Casual player feedback for 0.2.0 (and Poe2 overall)

Hi all,

Intro
so here’s my feedback on 0.2.0 and PoE overall. I doubt that GGG will read it but will do it anyway. I played 430h so far and 400 of that till end of January then I took a break. In terms of ARPG I played D2 and Grim Dawn (latter like 500h+ or something) before poe2. Overall I would say that I am a casual player when it comes to ARPG.

Character
Starting with a sorceress I played till lvl 63 then switched to ranger (pathfinder) lvl 80 but my main was a Titan ranger which I played till 94.
After doing math and noticing that the +50% on small passives would in the end give something like 28 “additional” skill points which for me outweighs the (at that time) bonuses from Pathfinder or even Deadeye. That was my personal conclusion at that time, which doesn’t mean it really is like that since I never played Deadeye. One of the nice thing with titan ranger was that you got your quiver bonuses to 104% which means +projectiles where doubled.
I enjoyed my initial 400h I have to say especially since I was lucky and rolled a good bow which allegedly was worth 100div (I guess it wasn’t) when I checked with trade tools.

Overall, I got to 80k DPS with main attack, 54k DPS with lightning arrow which combined with attrition and Vile Knight Helm I was able to melt all bosses pretty quickly (except Zarokh which seemed to have like 10x the HP of “normal” bosses).

Otherwise I had ~45 movement speed, 12k armor, 11k evasion, 2200hp and 75/75/75/48 resistances (yes I know chaos is too low).

Progress
At 94 I stopped because the game got a bit stale for me and the occasional death now really hit hard since I needed around 2h to 10% with <T16 maps and I was too stingy to constantly use T16 of which I had around 20 in the end.

Trading
I could have “solved” my problems maybe with trading, but for me the trade system in PoE appeared too convoluted that I have to go to a website no search for items, and then not being sure if it’s a scam or not. This applies for both buying and selling and of course I first would have had to sell stuff to actually buy something useful. I know it has always been like that in Poe and will not change but knowing a few other games I would have expected/appreciated if the trading was integrated into the game and was instant (like currency trading) and didn’t require direct interaction with others.

Crafting
My biggest gripe is the “crafting” system. Again, I understand I has been like that in poe but compared to grim dawn it doesn’t deserve the word crafting. It’s just gambling with different flavors. You have loot gambling (that’s normal), item stat type gambling (with minimal influence), item stats gambling, way stone gambling and many more.
In Grim Dawn you could lookup exactly what you could get when crafting and only the stats would be gambled. This is what I would say deserves the work crafting.

0.2.0 specific feedback
I was looking forward to the changes coming with 0.2.0 where I wanted to try a Titan fire sorceress and get down living bomb seeds to 0.18sec and casting time <0.1 as well as having high energy shield to allow me to survive more one shots.
Well, since I didn’t know exactly how the stats would stack I ended up with 10k Dmg, 0.25 casting time and 0.18sec duration (which I changed to 0.48 due to 0.25 casting time). Plus I had 88% fire penetration through passives.

Otherwise, I had 9k armor, 2000hp/7500ES, 77/77/77/75 resistances.
Actually, I was quite happy with the build albeit the DPS of ~40000 was a bit low. As I said I only understood after the fact how the casting time reduction stats would work. But In the end the goal was to trade DPS for survivability so it was fine.

Well … then I hit one of my first bosses, the bog witch (lvl 80) which wiped me 5 times. The first time was so fast that I didn’t even understand what had happened. I came out of a dodge role then her fire breath caught me and my 2000hp/7500ES with 77% fire resi were gone in 0.5 sec.

The last attempt I got her down to 10% (concentrating heavily and using fire resi reduction curse a lot) when I died. I guess my mistake was to not use attrition or Vile Knight Helm. The latter simply didn’t fit into the build because my helmet gave me 1/3 of my energy shield.

This is when I gave up on sorceress and went back to ranger. However here I had another rude awakening when I used a slightly modified build for more survivability and now was down to 52k dps main, 34k DPS lighting arrow, 11k armor, 9k evasion, 75/75/75/64. I even had to invest 4 more skill points to not even get above 100% quiver bonus anymore.

When I played a around a bit I noticed that I got hit much more often now (due to lower evasion) and even rares where challenging now esp. when there were a lot of other creeps around. I didn’t die but it was much more stressful to play.
In the end 0.2.0 made the game worse for me. I understand that some >200k dps or 25k ES builds had to be reigned in but also my casual build got nerfed a bit too hard I feel.

Conclusion
For now, I think Poe2 I’m done with. I know I could solve my problems with trading but I reject using the system offered to me. I might return to see the last 3 acts of the campaign but I guess that’s it. I guess I will switch to another ARPG as my “main”. Grim dawn will get another expansion and I guess I check out Titan Quest II. Thanks for reading (if you got that far). Cheers.