[Removed by Support]

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JeansJoe#2224 wrote:

+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.