My feedback on PoE 2 so far

I have finally decided to share my thoughts on the game so far, hoping to capture the attention of developers and generate interesting discussions within the community.

First, so this post doesn't sound overly negative: I have enjoyed PoE 2 a lot so far and I think a lot of things have been improved when compared to PoE 1. This includes but is not limited to: the much saner crafting process that was way too cluttered in PoE 1 with far too many options, the huge skill tree, the campaign story felt a lot more interesting to me, the updated visuals of course, etc. I also understand this is still an early access game.

Now the things I don't like that much:
- Base movement speed and skill speed feel sluggish. Although the checkpoints helped a lot, the huge maps definitely don't help with the feeling of being too slow, to the point that many people prioritize the increased movement speed modifier on boots above anything else. Skill speed is even more of an issue to me: as an example I have been playing twister Amazon and I simply did not have fun up until about act 3, because the combo was just too slow and boring. I had a similar experience with Warrior. I think allocating skill speed passive nodes just so the game feels fun is not healthy.

- I love new classes and ascendencies as much as the next guy, but I find myself wishing for acts 4, 5 and 6 more. I think it's safe to say that people complaining about the campaign being too long is due in large part to the fact that we have to repeat the same 3 acts in higher difficulties. Maybe that's just me though.

- Some drop rates feel absurdly low to me. I am thinking mostly about greater and perfect jeweller's orbs. It seems so incredibly low that I have wondered if that isn't, in fact, a bug.

- The endgame is varied and rich - except not at first. It takes dozens and dozens of maps to get to a level where you can consider engaging in funnier activities and get points in the atlas subtrees. Clearing maps, claiming towers, and clearing more maps and corrupted nexuses gets quite old fast.

- The trials feel really hard. I finally got tokens to get my 7th and 8th ascendency points, and I am legit scared to attempt it. It is a huge time commitment and I am tempted to wait until I level up more. I guess I am not so much put off by it being hard than the fact that an attempt takes a really long time.

- A pet peeve of mine, and probably very minor but I hate the fact that some items share the same visuals, such as forked/branched/pronged spears. Given the size of the game, I don't think that a few more 2d pictures would change anything. It just /feels/ lazy. Not saying that you are.

With all that said, thank you so much for this game that is already amazing and much love to the entire development team.

I agree with everything, specially with the base movespeed or skillspeed. It doesn't need to go super high, but the minimum feels bad.

I'm also with you in creating positive feedback and discussion!

I mean, there are many, many great things about the game.

Unfortunately they've been forgotten due to how bad this patch was...
- No loot drops
- 200% nerfs to builds that weren't even being used
- 0% buffs to builds that had <1% utilization (Hi Chayula)
- No currency drops
- No endgame drive
- No mobility or way to scale it
- Campaign is absolutely atrocious
- No Crafting & they
- Trading is terrible & no AH in sight due to 'Vision'
- No versatility
- We can't use orbs or try out gems early because vendors don't sell them and nothing drops them

I don't get it tbh. Even from a data point of view, it makes no sense what happened in 0.2.0.

And the biggest problem of all is how all of this made it out of QA & came as a surprise to them in the immediate post-patch feedback.

This last part is what really makes me wonder what's wrong on their end that they don't see this. Or perhaps feedback hasn't been enough on our end.

The Ops oriented person in me would tell them to functionally survey a huge pool of players from different playstyles / hours invested / $ invested to find out what's wrong.

Patches like these with emergency corrections aren't the way forward, even in EA :/

You pretty much summed up my feelings about 0.2.0 perfectly so far. There is a fantastic game here, but there are still so many fires right now...

PoE2 still has so many "quitting moments" where you just have to ask yourself "why am I even doing this?". For reference, in PoE1 I usually play 2 main builds (starter and main), and at least 5 to 10 secondary, "just-trying-things-out" builds. Testing builds is very easy, because it's easy to form currency, and pretty much all skill gems are available at level 34.

In PoE2, I played one build through the campaign, started 3 others, and deleted all of these characters reaching act 3 normal, because I completely lost interest in them. Now, 11 days in, and I'm pretty much done with the season, because I cannot get myself to invest more time.

It just feels like too much of a time investment for too little reward. Right now, PoE2 is just not capturing my attention very well, but I'm still very hopeful the game will improve with every patch to the point of "awesomeness".