Feedback on EA playing sorc to endgame (pros and cons)!

Hi all,

I think it's time to give some feedback on poe2, as by now, I have explored almost anything in the game (I am level 91), crafted my own items, fought the arbiter, etc.

First of all, let me say the game plays really really well. When I first saw the videos on youtube, I was a bit skeptical about the new combat system, especially WSAD-movement. But man oh man, you did really revolutionize ARPG combat. It's awesome. Of course I had to pick sorc into chronomancer; since bg2 I have missed a game where I can use time stop. The combat is very smooth, and the graphics are amazing. The loot system is well designed; there is not too much loot and it is worth the time to ID plenty of it.

With respect to difficulty, the game is much harder than poe1, and also in many aspects much slower. In some regards, this feels good, and in others not so much imho (more on that below).

Let's get into the details. I made a list of the most important points that need to be addressed in my humble opinion:
- Movement speed feels ultra slow. Right now, I don't feel like ever making a new char again, as it was often very painful to walk through these large maps (especially a3), searching for quest locations or quest items, or just exits, etc. I am not alone with that opinion; many people in global chat have asked for a pet or anything to make their character move faster. So please, either increase the general speed, or make movement speed modifiers on boots much easier to get, or add a pet that can be used if not attacking (or a mix of any of these).
And yes, I am using blink and I am aware of lowering the cooldown of it via Temporalis etc., but 99% of the players will never see this item anyways. I think we need good movement skills for all characters, and not require them to have 60 spirit. It feels way too much.
- Recommendations for support gems are not good. Currently we can view recommended gems, or all gems, but what we actually need is all suitable support gems that are socketable into a gem. So something in between the above two options. Also the recommended gems are not always the best option.
- Mana costs of skills are generally way too high. Yes, I was using Mana remnants and the best mana flasks, but you are always out of mana, unless you spec into mind over matter, which I eventually did. I realize mana cost is more important than in poe1, and has to be meaningful to some extent, but I think currently it is just too crazy. Arc for instance costs more than 300 mana. This makes the lower mana cost support a necessity, not a consideration. Also, I used a curse during the campaign, but after cursing the enemies I usually did not have enough mana to cast my main skill anymore. That hopefully shows you how extreme the problem is early on.
- You often get stuck by something on the map, which is hard to see, and then monsters overwhelm you. This is of course more critical for a caster than for a fighter that enjoys close combat. But it would be nice if characters in general got less stuck on trees or roots or anything on the map that is not a clear path. In this regard, if you try to teleport into a restricted area it doesn't work, but teleport loses a cooldown. I suppose this should not be the case.
- Armour feels useless. At first, I was using Armour/ES, but armour didn't do anything. It was better to stack pure ES. For sorc, I think that's actually okay, as it suits the character better than armour, but from what I have read everyone just specs into ES at the moment. So what we need is a buff of life/introduce nodes on the tree.
- Monster freeze is too strong. If you are ES-based, you get freeze immunity basically for free on the passive tree, but what if not? Currently there is too many monsters in the game that freeze you, and if you don't dodge, its immediately game over.
- Fire and cold skills are only average. During the campaign, I was eager to test everything out, and I actually wanted to make a dual fire/lightning mage, But soon I noticed with the current tree this is not really possible; there is barely any pure spell damage nodes and you just have to decide for one element, or you will lack too much damage. Also, there are much less fire/cold nodes on the tree than lightning nodes around the sorc starting point.
- Directly related to above, Spark is too strong. Yes, everyone is using spark now, as it simply clears the whole screen better than any other skill in the game. It feels weird that such an early skill gem does so well and outperforms everything else. I am missing something like freezing pulse in poe1, or some other skills that worked well.
- Monk generally feels too strong, with his AOE ability to freeze the whole screen. I think the chance to freeze has to be lowered for this, otherwise nothing compares to monk at the moment.

The following points are more general:
- Skill gem drops feel out of place already at the end of the campaign. You get so many skill gems, but you barely need any of them. Maybe it would be better if only the first gem dropped, and the rest of them could be bought at the vendor? Not sure.
- Similarly, runes become kind of redundant very quickly. You stack about 20 of each, and that's what you will use for maybe the next 300 hours of gameplay, if at all. Maybe you could add some variety (i.e., ranges between values) to runes as well, or introduce higher tiers?
- Inflation and trading. If you are playing more casually, let's say 2-3h max per day, you will be inevitably victim to the market. That is, first, you get power spikes way too easily, which imho ruins the experience of playing the game. For example, you can buy items that are totally OP requiring only level 59, but which were obviously found by someone from endgame, as the itemlevel indicates. Here I would like some restriction, so that stronger items found in endgame are not accessible to lower level characters that easily (maybe remove the - requirements mod completely). Moreover, chase-uniques (e.g. dream fragments) become incredibly expensive very quickly, so the price of few items jumps to infinity very soon after league start. This in my opinion can only be solved in one way: make more builds better, so there is more diversity, and not everyone is just doing the same thing which leads to ultra-inflation.
- Many unique items are too bad to use them even for leveling in the campaign. For instance I found a rare + 4 skills staff, and afterwards a unique staff with lightning damage. I never used the latter. I think many unique items could need better stats to make them at least comparable with somewhat decent rares.
- Build diversity and the skill tree (for sorc) currently feel a lot less interesting to me than in poe1. I can do less things, and I don't have any incentive to move far away from the sorc starting point, as many other nodes just cannot be used (e.g. crit nodes related to daggers, etc.). I hope as more and more content is added, we will see more build diversity and more options to choose from. Also ideally more skill gems. Sorc right now uses only a fraction of the skills that have been available in poe1.
- Towers feel like a cumbersome necessity to run. It's not fun, most people just use lower tier waystones as you just try to rush trough and that's it. There should be additional rewards or even bosses at the end of the tower. In addition, vision can be blocked sometimes (if you run into a bad design), which makes it artificially difficult. Imho towers could be redesigned to make them more worthwile.
- When you are new to maps and your atlas is not progressed much, you have a lot of filler maps that don't have any endgame content (breach, ritual, delirium) included. These maps also feel like a waste of time, similar to towers.

And lastly, here are some suggestions for the future:
- The atlas map could be more interesting. Currently it is just built around the one pinnacle boss, with its three constituents. What I would like to see is a bit more content similar to Delve in poe1, that is, themed parts of the maps. For instance, an ancient vaal city, where all maps have a special design. Or an underground city with related maps. Obviously that would be a lot of work, but you could also use existing maps and connect them with a certain questline. This would make engame less repetitive as it currently is.
- Content that connects players would be cool. For example if only 5% of players are running the map decay (cause it's aweful), rarity on this map could be increased by 10%. Something like this would be cool for certain endgame content; obviously it would not be suitable for all content.
- We badly need to be able to zoom out of the atlas map, to have a better overview where we are.

As written in my original feedback on poe1, some points are also relevant for poe2:

- The combat system in poe2 feels great. I think it would be awesome for PvP. Imagine clan wars of 10 vs 10 or even 20 vs 20. People cast ice walls to protect against arrows/projectiles at the beginning, until the first warriors jump in and chaos starts...
- We need an endgame place where people can unite/meet/chat/trade etc. Global chat seems out of date in my opinion. Auctions could take place at this location, or arena fights where people can take bets, etc.
- Special events would be cool, something like Diablo clone in Diablo 2.
- Trade in poe2 as in poe1 feels outdated. Why do I have to go to someone's hideout to trade with them? It's a huge waste of time imho.

I will add some more points when they come to my mind. Thanks for reading as usual :)