After roughly 5900 hours of POE 1 and 120 hours of PoE 2 a some impressions and a memento mori

I just finally managed to finish the main campaign of PoE 2 for the first time (yep, i tried earlier but got bored and diverged to other games after Normal Act 3, but now i wanted to see how we transit to the endgame (and maan that 10 seconds of cinematic which is cut from the end of Normal Act 3... wow, almost worth it)

Here are some facts about me when this comment is created:
- The complete campaign playthrough took me:
2 days 17 hours, 30 minutes (at this point using /played in game on the character)
Died: 51 times during the campaign playthrough (used /deaths) mostly died to annoyingly long and telegraphed boss fights such as the 4 armed gorilla who oneshots you if you the pillar catches you somehow, or my most hated and maybe least understandable boss fight the Viper and his/her/they/them phalanxed MF. Oh and the epic rare Drowners at the Drowned City which can sometimes have the modifications multi slowing, chilling whatever and they just pop their drowning orb in your face call their friends and ask you gently to bend over and remove your trousers and underwear...

Here are a few good impresssions, because there are some:

- The game looks gorgeous, it IS actually beautiful, and the skill effects are gorgeous, especially the shatter effects, damn that is satisfying

- The story so far is Okay(ish) but gets old pretty fast (especially when you have to complete it twice per season and well that 10 seconds does not tell much how the story will continue after beating Cruel Act 3. But as a big fan of the lore so far, and involve of ancient gods/ mythological rulers from the past seems to be hype.

- Finally i managed to create a character by myself without any guides / instructions but that is more of a me praise than a GGG perspective "feature" but the new skill tree is at least not worse than the original.

- Plenty of options to build (at least seemingly) the big passive tree and the traversability (can improve and i am pretty sure it will) but still awesome, however with the new class system and the weapon specific skill system pretty much limits what you can or cannot do.

Well that is all i could think of as a positive and now let's head to the problematic part, shall we? I took the time and took some notes when i had something really frustrating / problematic during my playthrough, but i am pretty sure most of these are highlighted and hate speeched over the last few weeks as the internet is good forum to hide behind anonyimity become the expert of any topic and spread negativity over what we do not like, and man i can feel for that, but this indicates the problems of (nobody will read any constructive comments anymore, because if you are too mild / positive thinking you are just afraid of saying what you want... if you say what's wrong direct and straight then you are just a jerk and how dare you not like what we have to offer to you... and so on... anyways i got a bit distracted, sorry about that...

Here are a few of my notes (if any of them sound sour [it is because i was sour] if any of these notes feel aggressive/frustrated... well yeah... I did not wait with comments until i calmed down, sometimes i even wrote litanies because i got so frustrated, so i understand if you cannot read through it (at the end of the day this is just a no F's given comment + 1)

Some of the bad thoughts i got as bullet points during the playthrough:

- 11/10 would drown the city back and never touch it again... Act 3 is just a complete mess both balance wise and story/length perspective

- Frustrating and unreasonably long fights (Damn when you fight a rare monster for over 5 minutes than it somehow manages to roll a oneshot on you (especially when it has less then 1% hp left - I imagine the controller cracking in some hands at this point)

- campaign too long and becomes boring pretty fast (And this is with only 3 acts and the other 3 still missing, if they progressively get longer than the earlier ones... damn no chance i will play this game through again... not a million times, but not even once more...)

- some bosses have too many random one shots and telegraphic mechanics... if i want to play bullet hell there are better options on the market to do so (Oh yeah... i hate viper and the phalanx... not just the one shots... the whole concept of the boss says that... you wanna play this game? well... YOU WILL SUFFER...)

- The Snake boss is just straight up frustrating and all it's mechanics are trash... especially when it becomes troll and spams all 3 "skills" on you to "dodge this btch" (Oh and do not get me started when you are res capped you have a lot of effective life pool and still the fight is so long, and you did so well to dodge until you literally have no space left, but the boss at literally 0% hp rolls the godly dice of randomness and says... oh wait... before your finishing move... let me regenerate all my energy shield over 2 seconds and let's see if you can still survive one more viper phalanx... no? too bad... try again... [This literally cracked me this was the point when I decided no... never again...])

