A casual's feedback - First Week & Act 1 Class Comparisons

I played a Witch to level 21, beating the first boss (hyena raider) in Act 2. Then tried out a Mercenary to Level 13, headed into the village in Act 1. I'll go over issues with each character, and then talk about general issues and overall feel.

Witch
I played a build that was originally supposed to be heavily minion focused but ended up mostly based around Contagion and Unearth, using the Unearth minions to spread Contagion around, after I realized minions felt lackluster. It worked fairly well and resulted in a play style that was slow to start each pack and then just steamrolled the whole thing no matter the size and composition. It could run into issues in boss fights due to lacking a supply of bodies (Desecrate is really needed in the game, maybe with 1hp max bodies so it doesn't work with corpse explosions), usually when they spawned minions and I'd get overrun, but in general Contagion and Essence Drain DoTs would kill them in a reasonable amount of time (much faster than a slightly too low geared Merc). All aspects of the game felt a bit slow, but of fairly consistent difficulty.

Overall minions felt worthless, even when I overleveled and traded gear to get up to +3 to Minion Spells. Zombies in particular were not worth the cost in cast time or bodies, which was really disappointing. Even if they had infinite duration like in PoE1, they would still probably be more trouble than they're worth until you get some way to heal them. In general, the minions with a spirit cost and an extra ability basically only exist to give you access to an extra ability at the start of a fight. This really wasn't helped by the lack of worthwhile support gems for minions. I actually ended up with a pile of uncut support gems by the end of Act 1 because there weren't any that would help them at all, even when branching out from the recommended options.

The number of area of effect and damaging ground skills enemies throw out was also a big factor against minions. The game is based on dodging a lot and minions can't dodge, so they just die immediately. This was especially problematic in boss fights where they throw out big AoEs constantly and there aren't any bodies around to replace minions with (spirit minions always end up reviving in the lull right before a big AoE and immediately die again). Some of the nodes on the passive tree might help, but probably not enough to make them worthwhile until I'm into maps since they're all near the outer edge of the tree and far apart from one another.

I think a big part of this is that we could use Summon Skeletons in PoE1 as a way to bridge the gap (both as meat shields and extra damage) and bulk up forces until we could get the tree nodes, auras, and support gems/slots to switch to whatever style of Necromancer we were playing. Another big part of the issue is that there's no indication of how minions scale as they level, other than decreasing Spirit cost. Do Unearth's minions level at all as you raise its level? Does the level or stats of the corpse matter to Unearth or Zombies? Does anything but the special attack improve with Spirit-cost minions? Do my stats or gear matter at all for my minions (outside of the taking the node to give them my amulet)? The UI gives no indication and adding levels to the minions didn't make much difference in how they performed in a fight.

The changes to auras (and lack of minions with auras, e.g. golems, specters) really hurt as well. Vitality used to be a major early power spike for necromancer builds, letting you keep your minions up significantly longer in fights. Auras in general were significantly stronger on Necromancers than on other builds just because they were applying to a full army of bodies. Even after examining all of the auras in the game, there were few that would help necromancers at all and none that would be worth giving up a minion meat shield for. This, on its own, is a huge nerf to Necromancers in the early game (say into equivalent of yellow maps for a lot of builds) compared to PoE1, even if everything else had stayed the same.

The final big issue is the passive skill tree. There aren't really any nodes I'm looking forward to reaching. The vast majority of minion nodes are for resists and life, there's some crit chance but you really need to get all of those nodes to be worthwhile. All applicable nodes are spread pretty far apart and the first aren't really accessible until the end of Act 2. Even then, at an average full build they'd have nearly capped resists, ~100% life, and ~200% increased damage. That's okay at full build dedicating most of your points to your minions but not really empowering enough that I'm looking forward to building for minions. There's no equivalent to the +Zombies/Skeletons/Specters/Golems nodes you'd really look forward to in your build. There are no minion life regen nodes. There are no Minion Offense Mastery equivalent nodes. There's no helpful Ascendancy (temporary?). In PoE1, minion nodes were available enough that you'd skip around 1/3 of them in any build because they were too far out of the way for what you were trying to do compared to getting a little more survivability for yourself. In PoE2, the tree is set up so you have to dedicate every point to your minions until maybe the extreme endgame where you might have a few points available for your own survival.

