The state of PoE2 development

Dear GGG and community,

So, PoE2 has been in early access for a while now. Lots of things a good. Some things are even great. And some things are absolutely horrible and i can't help but wonder why the horrible aspects have not been adressed long ago.

Here's a few of the horrible things from the top of my mind:

- If you happen (for whatever reason, the reason does not matter here) to die on a map boss, you instance regenerates and your explored map goes *POOF*. This makes sense during the campaign, but makes ABSOLUTELY no sense during a map, as mobs do not respawn (that would be exploitable for xp). Instead, it forces the player to either reexplore a new map where the player may or may not have parts of the map tagged as cleared already. Or simply quit the map.

- Portals are no longer teleport limiters, but death counters. This is all good and fine (excellent even if you are a loot/disenchant hoarders). But it feels odd that the more modifiers you have on a map, the less portals (deaths) you get.

- IF you use up your last portal (death), the last portal STAYS up instead of vanishing, and the world map will state that the map is in progress rather than saying "map attempted". This part worked before Dawn of the Hunt league. Why broken now?

- Minions (and yes, i am an avid minion player and therefore also slightly biased) movement AI seem to have improved slightly, but they STILL block eachother during narrow pathing, as does regular mobs. This seems like a major core issue that ought to have been looked at and solved before even going early access.

- Speaking of the above pathing issues, this also means that you (GGG) will have trouble balancing minion build in general, as pathing issues (and more) give a wrong impression of minion build strengths and weaknesses.



There are many MANY more issues, but these were just a few of which i find extremely odd to be allowed to exist for such a prolonged period of time.

- Important addendum of a large and GLARING issue:

If a player (client) does not have all graphics streamed/loaded/insertinternaljargonhere, do NOT allow large encounters to start as this will/may mean that the player (client) can not see/render effects. Noone likes to die to something they can not see.

"

Onds#6941 wrote:

- Important addendum of a large and GLARING issue:

If a player (client) does not have all graphics streamed/loaded/insertinternaljargonhere, do NOT allow large encounters to start as this will/may mean that the player (client) can not see/render effects. Noone likes to die to something they can not see.

if you haven't lifted the size limit form your shader cashe already i highly recommend doing so. it helps with that a lot

i play minions too, and they perform not well.

also if i use the key to move the minions they not attack for a few seconds they stand next to the mobs and dont attack every time i command them i got this delay.

there should be a command toolbar to set these to defensive or aggressive or move to my direction.

the survivability is also bad i got a bunch of defense minion nodes and the most of the time they dead and i need to wait for the respawn, some bosses oneshot all my minions with some attacks and the fight takes then minutes.

i think they are in a really bad state also since the dmg nerf i invested around 30 div in gear and its not much better.

"

Reactor#5977 wrote:

i play minions too, and they perform not well.

also if i use the key to move the minions they not attack for a few seconds they stand next to the mobs and dont attack every time i command them i got this delay.

there should be a command toolbar to set these to defensive or aggressive or move to my direction.

the survivability is also bad i got a bunch of defense minion nodes and the most of the time they dead and i need to wait for the respawn, some bosses oneshot all my minions with some attacks and the fight takes then minutes.

i think they are in a really bad state also since the dmg nerf i invested around 30 div in gear and its not much better.

I can relate to some of these issues.

Since spectres were reintroduces with their new mechanics, the only low cost spectre (for the variety node damage bonus, i forgot which one) is the terracotta soldier.

Without using the minion-move hotkey, they do absolutely nothing.

And even when using these, skills (support gems) linked to them seem to not work at all in most cases, whereas they gain different movement abilities and graphics in (VERY) rare cases, indicating that something is blocking their proper function in most cases.

But, tl:dr; general mob pathing (which ought to be a SUPER priority), and by proxy minion pathing (class inherited i am guessing), is in a very poor shape right now.

glad game is in EA and some of those things will be adressed in later patches...