- Oh and worse you somehow managed to survive for roughly 5 minutes against it... it is almost zero hp (literally empty hp bar at top, tightest phalanx, and triggers energy shield regen and venom phalanx before you can send in the killing blow... (i guess this was related to the earlier point but somehow managed to come to a new point, be proud of yourself viper, you are my most hated nemesis of all time now... i got so fed up and frustrated about you i would rather play with Uninstall Wizard than getting anywhere near you... literal PTSD, i do not want to even start a new character because i have to beat this MF again to get to endgame (TWICE...)

- Oh and was it rewarding?
Somehow you kill it in Cruel act 3 and here is the loot: 2 Tier 14 gems (already all my skills are Tier 14 at this point i wouldn't be able toeven do any damage without it) 1 level 3 support gem (at this point i havent even seen 1 greater jeweler's orb, in the game, all my skill are capped at 3 support slots, so pointless drop) and 1 random rare which i of course cannot use, so simply put 1 regal shard... thanks GGG thank you for giving me high risk no reward fights.

At this point i got so emotional and frustrated i wrote the so called litany, so sit back, relax, and enjoy my agony (as the internet and this forum is for everyones fun and joy (well, it is more fun than fighting the same rare fights for minutes and bosses annoying like Viper))

This game is not for casual/starter gamers of course... and i know this is one of the selling points, but this grew to an unbearable extent over the past few years, now only "GOD Gamers can enjoy this game anymore... so simply put, GGG decided to go on an all out war on the so called "Power creep" and decided to destroy the N letter from the FUN and leave it to FUUUUUUUUUUUU, just because they felt bad about them creating something fun, which was destroyed by the so called god gamers in literally no time, so at this point... now we got a sequel to an original Nerf Fest to a completely boring and slow paced game, where there is no fun but frustration ahead, with several minutes of struggling against rare/magic monsters and so... but please come with me to an emotional roller coaster below... Here is my thoughts after my first completion of the campaign.

General thoughts about the war against power creep: GGG is proud of their game difficulty and challenges put against players... and from season to season they try hard to force back the power creep simply nerfing everything, at this point they created a game unworthy of your time, when you have to simply put 5-10 minutes of effort to kill a rare enemy for 1 regal shard or worse drop and risking to get killed and reset the whole instance and your progress on your map to force you back to a waypoint and you have to fight yourself through all the new monsters again (Drowned city took me roughly 25 minutes to find the exit at Cruel Act 3... at the end i got swarmed by 3 rares got killed by 3 drawning orbs and slowed into it... and got ported back to the last seen waypoint which was unfortunately at the beginning of the map (yep, didn't manage to find any "Foul's cellar or whatever the name of the here take 20 gold coins if you can but first fight these 3 rares for 20 minutes for it...) bad luck wednesdays i guess... (Meanwhile god gamers already found a way to literally oneshot everything i am pretty sure because after the first 2 days of launch of 0.2 and introducing huntress, there were literally abundance of clips where god gamers literally oneshot bosses by abusing the uncertain rules of new skills... (spoiler alert i do not play huntress)

In ARPGs i am pretty tired of following guides and not being able to play whatever i want to try... in Path Of Exile 2 to this day you have 2 choices to play this game Follow a guide created by the top 1% of players who no matter what happens and what nerfs put into damage manage to find a way to create literal oneshot builds which you have no alteration for (no chance to put your own ideas/creativity into, because then the game feels awful and well... you will get oneshotted insted of course... OR!

You can choose to go try and enjoy the game (Oh wait... this is what games are meant to be for... joy and fun... oh wait...) anyways you try and go with a character you would like to try, you try and build a pretty balanced character on your own (with your sore knowledge of 140 hours in to PoE 2 and 5824 hours in to PoE) and you get slapped by random rare monsters after wasting several minutes fighting them but making 1 mistake or dodge rolling into some ground effects which cannot be seen because you chose to go with a full frost build which is beautiiful with all the shatter effects and such but in tight situations it is literal eye cancer (also if you built in some cast on freeze effects as well.
Get clapped and clapped again in the cheeks just to finally get on the verge of giving up, but finally you manage to get through the campaing once... well done... now... do it again, but on a harder difficulty (you are already 30 or so hours into this character... you got this... (no you do NOT)