Switching to more general Witch feedback and issues, the starting zones (first three) for the Witch were significantly slower and more difficult than they were with the Mercenary. I think this is mostly due to the starting gear/skills. Unearth is great, but only once you've gotten a couple of kills and can get some of the minions out. Skeletal Warriors are only good for slowing down enemies enough to get a few casts off. I really think Unearth should be swapped out for Contagion. The player can put Contagion on a mob or two, then auto them down for the explosion while the Skeletal Warriors hold the pack off. This also gives the player the option to kite once the minions go down, while the major issues with cone skills (I'll talk about that in the general issues) and its slow cast speed make that much harder to do with Unearth. This also makes the introduction to Witches be much more balanced around what the class is, rather than being entirely minion focused.

It seems like you guys are really trying to get people to build with weapon/tree swaps in mind, but there are a few things that make it extremely difficult for a Witch player to utilize, even for a build like mine with very distinct minion/chaos phases to a fight. The first was the Skeletal Minions on my Scepter going away with a weapon swap and taking a long time to respawn when you swap back. I don't know if there's some sort of out of combat requirement or time between casts, but spirit-based minions only ever seem to spawn in pauses between fights (and sometimes just when running around the map 30s+ since you were in combat at all). This makes it very difficult to swap weapons at all if you are running a scepter with a minion skill on it.

The second major weapon swap issue is that +Spirit tends to be on weapons, and spirit minions become completely disabled if you have more minions assigned than you currently have Spirit for. This means you have entire minion stacks disappear even if you could just get rid of one (and even if that one is already dead). Weapon swaps need to do something like take into account dead minions and then LIFO order your minion assignments, either that or let you assign minions separately per weapon set. As it is, it's virtually impossible to use weapon sets effectively with minion builds.


Mercenary
Mercenary is very difficult to evaluate because it is extremely gear dependent and so the drop rate issues mask other general balance/gameplay issues. The scaling between equipment and skills is probably too severe in the early game. As it is now, you essentially have to upgrade your crossbow every two zones through Act 1 to maintain power level and be able to beat bosses. That is extremely difficult even on a second character with extra crafting currency and gold available, I don't know if it would even be doable on the first character without rerunning each zone several times. I don't know how you would fix this without increasing the drop rate significantly. Maybe it would be possible to set up skill or item level scaling so skill levels are a bigger factor in the early game while items are a bigger factor in the late game? Shifting from Flat Damage to Percent Weapon Damage over time or something like that?

The Crossbow Shot basic attack, especially after I put Envenom on it, is way too powerful. It is by far the best attack against bosses in Act 1 and is the best skill for clearing packs of less than ~8. For a class that is based around alternating skills and setting up combos, having the basic attack be the highest DPS by a good margin is less than ideal. This might partly be due to issues with other skills though, honestly this is about the power level the Mercenary's other skills should be through Act 1.

One issue with most skills is that reloads seem to stop and reset when the player is hit. That's fine when we have a lot of Evasion and Reload speed increases in the endgame, but is a real issue when you get surrounded by a pack you can't escape from in the early game. It also really forces high Evasion on a character whose stat set suggests it's intended to use an Armor/Evasion hybrid build most of the time. Another issue is that a large number of his skills are cones and suffer from the cone skill issue talked about in the general section.

Bosses can be a problem for the Mercenary, and a lot of this is down to the fact that the combos he is supposed to be based on just don't work on bosses. You have one issue where bosses can't be frozen (at all or in certain phases), so your intro Permafrost/Fragmentation combo just doesn't work much of the time. Switching to the other early game combo, High-Velocity rounds seem to have a lower chance to hit than other skills (around 50/50 on normal mobs) but still seems to consume broken armor even if it does no damage. That can be a pretty big issue as breaking armor on a boss is time consuming with a really high opportunity cost.

