[Removed by Support]

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2836742981#3689 wrote:

The best way to help POE2 is for most people to log off, not buy any MTX, and watch the player count drop so Jonathan can wake up and take action. If we don't login and support the game in any way, there is a bigger and better chance to have things resolved quickly. Even if you login for 20 mins a day, that counts as a win in their book.

The other thing is I don't understand how they kept releasing patches almost every day last week with some decent changes. Couldnt they do that during 0.1 and add content and fixes as we went along? Wouldn't be in such a big mess now if they had incremental fixes/changes with MVP instead of one big release.

>The best way to help POE2 is for most people to log off

Absolutely true. Here's why I posted here: people keep complaining about issues at acts, but no one seems to consider what the game was actually designed for — the endgame. I'm glad I was able to save someone precious time. I bet League will be burried after two days when LE season start. Honestly, I'm just happy to hear that Last Epoch will support WASD movement — that's enough reason for me to not bother with PoE2 anymore.

As for the fixes — they basically went on holiday right after the Early Access launch, which was hilarious. They only pushed out a few crucial hotfixes just so people could run the damn game. Nothing significant was changed until February. They chose to leave everything as it was: ice wall exploits, random one-shots on maps. Players were mocking the game by flying around with duped Temporalis and autobombing all content by just holding the spacebar.

It took them 4 months just to showcase a class that was already was finished. They clearly didn’t care about the game’s health. Instead of fixing mana/attribute stackers and Trampletoes, they just nerfed a few mediocre builds. At this rate, I bet Jonathan will release the game in another 1–2 years — by then, no one will even care to play anymore.

For me Poe 2 is in a disgraceful state.

I don't like stressing games. Here it's all struggles and no relief.

Defences are SHIT, you can't beat dificulty - it is ALWAYS there, exp loss is ALWAYS there, 1 portal is ALWAYS there... game is retarded [Removed by Support]

And there is ONE fucking build to play. ONE. No matter if you are deadeye or hutress, LS is the only glass-cannon viable one.

I can't log in for 2 maps and then quit...

Guess I'll be anticipating Last Epoch season by one day.

[Removed by Support]

Ah, and PoE 1 DIED for this shit. Sad.

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LeonardoSilvaDF#3295 wrote:

For me Poe 2 is in a disgraceful state.

I don't like stressing games. Here it's all struggles and no relief.

Defences are SHIT, you can't beat dificulty - it is ALWAYS there, exp loss is ALWAYS there, 1 portal is ALWAYS there... game is retarded (yes please REDACT this word as my last time, retarded mods).

And there is ONE fucking build to play. ONE. No matter if you are deadeye or hutress, LS is the only glass-cannon viable one.

I can't log in for 2 maps and then quit...

Guess I'll be anticipating Last Epoch season by one day.

Utter dogshit, Jonathan is a stupid turd and his "vision" sucks horses ass, that's all.

Ah, and PoE 1 DIED for this shit. Sad.

upvoting. I like to struggle but it must be rewarding. Not countless groundhog day when you mindlessly grinding for nothing. You're limited around 100 divines and you can't make you stronger beyond that. Just another 1% for each next 100 divines.

I liked that i could test non meta strong builds, which could be strong enough, but for now there is narrow room for builds and quite low power cap.
I wished to test flicker strike legioneer, ice chaluya, xbow amazon, poison shield pathfinder/titan or test to play around herald of blood. But i tired to struggle for nothing in game with 0 content.

Holy hyperbole batman

A fan of the sentiment of the original post. +1.

I know that GGG want to make things better but it's a tall order and signs are (still) not promising, given the state of 0.2 and coming across as very out of touch with player experiences that make it to the internet, when quizzed in interviews.

Instead of going through the 5 stages of my own impending death and mortality (long way off, hopefully), I think I have to get through the 5 stages related to the death of PoE2.
I'm through the depression stage and heading to acceptance.

A couple of blindingly good patches could change the tide (Merry Christmas?) but I'm still of the mindset that scrapping and re-designing the end-game would be the best thing they can do. Some random...good. Too much random...well, having fun?

Where's the player agency gone?

