Progression feels awful (Loot + Skill tree)

- vendors can offer good items but often you don't have a gold for them (especially in an extreme patch like this where you have to respec a lot and they're stubborn on not giving us free respec in EA or at least in campaign...)

- no good loot. I was still using rare amulet from Act 1 in Act 1 Cruel and not because I couldn't find a better upgrade or it would brick my stats, I literally had 0 alchemy drops through the entire campaign. There are regals orb but very few and this amulet had 3 affixes anyways xd

- most of the loot is white and blue items. cant really spam currency on whites, can't upgrade blues either

- Essences are easier to find, you can even find Greater Essence in campaign, that's a really good change but I would like to get access to regal orbs as well, a lot of the time i just want to gamble a promising blue item. I can vendor rare gear but it leads to another problem which is...

- trade is insanely powerful, I had a whole div just from trading because people are desperate for a slight dps upgrade. This is beyond insane. I believe we should be able to spam exalts, regals etc. on items, otherwise we're stuck with underpowered gear for too long

- trade is still the best way to get a meaningful upgrade and it's even more noticeable for attack type skill gems. When I bought new spear my damage literally got tripled. This feels like D4 and Greater Affixes power spike.

- upgrades get outdated very quick, when you enter a zone with a new monster level it feels like you're in Grelwood again

- skill tree is just not exciting. More than half of my skill points are allocated into damage, the rest is travel nodes and some defences. Clusters are too big (they can even require 6-8 points to geat a meaningful stat increase), there is too much travelling points allocated to get anywhere, a lot of nodes has downsides. PoE 1 got it right with smaller and dense clusters, PoE 2 tree looks big on paper but it feels like a D4 tree very often, just go grab damage. On some classes it's not even a "tree", on Huntress it's a stick because there is nothing interesting on the pathing towards the "Spear" cluster

- for some reason party play is more diffcult than before by a sizeable magnitude. When I play solo I can kill a boss in less than a minute, in party some campaign bosses took more like 10 minutes, same thing applies to rare monsters. We had "Powerful Minions" enemy yesterday and his 3 little minions had more hp than Act boss, when you switch to solo rare monsters die in seconds. Just insane. It's not hard or difficult it's just exhausting for no reason at all

The realizations you come to after a while:

There are no significant loot drops in POE2

This is a gambling simulator. The game you think you are playing running around killing monsters is only a demand generator to fuel those who are actually playing the real game. You can interact with those players through the trade site. The format of the trade site is to maintain this specific status quo.