The real big issue with bosses though, is that they seem to have a capped amount of damage that can be done in a single hit and the cap seems to be about 2x what an average auto attack does. For a class that's based around setting up combos for big single hits, it almost negates the Mercenary's whole kit. When you finally get the Permafrost/Fragmentation combo off and it barely does more damage than a normal auto, it feels absolutely terrible. Compare that to the Witch where I was able to get a 3rd-tier Contagion explosion on a boss and see ~25% of its health bar go away in a few seconds (though most bosses seem pretty weak to Chaos in general with how effective Poison is against them).

The passive skill tree feels really weird for the Mercenary too. A large number of nodes near his start are for Melee builds for some reason. There are only two sets of nodes, way far out, that focus on the crossbow at all and that Reload Speed node seems to be a near requirement for the Mercenary to feel great to play from what I've heard from players who've managed to take it. We have a node that gives us extra damage based on chance to block that is significantly more accessible than Reload Speed and several minion nodes that are closer than most of the other nodes you might want to take early. The Mercenary at least has more nodes that I would like to level to access than the Witch does, but they seem to be placed at random with difficult pathing between them, rather than having somewhat related nodes near each other. I can understand if this was done to reduce player power, but it may have gone too far and just comes across like the nodes were placed by Jackson Pollock.

General
Let's start with cone skills, since I've talked about them a few times above. They feel terrible against anything in melee, and since they tend to be skills that are designed for use in melee/close range that's a really big deal. This seems mostly like the cone starts at zero width on the radius of the player character (maybe from their weapon?) rather than a 30° arc taking up a 30° segment of the circle the character represents. This means it's very difficult to hit many enemies standing right up against you because it's essentially a line skill until it gets outside of melee range.

The other issue with cone skills is that their aim seems to be off or inconsistent. You can really see this with Unearth since the area hit by the skill is really obvious. It seems like the center of the skill's cone does not match where your mouse is most of the time and is instead offset by a few degrees. When you combine that with needing to aim really carefully to hit enemies in melee range you end up with skills that feel really bad to use.

You can easily study these effects if you find a map with a lot of patches of urns or other breakable objects (the crypts in Act 1 work well). You can stand still, against a stationary group of targets, and see where the skills actually hit relative to where you're aiming and the character model. If you get right up against an urn and click on it, the auto aim will frequently miss that urn entirely. This is really annoying when trying to Unearth minions, especially because the game will move your character up against the body, even if it's in range already, just to miss it entirely. Try to get an entire group of urns near you (3m or less in a real life scale, about double melee range in game) by clicking in their center and you'll have only half of the urns destroyed. To consistently get all of the urns, you have to stand a fairly substantial distance away just to be sure the skill effect area will be much wider than the targets you're aiming at.

Support gems need a lot of love. A lot of skills can't even fill out the recommended list with options that are usable at each level, let alone worthwhile (and most of the worthwhile ones are shared between common skills in any given build). It doesn't get much better looking ahead to later tiers of support skills either. Even worse, many of the support gems don't seem to synergize very well with each other making it hard to fill in a pair of supports for your most used skills. That's even before considering the attribute-based limits to support skills, which can be really prohibitive early.

Overall, it feels like there's been a lot of work and focus on endgame balance and builds, along with overall reductions in player power levels (a great thing), but not a lot of focus on how to get from the start to the endgame.

The item drop rate (before the recent changes which mostly help endgame) is so low that I was just picking up everything, no loot filter at all, clearing the entire map completely (even the breakables), and only having to return to town to turn in quests for most of Act 1. Even after loot started to increase later in the Act, I usually only had to portal to sell once in the middle of a zone. Getting all of my gear slots filled never happened until the end of Act 1, with usually jewelry missing. Even the gear I eventually filled each slot with tended to be crafted and just whatever I could find, not at all appropriate for my build. I don't know if drop rates need to be increased or gold costs for low level gear from merchants needs to be significantly reduced (probably the latter, 300-500g is doable for a blue that fits your build, 2500-4000g for basic amulets is not), but something needs to be done. Especially given the constant churn of weapons necessary for martial characters.

