General feedback about the current state of POE 2 (Patch 0.1.0e)

This is a collection of feedback from myself and friends within my gaming circle. We've played a good amount of POE 2 collectively, several even getting up to pinnacle bosses.

Positive feedback

Skill variety. While there's some builds *cough* spark archmage *cough* that only use one skill, most builds I've played have several skills which interact with each other to make a combo or a "rotation" of sorts. This feels amazing and makes the leveling experience really cool, something POE1, D2, and D3 failed at.



Crafting. From what I've read on the forums, a lot of people yearn for the POE1 crafting where it's very possible to get exactly the gear you're looking for fairly quickly. While I can understand the appeal, myself and others in our group really enjoy the simple and somewhat chaotic nature of finding upgrades. In SSF, it encourages you to use your currency often as opposed to POE1 where you'd hoard until you found something exceptional to start working on. This has its drawbacks, but I've really enjoyed it. The only problem comes when you're past the point of 3-4 mod items being upgrades, which has been talked ad nauseam from players deep in the endgame, and is a fair complaint.



The Campaign. While Act 2 is a bit rough on the difficulty, the atmosphere, music, aesthetics, character dialogue, and progression all feel very natural. Nothing really stands out as infuriating (anymore, at least). Act 1 is easily the best and I love running a new character through every time. Count Geonor's intermission still gives me chills. The dialogue from each character is also great. The comments from each class during the campaign makes for a fun bit of entertainment. Comparing the Warrior dialogue to the Witch is funny and interesting.



Mechanic exclusive loot. Having specific loot only come from certain mechanics is pretty neat and encourages you to diversify your content. Ultimatum for vaal/chaos orbs or soul cores, Breach for catalysts, Sanctum for jewels, and Delirium for oils to Anoint with are interesting. You're running it for a specific purpose and don't really feel like you're wasting your time (with the exception of Delirium, explained later).

Critiques/Concerns
Blink. I've seen almost nobody talk about this on the feedback forums, but it is game warping in how powerful it is while also being limited to just casters or builds that use high levels of int. Movement speed is the strongest stat in any ARPG and it's why so many threads complain about movement speed not being an implicit value (talked about later). This game is supposed to be extremely slow, and is why movement speed is so powerful. However, movement skills are fairly limited, generally not being faster than walking.

Blink, on the other hand, is basically just flame dash from POE 1. This BREAKS the game. Any build that could run Blink will. Rolling is inherently weak and relatively slow because it has a travel time. The only time I have ever rolled was to slip by enemies or use it in Sanctum. Blink is instant relocation. It goes farther than a roll, has no travel time, and will be up the next time you'd need to dodge an attack. Truthfully, this skill should NOT be in the game. There's no way to balance it. Look back at D2. If you could use Teleport, you would at any cost.

After having done Zarokh, I can understand the complaints my friends had about this boss. The boss is fun with the exception of the timer mechanic. In my run, I had 55% movespeed (because of Hare's Foot) AND Blink, moved perfectly to hit all of the hourglasses, and nearly timed out. If I didn't have Blink, I would have timed out. This boss shouldn't require a colossal level of movement speed and a travel skill to beat. I don't see how a warrior, the only class on the tree who can't get blink, would be able to beat this boss without getting lucky on the hourglasses. Again, I think it is in the best interest of the game going forward to remove Blink and also balance the game around not having it.



Movement speed. There's been plenty of complaints about this, but honestly I think there's a couple of solutions here. The problem is boots have always been that you NEED movement speed on your boots and you'd always be down one prefix modifier, making obtaining a good pair of boots fairly difficult. In POE1, it was possible to simply farm a good pair of boots because the sheer amount of loot drops were astronomically higher than in POE2. Also, it's actually harder to craft a pair. In POE1, you had a wider variety of currency to force items to reroll their stats one way or another. Even with exalts being common-place, you can't slam them into boots often enough to work with every decent pair you find.

People have posited that movement speed could be put in as an implicit on boots, but I think this would still cause a bit of friction since there's an extra mod on the prefix now. It would be odd for one piece of gear on your character to have 2 prefixes while everything else can have 3. I think you could still achieve that limited mod space by simply increasing the stat weights of movement speed on boots. You guys could even make it where certain tiers of modifiers could stop rolling after a certain ilvl. There have been SO many times I have found a pair of boots that are decent, have movespeed on them, I regal/exalt slam to get absolutely nothing.



