My thoughts after 48 hours of playtime on in SSF Dawn Of the Hunt

After watching yesterday interview I'm quite happy and hopeful again. I was agreeing with Johnathan more often than not and i hope Poe2 caters to more challenging and engaging gameplay, I have played Poe1 for 14750 hours, if I want zoomies, to clear maps under 2 minutes and to kill bosses under 5 seconds I already that game for that, I lost interest in that gameplay long time ago and I have been playing new leagues out of habit and nothing else.

On a perfect world i wish map clearing is more methodical with threats of getting overwhelmed if I rush things too much but without the maps feeling empty or hard to maneuver, i think most of the problem lies on the current map layouts being very similar and having way to many obstacles, choke points are good to be there, the problem its when they feel like obstacles instead, Steppe's bushes being a clear example to what is wrong with maps. On the boss side of things i hope GGG aim to be around 5 minute fights at the very least once your character is geared and online, getting close to 2 minute fights with mirror worthy gear, i would hate to see again a shapers per second build being the norm.

For example i found this 8 minute boss fight against the a1 boss quite enjoyable, a bit misplaced being against the first boss but i hope pinnacle boss fights are close to this rather than one shots. https://youtu.be/CO8syTmJoEw

That being said those are endgame goals and characters need to first reach endgame for that to happen, it cannot be that the first hours feel like a chore you have to get through in order to really enjoy the game.

Onto the campaign things that i think that need to be addressed:

If you are not a caster Skills are tied to single weapon types, this is a different approach from PoE1 that I don't mind by itself but one extra problem comes from this that need to be heavily considered, Players don't choose a weapon type to go with, they chose a skill they wanna use and want to stick to it for as long as possible, in PoE1 i if i play heavy strike any weapon that drops can be a potential upgrade but if I'm playing spears in poe2 any other type of weapon that drops means a regal shard at best to me, this makes gearing through the campaign a bit too hard right now.

The change on artificer orbs being guaranteed at some key points in the campaign is really good and we need more of this, Charsi in diablo 2 was a good example, in short we need more non repeatable events through the campaign give some sort of minimum base line and spice areas a bit, there is a vast difference of a guy transmuting every white weapon he drops hoping for an upgrade and someone with a decent rare drop. Right now if you are playing the campaign you want to get out there asap since once you get to maps drops increase by tenfold in a mater of a few map tiers and a hundredfold by endgame, being a little less stingy through the campaign would mean people wont feel that much of a rush to reach maps because they feel that they are missing out. Don't nerf monster life, instead give us more loot so we can do more decisions during the campaign.

Another change that maybe did look good on paper but I'm hating, map locations not being static within the map UI, it only does disorients and annoys me to no end whenever i go to the map and i don't find the location i want to go with just a quick glance, the most most egregious case i had map UI was claiming that the exit from infested barrens to azak bog was on the east and then inside the zone the exit is on the opposite direction, just stick to more static entrances and exits please guys i beg you.

On the passive skill tree, i think we are missing a lot of agency there but most of it was mentioned multiple times already such as defenses being quite underwhelming compared to offense, im not afraid of this being the case forever since i know how much you guys love to tweak skill trees.

Now onto the skills i manage to test during this playtime.

Spectres feel either they will be the only minion you would want to use at all or remove the gem from your sight, they need to be strong and limited to 1 or 2 at most with maybe some extra elsewhere through unique items.

Idk why rhoa mount is in the game, either is gonna be broken or useless, i would hate to see it being useable ever, feels stupid to bein forced to combo stuff in order to clear for then to see someone else running around 40% faster than me just spamming a button on top of that thing.

Beast companions, feel a bit too overtuned but maybe is just the rest of spirit options being underwhelming, why on earth is armor aura tied to breaking armor is a mystery to me.

Missing the charge generation on disengage if you hit someone next to the guy you wanna parry first with the AOE attack feels super bad.

Slash/Twister combo, it does rely 100% on barrage being broken, rn i have it at 1.5cd and can be much lower i just don't bother to go further, you get get 15% more dmg from premeditation 3 times as many twisters and twice the damage overall, the class is saturated with frenzy charge expenders and you made sure most spear attacks wont scale with extra proj, why add barrage onto the kit then? it just makes the playstile a bit to similar to bows imo, barrage should be a thing i only use on tanky rares or bosses with 20-30 second cd imo, not something i add onto my rotation.

