Overall Feedback (long read, no tldr)

I've been playing Poe since betrayal league 3.5. I have god knows how many hours in Diablo 2 and 3 and two playthroughs of Diablo 1. After I stopped playing WoW seriously, PoE 1 became my main game. I have about 5000 hours across both games and want to add 5000 more over the coming years. I want this game to succeed and wanted to give my feedback on the good and bad in the current state of the game.

First of all, I would like to start with something that I believe the team nailed. The tone and story of the campaign are perfect; I cannot wait to see the full 6 acts. The artwork and design of the campaign areas and endgame maps are stunning, with an audio track that makes the world you're building feel dangerous, ominous, and alive. The animations of the characters and the new skills are so vibrant and impactful that it makes the game such a joy to play button press to button press.

The boss fights are epic, and with the correct tuning, I hope they will feel deadly every time I play through them. The monsters feel dangerous for the most part, especially on a league launch. Their design, from their animations to the skills they use, is excellent. They feel alive and change the way you deal with each monster in terms of the skills you use to defeat them. Not just something that's going to run at you and AA you or shoot arrows at you. Love it.

Items and loot

Relying on bases/rares from the ground is uninteresting; it reminds me of Diablo 4 before they changed items to have three mods—you would fill your inventory with rares and salvage anything you didn't like. PoE loot is like this currently. Currency is hard to farm; atlas strategies take way too long to get going and seem unimpactful, and powering your build relies on looting lucky rares that you can either equip or sell to help you buy better gear. If you're in SSF, it's harder, I would argue, as the lack of crafting options and building items from the ground up has made PoE2 a slot machine. Sure, you can find really great gear, but it is so easy to brick with no way to invest in recovering your dropped item. Once an item is bricked, you can't save it with meta mods, which are expensive in PoE 1 and bring actual value to the currencies we use to trade (divine orbs).

Tiered gear has potential if this is the path you are committed to. Personally, I would have tiered bases be rarer, much rarer than they currently are, and have locked affix pools the higher they go. Tier one rolls mods in the 0-100 percentile, tier two rolls mods in the 15-100 percentile, and so on until you find a tier 5, which can roll mods in the 75-100 percentile. Obviously this can be changed to fit whatever you deem as balanced, but tiers could apply to uniques as well when using divines on higher-tiered unique bases that have breakpoints on the scaling of their mods.

Overall, if this is the path we're going down, there needs to be a way to make the loot from the ground feel tangibly important. Looting a tier 5 base with half great stats on it and then slamming it with an exalt that adds 14 life or 1-3 physical damage never feels good. Having 'chase' crafting bases and unique bases adds purpose to the items as they currently are with the current level of crafting we can access. Regardless, crafting currencies needs to ramp up, and collecting large amounts of bases needs to ramp down.

Personally, if I see a rare base I could use, I will always pick it up to see what mods it has, but it should never be the case that you have quad tabs full of white bases to use 1-2 attempts on trying to hit the mods that you need. There are stash tabs being ported from PoE 1 that were designed for you to have hundreds of certain currencies for crafting to use.

Crafting and currencies

Let's be honest, compared to PoE 1, the crafting with targetable, but not deterministic outcomes doesn't exist to the extent that it should. Now, while I agree it needed to be diluted from the very complex levels of the first game to assist with the barrier to entry for new exiles, the current iteration is an abolishment of what we know. We've had fractured orbs that help lock mods you would like to keep, but ultimately, no matter which way you cut it, there are almost no ways to work on items and farm currencies to create your own or add to bases we have collected. The fact currencies as a whole are far less impactful also diminishes your want to farm them, which gives you less incentive to want to keep playing in endgame or interacting with its systems. The building of a character through gear is vastly less interesting than its predecessor.

Basic currencies are almost there. I don't mind alterations being removed if annulment orbs were about 6000x more common than they currently are. I really feel like annulments need to be as common as a regal orb with the current system we have. They also need a vendorable way to collect them.

Essences are in a really sorry state. I would love for them to just be as they were in the first game—reroll the item with a fixed mod. Using those on a fractured base would be nice and bring value to essence farming. Currently people are collecting quad tabs full of items to spam essences on rather than collecting the currency and using the stash tab that was created for essences to craft an item. This seems backwards.

Are omens there to replace meta crafting? 'Cannot be changed' omens need to be added to the game. The current system feels out of reach to interact with due to the good omens' scarcity and availability.

Catalysts are fine; they need no change.

Soul cores and runes do a good job of filling gaps or enhancing items that are missing res/att/dam, etc., like the crafting table. Would love to see way more of these and a couple more tiers linked to pinnacle content. Corrupted runes as well.

