So 0.4.0 Released yesterday. Already bored. Game play pacing is way off.

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The same Diablo 4 tourists whine about this every time a new league is released, yet this game has 8x more views than Diablo 4 on Twitch

It's possible that two things are bad at the same time.

+1

You have to put so much effort into making true melee builds work that it doesn't feel fair or fun compared to any ranged character

They create mechanics to slow down players in poe 1, then decide to import them into poe 2 where skills are lot slower and require combos, and then wonder why the community is so divided about zoom or engaging combat.

"We focused on ranged builds because that's what the majority of the player base prefer."

No wonder why players avoid melee when everything in the game puts so many obstacles in your way and rewards high clear speeds.

Every league is shit yet you still play. How interesting.

I don't want POE2 to be POE1 with better graphics and I geniuinely propsed decisions like reducing pack size in maps and trading this off to more toughness. Or the combo-style gameplay design of classes, with charges being spenders rather than passive boons granting more dmg or more EHP. This reminds me of WOW classes that have very similar spenders to fuel the most powerful abilities - game is designed with a rotation in mind, not with spamming one ability 100% of the time.

But this is just not fun to play. Playing melee character is a slog, as many people mentioned. We have no options for serious defense capabilities in early levels, we're as squishy as casters or bow builds - yet we are expected to facetank all those ground degens, in-your-face explosions etc. In POE1 you can path to a lot of maximum life, resists, armor etc nodes easily, Marauder starts near a lot of those. Melee IS tankier there, even early game.

I like many things that they've added lately (better crafting than 0.1 and 0.2, the shapeshifting mechanic is pretty cool, the overall idea for the Vaal Temple is nice, merchant tabs...) but the issue I see is that PoE2 is trying to be twice as punishing as PoE1 without understanding why PoE1 can afford to be so.

I have a higher tolerance to frustration in PoE1 because I have flexibility with builds (I found some cool interactions this league with shield crush + Usurper's + lethal pride + bleed), MTX rewards and the lore and characters are far better.
PoE2 is somewhat "pretty", but the moment I feel the game is antagonizing me too much I just don't find a reason to keep playing.
Like between the one minute loading screens (to log in, to spawn in the hideout, to check the Atlas, to start the map and sometimes even to open my inventory), freezes, getting stuck on trees after pouncing, and dumping currency to make a recombination work without any success it's all just too much.

Yes, the campaign is long and slow, it's repetitive and acts 2 and 3 are terrible, some boss arenas are too small for how big the bosses are (and their AoE attacks) and it's hard to get movement speed on boots to dodge oneshots without tons of attempts at crafting... But I could get over all that if there was something interesting waiting for me on the other side of the grind.
No loot, bad luck with crafts, repetitiveness, lack of room for creativity, junk uniques... You lose me there.

It's just my opinion though.

0.4 is extremely boring.
I have played/been active for about 30 hours now.. and I'm bored. (550h in 0.1.0 and 400h in 0.3.0) I have finished the campaign (Oracle Wolf), and played part of the endgame, but it was a long slog fest and the new "Atziri's Temple" is a complete waste of time. It's very time consuming and really doesn't give anything worth while, I think it's meant to be saved and only used when needed.

I feel like the decrease in mobs and the over tankyness of bosses and elites has made this game for me.. very boring and pretty tedious in my opinion, I hope that 0.5.0 will be better.

The game is sweaty.

Ground explosions are fewer now I noticed, and that’s good.
Crafting? It’s treated like a side reward, not a core system. It should fully exist. The fact that it doesn’t means we’re stuck with endless attempts at something else. In PoE1, crafting was an adventuring activity, a skill people enjoyed. Now? It’s a casino.

The game is heavily gated. It’s sliding into the same rut as every other title in the genre. All we really need is Copper, Silver, Gold, and Platinum straight currency to buy gear. Without crafting, you just buy.
Ten, twenty… how many tiers of currency?

Orbs used to have value because of their function: add an affix, remove one, make an item rare. Now crafting is a crapshoot, so currency has no real value. They try to fake it by saying “enhanced currency” makes outcomes more likely, but it’s just gating.

The highest tier used to mean something. Now they’ve flooded the game with junk tiers. What’s their value? Tokens for the slot machine.
Platinum: chance at a T10 affix. Gold: chance at a T5 affix. That’s all it is now. Why dress it up with exotic names? Just put a slot machine in town. Insert item, insert currency, pull the lever…
7 7 7 yessssssss, T10 run speed on the boots!

Another layer of progress-suck. Currency shards? Why. Orb shards? Why. Every bit of it is just gating progress in the most boring way.
The skill tree? Fine, but only fine. It’s a knockoff of other games, badly drawn.

Not enough node variety, not enough crossover points. Long segments with clusters hanging off — just traditional skill towers turned sideways.
More gating behind skill gem drops.

Builds come online twenty levels too late. Ascendancies should be finished by level 60, baked into the campaign quest line. Post-game should unlock endgame-specific trees or enhancements. Instead, it’s dragged out.

The game is too sweaty. Its gating nature is showing, and the systems behind it are basic. And they piss me off

The economy is already ruined, what is the point anymore? Currency ratio almost tripled in 1 day.

Deleted - Somehow posted in different thread, lol

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MarsAstro#7928 wrote:

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cynic1984#0395 wrote:

I wish i could properly explain why i dont like the pace of the campaign and leveling.

Everyone says slog and it really does feel like campaigning through mud.

A poe1 campaign run feels like i get so much more for the time i put in.

There is just so much less friction even if u get to maps at the same character level.

The interlude acts feel best out of any part of the campaign and they are not even the proper vision of the game.

I'd say it's mostly about how much time you spend per map. Big, maze-like maps make you stay in one zone for far longer than you do in PoE1, and in the campaign moving on to the next zone is how you feel that you're progressing through the campaign.

So, since you move zoones slower, it feels like you're progressing slower, and that makes it feel like a slog. That's why endgame feels so bad in PoE2 too, you spend so much more time per map than in PoE1.

Mostly I think they just need to reduce map sizes, and that'll help a lot. Currently you get way overleveled if you kill a lot, and that would also be fixed by reducing map sizes. Some maps, like Matlan Waterways, they should probably just completely remove altogether as well.

There's just too much time spent in limbo, awaiting progression, and not enough time spent actually progressing.

Or just fried brains after years of playing basement size PoE 1 maps (probably technical limitation) with late PoE 1 power level. More, next, new, now, never in the moment.

Even car games get open worlds nowadays, but you want to reduce what already are just small pockets of space, basicaly demanding an absurd level of amusement park design.

Or maybe just start enjoying gameplay, instead of waiting too long for progression. IDK.