Main Issues Causing Lack-of-Fun in 0.2.x

My main issues with 0.2.0 that create an overall sensation of displeasure (in priority order):

===== 1. Lack of gear availability =====
Especially during campaign, but also in maps. In an RNG looter, you need lots of drops (or lots of crafting materials) to compensate for the prolific bad affix combinations that are a majority of the rolls.

The number of rare drops during campaign is very low meaning it's tough to get a needed upgrade for a specific gear slot. Crafting currency is also scarce which means a 3-affix rare will typically stay at 3 affixes until you discard it for another piece.

If I find a promising 3-affix rare (i.e. 3 affixes that look useful to my build), then I'll slam it with whatever exalts I have. Over the entire campaign I will have less than 10 exalts in total -- so I can do this slamming three or four times. This is very dissatisfying.

===== 2. Lack of power during campaign (aka passive tree weakness) =====
There is very little power from the passive tree during campaign. Even when snagging five or six "+12% damage" nodes which boost my DPS by over 50%. The power is coming from the gear (see issue #1 above). If you get lucky, you can have a great weapon which makes the journey easier for 10-15 levels until the weapon is out-leveled.

Essentially the leveling experience should be greased by having significant power in the passive tree which mitigates the effects of player RNG. End-game experience should be dependent on gear (which makes sense as the passive tree is nearly complete in end game).

===== 3. Ascendency Gating is Severe =====
Having played 800 hours at this point, the trials are well understood. The first two trials only take 15-20 minutes now (initially they felt absolutely horrible -- and probably still do for new players). The 3rd trial is annoying in its time consumption. The 4th trial is ridiculous -- I have never completed it in all of my play time in PoE 2. At this point, I only expect to complete 3 trials when planning out a build.

In short, Ascendency points are not optional. It's part of the power fantasy that is mandatory for good player experience. Therefore, the trials should be the opposite of tedious. The trials should be the opposite of "high end content". The percentage of the player base that completes the 4th trial should be very high -- similar to the percentage of players the complete the campaign.

===== Some Positives to Close =====
Path of Exile 2 has some very strong positives:

* amazing graphics
* incredible player animations
* combat is very polished (hit boxes, dodge, impacts, etc.)
* great visceral feel to the combat action
* campaign (so far) has great story, voice acting, etc.
* boss fights are lots of fun

All that with a rather incomplete implementation -- some of the gaps in the game are due to missing half the campaign and nearly half the classes + weapons.

I hope GGG can get the fun-factor fixes before exiting early access.

If i had to point out some un-fun balance specifics, I would say:

* Minions are incredibly weak now - even when stacking minion nodes on the tree. Both survivability and damage output are way low. I have a mediocre minion build right now which would be utter trash if it wasn't for a few outliers on spectres.

* Chalupa monk feels even worse than in 0.1.0. The changes to the leech nodes actually play worse. I loved the concept of opening up leech to all damage types and hit types -- but I cannot regenerate energy shield when mana is full. Other players have told me I need MoM (which makes sense), but if these nodes are only good with MoM, then maybe add MoM to the ascendancy nodes instead of requiring every chalupa to path half way across the passive tree simply to get MoM.

* Mace warrior only feels good if you go all in on strength. Unfortunately that's a long-game when we're talking 800 strength. That journey feels painful until you get there (if you can stomach the pain long enough to arrive at your destination). Also armour is still really bad and recovery options are limited (unless you're at very high life so the meager percent regen becomes significant -- and now we're back to high-strength again).

* Spear on any class feels bad during campaign -- unless you win the RNG lottery on a spear drop or when slamming exalts (likely every exalt in your inventory because less than 10 drop during entire campaign). Lightning Spear feels amazing for clear, but get to a campaign boss and it's a slog. All damage gone because of inability to generate charges on quick intervals. Combo mechanics are great if you can actually use them in boss fights. Heralds and charge-based-combos simply don't help in campaign boss fights.

* Firewall feels mandatory on any build using projectiles (including projectile minion builds). I'm so fatigued from always taking firewall. Yeah it's a choice, I get that , but it's a choice the same way that "i want to be bad" is a choice. Nobody will be happy choosing to be "bad".

"

Kozikuru#3127 wrote:

===== Some Positives to Close =====
Path of Exile 2 has some very strong positives:

* amazing graphics
* incredible player animations
* combat is very polished (hit boxes, dodge, impacts, etc.)
* great visceral feel to the combat action
* campaign (so far) has great story, voice acting, etc.
* boss fights are lots of fun

I agree on the graphics. Game looks very good. Compared to poe1 it is a lot more colorful, but somehow it's not a detriment.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, that performance is a big issue, game cannot handle things like elemental grounds, particles from shattered mobs and other abilities. FPS can drop below 30 even on high end systems with 9800X3D cpu with 4090 gpu. This is one of the biggest issues atm.

Campaign is meh, neither good or bad, I don't care about story aspect at all.