Things that I would like to return before launch: influenced items with at least 2 different influence types, unveiled mods to add some choice to certain items, and the veiled orb. Corrupted currencies, biome-specific prefixes/suffixes similar to delve, hinikoras lock, add influence exalts (warlords exalt) items from relevant bosses, Blessed orbs brought back and divine orbs being separated from them. Endgame mapping feels directionless without crafting that has value for any game mode.

Scarabs when and how. There is room for them in the map device, hoping they make it in before launch.

Skills, combos, and charges.

I think that this one is probably the most important one on the list because above the loot and crafting, the way the game plays is THE most important aspect of it. Loot and crafting support the feel, but moment-to-moment combat is far and away the most important. There is a large part of the community that wants to build their build in PoB and simulate it in-game by pressing one skill that is enhanced by items, the skill tree, support gems, and auras. Personally, if PoE2 ended up degenerating into this, I would stop playing. I've played that game. PoE 1. For 7 years. I had fun and will more than likely revisit it when a league launches that looks interesting enough to play. Thats why i play it, for the mechanics of the game.

I play Poe 2 on the other hand for its combat and when it polished hopefully its juicy, inifinite, content filled endgame. PoE 2's combat is vastly more interesting than its predecessor, and I hope that GGG sticks to their guns and continues to make a NEW game rather than going anywhere close to how PoE 1 plays. Crafting and loot in general need to compensate reward-wise to make sure that the game, while slower paced, doesn't feel sluggish to play through in the endgame. More content on maps, more rewarding loot drops, and more endgame content to farm for crafting on a map-to-map basis.

Below I will go through some examples of how my characters played over the last two seasons in relation to their skill gems and supports and how I like to play the game and want to play it in the future. First lets talk about gems.

Supports

Some of the support design needs an overhaul. Let's use an example: Jolt, the spear support skill, is incredibly well designed; it gives you increased damage and clear for being less trigger-happy and incentivizes you to use another skill for single target. This is the right approach I would like to see in as many future skills gems as possible. Salvo is another gem that works in a similar way that lets you build a skill up to unleash a devastating final strike that increases damage and clear. Longshot is similar to these but is based on your positioning. These are all good examples of well-designed skills. There are plenty more for multiple classes, but these are what I've been using mainly for the current and previous seasons that come to mind.

There are plenty of staples as well that just increase throughput, which is needed to help scale damage without requirements, and I believe we need more of these, but not an overabundance. They need to be conditional to different styles of skills so as not to incentivize all damage on the 'one button and boom' playstyle.

Examples of support skill design I would like to see reworked and for future development to stay away from. Overextend, skills like this have too large of a downside to consider using properly. To equip one gem, you have to solve the issue of potentially being stunned all the time, and being killed. It's just a really poor trade-off. Increasing daze buildup from monster hits after critically striking would be a better solution, rather than dazing yourself. Alignment, one of those 'damage on Tuesdays' ones that I would like to see not make a return. Too conditional in its current state. Perhaps making the arc 180 would help with its usage. Dauntless, not sure where this skill would fit in outside of supercharged slam, perhaps. Even then, having to stay stationary for almost 4 seconds to see full payoff seems like gameplay we shouldn't be promoting, in my opinion.

To be honest, there aren't as many that are poorly designed, and I'm sure with the new classes we will see more interesting combos between skills and the supports we have to choose from.

Skills and combos

I've been lucky the last two leagues, with the classes I've played having multiple skills for different situations. Monk was using a charged staff as my active buff for single target and ranged, initiating with Hand of Chayula to curse them all with conductivity, Tempest Flurry up close to burn down those rares with loads of attack speed, and throwing a bell on the nasty ones or bosses during burn phases. Then using storm wave as my safe clearing option from range. That's 5 active abilities I had the option of using, and I didn't always need to. For the most part, I could spam Storm Wave when I had enough gear to clear through maps quickly, but if I was doing juiced breaches or fighting an insane essence monster, I had a kit there to deal with them. This, for me, is ideal, and where I would like to see all well-designed builds combo-wise.

Swapping to Ice Strike to deal more damage more easily with the tier 4 breach boss I was farming made the game far less enjoyable because it devolved into this 1-button play style. I hated it and ended up quitting shortly after.

Amazon, while most people would say it is a one-button build, is not. I am actively applying my mark to get frenzy charges, clearing with lightning spear, using storm lance for single-target situations, barraging for much larger clears of more single targets, and I have a leap to get over terrain if I get stuck or out of situations where I get walled in by mobs. Again, while at a glance it seems like a 1-button build, there are cogs in the background that I use to keep the build flowing. I'm sure when you are a mirror worth into a character, you can just spam lightning spear, but that's the payoff, I guess, for massive investment.