Armour. This is most definitely on your guys' radar, but it's worth mentioning. While I don't like how it has effectively no usefulness against slams, I think it's in a good place. People will point to Cloak of Flames, how strong evasion and ES are, and how they can tank or dodge slams while armour-based characters can't, but I think it's a reseult of those two defensive layers being vastly overtuned. In general mapping content, armour eclipses the other two forms of defense. I went from a 10k armour build to a cloak of flames setup and could notice the difference immediately. I'd be careful buffing this. With the body armour that allows armour to work on elemental damage (Blackbraid), I can easily see armour getting buffed and suddenly players have the ability to face tank everything in the game.



Warrior. There's a lot of discussion about warrior, but the main thing I noticed is that I think he is designed around the fact he's supposed to use two different weapon types and weapon swap depending on the situation. With there only being maces available currently, you don't have enough variety to make full use of this class. Maces have SO many skills for mapping, but not so much single target. However, he's also insanely slow. The difference between having the skill speed cluster at the start of warrior's tree and not having it is night and day since that's the ONLY source of skill speed on that side of the tree. The only Mace skills I think are undertuned are Molten Blast, Volcanic Fissure, and Supercharged Slam. Blast and Fissure just don't feel impactful, and Supercharged Slam just doesn't do damage despite me channeling it for 3 seconds.

Half of Titan's ascendancy feels underwhelming with just about every build taking Hulking Form (why wouldn't you?) and Mysterious Lineage (again, why wouldn't you?). I don't think it's an issue with Hulking Form or Mysterious Lineage per say, but an issue with your other options. Earthbreaker feels like it should be 100%, Ancestral Empowerment should be every slam, and Surprising Strength should have some sort of stun duration modifier to it. Stone Skin COULD be fine, but armour is in an exceptionally bad place currently.

As a side note, melee is considered exceptionally bad, but I just don't see it. This isn't just a problem in T15s, but people complaining at all stages of the game. Is it as easy as a caster/minion/bow build? Not really. It doesn't map as fast as them either, but I didn't expect to. Even when playing SSF, there have only been a couple of times where I struggled to keep progressing, and it was my first character.



Stuns/Stunning. Oddly enough, it's too easy for Warriors to stun non-boss enemies right now. So easy, in fact, it lowers your clearspeed (unless you're doing armour explosion memes) because you can no longer Boneshatter enemies. It's a very weird situation to be put in where you've got so much damage and stun buildup that you lose tons of clearspeed as a result. I don't really have any ideas on solutions for this, and maybe it's worth looking at with other weapons released?



Melee mobility. I find it very strange that melee is far less mobile than ranged characters while also being significantly slower. The mace skills are already slow (which I imagine is by design, and will feel better once other weapons are added), which puts you in a catch 22 situation when fighting monsters. Since your attacks are so slow, you need to basically be immune to stuns to be able to kill enemies you're fighting. If you initiate combat, you're stunning/killing the enemies so there's no risk of getting stunned yourself. If enemies initiate on you, though, either you'll have to face tank and pray or try to run away (which is exceptionally difficult because of general speed issues). It feels like melee skills should be slowed by 20-30% when being used, not 60% like everyone else.



Blood Mage. To quote a friend who had made one: You can very easily tell not a single person at GGG played Blood Mage from when they unlocked the ascendancy and always created decked out characters for endgame content testing. Part of ascendancies is the fact that you can take it whatever direction you want, and Blood Mage is ALWAYS -2 ascendancy points because you're forced into taking Sanguimancy. However, most of the time this point is a DOWNSIDE and actually makes your character WORSE. Sure, it might make sense at higher levels, but it literally bricked people's characters early on. When you're punished for allocating an ascendancy node that you're FORCED into, there is a massive problem. Why not bake it into other nodes you take, or make Blood mage special in that the first point is Sanguimancy, instead of that small node, and then you can take a real node?

There's lots of people who are now picking up on Blood Mage's endgame potential, but that's not the problem here. It's simply the fact that your first ascendancy node makes your character worse and is only balanced out later on.



Uniques. It might be too early to tell with this, but uniques found in the early game tend to be insanely powerful, and nearly useless at higher levels (even act 1 cruel or even act 3 normal). Some uniques are locked to a certain level and are exceptionally powerful, but these are typically pinnacle boss items like Temporalis, Svalinn, or HOWA and not surprising either. I like some of the weird things these uniques do, I just wish they had a stronger presence later on. Just about every weapon unique is, literally, useless outside of the level bracket you can equip them at. Hoghunt, Hrimnor's Hymn, Wylund's Stake, Brain Rattler, Blood Thorn, the list goes on.