Whirlwind Slash, i hate that it can collapse by touching previous twisters that were generated before it was made, i rather it only work with twisters i generated after i made it that came from inside the twister.

Whirlwind lance, it feels like a worse version of the slash i cannot get into but more variety is always welcome, maybe someone else likes it more than the melee option.

Lightning Spear, either useless if you dont have frenzy or broken if you can spam it with frenzy

Rapid Assault, this is worse than AA unless you have detonators, and all the options for detonating rn are underwhelming

Spearfield, situational but amazing whenever it does fit to use, maybe tone down the damage and give it a bit stronger utility on the slow

Rake, procs 3 stomping ground per cast with no cd and its the only travel skill with no less speed modifier on it, a bit of an oversight this made it live and it just does feel like a band aid fix to have something that works through the first four or five acts, other than that bleed is not the strongest rn but there are plenty of tools like new support gems bloodhunt and bloodhound mark around it, it looks engaging as long as you remove stomping ground from it and tweak the damage numbers from bleed a little.

Primal strikes, this should not consume shock, its worse than wild strike from PoE1 in every way shape or form, it does feel awful, worst range by far of any spear skill, tone down the aoe from the final strike have it keep the shocks.

Spear of Solaris, im playing a Titan so i have a lot more ways to proc the glory but its still underwhelming, i have yet to test a spear ignite build with explosive spear i plan to do, maybe there it does shine a bit more, but by itself is just a gimmick, the windup it does take to throw the spear is twice as annoying as hammer of the gods, you are a sitting duck while throwing the spear and because of that you get light stun all the time which consumes all the glory and cancels it completely, this is an attack not an spell, make it ignore light stuns at the very least please. Either way unless you build onto the ignite or the target is really stationary there is no way this is worth over using your normal combo.

Wind serpent's fury, originally i wanted to use this but game was crashing for people using it so i did reroll from deadeye to Titan, rn I'm using twister and having fun so I'm gonna leave it for later, but in theory it does really looks like the most broken stuff on the level of the broken things that were on 0.1 able to oneshot bosses like none else business thanks to deadeye and barrage state, the disparity in charge generation and quantity with deadeye's thrilling case versus any other build feels so wrong to me, lets say its balanced around people having 8 frenzy charges then you add deadeye and you have 18 charges worth of extra damage, then you add barrage to the mix and watch the world burn, since you have a 35% whenever you get charges and you have a 5 second window to of load the barrage you can just pop barrage at max charges then get frenzy charges again to shot 16 frenzy worth of serpents with 16 frenzy worth of barrage and see what happens to the target. What gives? if you guys balance around this being the norm the rest will suffer and have an unplayable skill. witch leads to my final conclusion.

Spears feel way too focused on endgame combos and balance resulting on a clunky and underwhelming early game unless you cheese it with overgear or oversights such as rake stomping. i would hope for the skills to work by themselves during the campaign as soon as i get them, cull the weak seems the right direction but i would have to level a new character to see the results and i have ptsd right now from the current leveling experience on top of wanting to see what the new endgame looks like.

I personally HATE cull the weak. It's basically killing palm but for frenzy charges and mind you killing palm is one of the clunkiest skills in the game. It IS better than disengage but that's just indicative of how bad disengage is. I'm personally appailed by the fact that they added a whole new skill instead of giving disengage some proper AoE to help with aim assist screwing up the skill. Or, maybe just maybe, fixing aim assist.

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onetruelai#7327 wrote:

I personally HATE cull the weak. It's basically killing palm but for frenzy charges and mind you killing palm is one of the clunkiest skills in the game. It IS better than disengage but that's just indicative of how bad disengage is. I'm personally appailed by the fact that they added a whole new skill instead of giving disengage some proper AoE to help with aim assist screwing up the skill. Or, maybe just maybe, fixing aim assist.

I feel you but you should not worry this much, changes to Disengage may be still being considered or in the works, some things are faster to deploy than others, cull the weak is most likely a copy paste of killing palm with just a few line tweaks in the code, work like this can be finished within a workday of a single person, that doesn't mean that further changes are not coming, their problem was being radio silent on balance in 0.1 for months but since the playfield is way more even in 0.2 my guess is that we will see constant changes/buffs during the whole patch.