Skill trees seem to put every node you would actually want in a standard build into the second tier of nodes (outside of the middle travel node ring but inside the outer travel node ring) or in the third tier (outer edge nodes). The first tier of nodes seems to be solely nodes that don't fit the class at all, or nodes with incredibly small bonuses that aren't worth taking. It comes across like all testing was done starting 40 points in with a full set of average at level gear at minimum or something. Getting to those first 40 points seems like it wasn't considered. PoE1 gave a lot of extra passive skill points early on (Act 1 - 3, Act 2 - 2, Act 3 - 2, etc), maybe more of those could be front loaded into the PoE 2 quests to get players moving quickly into the depths of their tree.

These aren't things that are insurmountable for an average player, but they really don't feel good to play. A F2P game relies heavily on its initial experience and Act 1 feels difficult for no reason and without a lot to look forward to. Even streamers who play PoE 1 and other ARPGs 60+ hours a week were having a lot of issues. Just look at constant stream of deaths in Hardcore the first few days (and I'm not even sure if they've stopped yet).

There's clearly an amazing game here. I love the map designs (particularly the way-points placed right as you walk in), though they could be a bit smaller given the slower movement speed. The boss fights are tough and engaging. Overall polish is already pretty solid. But, and it's a big but, a lot of these Act 1 pain points need to be smoothed out or you aren't going to have people willing to get to the endgame you all are working so hard on.

Sorceress
I leveled a Sorceress to a similar point as I did the Witch. She is completely overpowered in Act 1 compared to the other two classes. She is comparable to one of the go to leveling builds in PoE 1, not at all the slower gameplay with less player power that PoE 2 seems to be aiming for. I was running under leveled with only 2-3 gear slots filled through most of the act, only bothering to get gear slots filled around the Executioner because I hadn't found drops and didn't feel the need to buy or craft anything.

The really nice thing about her power level is that it let me consider getting defensive tree nodes rather than going full offense. With other characters, no amount of defense I could get would make me survivable enough to offset the damage enemies could put out if they were still alive, especially with a lot of bosses having built-in DPS checks. With the Sorceress I was able to pick up some extra defenses and plan to get even more as I level through Act 2 & 3, even though I get hit a lot less and take a lot less damage than I do with other characters. This aspect is something GGG really needs to consider as they try to balance power levels between mobs and players to encourage more balanced builds.

This is the first character I've run since the item drop rate changes a few days ago and it certainly made a difference. Picking up everything had me returning to base ~3 times per zone and I actually got some amulets to drop, even if I needed to craft them. Rings were still pretty rare but those are frequently purchasable at a price the player would possibly have the gold to buy. The major effect was that gold gain was more than doubled compared to my past characters, and that was with being much more free with my purchases and setting several items aside for future characters. It might have actually been tripled had my behaviors not changed. I'm going to try a martial character next to see if the extra gold makes them feasible with the required weapon churn.

She's also the first character I've had where I used weapon swaps and I did it pretty heavily. Managing which skill goes with which weapon is a giant pain in the butt, the UX really needs some work. I was actually running barehanded for a couple of acts because I expected the assignments to reset to both when I switched out one weapon and dropped the second set. It had reset on its own a few times when I switched weapons previously but for some reason not when I wanted it to. Just adding a button that would let you go back to having all skills on both weapons again would be really helpful. Even better would be a menu where you could at least see, even better change, which skills are assigned to each weapon. Just a simple table of toggle buttons: Skill Name, Weapon 1, Weapon 2 for the columns.

I ran into one pretty big issue (bug?), where Frost Bomb sometimes failed to fire but consumed the cooldown. This happened both in and out of combat and didn't seem to have a consistent cause. It seemed to get worse and worse the more I leveled for some reason too, never happening in the first zone and happening every few casts by Act 2.

Her passive tree was amazing compared to the Witch and Mercenary. I had multiple options to choose from at all levels and could almost immediately move to nodes that would improve my build without having to spend 10 points traveling to them. There are nodes at all phases of the game I was/am actively looking forward to working toward. This feels like a tree where leveling from the start was actually considered.