Loot. Pretty obvious when you've played a little bit of endgame, but there's way too much of it, and barely any of it is worth picking up and slamming transmutes/augs/regals into. Because loot is tiered in normal/advanced/expert bases, the only thing players care about are expert bases, and there is a vast abundance of the other two. I was adamant on not running a loot filter because I wanted to see how bad it was in later maps. Once you're in T10 maps, it's not hard to do a breach and not be able to see the ground because there's that much loot. Maybe just cull the meaningless bases at certain level brackets by turning them into their gold value so we're not being bombarded with loot?



Runes/Soul Cores & Sockets. While I think Runes and Soul Cores are fine, I think you should be able to replace them once they're socketed. D2 had the same problem, and I think being punished for making a short term decision to improve your character power is weird. My friend had a pair of boots unsocketed for the longest time because it was the optimal choice. Sure, he could put in an Iron Rune now for slightly better defenses, but what if he needs more ele res, or chaos res, or needs a certain resist rune later? Very strange choice.



Trading. Good lord, where to begin? It was a bit of an epidemic on POE1, but price fixers and scammers in POE2 are egregious. Trying to buy ONE item, have it be a rare or unique, is painful. You're likely to message 20 people before you find ONE person that will invite you. Part of the reason are the price fixers. When you're bombarded with buy DMs, you second guess the price you post and pull out your item to adjust it. And that's just because of those price fixers. None of this is to mention the fact that Divines on the site are being estimated at 6 exalts, where in reality they're 100+, which results in people getting scalped. Something has to be done about this.

Obviously an Auction House would directly solve the issue, but I understand it's a lot of work. Changing something on the back-end to delist an item after someone has messaged you X number of times about it, maybe even preventing your items from showing on the market for a while as a result, would help alleviate the price fixing epedemic. You will sometimes get false positives, but it will heavily discourage bad actors. If the trading system is left EXACTLY as it is, there's only going to be further friction.



Dying in maps. It feels a bit too punishing when you die in a map. There's three things that happen when you die in a map: 1, you lose 10% of your current level experience; 2, you lose the map; 3, you lose any league mechanic on the map. I feel like only two of these things should happen, not all three.



Delirium. This mechanic feels unfinished, out of place in the design space of the game, and unrewarding. When killing rares, it's slows the rate at which the fog rolls to the point the fog stops. Great! Except, the fog also will stop expanding. Indefinitely. Why? Likely a bug, but worth pointing out. Additionally, Delirium mobs are invulnerable for a couple of seconds once they spawn but can swarm you and push you around. This just feels broken. I'm sure it's supposed to mimic the way Delirium mobs rise up from those pods in POE1 before attacking you, but they can perform actions during that invulnerability state.

As for the second part, this game was intended to be, and is, slow and methodical. The mechanic feels like a direct port from POE1 where you're supposed to be rushing through the map to kill as many mobs as possible, like you're supposed to be ignoring loot and blast packs until the fog catches up to you. While that kind of mechanic makes sense in POE1, it's just out of place here. Why can't Delirium just be like Delirious maps where the fog is always up, with the difference being until you cancel it early? You can still have delirious maps which are harder than regular mirrors found in maps, but also not punish players for not having auto bombers.

And for the final part, the rewards don't scale well. According to a friend who has been playing SSF and has been spamming delirium, he'd done a LOT of t15 delirium mirrors to get just one singular oil (worth a handful of ex on trade) so he could annoint the Icebreaker notable. It's so random that you never feel like you're making meaningful progress.


(These following points are verbatim from a friend while talking with him, but I share in his thoughts)

Mechanic falloff. I'm not sure whether or not this is intended, but some mechanics scale very poorly into high tier progression. For ritual this could definitely be intended. Currency you get from ritual is a lot less meaningful if you find 5+ exalts per map. Expedition though seems problematic. The base types offered by the vendors do not scale all the way up, so even when I'm on t15 maps the majority of crafts I am offered are on advanced or even regular tier bases, making it pointless to spend reroll currency on 2/3 of the vendors. Tujen is alright but considering that Ingeniuity is the BiS belt for almost every build in the game, 1/3 of his items are useless. Breach is really the only meaningful and rewarding mechanic late game which just removes interesting choices in the mapping system.



Map Corrupting and overworld progression. Corrupting maps to try and get t16s just feels terrible. Even when you get one, it doesn't feel vastly more rewarding than a t15 does. But it comes at the cost of potentially bricking or downtiering a significant portion of your maps. Overworld map progress feels weird. You almost immediately get the quest to find the 3 citadels, but are never told how to actually go about doing that. I more or less randomly went around the map just focusing on mechanics I wanted to do at the time, and in probably hundreds of maps never found a citadel. This is apparently because you want to go in a straight line away from the main one, but even if I had known to do that there are issues. Sometimes the nodes just decide not to connect to each other in generation, which can cause you to backtrack by a huge amount to reconnect. Lastly, towers just aren't fun. I like the idea of tablets, but the actual tower maps become a huge waste of time. Theres no reason to put high tier maps in them because you get so little loot, so I just slot in a t11 or t10 (the lowest tier I pick up) and speedrun the map in a minute, usually picking up basically nothing loot-wise.

