PoE 2 Isn’t a Souls-like — It’s a Casino Where the House Always Wins
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Honestly I think I got really lucky and somehow landed perfectly in the middle. I'll echo what I said in another thread and hopefully this doesn't come back and bite me in Act III lol.
Purely anecdotal here but my journey into the third Act has been incredibly fulfilling. I haven't looked at any builds, just followed my own corny high fantasy intuitions and I'd make accommodations to my build by not being conservative with my orbs on gear, grind a bit when the occasion called for it, and through these devious devices I was able to trounce everything up to Act III. It wasn't easy but it felt fair and organic. The efforts on balancing the game to achieve such an endeavor really has shown in my experience. They knocked this out of the park. |
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" My comment is more about the endgame. The campaign is okay — it’s long, but manageable even with white gear after a few tries. But what I personally want is to have a real sense of progression in the endgame. And right now, it feels completely RNG-based. Some players get lucky, drop one insanely valuable item, and take off in just an hour. Others are still in T10 maps with negative resistances because they just "got unlucky". Same goes for the Nexus system — if you’re lucky, you find them back-to-back. If you’re not… good luck grinding endlessly. |
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" Word. I can't opine on the endgame just yet. I guess it depends on where you're drawing the line in terms of progression. Me personally, I've never set my expectations to reaching the highest theoretical tier possible and just push my own build to its limits because finding some semblance of a consistent balance will be pie in the sky for some time. I do think that RNG should play a pivotal role in endgame to contribute to the fun factor and replayability. Folks getting luckier than others is just a reality with RNG and I just try and temper my expectations and remember why I play the game. I think your criticism isn't unfair though because I can fathom an issue disparity RNG could create so hopefully it's something they are looking at but in the spirit of your expression in the title, you just have to roll the bones and hope for the best sometimes, and be careful comparing your progression to others given the complexity of the game. |
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" Tell me if I’m wrong, but in the end, we all share the same goal — or at least I think so. The purpose of this kind of game is to make your character as strong as possible, right? And to achieve that, there should be different paths to power. For example, the harder the content you do, the better the rewards should be. The loot can (and should) remain random, but it must scale meaningfully with difficulty. Yet once again, I see someone in chat getting a Mirror in Act 3 Cruel, while others are grinding T16 fully juiced delirium maps and getting 4 Exalts. Sure, loot generation stays random — but it should improve as the content gets harder. Right now, it feels like being a miner working endlessly for a miserable wage. If we’re playing a game, it’s to have fun — and in a loot-based game, the fun comes from the loot. They could make the campaign harder, that’s totally fine. But what really matters is that our efforts — the dozens, maybe hundreds of hours we put in — should be rewarded. What worries me most is that GGG is owned by Tencent, and if you look at Supercell (also Tencent), all their games eventually became flooded with microtransactions — especially “pay-to-fast” models. And with how things are going right now, I can’t help but feel like PoE 2 could be heading in that direction — maybe slowly, maybe sneakily. We already get RMT spam every 5 minutes. Maybe one day they’ll just make it official and put it in the store. Have you noticed they’ve already added loot boxes? Okay, for now it’s just cosmetics — but we’re one step away from random currency or unique item boxes. And don’t forget, the game will be free to play at launch. That alone makes this shift toward monetization even more likely. There are a lot of little signs pointing in that direction — and I really, really hope I’m wrong. |
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It's fuckin' Diablo II-like
except way better not even really that hard once you figure out the mechanics of the bosses. 0.2 made it a little harder on players than it should have, particularly around act II for some reason |
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"Tencent owns GGG since 2018, so it's unlikely to see some weird P2W shifts in their MTX model. Furthermore, Tencent doesn't give a shit about the Western Client, they primarily want the rights to publish PoE in China, and THERE P2W stuff already exists for many years. On top, these "loot boxes" you are talking about are a thing for a long time. GGG even changed how their function from "completely random outcome" to "you can't get a skin twice". [Removed by Support]
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" Yes, Tencent has owned GGG since 2018, but back then, Path of Exile 1 was already a well-established game, with a loyal and passionate player base that was deeply attached to the game's core philosophy. A drastic shift toward a pay-to-win model or heavy monetization would have caused massive backlash, and the devs knew it. But now the situation is different. PoE 2 is a brand-new game, still in development, and it doesn’t yet have a solidified community around it. That gives them the freedom to shape it from the start toward a broader, more casual-friendly audience — with simplified builds, streamlined crafting, and a more accessible gameplay loop. And if that broader audience includes players willing to pay to progress faster or enhance their characters, I highly doubt GGG — or more accurately, Tencent — will hold back. This kind of business model isn’t driven by sentiment, especially when you look at other Tencent-owned studios like Supercell, where nearly every game ends up flooded with microtransactions. At this rate, it’s not unreasonable to think PoE 2 might slowly shift into a “pay-to-fast” system — first in a subtle, hidden way (like the constant RMT spam or random cosmetic loot boxes), and eventually more openly, perhaps even offering currency or random uniques for sale. |
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Pretty dangerous move, and there's nothing other than pure speculation saying that it could happen. They make a lot of money with the system they have. Despite how people feel about the devs for whatever reason, they obviously care a lot about their games and I know this is not a path that they want to go down
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" I feel like I'm noticing a very persistent pattern in the rhetoric from people who are unhappy with the current state of the game, and it is in these attempts to characterize experiences that obviously occur along a very broad spectrum of possibilities as instead being one of two possible extremes. What if I told you that between "your nexus nodes are back-to-back" and "good luck grinding endlessly" there exists a massive range of possible experiences in which the overwhelming majority of players will actually find themselves? Some of their nexus nodes will be near one another and others will be a little further away, but as long as they don't panic and lose their ever-loving minds at the thought that someone out there might be finding theirs a teensy tiny bit faster than them then it's actually fine and makes no difference in the grand scheme of things? |
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"There isn't really a reason to do any of it. Tencent is not really interested in the Western PoE audience. They want control over the Chinese Client to offer P2W there. Not only would a shift to P2W on the Western Client lose basically all PoE vets, but from what we know, it's in the contract between GGG and Tencent that GGG has the "power" over the Western Version. Or in other words, why would Tencent piss of the Western Community and lose ppl who pay for MTX, instead of just focussing on the Chinese Market, where way more ppl are willing to use P2W and well... more ppl in general. [Removed by Support]
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