I Went from Having Fun to Really Hating this Game.

Yup, I really enjoyed the game during 0.1 release (and still do in Standard league), but as I attempt to run current season more and more issues pile up.

Experimentation during leveling is heavily discouraged. If you diverge from an expected character archetype, you lose way too much in terms of damage and clear.
And even then, some skills within an archetype are just better than others. I legit lost my mind and finally deleted my Huntress, because either:
1. you jump through so many hoops to do mediocre damage until LS;
2. if you get bored of LS and do anything else (like focusing on RA+Rake bleed), you can't deal with any packs during campaign.

Rise of the Abyssal also I feel just ruins campaign pacing completely.
Act 1 used to be the perfect example of what GGG wanted from PoE2's new combat approach (at least back in 0.1): smaller packs, enemies' attacks are very linear and side-steppable, after Executioner you start to AoE blast packs, etc.
Now you already got 15+ mob packs starting from graveyard, and good luck if your chosen build doesn't have good clear at that stage.

Probably gonna go back to Standard league, because at least there I can push past the BS with all the hoarded currency instead of having my excitement about a build theory completely shut down by all the restrictions the game puts up.

They seem to be heavily conflicted with accessibility and player power balance.

0.1 and the campaign is solid and I'm sure most would review that as fun but have the obvious criticisms about lack of support gems and skill/class balance at the time etc etc. I feel what didn't help was the Warrior's overwhelming need to have a shield for true worth vs other classes, which then led to streamers like Asmongold basically saying Melee is more of a frustration than a simple joy.
I feel its generally a mistake for a dev to make a traditonal class like a warrior be overly complicated and no matter how difficult ranged classes end up being, those types of players don't mind as the weapon/personality type aligns with more finesse (so basically swap the difficulties).

Now I really question this game, in a very critical way and before when people were talking about vision problems I honestly think those were very rushed but 0.3 changes have made it very apparent that there is a vision problem if the intended vision was infact to have PoE2 as an actual game with meaningful attack/defense patterns.

0.3's campaign difficulty is far too easy from before and support gem freedom ends up inflating the fact that there isn't enough ingeniuty (from passives/gear additionally) + the Lineage supports are currently very underwhelming and just basically further icings to your crazy AoE'ing god mode damage builds.

I don't hate this game but I expected a far better game in my Steam library than a PoE1 or a Vampire Survivors mass kill+simple mechanics fest that is sandwiched with a decent campaign and beautiful graphics.

you didnt noticed how these charges mechanics are poorly made???.

they didnt even creat a modifire with "minimum" to #charge. still a 1 botton game my man. thats it.

When i hear "my vision", i just imagine 100000000000000 B2 raining napalm bombs over me.

bad developing, broken vision...

"

EsoEs#4803 wrote:

The more I play this game, the more frustrated I get. SOOO many skills are built around charge generation/spending, and yet the mechanics for actually generating said charges are TOTAL ASS. You have to jump through these ridiculous hoops so you can do 1 attack with somewhat reasonable damage, meanwhile meta builds are running around clearing multiple screens with a single button.

Endurance Charges:
-30% to gain a charge for heavy stunning enemies
20% to gain a charge for armour breaking

..and that's literally it for options to generate charges. SERIOUSLY? and you cant even socket Charge Profusion in those for the chance to get additional charges since the base skill itself isn't generating charges.

In a more general sense, every single build I have attempted in 0.3 has run into this problem where I have these problems I have to solve with the build, which is cool, but the game gives you 0 actual solutions for these problems.

My mana stacker has no way of dealing with Light Stuns, my Trinity Monk can't weapon swap because Charged Staff doesn't stay on your Quarterstaff when you weapon swap, my Infernal Cry build can't generate endurance charges, and my Mortar Cannon grenade guy can't see a freaking thing on my screen besides giant orange explosions.

I guess I had some fun along the way trying to get these builds to actually function, even though none of them really do, but in all reality at this point I am just so disappointed with PoE 2. It feels like none of what was promised with this game has actually been delivered, its just more of the same PoE 1 1 button can't see shit on my screen zoomer nonsense.

EDIT: Oh and by the way if you somehow get your build to function, you also need 150% rarity on gear or its just trash. Bleh.

Brother the game is essentially in a paid beta but it’s a fair paid beta imo. Anyway the point is that they are fixing and balancing as they go and yeah there are going to be rough patches but most builds can function in the end game. The problem is they require very specific build focus that can’t really be deviated from meaningfully beyond do I want to do big big boom attacks or lots of big boom attacks. Most builds don’t have a diversity but if you are looking for diversity the best bet is Abysal lich imo.

The spirit you can translate into buffs actually can be pretty useful in making some crappy builds function quite well.

I think there's lots of space for GGG to pivot back towards an interesting and creative gameplay around using multiple skills or timing stuff and so on.

But I do kind of worry that it is not really what players want. PoE2 has been a massive success in regards of player counts; on release and on both later league starts, it has had more players in the first few days than PoE1 has ever had. Clearly, PoE2 is a success. (Player counts drop fast, even faster than on PoE1, but I think that's just a lack of content, which they obviously work on all the time)

If they backpedal from what the game turned out as and try to reinforce their original vision, they indeed risk breaking that winning formula.

I think that there are a ton of very interesting ways how charge generation could work, how skill synergies could work, how combos could work, without even necessarily having to enforce everyone into utilizing them. But at the moment it seems like they almost 1:1 copy pasted a bunch of skills from PoE1, like Lightning Arrow, which are fast and clear screens. Then they slapped in a bunch of new skills and rethought skills, that just aren't good. They are slower, have less damage, don't chain and cleave as well, etc.

By now a lot of players have already been acclimatized to being able to play PoE2 like they played PoE1. I'm not sure if you can come back from that. I hope they can. There's so much potential that would go to complete waste if synergies, combinations and charge generation strategies are left as something inherently weaker than spamming 1-2 skills.

Things that could be interesting as combos/synergies/charge gen:

- Leap slam that if it travels over 5 meters and hits 6 or more enemies, generates a charge.
- Charge generation when you remain close to an enemy for e.g. 3 seconds without it dying. The more enemies, the faster the charge generation, e.g. a single enemy might give 33% of a charge every 3 seconds, while 6 enemies would give two charges.
- Creating a charge when you go below 50% health
- Travel skill that boosts damage if you time a melee hit at the end of it
- An attack and a spell skill that looks at previous 3 skill uses and picks one of each different skill, repeating them with a bonus to their stats. For flavor, attack version might e.g. increase attack speed by 25%, and spell version might gain 20% extra damage.
- A spell that you cast 3 times and it creates a triangular zone; enemies inside the zone generate charges or maybe they would take extra damage.
- An attack skill that empowers every 2nd attack, strength of empowerment depending on how many foes the non-empowered attack struck.
- A support gem that adds stun build up or damage for an attack launched immediately after a dodge roll

Quick sketch of stuff that came to mind, some/most/all might be stupid ideas, but either way - none of stuff like that would really matter if players don't want it, and as long as it's possible to fairly easily zoom through while exploding every screen off of monsters, as long will also drop balance need to account for that sort of a playstyle. Which means that trade prices will be set by players utilizing that playstyle. Altogether, meaning that players who are looking for tad bit slower style of play or who are utilizing more mechanics, will have to make do with drop rates that for them are going to be very low.