Feedback on Path of Exile 2 — After Playing PoE1 and Looking Ahead to 0.3

First of all, I want to thank the development team for all the hard work put into PoE2, and a special shoutout to the community managers for gathering and processing our feedback.

Initial Thoughts
- Progression is Item-Dependent: As mentioned in the Zizaran interview, player power mainly comes from gear. However, drops are limited in quantity compared to PoE1. This is good, but it also means upgrades are more rare, especially when gear must meet multiple requirements (e.g., Energy Shield + correct resistance). The chances of a meaningful upgrade feel too low without a crafting safety net.

- Crafting Progress in PoE1 vs PoE2: In PoE1, I could progress my crafting and character at nearly any stage of mapping, even when failing content. PoE2 lacks that sense of constant growth. From Tier 1 to Tier 14 maps, the difficulty feels mostly flat, and most meaningful content (e.g., Invitations, Logbooks with boss) is locked behind T15. This creates a large gap between the start of mapping and T15 with nothing in the middle.

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Crafting System
- Essences: I think Essences are bad in their current state. Here’s why: if I find a magic item (e.g., boots) with one really good affix and want to build on top of it, I can’t use a regular Essence — only a Greater Essence works. This means regular Essences are only useful for crafting on white, which makes them feel pretty limited. My suggestion is simple: Regular Essences should work like Augments, adding a new affix to magic items. Greater Essences should work like Exalts, adding a new affix to rare items.

- Crating tier modifiers: In PoE2 endgame, getting high-tier modifiers becomes increasingly important — and right now, there’s no clear way to target-remove low-tier mods. My suggestion is to add a new currency, maybe called Crafting Hammer, which lets players remove weaker tiers by consuming more currencies: Spend 3 Augments/Exalts to remove a T1 mod. Spend 5 for T2. Spend 8 for T3. This doesn’t need to scale linearly, and it should work in combination with Essences, so a player could, for example, use an Essence of Speed + 7 Augments to guarantee at least a T4 movement speed mod.

- Recombinators: I’ve tried using Recombinators, but they never seem to work — my lowest roll was 12%. I see two ways to fix this:
1. Make Expedition passive tree nodes improve Recombinators, increasing their success rate.
2. Allow players to “overcharge” Recombinators by using additional items or charges to boost the odds, also unlocked by tree nodes in expedition Tree.
This solves two problems: It improves usability of Recombinators (right now they feel too low to bother with). It adds a new sense of progression to the endgame through tree investment for better crafting.

- Affix Swapping for Resistances: Resistance pressure in PoE2 is really high. I dropped a better helmet recently, but couldn’t use it — even though it had +300 Energy Shield, it only had Lightning Resistance (which I was already overcapped), while my old one gave me 54% Cold Resistance. Two possible solutions: Allow mod swapping (e.g., change Lightning Res to Cold Res on an item). Bring back hybrid resistance mods like in PoE1 (e.g., “+20% to Fire and Cold Res”), perhaps as endgame-only mods.

- More Crafting Modifiers & Unlocking: One of my favorite things in PoE1 was unlocking new crafts through mechanics like Syndicate. I don’t know if Syndicate would fit PoE2, but I’d love a similar system. It could:
Let players unlock special craft modifiers in endgame content.
Provide a sense of progression and crafting mastery.
Be tracked in a Crafting Book, where players can see what they’ve unlocked and what they still need.

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Charms Feedback
- I think the current charm system feels limited — especially compared to PoE1. In PoE1, flasks offered a wide variety of effects and gave builds a lot of utility and flexibility. Players also had access to tinctures, which added even more options. In PoE2, charms feel much more static, and there just aren’t enough types or tiers to support diverse playstyles.

-Charm of Speed: This is an idea for a utility-focused charm that improves pacing without breaking combat balance: Grants +20% Movement Speed if you haven’t been targeted by an enemy in the last 4 seconds. Consumes 1 charm charge per second while active.
This helps solve a common issue — navigating large or maze-like maps. Even though PoE2 maps are smaller than PoE1's, they feel slower because we lost quicksilver flasks and movement skills. This charm would make backtracking and exploration feel faster, without letting players skip combat — since it deactivates when enemies aggro you.

