Proper feedback from someone that hates what PoE1 has become and has some critical thinking.

First off, let me just say that you are moving mostly in the right direction GGG. But there's still tons of work to do, and some things simply need a full rework and there's no way around it.

Secondly, I need to preface this as someone that has played with minions so far, so this feedback comes from a minion playthrough. Initially I had started with a crossbow till level 8/9 and I have to mention that it felt considerably stronger then last patch when I did the same.

Here are some of the issues that I've noticed still being problematic:

1)Monster density/speed is still too high. To have good combo-gameplay and meaningful combat, you need response time. There's clear friction there and everyone can agree on that.

2)Minions need a full rework in the context of meaningful combat There's simply no way around it, I'm sorry but PoE1-like minion mechanics will simply never work out in PoE2. Just lowering or increasing their damage output will never magically fix them. All that's changed from last patch is that It takes considerably longer to kill anything while skill expression is still largely absent.

Not to mention that you had the opportunity for specters to make their skills usable by the player when they want to, but you didn't do that one either. There are specters that have quite a few skills too. Such a shame.

I have noticed one good thing here though, enemies in general seem to target the summoner more which is a step in the right direction.

3) Monsters and boss mechanics in general seem to have less impact on the player compared to before, or at the very least they impact it in a different, less exciting way - This one is a bit tricky and hard to explain.. but what I think happened here is that their damage got reduced to a point where getting hit by a boss ability in itself doesn't threaten you as before. So far I have never felt like a boss ability or sequence of abilities could kill me like it used to do before.

However, this in itself combined with less player power created what I would basically call a pure attrition fight. While getting hit in itself didn't feel like an imminent danger, the sustainability long term became the challenge instead. This imo is very bad. Encounters need to stay dangerous immediately not in the form of an attrition fight.

If I make a series of mistakes I should die from them in that moment and not 2 minutes later when I'm out of flask charges.

4) Killing bosses during campaign doesn't feel rewarding for the most part from a loot perspective I honestly think there's such an easy fix here that I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet. This would be super easy to fix by giving campaign bosses a guaranteed chance to drop an account-bound leveling unique from a small pool of items.

Don't want that to be a baseline? No problem! You could make it so that players can decide in some way, shape or form to make the encounter harder for that guaranteed drop.

It's a pretty simple issue at it's core. If you give someone a more difficult task then usual, you want to reward them with something more valuable then usual. Giving someone a harder task but rewarding them with the same or worse rewards then usual simply feels bad.

That's all the fairly surface level feedback I have so far.

Nice and productive feedback...i like the idea of bosses dropping lvl uniques.