Combat. It's not polished, not at all, quite the opposite.
It's clunky AF.
I made two characters, first is quarterstaff monk, I landed on using cold skills, such as Ice Strike, Shattering Palm and Frozen Locus. First two have built in dash mechanic. Dashing in this game is really broken.
Dashing into pack of mobs is like gambling, you never know where you will land. You expect to be placed next to the mob from the side you dashed from, but no, that's not what happens. You can land on the side of the mob, and it's super goofy how either you, or mobs get displaced.
This also causes tons of desync.
Fighting singular large mob or a boss is even funnier. You can stand next to the mob, let's say from left side, you attack, and it will port you to the top or bottom of the mob, or you start sliding. It's really bad on large bosses like that bone monstrosity, that is stationary in a hole in the middle, is really big and you can run around it. Using Ice Strike on that boss makes me slide and fly all over the place, and when it moves it displaces and slides my character model. Abilities that create objects such as Tempest Bell are incredibly unpredictable, you never know where it will land, it almost never lands on your cursor. If you target boss model, it will land in a random place, quite often behind you (WHAT??), or to the side of the boss, making such skill useless.
For a test I also tried some other quarterstaff abilities, that one lightning attack with range (I forgot it's name) could not hit bone boss at all!, from any angle.
Bone monstrosity boss is the most outrageous example, but it also happens on other big bosses or big non-boss monsters.

For my second char I wanted to play something ranged with a bow, so I went for .... ranger. I chose pathfinder ascendancy. When I read nodes description on the ascendancy I could not believe how useless it was xd. I tried concoction skill. They are so bad, they drain mana flask in few uses, it's impossible to kill enough mobs with it to sustain flask charges, it requires (unarmed WTF!?), other nodes like immunity to chosen ele ailment or extra passive points, immunity to slows are so incredibly weak. But I diagress.
I hoped that playing ranged character would be better, boy was I wrong.
Since most of lvl1 skills in this game are useless, basic weapon attack is faster, does more damage and does not drain mana.
Bow attack targeting is broken on bigger minions and bosses. It just missed them. I tried clicking on all parts of mobs, having cursor in the center, but still arrow was shot at an angle to my cursor, resulting in an arrow flying in different direction that I pointed, missing mob by few meters.
This is unacceptable.
Clearly there are some issues with targeting, your character is not targeting your cursor, but rather model of the mob. And there are some serious issues with model sizes and shapes.

But the biggest problem in combat for me is being constantly mini-stunned and swarmed by mobs, you have no escape tools.
Only way to play the game seems to be blow up the mobs before they get to you. There is no room to combo your abilities as devs intended, mobs swarm you and start interrupting. This makes 90% of abilities in the game useless.


And then we have bosses.
During campaign they feel terrible. Every single boss has at least one ability that is intended to be dodged with this pathetic dodge-roll skill. Bosses have immune phases, or phases when they do some kind of barrage and you need to keep running to stay alive. This is so not fun! They are damage sponges too, simply because during campaign you are too weak due to lack of gear drops and crafting bench.
Later during mapping, when you get 30%ms boots and some gear, bosses are pushovers. Difficulty scaling on bosses is a joke. It starts way too hard, but really not that hard but tedious, and later becomes too easy.



I never played 0.1, so I have no point of reference.
I must say I hate the game so much, mostly due to fundamentals like game being way too slow (it's not really the game being too slow, but rather your character, mobs compared to you are actually too fast), lack of crafting bench, stupid scavenging benches, issues with getting attributes, terrible end game with sprawling huge atlas map, terrible connections between maps, and 100 other issues.


Adding crafting bench would solve 50% of issues with the game, but devs are too stubborn to do that.

I had to accept that this game is just not for me, uninstall it and just move on.

"

Messnejah#1099 wrote:

FPS can drop below 30 even on high end systems with 9800X3D cpu with 4090 gpu.

I'm not having this issue with a 9800x3d on ultra and a 5080 driving a 2K 165Hz monitor. I'm constantly at 150-210 FPS, but I do use DLSS where it auto-upscales to achieve a target FPS (unfortunately the slider in the options maxes out at 120 max target FPS).

"

Messnejah#1099 wrote:

And then we have bosses.
During campaign they feel terrible. Every single boss has at least one ability that is intended to be dodged with this pathetic dodge-roll skill. Bosses have immune phases, or phases when they do some kind of barrage and you need to keep running to stay alive. This is so not fun! They are damage sponges too, simply because during campaign you are too weak due to lack of gear drops and crafting bench.

This is tapping into my #1 and #2 points which is lack of gear drops, lack of crafting materials, and lack of power from passive skill tree. This makes characters feel very weak during campaign unless you get a lucky gear drop.

I'm currently farming sekhemas with only 40% honor res and 44% increased honor.

So if you can't finish it even once for your 4th asc points after 800 hours of play time then I can only assume that it's 100% a skill issue.

"

yummysushipjs#7638 wrote:

I'm currently farming sekhemas with only 40% honor res and 44% increased honor.

So if you can't finish it even once for your 4th asc points after 800 hours of play time then I can only assume that it's 100% a skill issue.

Good for you? How many divines required to make your build? I don't care what 1% of the player base can do. It would be nice if GGG posted completion metrics for the trials, but I suspect the numbers are not flattering.

Further clarification, I never said I couldn't finish it. I said I haven't in 800 hours of play. The amount of time it takes is not fun. Both trials are not fun.

For Chaos trial you have to complete three 10-wave trials. THREE. Why da fok did someone think that was fun. "Hey people won't like this... I know, let's make them do it three times!".

The sehkema trial is four floors. FOUR. <queue same response>

Uber bosses, they need a little more cooldown between skills, they can even stack depending on the time it takes to finish the fight.

I'm tired of dying after killing the boss and losing the items