Warrior
I haven't had a lot of time to play over the holidays but I managed to get a warrior through Act 1. He was really odd to play. You were either steamrolling everything like a god or barely able to handle the content without being very careful and taking time to heal up between every fight. It didn't seem like gear was the issue nearly as much as the Mercenary, it seemed more like every matchup was just a hard counter one way or the other. I was able to fight some bosses in melee range with the recent update, but rarely could I stay there long enough to get much damage off, so it wasn't all that helpful.

Having a lot of the bosses in Act 1 be DPS checks makes things really difficult for the warrior because they don't have all of the multipliers from skills and gear they'll eventually have, especially initially, and at the same time the entire class has a very defensive focus so DPS checks are never going to be a good match for the class. Most of the Act 1 bosses will be very difficult to beat at all if you go with a shield build, but especially the bosses in the crypts, the cult leader, and the ending Wolf boss as they all have strong timer mechanics.

Shield skills really need to be put into their own weapon tree rather than shoehorned into a random main hand weapon's tree. If I'm running Scepter & Shield or Axe & Shield, should I really need to search out the shield skills in the Mace tree if I want to pick them up? I get that you didn't have enough shield or mace skills to fill in a tree for either on their own, but you need to practice (Early Access) like you're going to play (Live Release), and shoving shield skills into a random tree is not how you want to do the release.

Putting the shield skills into the mace tree does paper over the lack of actual skills there, which is really exacerbated by the fact that one of the three intro skills has such bad stats that it's nonfunctional (Earthquake). All of the Mace skills feel like they were thrown in as an afterthought and not actually tested at low levels.
- Boneshatter is great but the stun window is very narrow on small/minion enemies. It would be nice if it could be used for a short time after filling up the stun meter just for damage and not the heavy stun. Combos okay off of the heavy stun Rolling Slam generates on its first hit but isn't very reliable given Rolling Slam's mechanics.
- Earthquake is completely worthless as an ability. By the time it goes off, the fight is over, even when supported by Fast Forward. Even when you do manage to get it to go off, it basically does a single melee attack worth of damage, and you can't have more than one going at a time. Compare an Aftershock at 65 average damage after 4 seconds to my Sorc's Frost Bomb at 300 after 3 seconds (which will also slow and give a nearly guaranteed freeze). I got really good at stacking enemies on the Sorc's Frost Bomb and Earthquake was just too slow and lackluster to use. I even tried to combo it with the Shockwave Totem to make the Jagged Ground explode more reliably and it just didn't work. You could 10x the damage of this skill and it still would probably be passed over by most of the playerbase as a starter skill. You really need to go back to the drawing board and give it at least Frost Bomb's numbers for damage and duration with an average weapon, or switch it with a late-game skill if you're concerned about how it scales into late game. As is, this has no business being an intro skill.
- Rolling slam is just too slow. That +1.5 seconds to total attack time on an attack that already takes ~1 second/stage just doesn't happen. That's ~5 seconds to get the whole chain off and it's worth less than an auto attack at low levels if you don't hit that second slam (granted it's a small AoE). I don't know how it needs to be adjusted so that it doesn't get crazy in the late game, but in the early game you need a Fast Forward support to make it usable at all and requiring a support for basic usability is sub-optimal.
- Armor Breaker and Shockwave Totem were fine, nothing particularly special but they do the job they're supposed to do.

Armor is still the worst defense by far and that really hurts strength-based characters, just like it did in PoE 1. It also makes all of the armor-breaking skills pretty lackluster, particularly when they're on slow, high damage per hit weapons that aren't strongly effected by armor anyway (as opposed to the Claw equivalent).

You guys have heard the whole rant about armor being underwhelming from the players constantly for over a decade though, so I'm not going to go into it again. The real problem here is that you somehow managed to make Armor even worse compared to Evasion than it was in PoE 1.

