Feedback on Dawn of the Hunt (huntress, playing hc)

Hi all,

wanted to give a short feedback on dawn of the hunt. After my first, enthusiastic feedback with suggestions (see here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3680526), and a long break inbetween, I played the game again, as I was excited to try out Dawn of the hunt. I liked Huntress and I was very eager to try out her skills.
A lot has changed since the last time I played poe2, much for the better. For instance, towers are much better, and endgame feels more diverse. When I played last time in softcore league, endgame became very dull. It was hard to progress, and every upgrade cost 100 of divines which were very cumbersome to find.
But let me comment on my experience in Dawn of the hunt. I was playing Bleed Ritualist in Hardcore league. Got to level 85, tier 15 maps. I played hardcore mainly because in my opinion the economy is much cleaner and less saturated. Also, I played in semi-selffound (only using what I found/crafted, but selling anything I didnt need) through the whole campaign, to get the experience of crafting myself.

1) Huntress
- overall well designed character
- too many skills are hit and run in my opinion, like Rake and Blood hunt. Rake should be more like Cleave in poe1, stacking with AOE. It would be more fun to use.
- Skills like Spear of Solaris take too much time to cast. By the time you cast it, you might be dead already. Cast time should be reduced to make it viable.
2) Huntress vs Deadeye
- you cannot be serious to make Wind serpent's fury that good, and then make the arguably best huntress-skill be much better in the hands of Deadeye (because of charge generation)?
- In this regard, I feel that in the current build of poe2, characters are too much alike. If you make for instance a build that touches the starting point of Ranger and Huntress, you can choose without any downside the best ascendancy build for your class, even if it is counterintuitive (using Deadeye with spears for example) I am sure there are similar examples with other classes. Maybe make spears Huntress-only (generally introducde class-specific items)? This would change the situation and make builds more unique and distinct.
3) Skill tree
- Imho still needs more work. The problem with life vs ES still exists. You can stack ES with the tree and not life, which does not make any sense whatsoever.
- ES or hybrid ES/life will be always superior to pure life, unless you play glasscannon or dont care about dying.
4) One-shot mechanics
- My character was using Rake and felt fairly strong. I was stacking all three defenses: max block (75%), decent Armour (about 65%) decent evasion (about 67%). Max resistances, except Chaos at about 60%. About 3k life and 100 ES.
- But then I got to a tier 15 tower map with a boss, and it had this weird Lightning Blackjaw variant inside. I ran past it to hit its minions/mobs around. Guess what happened? It one-shot me offscreen.
- With the amount of gear and defenses I had, this just should not happen. It was not a pinnacle boss or anything special, and the Waystone was on purpose only magic with affixes not dangerous. This feels like a very old problem that poe1 also used to have - random mini bosses possibly being way to overpowerd in terms of damage.
- Interesting and engaging gameplay would be if it could hit me for maybe 2k life, possibly in somewhat quick succession of hits, but so I can still react/leech life back and take some pots...but this was really demotivating and bad in my opinion (and made me ultimately quit for this league at least).
Either monster damage needs to be reworked, or defenses need to be boosted. Currently the formula is off
5) Fluency
- Poe2 currently still feels slow and clunky, and when I was checking global chat during league start, a lot of people felt the same way. The rhoa mount has not changed that, and it is also really only usuable for ranged builds effectively.
- People have started abusing Rake with parry/animation cancelling to progress with somewhat reasonable speed...and it is currently the only way to enjoy playing the campaign.
- I mean when I first played the campaign, I had a blast. It felt like a lot of fun. But now when you know everything, and you even have to do it twice (2nd time in cruel), it feels just cumbersome and more a necessity than actual fun. I think most players just want to be able to blaze through - like in poe1 - cause that actually would be fun. But in poe2, this can only be done with Rake and animation cancelling.
- We need much higher movement speed or quicksilver flasks or whatever to increase fluency. If I check other games (last epoch for instance), movement speed is also much higher. In poe1 it was much higher. I dont understand why poe2 has reduced pace so much. Surely, to some extent for engaging and also more intense gameplay, but not sure if this is long-term the right direction.
6) Boss and monster HP
- Related to the previous point, monster HP, especially from bosses, is way too high. I was making sure to always use the best spear I could aquire from the vendor, or selffound, often socketed with a physical damage rune (and obviously the best supports for a bleed build, that is +% more physical damage). Still, my damage didnt feel like really popping off through the whole campaign. Always needed multiple hits to kill normal monsters...
- And dont get me started with bosses. They have a billion HP, and you need to go through their cycles often multiple times. This really feels cumbersome and like a necessity. Even if you aim to have engaging gameplay - at times you can hit the bosses, they should lose a significant portion of life, and not just 0.01%...note I am not talking about pinnacle bosses.
- I realize some content is intentionally harder, but do you really want to have that for every single boss in the campaign?
(At I sidenote, I realized way too late that stomping ground + str scaling + Rake is OP early on. That would have changed my opinion likely, but my statement is not only valid for huntress but for all classes)

As usual, there is no tl;dr.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next season :)