Ok, let's talk combos and charge generation. Personally, the active damage mitigation with parry and the way it enables skills to deal damage is not for me and should not ever be a core focus of how you generate charges. Killing Palm and Cull the Weak are better options early, as they let you set up for the next fight as you get rolling, but trying to either time a parry and having to put yourself in harm's way or standing there trying to parry an attack that can stun you and kill you (happened a lot the first few days) is poor design in my books. Especially for only one charge. If parrying an attack gave you max charges, it would be more bearable, but ultimately I would like to see more active ways through supports and abilities to generate charges. Like detonating a skill with another skill gives you max frenzy, power, or endurance. Armor breaking, fully stunned, dazed, etc., there is plenty of support there that promotes building up these conditions, but it ends up becoming a number increase or purely an offensive/defensive layer in the case of a warrior.

I actually really like the way the spear skills use charges to change the skills, but the ways to generate them are awful at the moment. Even in endgame, the passive setup is just something you have to do to avoid using the early game tactics which are tedious later on. I think giving more skills from every weapon type charge spending capabilities to alter the outcome of a skill is super interesting. It doesn't need to be everywhere, but in more places than it is, given that ways to generate charges come with them.

The above-mentioned examples are the way I think about combo gameplay, through the charge system altering attacks to short cooldown buffs that enhance abilities. I don't think it needs to be deeper than that.

Mana

The mana cost of skills is simply too high for a lot of classes that don't have access on the tree to counteract them. Mana costs simply need to be reduced to a point where you can use skills frequently enough, especially in boss fights, without ooming. If a boss is stunned and you want to be spamming , you will want to use mana pots to recover mana from that burn period. Not having to use them so you can keep attacking during that period. There's a balance here; I hope the team can find it.

Movement and dodge

I strongly agree that spammable movement skills are not the right direction for PoE 2. It just becomes something you do rather than walking. With WASD being most people's main choice of movement, I don't think people realize that if spammable movement skills were reintroduced, it would just gut the entire WASD system and all the work that went into making the skills usable around it this time last year. Personally, I'm glad you're steering clear of it. That being said, people love movement skills, and while there are a few, there are other ways to help people traverse terrain and deal with some of the trickier map layouts.

Adding Dodge Roll as a passive skill slot skill like auto attack, with modifiable supports that change the way it works: leaps, dashes, blinks, and retreats. The gems that are currently consuming spirit should be put here. All at the cost of being able to spam with cooldowns added. A 2-3 second timer per use should do it, and obviously not the range of the full screen like PoE 1, but longer than the current dodge roll distance by a little bit. Speed boost support gems for clearing terrain for a short period after—things like this might be an avenue to bridge the gap for the PoE 1 enjoyers.

The Atlas and the Tree

It's funny; I had some of the changes that have already gone in typed out in my 0.1 review notes, but man, this is a tricky one. I think some people love it or hate it. Personally, I think the new atlas is far more interesting at a glance than the old one, but it has some pretty glaring issues.

Atlas tree progression and strategies

The previous tree was way more interesting and ideal than the current layout. Having one large tree that you progressed through felt like you were working towards a goal and ultimately towards your endgame farming setup in the higher-tier maps you played through. It was a separate power fantasy in itself on top of gearing your character. That needs to return, in my opinion. While bossing is obviously a focus for PoE 2, which I personally love, I still don't like that you have to do increasingly hard boss fights that take ages to farm the shards to get the points to juice the content on the maps. Items from bosses should be reward enough, as they have the most raw value and impact on builds. A return to a larger singular tree with options for juicing, bossing, and mapping for all league mechanics. Combining what we currently have into one is a start and using the pervious one as a guide on how it should look by 1.0 is what i would like to see.
Waystones and maps

Personally, I think players not having a choice over which layouts they like to run is not good. While the biome system, however, adds a nice layer of complexity and intrigue into further design, more control over how you play your endgame is needed. In tandem with my point above, choice and control during and after progression should be in the players' hands. The waystones should return to difficulty = quantity, rarity, and pack size. Potentially with fewer modifiers given the current state of accessible defensive layers. 4-5 mod waystones max. Transmute, aug, regal, and exalt, and then vaal for a potential 5th mod. The maps should match their biome name, and then you can select from a pool of maps from that biome which layout you would like to run in that pool when you insert the waystone. To keep all map layouts relevant, specific unique and div cards, when they are added, need to be tagged to maps/their bosses and not biomes. This will help with the current design of buffing vast areas via towers, which I'll get to now.

