played poe1 since 2012 with 15k+ hours, 600+ hours logged in poe2 -- feedback/review

i'm probably missing a few things as i typed this up all in one shot just before im about to go to bed, but here we go

POE2 Early Access Feedback:

What I like
-WASD movement, i hope this is back ported to poe1 while poe2 cooks
-combat for the most part feels really good, mace attacks being so slow feel terrible with how fast mobs move
-graphics - great atmosphere and design as well, glad they didn't take the diablo route with bright vibrant colors and highlighting and shit
-Breach - the only mechanic i feel like was done well. i get enough splinters where i can get the boss regularly enough if i target farm breach, and can sustain precursor tablets
-Bossing - overall a big W, good variety, movesets, surprises -- my fav is breach guy
-Campaign - overall, another big W (couple caveats below), even if we have only seen half of it. Progression on first playthrough is engaging and challenging, subsequent playthroughs are easier with leveling gears. Difficulty seems in a decent spot tbh
-Sound track and audio design.
-Voice acting and voice lines
-i like the cutscenes between acts. Nothing too crazy, but still pretty cool




Generic Commentary:
-Expedition - overall in map mechanic and logbooks feel good, but the vendors are bad. Feels like it's less attempts and worse outcomes. precursor drop rate needs buffed

-ritual - Mechanic itself is ok, swarms of mobs in a tight arena, but the rest of it is trash; gating the little bit of "crafting" that's in the game behind this is bad, not to mention how rare it is. Boss frag doesn't show up nearly as often as it should, 3x the drop rate on this. Currency orbs and random items seemed fine. 600+ hours played, not a single chaos orb omen. i should have found way more, how are we supposed to craft without the omens. precursor drop rates need buffed

-skill design from a zoomed out perspective overall is kinda shit. Since I can just have w/e six linked, everyone is just gonna run the same freaking single target stuff, homogenizing the build diversity. Are you a mace build? slap on hammer. Are you literally any build with enough str to wield a mace? slap on hammer on your weapon swap, fcuk it, why not, right? And ofcourse the same concept will come into play for clearing abilities as well, even further blurring the builds together. Tagging abilities to weapon types sucks too. I mean, you have to do this to an extent, like you can't fire arrows out of your mace, but why the hell can't i slam the ground with my quarterstaff again? This further limits build possibilities as it's a "oh i have to use only these abilities." I think this is a step back from the previous system. You had an opportunity cost of what was on your 6L, did you run a 2h so you can get a second 6L? did you have some other funky setup with squire or bringer of rain? There was a lot more opportunity cost for every decision, allowing for specific distinct builds. Some of this will be sured up with additional skills coming in, but core problems with the 6 links and tying skills to specific weapons will limit build diversity significantly

-ultimatum overall feels decent, with the exception of random corrupt items as rewards. Get rid of that crap. It should be a currency, precursor tablets, literally anything that gives the user a choice that is tied to the mod you pick that actually has potential value, not corrupt garbage no one picks up. The harder mods get the higher rewards. i.e. boss takes less damage and deals more damage is a chaos orb or w/e

-sanctum overall feels good, maybe even nerf drop rate of relics tbh. I like the new mods on the relics as well. Oh yah, temporalis. Yah delete this item or give it to the masses or make it so it doesn't work with blink. You can't make everyone fat and slow by default, then gate enigma status blinking around behind the no hit run. You're making 99.999% fat and slow, and only the .0001 get to play with the fun thing. Don't get me wrong, it's cool having items gated behind bosses, like howa for example, but not a core movement mechanic, especially when it's effectively the only good mobility "skill" in the game and it's gated behind this. Bad design imo.

-(campaign)too many of the zones are just like big mazes (just like in maps), with no markers of any sort. It's just stumble around until you find it. If this was linear with a couple offshoots it wouldn't be bad, but so many zones are like mazes and i think are way too large. So many times I clear a zone looking for an objective, like the heart in utzaal for example, and it's in the last corner with 1 mob, and there was never any indicator of any sort where to get it. Spend 15-20 minutes wandering around aimlessly looking for straggler mobs. This is boring and tedious gameplay that no one wants to do.