- High-Tier Charms: Some low-level charms like Ruby and Sapphire (which grant temporary elemental resistances) fall off in the late game. I’d love to see high-tier versions that: Provide Maximum Resistances in addition to base resists. Possibly have longer durations or stronger effects. I know charm quality is planned for the future, so this may get addressed eventually — but even with that, more endgame-relevant charms would go a long way in making charms a permanent part of high-level builds, not just leveling tools.

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Build Variety:
- Many skills — especially support gems — feel like they were designed to work only in specific combinations. I often feel boxed in by attribute requirements, the affixes I need on gear to keep a build viable, or the rigid paths I’m forced to take on the skill tree. For example, I found Olrovasara during an Expedition and thought it would be fun to build an Amazon-style character around its accuracy bonus. But because that item naturally pushes you toward the right side of the tree, I was once again stuck building Energy Shield — and honestly, I’m just tired of it. PoE1’s tree gave me more flexibility to support creative or off-meta ideas. While I appreciate PoE2’s improvements to skill gem design, the passive tree — and the synergy between support and skill gems — feels much more limiting overall.

- Melee feels weak. After playing ranged builds in PoE2, the difference in survivability is night and day. Many campaign monsters that are dangerous to my melee Monk were trivial for my archer — not because of gear, but because my archer could kill them before they even get close.

- Life builds feel bad. A lot of players criticize armor, but I’ve tried life + evasion three times now — especially on melee — and ended up completely frustrated each time. Melee characters also suffer disproportionately against mechanics like fire orbs and chaos plants that track the player.

- My suggestion: take a deep look at tree balance and work toward making more gems viable in a wider variety of setups. Improve synergy between support gems and core skills in 0.3. Also consider adding a few generic skills — I know some skills are gated by weapon type, but there's room for more universal options like Spectral Throw from PoE1.

- Lastly, I understand GGG gets pushback for nerfs, but I think it’s better to say, “GGG gets punished by players for heavy nerfs.” A 30% damage cut all at once is way worse than adjusting something by 5% over time. Early access should be used for iterative balancing. In 0.2, a lot of big changes didn’t hit the mark — Lightning Spear is a good example. It felt underwhelming early until players figured out how to scale it. A small 5% early-level damage buff might’ve helped, but instead it got a 25% attack speed boost, which arguably made it too strong. Smaller, more frequent changes are easier to evaluate.


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Progression:

- As I mentioned in my initial thoughts, progression in the endgame feels off. There's almost no noticeable difficulty difference between T1 and T14 maps — once I fixed my defenses with just two items in T1, I was able to clear T14. The only real barrier was found bosses to drop high tier waystone, and even then, only in T15 did the difficulty actually feel like it scaled up. I think the gap in challenge between tiers should be more pronounced, and players should feel rewarded across the entire progression.

- Ideally, a player progressing from T1 to T14 should gradually unlock harder content — like Simulacrum, Expedition, Ritual, and Breach at T0–T1 difficulty — while something like Arbiter T0 should remain a significant milestone, a boss to face only after you’ve explored atlas and acquired strong gear. This mirrors how the Maiven work in PoE1, and it gives players a goal to work toward.

- But to feel progression, players need more than just a difficulty curve — they need consistent power growth. That’s why I started by talking about crafting: right now, item progression feels probabilistic. You might spend hours grinding and never find a real gear upgrade unless you trade. I don’t have anything against trade, but I believe most of the player base prefers to improve through crafting, drops, or deterministic systems — not just by buying what they need.

- As GGG mentioned in the Zizaran interview, power should come from gear and be amplified by skill. The problem is that amplification is constant, but power acquisition is random. If drop rates are poor or upgrades don’t come, the experience feels stagnant — and making every monster a loot piñata just to increase the number of dice rolls isn’t a satisfying solution.

- There’s a lot of talk about meaningful combat, but ARPGs are also progression games. Meaningful progression should be just as important. In one of the early Tavern Talks (with DM and Gazzy), someone said that a player should be able to overcome a challenge either by skill or by gear. And it’s something I don’t feel in PoE2 right now — and I’m not sure it’s even being actively discussed. Overcoming a challenge with skill is satisfying, but so is powering up through progression to the point where you need less mechanical skill. Both are valid, rewarding paths — and both should be supported.

One small suggestion to support smoother progression: consider giving players a few guaranteed items from campaign quests, similar to PoE1. This could help avoid softlocks where a player simply can't find a necessary upgrade to keep moving forward, especially for newer players.