10000% agree OP...the stun threshold nerf is absurd...chain stuns are real fun!

+1 OP

For some stupid reason (Maybe I'm stupid) but i like the core of this game, it can be a really fun game and i can see it but 0.2 isn't it and very far from it. This game does have good bones but the devs have thir rose coloured glasses on pushing for a vision that will never work in a ARPG. Maybe ggg forgot that "A" stands for action in aprg, and this very slow, tedious, methodical game play isn't what arpgs are about. Loot, getting more powerful as time goes on is a core part of ARPGs and this game doesn't do a good job of either of them until you hit very late game and get really lucky on drops.

Also the lack of currency and loot during the campaign is criminal. Have not found one Orb to turn a magic into a rare. I'm still using a Act1 weapon in Act3 so viper lady is a nightmare still. Getting her to last phase but that damn aoe is cucking me and not leaving me room to stand as the space is stupidly small. This fight isn't hard it's just unfair.

The mini stuns that stop your already stupidly long animations for an arpg is the single most annoying thing i have come across in any game.

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JakkerONAIR#4902 wrote:

I would defend it if it were defendable, it's not.

I loved 0.1.0 a lot, spend 800 hours, levelled all classes at least once into endgame, some multiple times for the second ascendancy, had everything on farm status in the game, and while I saw the flaws and reported them like many of us, I thought to myself "Man, the foundation has great potential. If they improve from here, balance stuff, fix bugs, add content/crafting, and so on; this will be THE aRPG.", but they did not.

And before someone says: "Nyo, you are just a PoE1 veteran who wants zoom-zoom boom-boom", you are wrong. I always play and enjoy the builds with normal speed and reasonable clear. Hell, I quit "Affliction" because it was so easy to become "a God" that I lost interest. That's why I would like to enjoy PoE2 because the zoom-zoom boom-boom was my main criticism with PoE1.

Let's go through some examples.

What defences do you have as an INT-based character?
Not a hybrid, but pure INT-based.

Hm... "Energy Shield". It's always good to have a bigger hit pool.
What else?

A flask to gain ES instead of Life? Sure. If you think that 1k-1.5k life does anything for your 8k+ ES.

Block? You are funny. Foci don't have block. What? A shield? There are no INT-based shields, only hybrid. And in the section of the tree you are pathing are no block nodes.

Leech? Nope. Only mana and not for spells. ES on block? I told you - no block.
NOTE: and the spell leech from Blood Mage is another topic, it's horrible.

What is with ES regen? Is pointless without "Wicked Ward". Every single small thing interrupts your recharge. What? The new gem? Sure. Let me watch LotR while waiting for the cooldown in a boss fight. Because, you know, stuff in PoE2 is known to "not spam abilities in your face"... wait.

Grim Feast? Removed. You know, a simple change to Grim Feast would be enough.
Instead of removing it until you "fix" it (only took GGG years to "fix" slams), just remove the overflow from the gem. Having ES orbs to heal on enemy or minion death helps a lot with survivability, while not turning ES users into characters with a doubled hit pool.

What is with a companion with a bubble? Ding Dong... INT-based. Next.

Debuffs? Like Hinder and Temporal Chains? Sure. But in maps, the pure movement speed of monsters can be so high, even with increased slow magnitude, they zoom right in your face.

Just use minions as a meat shield? Ah. Ok. So, I don't play caster and go for an entirely different archetype? I wonder what Ghazzy is thinking about minions right now.

"Mind over Matter"? Yep. Let me completely change the entire build and get cucked by stun because I heavily invested in a "hit pool" they nerfed because they didn't want it to be present on so many builds. The "50% less regen" will not nuke my mana pool when using spells that already cost hundreds of mana for a single cast.

Ah. I got it. The best and only available defensive option for a pure INT-based spellcaster is - kill everything on the screen so fast that it does not interact with you. That's the vision.

But hey, at least most other archetypes don't have these issues dot dot dot

Wait did i really just read someone complaining about the lack of defensive options for INT builds?

Lmao you have the MOST and the BEST defenses in the game.

+1 OP

Those were most of the points I made in my original critique of the game in December 2024.

