Seeking Advice: Balancing Path of Exile 2

Hi everyone,

I'm a man in my 30s with limited free time, and I've been trying to get into Path of Exile 2. The game is incredibly engaging, but I find myself struggling to make meaningful progress. The difficulty level is quite high, and I often spend my gaming sessions dying repeatedly, which leads to frustration and eventually switching to other games.

I understand that Path of Exile 2 has introduced more challenging boss fights and a complex skill system, which adds depth but also increases the learning curve. Given my time constraints, I'm finding it hard to keep up and fully enjoy the game.

I've already tried several build guides hoping to smooth out the experience, but I still find myself burning precious time without the rewarding feeling of progression. At this point I'm not sure if I'm missing something fundamental, or if the game just isn't suited for players like me.

Has anyone else run into this? Would love to hear if there’s a better way to approach the game with limited playtime — or maybe it's okay to just walk away.

Ok

Well yea. If you go into the game completely blind. by any luck find "good" by your mean gear. Pick recommended support gems and trying skill gems you will still hit a brick wall in campaign. Or on boss or on map, and doesn't matter if you over cap the lvl. it still will feel like you are stuck.

I have put in over 427 hours into poe2, so I will give you a straight and honest answer.

If that has been your experience so far, I recommend you stop playing this game and come back in the next big update (0.3.0)

They ruined the game with this patch. It is extremely unrewarding and sluggish to play compared to 0.1.0. You will not scale in power, you will have way less viable build options, and it will take you another 50 hours before you start feeling the fun.

You're probably better off playing a different ARPG. POE1 and Last Epoch are both fun, and both demonstrate a significantly greater respect for the player's time. If you haven't tried POE1 before and want to try it, especially with limited time as a new player, you should try following one of Pohx's Righteous Fire build guides; it'll offer you probably the gentlest intro to the game you could hope to get; it's a very comfortable playstyle, plus he's basically got a whole wiki + FAQ just for his RF builds so it's easy to follow and learn, and RF builds are generally tanky enough that you can actually learn enemy mechanics instead of having to offscreen delete everything to survive.