The big thing I want to point out that is new has to do with the way stuns are implemented. As an armor user, I'm getting hit by physical damage frequently, the entire point of armor is that this does very little actual damage. For some reason I still get stunned though, even if only negligible damage was done. You guys clearly filled the tree with Stun Threshold nodes to try an mitigate this, but I shouldn't have to dedicate 20% of my total endgame passive points to nodes for an effect that Evasion gets for free. If a hit doesn't do a sufficient amount of damage (a certain percentage of life/armor?), it shouldn't be eligible to cause a stun at all. The other option is to stick Stun Threshold onto other nodes I'd be picking up anyway, including the small passives rather than just the notables. There were a few packs of physical damage dealing small mobs that I could sit in all day without taking more damage than my meager regeneration, but I couldn't actually go long enough without being stunned to have the first part of Rolling Slam actually go off. I noticed this with Mercenary reloads as well, but that wasn't nearly as bad because he had a good bit of Evasion and reloads are relatively quick. It's not fun, it's just annoying and frustrating to play.

A common theme I'm seeing in some feedback: some players are expecting the game to be balanced around using only their designated class skills. I'm a roguelike player, a genre where you use everything at your disposal to survive - even potions evoke the question "do I drink this myself or throw it at enemies or even blend it into food to gift to NPCs?" To me, it's common sense to branch out from my "class kit". If PoE 2 is intended to be played with cross-class synergy, then this must be made clear in the tutorial. The UI at present makes it all too easy to assume you're supposed to meekly stick to a tiny group of recommended skills. It doesn't look tiny to MOBA players and a lot of PoE 1 players are used to only thinking about 1~2 skills for their damage needs.

To compare my Warrior experience (a 2nd character so with extra leeway in gold/uncut gems), the first thing I did once I reached town was to buy a crossbow from Renly. Why should I approach enemies when I could be shooting them before getting out my mace? If I felt like blocking, I put down Explosive Grenades then held position. Agreed that Earthquake is not a good starter skill.

Once Lv 3 skill gems came online, Flash Grenade set up Boneshatter. Armour Piercing Rounds kept the armour break status refreshed during boss fights when I couldn't be in melee range all the time (hello Lachlann). Until I got my +30 spirit halfway through Act 1, my damage output was slow while I was building up stun. After that, the act of blocking was contributing to my DPS.

My first Lv 5 skill gem (from killing the Executioner) became Perfect Strike then I put some support gems on it. Now I didn't need to block, a 1H mace could kill so fast after getting used to the timing window. As more Lv 5 skill gems dropped, I swapped from crossbow to quarterstaff. Wind Blast with support gems sets up Boneshatter in 1~2 hits, which itself sets up Killing Palm that (with support gem) heals me. Big enemies get a Perfect Strike while they're in Boneshatter's heavy stun. I have Vaulting Impact to get out of surrounds if I ever can't kill fast enough (and to set up a second Boneshatter after consuming Daze if I ever need it). Resonating Shield makes blocking even more damaging (magma hit, soundwave hit, then I swing my mace normally). With all this weapon swapping, I quickly found myself heading to the Mercenary's side of the passive skill tree to get faster swaps. I've never been stunned as nothing hits me.

Now in Act 2 with Lv 7 skill gems showing up, Shield Wall gives Vaulting Impact even more utility. I can't be surrounded anymore when melee mobs are busy attacking rock walls that I will detonate with a slam skill anyway. Walls that are healing me, protecting me from projectiles and shaping the pathing. Sure a 2H mace swinging Molten Blast is fun too but I'm firmly in a shield playstyle by this point.

On the point of cone skills, I don't believe they should ever be used in melee. If you must hit something with a cone skill, you need to put something in the way then walk back to a good distance. There's a Lv 1 Monk skill, Frozen Locus, to do exactly this. It's kinda useless for a melee build but ideal for someone needing to hit with cones.


Oh and thank you for taking the time to write a detailed report. It's sadly rare to find good feedback.

"

A common theme I'm seeing in some feedback: some players are expecting the game to be balanced around using only their designated class skills.

I'm mostly sticking to the defaults because it's EA and Act 1. I fully agree that they should be irrelevant in endgame. I didn't look at any other feedback before my first post, but it seemed like all of the feedback (and the developer focus in patch notes) was around endgame, so I decided to just look at Act 1 and give feedback for all of the classes. If you like, you can consider each class' feedback to be a mix of feedback for both the class and the default weapon/armor options for that class.