I was enjoying your indepth write up, until we got to this:

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Deth_Meth#3954 wrote:

Dying in maps. It feels a bit too punishing when you die in a map. There's three things that happen when you die in a map: 1, you lose 15% of your current level experience; 2, you lose the map; 3, you lose any league mechanic on the map. I feel like only two of these things should happen, not all three.

STOP REPEATING THIS OBVIOUS LIE. You play POE1, you know it is not 15% and it has NEVER been 15%. Just like POE1, it is 10% and has been since day 1. It was never 15%, and the fact that people keep parroting it makes me wonder if you actually did make it into the endgame. It's not hard to see you lose 10% and not 15.

"

Valsacar#0268 wrote:

I was enjoying your indepth write up, until we got to this:

"

Deth_Meth#3954 wrote:

Dying in maps. It feels a bit too punishing when you die in a map. There's three things that happen when you die in a map: 1, you lose 15% of your current level experience; 2, you lose the map; 3, you lose any league mechanic on the map. I feel like only two of these things should happen, not all three.

STOP REPEATING THIS OBVIOUS LIE. You play POE1, you know it is not 15% and it has NEVER been 15%. Just like POE1, it is 10% and has been since day 1. It was never 15%, and the fact that people keep parroting it makes me wonder if you actually did make it into the endgame. It's not hard to see you lose 10% and not 15.

Calm down, 10 or 15 its still an antiquated system that needs removed.

I agree with nearly all of this.

I am glad you brought up the positive counter points and a few non-popular opinions.

I also think that deterministic crafting isn't a good thing in ARPGs. And loot is too much.

I also like how you didn't ask for the removal of death penalty entirely. I agree it's a bit too punishing right now.



The thing I disagree with is auction house. Trading MUST be difficult. Otherwise, it just becomes D3's auction house simulator. If there is an auction house, it must be exorbitantly expensive.

I think I actually like that. Instant trading through a black market trading firm. They have a 100% markup.

A short note on why trading must be hard.

1. The easier the trading, the more profitable just playing the market is. You can see this both in game and in the real life stock market.

2. A drop is 100x more likely to be an item SOMEBODY wants, instead of something you want. Which means if there is no opportunity cost, free trading gives you 100x the access to items.

"

Karishin#7986 wrote:

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Valsacar#0268 wrote:

I was enjoying your indepth write up, until we got to this:

"

Deth_Meth#3954 wrote:

Dying in maps. It feels a bit too punishing when you die in a map. There's three things that happen when you die in a map: 1, you lose 15% of your current level experience; 2, you lose the map; 3, you lose any league mechanic on the map. I feel like only two of these things should happen, not all three.

STOP REPEATING THIS OBVIOUS LIE. You play POE1, you know it is not 15% and it has NEVER been 15%. Just like POE1, it is 10% and has been since day 1. It was never 15%, and the fact that people keep parroting it makes me wonder if you actually did make it into the endgame. It's not hard to see you lose 10% and not 15.

Calm down, 10 or 15 its still an antiquated system that needs removed.

Yeah, no. Repeating something that is easily verifiable as false says a lot about a person.

It's also not an antiquated system, it serves a purpose and does it well.

"

Valsacar#0268 wrote:

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Karishin#7986 wrote:

Calm down, 10 or 15 its still an antiquated system that needs removed.

Yeah, no. Repeating something that is easily verifiable as false says a lot about a person.

It's also not an antiquated system, it serves a purpose and does it well.

I just think it's a bit too punishing. It's the same gripe I have with GGG's approach to nerfing something: the triple nerf. They nerf the thing and at least two other key components to whatever that said thing was even if they're entirely fine with the problem child being atomized. It's how warcries in POE1 went from being on par with casters to the underdog again in one patch. It's an over adjustment to a problem solved by having one punish, not three.

Like I said in the post, if it were just losing the EXP and the Map, or losing the Map and the league mechanics on the map, it wouldn't be as bad IMO. It feels like an unnecessary kick in the nuts for getting unlucky (which happens in POE regardless of how much you try to mitigate it) sometimes.



As for the other point about repeating the 15% sentiment, I haven't died a ton in maps, and friends of mine said it was 15%, so I assumed it was 10%. I also trust my friends more than Reddit. I'll change it, thanks for bringing it up.