Towers and citadels

These are the most frustrating part of the atlas; having to find them and travelling to them is a chore. While they offer powerful rewards, ultimately I think they should just be combined into one. With three more act bosses being turned into citadel bosses, there will be enough variance in citadels to target that they will be more common. Combining them into one allows players to really feel that reward for beating the citadel. The area that these would need to cover would need to be expanded so that players can tablet up an area on the grind to the next one. They need to be far enough apart while still getting the overlaps in certain spaces. Also to keep boss fragments rare enough to have value and keep players chasing them. The tower variant of the map would allow you to add tablets in the higher map tier. Every 3 levels plus a unique slot for tier 15 and above. So 6 sockets total? Hard one to balance, to be fair. Something different from what we have now.

Towers in their current state are tedious, and while I like the idea behind them and the tablets I think are cool, reducing the need for them to impact your atlas so often needs to be implemented. Overlapping should still be a thing, but no more than a small Venn diagram area for three towers and two overlaps to be common enough in areas. Multiple tower/citadels should also always be visible. Wading out into the fog aimlessly is painful. While the corrupted areas and the unique maps currently alleviate this, I don't think it's enough. Those should be bonuses you discover upon revealing the fog after defeating a citadel/tower. 'Amazing, there are some great unique maps and a corrupted area on the way to my next citadel,' 'Oh, the biomes on the way to my next citadel have some great map layouts and bosses that drop div cards I could use, sweet,' 'I don't need that citadel right now, but if I go towards the other one I do need, I wonder what's under the fog that way, as I can see less of it.' These are the feelings and interactions I would like to have with the atlas map itself.

League mechanics

The changes to strongboxes are fantastic as a staple-level mechanic you can interact with. The unique ones are great so far. I would like to see even more. Keep going, team; keep up the good work. More, more, more.

Rogue exiles look fantastic, and while I haven't interacted with a lot of them, the concept of them carrying uniques is chef's kiss. Would love to see semi-archnem style mods for them from Citadel bosses. Doriyani touched on a chance to drop something unique and specific to his loot table, things like this. Also making them more aggressive where they are right and not always on the retreat.

Wisps still need work even after the buffs, more types of wisps, more loot, and more effect of the buffs it covers mobs with on the way to its rare.

Essences are ok, I guess. I'm glad they can be corrupted. I would like to see more rare essences that add unique mods. The unique map boss is cool.

Breach is fine for what it is. I would like to see more bosses added to Breach eventually. The different domains from the first game are awesome, and facing two versions of any of those bosses would be mint, as well as adding some variance to breaches that spawn in maps shard-wise.

Expedition needs our boy Tujin to come back and combine his crafting option into Rog or Gywen. More precursor bosses as well, please. Crafting windows should have chances to spawn tiered items.

Ritual is fine as it is, in my opinion. I think the ritual tree could be more interesting.

Delirium could use something; I'm not sure what yet. More specific uniques would be sweet.

Map bosses are a good addition as something to be able to modify on the atlas tree. Hopefully options for uniques and div cards to be added to the tree with increased chance from bosses of that map, etc.

Content I'm hoping will return by 1.0

Legion and its domain, rework of the timeless jewels, a good way to deal with attributes. Perhaps where the jewel is socketed gives a specific buff based on which god it's sacrificed to rather than affecting all the notables in the surrounding areas. Having to use the calculator for that was pretty crazy.

I would like to see heists return as a side area on the map rather than a separate mechanic altogether. Replicas, alternate weapons and armor, and the enchantments.

Betrayal, but completely different. Basically, I would like to see veiled mods return and the orb. The mechanic itself is too complex to include. There might be something here with cleansed maps that could be interesting, but a different type of cleansing if there is more than one corruption type.

I was going to include Harvest here, but perhaps they could create a currency that allows res swaps on an item. I think three more added is probably enough to start with. We need to make sure we leave design space for new seasons!



This has turned into a dissertation of a feedback piece, but I want to get my thoughts out there. The message I would like to add is that for everyone one giving feedback, regardless on what platform, is you do it with some thought put into it and a clear message. Saying loot sucks, games to hard, my build sucks, that build is over powered, things that you are not enjoying. Deliver it with a solution you would like to see, rather than targeting developers, communiy members, anyone within the space and blaming them PERSONALLY like they've insulted you or targeted you.

For the GGG team as a whole. I Believe in the vision. I also believe you have done a good job of listening to the community and applying fixes in relation to backlash appropriately, which I hope continues. There is a decent size crowd of people trying to steer you away from creating what you set out to. Stick to your guns, youve made and incredible game before, a masterpeice. I cant wait to see the evolution of that masterpiece.
Cheers.