Act 1 should be heavily focused toward new player, expecting them to have all of the weapons and every tree memorized to get those outside skill and weapon swap combos going is probably a bad plan from a user retention standpoint. PoE 1 was always known for most players requiring build guides in order to be successful, but any half decent player could also muddle their way through the campaign eventually by using whatever felt good at the time and picking any tree nodes that seemed helpful. I saw so many people in that first week who couldn't even get through Act 1, and were rage quitting the game because of it, that it was kind of mind-blowing.

"

On the point of cone skills, I don't believe they should ever be used in melee. If you must hit something with a cone skill, you need to put something in the way then walk back to a good distance.

Cone skills are portrayed as medium-short range "shotgun" skills. I agree that you can't use them in short range and need to find a way to create distance to use them successfully, but I don't think that's intended. The fact that you can click on a jar and have the skill not hit the jar really implies that something is messed up with the way the skill is working. You can make it work, but it doesn't seem to be working as intended.

Ranger

No real notes here. She's not quite as strong as the Sorcerer, but she's stronger than any of the others I've played. Just smooth gameplay through the whole Act where I always felt like I had multiple options to approach any challenge. This is just about the perfect difficulty of gameplay to aim for so that you don't drive people away from PoE 2 in frustration, but also to let them know that PoE 2 is a much more difficult and active (likely no one button builds) game.

Bow Skills all seem solid, the only odd thing I saw was that some of them didn't really give much reason to ever upgrade them past level 1. Vine Arrow for instance, only appears to give a slight increase to impact damage (rarely used) and never increases its vine damage. Once again, support gem options were severely lacking.

Channeled charging skills like Snipe (and I assume Perfect Strike) could really use a charge indicator somewhere. It's really obvious when you're charged when sitting in town, but a lot of visual effects (particularly ice/frost based) make it really hard to see. It did seem impactful enough to be worthwhile when I managed to get a stun or freeze off on a strong enemy though.

Her tree gives pretty good upgrades at the start and provides several viable build paths you would want to be able to access in the early to mid game. Everything did seem even more disjointed and difficult to path between though, and a few clusters seemed oddly placed. For instance, why is the Mark cluster so close to the start when you don't get marks until level 7 skill gems? Same with Frenzy Charge clusters, since you need a Mark skill to get charges in the first place. Between those and the sheer number of flask-related nodes in her tree I felt like I needed to path very carefully after my first 5-10 points.

Evasion is OP. There's no reason to ever go with armor or ES. I could just stand in mobs of enemies and not care for a good part of the game and I didn't even focus on Evasion tree nodes.

Monk

I managed to get the final class through Act 1. I'll be honest, I wasn't too excited to play Monk before EA and then seeing how bad combos were with the Mercenary and melee is with the Warrior put him firmly on the bottom of my list. I was extremely surprised to find out that he was very fun to play and very powerful in Act 1, with a similar power level to the Ranger.

His combos were really smooth, he has decent enough range (probably more than the Mercenary in general), and his damage is really good. He's probably too good at most of the bosses, he'd be more in line with others with half the DPS. It gets a little ridiculous after you get Tempest Bell + Tempest Flurry, which still lets you dodge while hitting to some degree and is more like 4-5x other characters' damage on the wolf boss.

His starting tree is amazing. Absolutely head and shoulders above the starting tree for every other class. It looks pretty good going forward as well. Why can't all of the classes have so many great options to get a build going easily accessible in the first ~20 points? The biggest problem I had with the tree was when I needed to grab some attributes because I hadn't gone anywhere near a travel node yet.

Act 1 Class Tier List

I thought I'd throw this in here really quick just as a reference for people. If you have a friend who you want to show PoE 2 to and don't want them to rage quit in the first few hours, this is for you.

S
Sorceress
Monk(Bosses)
A
-none-
B
Ranger (Almost A)
Monk(Everything Else)
C
Witch
D
Warrior
Mercenary

This is assuming B is the targeted point of balance. Note that this is assuming a very straightforward play of the class as presented. If you are running multiple weapon types with synergistic skills and moving quickly out of the class' pie slice on the passive tree you are likely to have a very different experience. That isn't something a new player is likely to do when first introduced to the game though.