-Mobility. There isn't nearly enough sources. Although dodge roll feels okay, you get no mobility benefit, and it's only for as the name suggests, dodging attacks. And i'm guessing this is here to stay, because as soon as you add giga move speed, flame dash and ice blink, dodge roll becomes meaningless. Overall i think this is an L. No one wants to spend 10 minutes slowly walking across maps. You might as well make all the characters have the appearance of 90 year olds and give them walking sticks. I'm not saying we need super juice quicksilver headhunter onslaught frenzy bla bla bla, but i mean come on, no one wants to be fat and slow.

-passive tree is ehhhhhh questionable. No life on tree? Giga es is available? As soon as I saw this I though of the quin audio clip, "THEY"RE NERFING LIFE AND BUFFING ES?!?" -- also why are all the melee nodes like reduced max mana and reduced attack speed lol. Although doing the tree like this is complete trash, i couldn't help but laugh because i knew quin would play this corner lol

life sucks, armor sucks (another kinda laughing at quin lol)
resistance is what i'd expect, though it'd be nice to have some resistance on the tree to help with gearing. I.e. waste these 10 points early on to help with res, then when i get better gear i can spec out of it

but in all seriousness with the tree, it's decentish, but a little bland overall. i'd like to see some more build enabling things, like damage conversions for example.

a few brief generic points:
evasion is very strong
energy shield is way op (both passives on tree and grim feast that is, base gear items i think are fine)
block is very strong
grim feast is way op
archmage is way op -- unclear if everlasting gaze is supposed to work in concert with eldritch battery, my first thoughts are this is not working as intended
hammer is way op



What I do not like:

-Non existant crafting system, i don't want to pick up 1000x bases off the ground, let me just utilize one good base i find please. We don't need 10 different systems like poe1, but we need something that's functional at least.

-item rarity is trash on gear, get rid of it. If you are playing anything beyond your first character, this problem becomes apparent. I have for example a spark magic find guy with like 150 rarity. I have another howa guy that is near 0 rarity. As i needed all the suffixes for attributes, i can't really put on rarity like i can with the sorc. Both can clear the desired maps we'll say equally as well. If i want to farm a citadel up and do w/e 10 maps to get to it, I'd miss out on like a dozen exalts if i didn't play the sorc. This discourages me from wanting to play anything except the magic find guy, which in turn makes me get bored quicker. Then you have the ssf problem where gearing is extremely difficult, not only does it take up a spot where life or resistance could go for example, but then because you miss out on so much currency by not having it, and crafting being in such a bad spot, it feels terrible to not run magic find. At the very least item rarity should not be tagged to currency orbs so you don't feel like you're missing out on raw currency, but really should just be removed from gear affixes. Now to be clear, item rarity and quantity i think is perfectly fine to have in the game, and is desirable actually, but leave it on the other things, like mob affixes, shrines, waystone affixes, precursor affixes, atlas passives, and things of this nature. Tying it to the character itself is bad.


-atlas design is terrible, should be scrapped altogether. If let's say I'm 4 nodes from a citadel, and i want to do breach content or ritual or whatever, i can't juice per map, tower juice is rng. So then when i put a tablet in the tower, the juice goes on mire which isn't even near the citadel im going to, which i also don't want to run, same with many other maps. Which brings us to forcing us to do maps we don't want to play. I don't want to run vaal factory, stop putting it in front of citadels damnit. Stop putting my map juice on trash maps please. It feels like 80% of the maps are purposely bad, and it makes no sense to me. And of course the back tracking. Maps are 2x bigger than they should be and way too mazey with deadends. Over 50% of my map time isn't even playing the damn game, it's back tracking and looking for the mechanics which for whatever reason don't appear on your map unless you are literally right on top of them, and of course the rare hunting which is just a feels bad man. In poe1 it was look for boss room which depending on map you knew how to find it easily. Here it's hunting the rare mobs which could be in literally some random corner of the 20,000 acre map.

