No variety. Boring spells.

Please add some more basic spells and buff underperforming ones. Nothing is fun to play as it is.

I've tried cold sorc which has one very weak frostbolt spell and a very strong cooldown frost wall as well as a slow comet. I feel like frostbolt has way too much of its damage in the explosion part of it, so you're forced into the slow playstyle of exploding frostbolts with cold snap and using frost wall on cooldown. It's not very fun, and a lot of the time you're waiting for cooldown.

Now let's look at fire sorc. Same thing here. Weak fireball, strong super long cooldown flameblast, as well as a weak flame wall and flame orb, and then "Ember fussilade" which has a very weird bugged playstyle at the moment where you are able to spam it and keep getting max charges. That makes it playable but seems to be annoying to do. You also got incinerate of course. Not great from what I've seen and not really my playstyle.

You also made huntress, which has a very strange playstyle where you need to intentionally get hit in order to parry, then dodge, and then do your spell. It's not fun. You could have done something way more interesting. There can be spell interactions in a fun way. Essence drain getting spread by contagion is one example. Frenzy charge playstyle is NOT it. Incredibly boring, and then once you have charges solved in some way (you've made this way too difficult by the way), then it's way too strong, especially for certain ascendancies.

Why is it taking so long to at least buff underperforming spells? That's at least a first step that would make it so we can have a little bit of fun, even though the bigger problem is that the spells are simply not particularly well designed or fun to play.

You leaving huntress abilities in a way overtuned state due to not wanting to upset people is making things even worse. Now the gap between every other build and the meta builds is so large that you feel stupid for play anything else.

The game has been out for quite some time now and your only focus seems to be on breaking any effective builds (not balancing, breaking entire builds). Why not bring overperforming builds down a bit and bring underperforming builds / spells up? I feel like you're focused on developing another build of the game behind the scenes with new classes and acts instead of making the current game fun by adding / tweaking spells. Your main efforts should be on making the current game fun, and the extra acts and classes should be second, not the other way around.

Agreed. Sorc spells are pretty lame with a few exceptions.
However, that might change because there will be 2 more caster classes with their own spell pools, I assume. We're currently seeing a game with around half it's content.

Who knows where it'll go but they already have companions and spectres so maybe we'll end up being able to make copies of monster spells too but that's doubtful with the heavy skill constraints we're seeing.

I just wish so many spells like Fireball weren't so lame, Comet could be turned into other elements, and +Levels weren't the only offensive mods that seem to matter. I was cruising through campaign until I outgrew my +level items that I needed to replace for items with better defenses. and can't find replacements. Now monster power is ramping beyond my ability to keep up until I get lucky.

Currently poe2 is suffering from poe1, 2-3 builds per season syndrome.
That's what I feared will occur here, and it did.
So many skills and spells but from all of those only 2-3 combos are working.
Huntress got either bleed or lighting spear build.
Witch got minions or thorns now
Sorc got cold snap.
Rest idk. Poe2 ninja site shows clearly what builds are trending by %. And its not a promising view.

They could do so many fun things if they weren't so focused on developing their new classes and acts, and perhaps not so locked into their vision that classes play one way and one way only, and no one is allowed to have fun.

For example, there could be a unique that turns frost nova into fire nova (and maybe now it would do more than 100 dps at level 90). One that turns frostbolts into chaos orbs, which would do damage and apply a stacking dot. Just some examples. Could be made more interesting with various spell interactions. And yeah, just simply buff underperforming abilities seems like a very simple thing to do.

One thing i was thinking awhile back is that spells have same list size as other weapons, while weapons have "attack" tag and so has better flexibility in swapping weapon types, spells kinda cant swap and are locked in narrow spell list since spells scale from spell damage. It maaaybe could work by swaping between wands and monk's staff or whatever but its quite awkward.