have crafted several end game items already worth 200 divines each. The crafting was better experience than poe 1.

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AverBeg7#1689 wrote:

I think the well is such a minor problem. If the devs want to make us a click a well to get flasks back, fine.

I think this post is permeated with minor issues (such as having to load the atlas UI once, which is not a problem with modern SSDs), but has some fantastic ideas buried within it.

The Tiny's Trial quest reward once per act idea is fantastic, and the overlay of PoE1's history and problems that haven't been implemented in the first iteration of PoE2 is valid.

The rest of the post feels more like carping about having to play the game than actual suggestions to make it better.

For crafting, I much prefer PoE2. PoE1's deterministic crafting made rares worthless, and anything that is not almost perfectly tiered with exact mods worthless. It is boring just farming currency, grabbing a base, then spamming it. It is bad never caring about a single rare after res rings on league start, and making loot filters to only show currency. You can't fix those problems if you allow people to deterministically craft end-game gear.

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Tomorrowtech#4871 wrote:

You capped NEVER? So how did you learn the uber elder boss fight? With one portal? We NEEDED 6 for a chance to learn and beat it WITHOUT farming a whole notha set of stones. Your comment is ludicrous.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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Tomorrowtech#4871 wrote:

You capped NEVER? So how did you learn the uber elder boss fight? With one portal? We NEEDED 6 for a chance to learn and beat it WITHOUT farming a whole notha set of stones. Your comment is ludicrous.

Are you seriously trying to say that we should make PoE easier because Uber bosses are hard? What kind of sense does that make? Uber bosses are supposed to be hard, its in their name.