After another 30 hours of eternal suffering and pain, you finally somehow manage to complete the cruel "addition" to finally get to maps... and you realize you managed to wast more then 3 days in real playtime on a character which you do not enjoy, you blame the game, you blame yourself, because you are not "smart enough" and you are not a god gamer, but finally you reached the endgame, you go for a trial run to check on the "new mapping" but you feel no revelation, or ease on your success and completion, nothing, but emptiness, because you achieved nothing, just playing a game not fun to play, you are in the end game with still 3 socketed skills because you are not a lucky type and you are not a trading god and not a god gamer either... but at least, after you somehow finish your first waystone for an average 50 minutes runtime (time to kill around 10 rare monsters of course getting the best mods on them possible Gargantuan, Extra life, Unbreakable, *Unkillable* Resistant to everything and leeching/regenerating of course...

You just realize, oh wait... i can finally quit this sh*t, I beat the campaign, i've seen the story way too many times, at this point I literally blast through (roughly 60 hours of gametime) the campaign not reading any story anymore, because at this point it became boring and i just played it through around 8 times now. Now i could start chasing uqique items and endgame bosses (more eternal suffering oh yeah... i would make me suffer more on the way to the pinnacle content) but i am tired... I am tired of this pacing of the game, the way no matter how hard i try to make my character work it will not, because there will always be a rare monster with all the possible mods you hate, that will literally frustrate you until you rage quit, or just kill you with an instant one shot... and at the end of the day... you wasted your time... your money for hothing but suffering... at this point, i would not dare to make any suggestions, or have some advise how to improve the lengthy early game curve, the annoying and unneccesseraily overpowered rare monsters, the unreasonably hard telegraphic literal gamer god design bosses such as the viper... because GGG will find a way to make it worse like here... take this little bit of improvements and oh also we added some nerfs to these three hundred things to make the game "balanced" so you cannot have your fun and blasty time, just overthink your build (not sleeping at night where you gone wrong with it) and also to feel yourself a beta/zeta gamer just because you are starting to think maybe Diablo IV or Torchlight Infinite is your game, because you like complexity and all, but at this point in your life you have only 1-2 hours daily to have fun, and you just want to have a blast, you want to get rewarded, if you played a game for more than 6000 hours you want to feel like you can figure out at least some aspects of the game, and you would like to think you understand some of the mechanics and aspects of the game pretty well... or you just want to lay back, and have fun, blasthing through any enemy coming your way not caring for anything in the world, just go through content, and overcome some minor challenges... (none of these apply to me or the game i loves so much i literally gave years of my life to so i am sad but i have to leave this game as it is... a beautiful memory of my past 10 years and move on because as i see it now, there are no more PoE 1 leagues (however the whole unfun thing started when someone decided to fight against power creep with unbeatable rare monsters introducing with Archnemesis mods a few leagues ago... so at this point the game fundamentally and definitely not for me... and as i see the direction where GGG drives things it will never be again...)

So at this point nothing more is left from my side just to say thank you for the beautiful memories and the fun learning curve which i hoped will never end i loved this game,
but just as the most painful love in this world it has to end, because it hurts me so much already, it causes so much pain, agony, frustration and anxiety that i have to leave...

Thank you again it was a blast... and mostly fun...
(except the last few years since there are only nerfs and making everything significantly harder... I almost completely forgot how to have fun already...)

If you read through this thank you for your time and effort. I am sorry but I am just like the same as I feel for this game design... I appreciate your effort to read through this, but i cannot even give you a candy for it, so here is your reward:

"Have a nice day!" (worths 1 gold - ingame)

That PoE1 became less FUN over the past years is extremely relatable.

It's still the best ARPG on the market, but many choices they made were horrible in my opinion. But hey, that's subjective.

From what you've written, I would say "play Last Epoch, that's massive FUN", but then I probably cause someone to flame me for bringing up LE, so...

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3764551

There is another thread on this with is so similar, it seems players that are playing the game alot is getting hurt the most.

I believe everyone was excited for 0.2.

With that much patches, quick fix and yet the game is still in a similar state is truly disappointing.