To put some positives into that Sandwich:
Because a critique as harsh as it might need to be, you need to include some positive outlook.

Imop, the game is in a early beta stage. Foundations are there, but I think the foundations are still lacking. And GGG is sort of building more stuff on rocky foundations because the community needs content.

I think the leveling stage reveals so much of what this game is not and what needs to be fixed. GGGs fixation on endgame is a bit of a problem because a lot of people will not make it to endgame every league when leveling is so horrible.
The map layouts during mapping show that a lot of the concepts do not add up. There are mobs bugged in walls, you have areas where you can't see aoe effects, you have boss fights that are massively overtuned, or that can be cheesed with range attacks. And yes yes yes - passive tree is bad, the skill balance is bad, itemization is bad.

I think the game could be a lot more enjoyable if they would just use the campaign as a tutorial and give more goodies within the campaign. So that you pretty much can beat the campaign on blue gear and 4 correct passive clusters for your build and with any 3link skill. The campaign can be hard on ruthless, but it's a bit of a stretch to make this dark souls. Especially since the engine, internet connection, and shallow ocean depth of complexity make this a nightmare to balance now and any time in the future. It's just the wrong game genre for this level of difficulty. It would work offline... but that's a different genre.
And endgame could be made harder with the complexity of mechanics that you need to gear for or make a creative build for.
For example the poe1 Holy Relic of Conviction build was such a joy to work with.
essentially this one: https://poe.ninja/builds/settlers/character/JeansJoe%232224/Azadi
It was so nice to make mechanics fit into this build because it was massively starving in passive points. But it also was pretty enjoyable to get it off the ground at league start.

I think poe2 is lacking vision and creativity. The only vision was to make fights more meaningful and harder. Which is an age old trap of ARPGs that nobody ever solved how to do. ARPGs, especially online art just not made for it. And apart from that there is nothing really that innovative about it. It's just a lot of the same from poe1, which isn't bad, but it's mostly the bad stuff from poe1.
For example: get rid of passives on the tree as they are now. One idea could be to have passive nodes but they add 5 points into a pool and you can adjust this with sliders.
Honestly I doubt that the division into 3 different passive types does a lot of good. It's nice for lore, but for gameplay it's massively annoying to adjust. It would be great if gear did not need it. This would pretty much solve a lot.
I have a +15 dex spear. when I unequip that because I want to see if another spear does more damage, my gloves will not be usable which means I lack the +10 Strength on my gloves. That means my helmet is no longer wearable and then I also lack +15 Intelligence.
And this is during leveling - where you are supposed to swap gear (which you don*t really find btw) and try out your build and be creative and have fun.

But instead we are having meaningful 10 minute long fights with meatsack bosses because we have no gear, bosses have overtuned resistances, or we lack defenses and get oneshot, or we have suboptimal support gems or passive nodes.
And of course the boss has immunity stages because that has always been fun to be thrown around by an invincible boss while the RP talk is happening.

Overall - I really think this game can be a poe1 successor, but GGG needs to start touching the foundations. They are shy about it, I get it - they had a vision and they want to stick with it. But I think people (not me) mostly could forgive the bad foundation when EA launched. But with this patch people woke up to the reality that leveling characters every league is just not fun because there is not much room to play around. The difficulty of the game just stops 90% of build dead in their tracks.
And frankly, the poe community is aging. ain't nobody got time to spent 30 hours in a crappy leveling experience with a crappy build. People want to have fun right away and play the skills that they logged in for.

and btw I am talking about single player experience here - I know that in multiplayer leveling is a lot more trivial - still not easy but it felt soooo much easier.
And also I don't care about "gitgud" gigachad bros that literally own the game and just wing it. I am speaking mostly from a perspective of someone who wants to put a moderate level of time into this game but not have it as a main game that you write a thesis on. So yeah, maybe I could have an easier time if I just did try every support gem there is in my build and figure out a better way. But that's not what the start of the campaign should be for.
But you know what - all my whining is pointless. Because GGG never did anything to make the campaign easier. They are set to destroy dreams right from the start. If anything they want you to spent 30 hours in act 1 alone and die 10 times on Hillock.
Good on them. If that brings in the money so be it.