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Towers and Waystones:
Towers feel out of place in the current progression flow. While exploring the Atlas, I want to focus on finding corruption to level up my Atlas skill trees, searching for citadels, and improving my character's gear. However, Towers create a situation where I feel forced to stop and “juice” specific parts of the map. This creates a clash between the exploration aspect and the need to focus on Towers, which ultimately detracts from both.

In my opinion, Towers should be reworked to still guarantee vision but should not directly impact loot drops. The mechanics of juicing a map and improving loot quality should be entirely separate from the Tower system to avoid unnecessary friction between these elements.

As for Waystones, having rarity and quantity modifiers implemented like in PoE1 would be a much better design. In versions 0.1 and 0.2, crafting Waystones with good modifiers using Omens is the best approach, and only using Waystones with increased rarity modifiers is the optimal solution. However, this creates a significant disadvantage for players who are unaware of this mechanic, which heavily penalizes new players. A more intuitive design could ensure that all players, regardless of experience, have a fair opportunity to progress.

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Average Time to Finish a Map:
Let's assume that, on average, a player needs 30 maps to reach T15 and another 30 maps to prepare for the endgame boss fight. Taking a generic player who spends about 30 minutes per map at the endgame, that’s 30 hours of gameplay just to interact with the first endgame content. Then, an additional 15 hours per boss fight. Even if we reduce this time to 15 minutes per map, that still means a player will need around 7.5 hours per boss fight, so if they play 2 hours a day, they’ll reach an endgame fight every 4 days on average.

This is why skills like Lightning Strike (LS) and Heralds are so desirable — they dramatically reduce the time required to clear a map. I don’t think GGG should fight against this but rather allow more skills to become viable for fast clears, especially with investment. As the tiers of Waystones become more distinct in difficulty, players should be able to start a tier taking 15 minutes per map, but with investment, reduce it to around 5 minutes easily. However, it seems that GGG doesn’t want map clears to be too fast. Still, the issue is that many maps do not provide meaningful progression. If a player runs 5 maps in a row without dropping any gear, currency, or significant progress toward an endgame boss fight, it becomes grinding. This kind of progression grind can wear players down.


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Biomes:

I really like the idea of biomes, but they feel underutilized and seem like random pieces thrown into the world. I think a better world generator would help make biomes feel more unique and expansive. For example, a player seeing a grass plain or a desert should evoke a sense of exploration and distinctiveness. If biomes felt more meaningful, it would make Atlas exploration more interesting. Additionally, focusing the Atlas progression on biomes could allow players to specialize in certain biomes, with buffs to drops or other rewards based on the biome they choose to focus on.

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Atlas progression:

The new Atlas progression is better in some ways but also worse compared to 0.1. It’s better because it pushes players to engage with unique scenarios, but it’s worse because it lacks consistency. A player can spend hours searching for corruption without being able to progress on the Atlas skill tree.

My solution is simple: introduce more parallel ways to progress in the Atlas skill tree, such as looking for corruption, completing unique maps, or exploring different biomes. For example, a player could be guaranteed to fight against each of the major bosses (except for the Arbiter) in the early stages of their map exploration. Upon completing these boss fights, the player would gain Atlas points.

Let’s say the first time a player places a tablet for any endgame content in a tower, it generates a special map. This map would allow the player to experience the first encounter with that boss, earning the first 2 points for their specific Atlas tree and an additional 2 points for the general Atlas tree.

Another idea: If the player explores every biome, they should be rewarded with Atlas points.

I believe that having more parallel ways to gain Atlas skill tree points would make the game more enjoyable and significantly improve the feeling of player progression.

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PS.: I stopped playing PoE2 because I didn’t feel like my progress was meaningful. It seemed like the only way to progress was by acquiring currency to buy items from the trade site, which just wasn’t engaging. I’m sharing these thoughts in the hopes of sparking a conversation about how progression can be improved in a way that feels rewarding. I believe a system where skill, time, and effort directly contribute to progression — both through loot and crafting as well as exploration and Atlas advancement — will make the experience far more engaging and enjoyable for players. I hope GGG can explore ways to balance meaningful progression with the challenge and excitement that we all love about the game.

''the vision'' chico, ''the vision'' never lies.