POE 2 feedback after league completion

POE 2 Feedback
Who I am: age: 35 playing since january 2013 open beta. Construction Design Profesional. Game design hobbyist. With 10+ yrs experience. Pay for a supporter pack every few leagues I play. Play every few leagues. I’ll get 50-100 hrs in a league i play.

I never copy net builds. I exclusively homebrew or play “from the hip” my goal is never to be the best but to try to complete endgame content with a build i made from scratch (I will use tools like path of building)

Graphics / Sound / UI - pretty much perfect. The best game experience I have had in a long time. The graphics look great, the art is styled like very dark and historic fantasy. The sound queues are so good and create clarity in a visually cluttered game. The UI is smooth and reliable. The overall impact of the actions matches their intent so well that this ALONE puts this game above any other ARPG for me personally. When I click on an ability it does what I expect and feels how i want it to!

Core system, Gems - While i think this is an improvement from POE 1 it lost some of its charm. Critically the OPEN Exploratory character building feels limited (this may be due to devs forcing balance) but overall i want to be able to mix and match gems in every single way possible and not be limited by so many weapon types. The other important thing here is that fusings always had value while lesser jewlers orbs value approached 0 after your 20th or 30th orb. 1 copy of each support is great and forces creativity. % more values should feel more standardized (50% more when it applies to 1 hit, 40% more when it applies to conditional modifiers, 30% more when it comes with a drawback, 20% more for standard scaling) on support gems i don't mind being limited to weapon type or specific keywords/

Core System, Items - Items are similar to POE 1. I think both POE 1 and 2 items lack a sense of identity. A melee weapons feels so similar to all other melee weapons. Just like a ranged feels like a ranged and a spell feels like a spell. I think ALL items would benefit from an impactful inherent modifier which makes its type feel unique. IE I think all boots should have an inherent move speed rolled on a 1% basis. OR add some ground effect or slow or free mitigation etc to each boot type. A hammer and a mace should feel different, even if just in animation.

Core System, Skill tree - Both POE 1 and 2 skill trees are so cool. Just keep developing and refining them. Notables which add impactful and unique effects feel good to take. Limit the number of notables which do the same thing as a normal node or 2-3 other notables. Overall a players choice in the skill tree is well balanced in terms of the portion of their character that it makes. Pathing sometimes feels like a chore / specific lines through the tree are strictly worse than others (5 nodes to go one way vs 9 nodes to go another).

Pacing - The game pacing is in an odd state. Act 1 is near perfect, Act 2 feels good, but a bit boring until the boss fight. Act 3 is a grind with some strange difficulty spikes (depending on build) and an incredibly easy boss. Act 4-6 is a placeholder. Early mapping absolutely sucks. As you are just forced to make progress with no real variety of goals /checkpoints. All the good feelings come right as you reach pinnacle content for all the league mechanics (which happen at the same time) and start to feel some real variety and progress all at once. Then all of a sudden you are done. Either because you complete the content or your build is unable to progress.

I want more CHOICE in my REWARDs as a progress in early mapping, i should be able to reach 1-2 pinnacle content bosses (and therefore rewards for their map content) much earlier than others so as to keep things interesting. Generally as an adult with a family and job the game simply requires too much time investment for me to make a regular effort to complete it. Let's say I can commit to ⅓ leagues and ⅓ of my homebrew builds can actually reach endgame content. You are getting 1/9 completion and generally financial commitment from me. If you made this so i could commit to ½ leagues and ½ of my homebrew buildings reach endgame content you will get ¼ completion and financial commitment from me essentially doubling my input to the game. Note that if I was winning 100% of the time I would be bored and not committed at all. ½ - ½ is a really nice goal for an average player. On that note i feel like much of the game is balanced around the highest 1% of players or the ??% of players which copy their online build guides. Its okay for the most elite of the elite to find the game “easy” the addition of things like T4+ bosses is a great goal for these players to face.

On that note the game needs some serious build adjustment and teaching tools. Arbiter of ash as a “game boss” does not allow for players' builds to feel impactful. Basically the best possible builds are those with high move speed and high damage. This is limiting the role playing / character building aspect of an ARPG. melee abilities need to deal a % more damage than ranged similar to how much % safer ranged abilities are than melee. Attacks need to have some guaranteed campaign scaling. & the campaign needs some new player tools to teach them what is important. Simple things like explaining to players the importance of defensive stats like resistances when they reach the end of the campaign. Something the help point out to players what of their equipment they should be looking to improve. Reminders to change up support gems as they progress. Etc. I feel like amyn players i have introduced to the game hit a stumbling block and end of campaign / early mapping which is entirely teachable with in game lore.

Core system, Atlas - The endgame system is expectedly lacking due to early access. Some things are very good. The “infinite” expanse of the atlas is so aspirational but in reality falls flat. I will reiterate the amount of total time invested is not realistic for a normal working class person to maintain in a single league. More importantly there is not enough variety within exploration. I want to find nodes FULL of citadels, FULL of unique maps, or full or other cool, non repetitive content. I want the atlas tree to allow me to actually chose something rather than 10 nodes which all give +3% item rarity give me 2 nodes with +10% item rarity, give me nodes which trade off enemy damage types or trade off reward types for another (+5% item suffix mod tier, -5% prefix mode tier, or +15% gold - 5% currency items ). Make the atlas tree feel like it is a CHOICE rather than just “more good stuff and bad stuff”

Core System, Crafting - This needs some work. Most importantly the current system all revolves around a trickle down time economy where currency is most valuable to the highest level players and items are most valuable to the lowest level players. So it is always beneficial for a lower level character to sell their currency to a high level character and buy their items. This core design is preventing a large user group from having fun crafting items. The entire system needs to be rebalanced to allow for early game crafting to be impactful and valuable. Perhaps the most critical to this is making early game crafting understandable and accessible to new players. There should be more opportunity for new players to “make mistakes” during the campaign and learn to craft gear. Maybe a few quest rewards should be item crafting sequences where the player is forced to make an item with some orbs that must be spent in that sequence. Deterministic crafting should be available earlier but locked to lower tier equipment. Because if a player never gets to use an omen of whittling on a shity level 10 item they dont get to learn why its so important later in the game.

Game balancing - Just a few notes here, i think that the player base should be receptive to smaller balance changes, multiple times in a league. If an ability is too good tone it down 2% and tone the bad abilities up 2% THEN later feel free to do it again pumping those that are still to good / bad 2%. Never nerfing the best builds encourages “net decking” and never buffing the worst builds discourages creativity.

Summary - The game feels so good, it’s rigging / animation and core programming has huge potential. The worst parts relate to a lack of understanding and choice for an average player. It is a great scaffolding with a few design flaws. I would encourage the use of some infometrics to get feedback rather than just relying on THESE types of posts.