-deli - Firstly, its too damn foggy and gray, you can't see shit. 1-3 splinters? are you kidding me for 5 reward full map clear? that should be way higher. 100-300 maps for a boss my ass. at least the mobs pushing is gone now

-trade still has the same damn problems as poe1. I do my search scroll through, find the items i want, message the guy, and nope he just doesn't reply. Then i scroll through a message the next guy, and it's the same story. And again, and again, again, again, again. Oh and i already got scammed in poe2 for 20 divs with the classic, i wanted attrib/all res % chest piece, guy puts in life/all res and i didn't notice til like 5 seconds after i clicked accept and went to put it on. Of course he did it on purpose and instantly put me on ignore list. Yah it's my own fault for not looking you could say, but it could also have been avoided if the system provided by the game didn't physically allow it to happen. Oh and of course if a guy puts an item up for X price, you message him to buy it, then he takes the item down and relists it for more. Everyone loves that, right? NO. Give us the damn AH already

-charms are poopoo. Just make them perma buffs, we get three of them, each has 33.3% reduced effect of w/e shock, ignite, bleed, freeze, poison, so you can use all 3 slots to be immune to one, or lessen the effect of three of them, or w/e, mix and match, Maybe sprinkle a unique in the game with doubles or triples charm effect

I also don't like rmt'ers and people paying for boosting being able to play and compete with the rest of us. They should get the ban hammer of the gods.

+1

All of this is correct.

Agree with everything. Some sentences are straight out of my head ;)

For me the most boring part is the movement and lack of creative crafting.

true. i hate the current crafting and i hate the new atlas. besides that there is nothing so i dont play anymore.

"

-item rarity is trash on gear, get rid of it. If you are playing anything beyond your first character, this problem becomes apparent. I have for example a spark magic find guy with like 150 rarity. I have another howa guy that is near 0 rarity. As i needed all the suffixes for attributes, i can't really put on rarity like i can with the sorc. Both can clear the desired maps we'll say equally as well. If i want to farm a citadel up and do w/e 10 maps to get to it, I'd miss out on like a dozen exalts if i didn't play the sorc. This discourages me from wanting to play anything except the magic find guy, which in turn makes me get bored quicker. Then you have the ssf problem where gearing is extremely difficult, not only does it take up a spot where life or resistance could go for example, but then because you miss out on so much currency by not having it, and crafting being in such a bad spot, it feels terrible to not run magic find. At the very least item rarity should not be tagged to currency orbs so you don't feel like you're missing out on raw currency, but really should just be removed from gear affixes. Now to be clear, item rarity and quantity i think is perfectly fine to have in the game, and is desirable actually, but leave it on the other things, like mob affixes, shrines, waystone affixes, precursor affixes, atlas passives, and things of this nature. Tying it to the character itself is bad.

this needs to be fixed with decent general uniques. I wrote a post about it, but most people are too stupid to understand how items work, so my assumption is youre barking up a tree that no one is even aware of.

"

Alisia261#7396 wrote:

"People paying for boosting being able to play and compete with the rest of us. They should get the ban hammer of the gods."

I agree with everything you said except, buying Trial of the Sekhemas carries.

The Trials of Suck-my-ass are not worth the hassle to do it yourself, until they are fixed or balanced, I'd always purchase my ascendancy thru carries, without a doubt and i bet 70% of the casual community would agree and I know a good portion have already purchased their ascendancy carries so you think GGG is willing to ban thousands of people and have them perform chargebacks on their visa, Mastercard's because they lost access to their EA Content key for PoE 2..

I know i would do a chargeback on my supporter pack.

The biggest turn off for me is 1 portal and not being able to revive a friend. It legit made me and my mates stop mapping together and turned us into solo players. imagine buying early access only to be able to play the campaign together kind of smoothly.