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Quantifier#6676 wrote:

I agree with nearly all of this.

I am glad you brought up the positive counter points and a few non-popular opinions.

I also think that deterministic crafting isn't a good thing in ARPGs. And loot is too much.

I also like how you didn't ask for the removal of death penalty entirely. I agree it's a bit too punishing right now.



The thing I disagree with is auction house. Trading MUST be difficult. Otherwise, it just becomes D3's auction house simulator. If there is an auction house, it must be exorbitantly expensive.

I think I actually like that. Instant trading through a black market trading firm. They have a 100% markup.

A short note on why trading must be hard.

1. The easier the trading, the more profitable just playing the market is. You can see this both in game and in the real life stock market.

2. A drop is 100x more likely to be an item SOMEBODY wants, instead of something you want. Which means if there is no opportunity cost, free trading gives you 100x the access to items.

I'm wondering if we're thinking about the same kind of auction house? The main thing would be that you could post onto it, similarly to how you have a public premium tab, with a suggested price. Basically an official trade broker. If someone posts, say, a white Stellar Amulet, on it for 1 exalt (which they're 15+ as of writing this), you could actually buy it because the person posted it for that much.

The main thing with the Auction House idea is just a way to circumvent the price fixers that flood the market. These are people intentionally making trading worse for the average player and actively trying to scalp people. The "remove item after being messaged X times about it" would be the least intrusive way to fix the market as it is now. Of course... I can think of a few ways to abuse it already and it's still hypothetical.

I agree trading should be difficult because it's literally easy mode, I'm just mad about the egregious price fixing & market manipulation. If you have the gold, which you should if you're mapping, you can very easily flip and make money with the currency exchange. So, I understand the concern that it makes it too easy to make money (or even technically makes the economy WORSE).

All in all, an auction house might not be the way, but it's just a frustration with how groups of people (or individuals) are abusing a system uncontested.

there's no way you're going to solve the problem of market fixers and scammers.
The auction is necessary for another reason: switching the game to the browser seems to be the height of idiocy, don't you think?! (especially when you have fullscreen).
It just shouldn't exist!

It's also idiotic to require a person to be online!

It would be enough to make auto redemption of items!

But since there is already a currency merchant (and a full auction on consoles) I hope VERY much that it is in the works! Otherwise it will kill the game!

now the market is ‘dead’ also because 90% of casual players do not want and will not understand this outdated trading mechanics.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

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sanba#5661 wrote:

there's no way you're going to solve the problem of market fixers and scammers.
The auction is necessary for another reason: switching the game to the browser seems to be the height of idiocy, don't you think?! (especially when you have fullscreen).
It just shouldn't exist!

It's also idiotic to require a person to be online!

It would be enough to make auto redemption of items!

But since there is already a currency merchant (and a full auction on consoles) I hope VERY much that it is in the works! Otherwise it will kill the game!

now the market is ‘dead’ also because 90% of casual players do not want and will not understand this outdated trading mechanics.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

There are definitely ways to massively mitigate the problem, and it's through a form of punishment. The word itself is more severe than the reality it could be.

For example, punishing a player by removing the item from the market after being whispered 5 times about it and forcing them to post it again is, in my opinion, enough to reduce the problem by probably 95%. If you need to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to achieve the desired result, the less amount of people will indulge in the tedium. Ad-blockers are a great showcase for this phenomenon.

On the point of the trading platform being through the website: players will still find ways to complain about it even if it were copied in-game 1 to 1. It's robust, precise, and highly configurable. There are a ton of filters you can apply to find EXACTLY what you want.

However, newer players, understandably, don't understand it and quite a few don't wish to. As a result, they complain about it being archaic when in reality it's exactly what it needs to be in terms of functionality.

Additionally, the game continuing to be online-only is outside the scope of the feedback I've provided and I'd encourage you discuss it in your own thread!

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Valsacar#0268 wrote:

I was enjoying your indepth write up, until we got to this:

"

Deth_Meth#3954 wrote:

Dying in maps. It feels a bit too punishing when you die in a map. There's three things that happen when you die in a map: 1, you lose 15% of your current level experience; 2, you lose the map; 3, you lose any league mechanic on the map. I feel like only two of these things should happen, not all three.

STOP REPEATING THIS OBVIOUS LIE. You play POE1, you know it is not 15% and it has NEVER been 15%. Just like POE1, it is 10% and has been since day 1. It was never 15%, and the fact that people keep parroting it makes me wonder if you actually did make it into the endgame. It's not hard to see you lose 10% and not 15.

why does the % value matter, you lose way to much progression and that's the point/ STOP TELLING PEOPLE HOW TO THINK