Rating POE 2

After many hours of POE2 and recently also a sgignificant number of hours in POE 1 (again):

++ Artwork and Graphics. Looks superb (but also comes on a cost, see later)
+ Story telling / campaign: very well executed, but certainly for the majority of players not the strongest argument to play this genre
+ skill gems not linked to item sockets
+ WASD
+ Rhoa mount feels unqiue

....and thats about it on the + side :)

-- visual screen clutter (felt worse to me than POE 1), some ground effects contriute to that as well (some of them are very heavy on FPS)
-- performance issues, at the heart its the same engine, now just pushed to new limits and heights. I think the other day, I saw a guy with a 5090 complaining about FPS, so ridiculously bad optimized...
-- leveling curve (POE1 was supposed to cater a wider variety of ppl, howver level e.g. to 98 is significantly more difficult in POE2 than in POE 1. Which makes zero sense to me.
-- each map feels about the same, boring and repetitive very soon, contrary POE 1 is brimming with content and each map is full of suprise elements to discover. Those that say that POE 2 will ahve this over time: it has been years since the worked on POE2, so why not copy more of the suff at launch? And try to focus on actually NEW content earlier? Introducing a mechanic should be much easier than the overall graphical design, which they did achieve very well
- most of the mechanics are just copies from POE1 with a slight twist. Or total crap, like wisps.
- classes dont feel very memorable or more unique than in POE1, this might eventually change with the druid
- very limited possibilites to tailor the content to your liking
- loot e.g. number and quality of unqiues is far less exciting than in POE1, and most of the existing ones are just a new twist on the old ones
- no blessed orb, an omen and a divine for that feels a very clumsy solution

Overall POE2 feels more like a revamp or remaster ("classic") to the franchise than a game that is redefining the genre in its current form. Very few elements make it stand out to its predecessor. Gameplay wise its currently clearly inferior.

POE2 is by no means a bad game in terms of general ARPG standards, but in direct comparison to POE1 it lacks a lot, and it will take a long time (hopefully not?!) till it is on par in terms of overall gameplay. So much that I wonder if the original idea of POE2 integrated into POE1 would not have been the much better idea...

The parallel development will slow down both games evolution.... POE will keep Visually LOOK outdated, and POE2 will PLAY outdated 8-)

I want to add another vote for 'no blessed orb' in particular.
Why this awful crap of having to use god knows how many divine orbs, just to reroll an implicit modifier ? And to need an omen per try to boot ...
Since when did implicit modifiers become the pinnacle of power that being able to up their value slightly has to be so heavily restricted due to the rarity of the omen AND orb ? As if there weren't enough different omens already to acquire, making it more difficult to obtain the one you need, this unnecessary addition dilutes the pool even more.
I just can't see any reason to make implicit rerolls so damn convoluted.
Bring back the blessed orb !