Feedback from my experience with the beta.

I've played through the campaign with several types of character bases now. Bow, Shield and board and spell caster. Thus wanted to share my thoughts for improvements:

# Shield and one-hander is missing a skill to use for their attacks. Leaving autoattack as the higest dps and best option. This is a bit sad. Hopefully we will get a few more skills eary next year. Every other attack is some slow jump around type of thing, seemingly designed for harder hitting weaponry, like two-handers.

#Bone-Shatter would do the trick, but it really should be triggerable on stunned monsters. It would be a massive dps increase, especially on long stuns, but it's also the only skill actually carrying content. And it's extremely clunky to use, because with a high attack speed, you have little control over when a mob is close to stunning, and then you loose your trigger window. It's got nothing to do with skill, because you cannot interrupt the animations that fast. And it would still not go up to the levels of the better skills used at the moment.


#Perfect Strike is too slow to be of any real use. At the very least allow it to be used at your regular attack speed, via clicking, I don't mind if you have to hold it as long as you do now in order to charge it up, but with this change it could replace auto-attack as main hand skill.


#Shield-charge should not be blocked by other players. In a party, this skill is often useless if there is a hallway of any kind. In open areas, it might often path around the monster you try to hit, sending you far away from the point of action.


#Lava Shield has very little damage. This one can be safely upped a lot.


#Every bow skill, apart from Gas Arrows and Lightning seem to underperform a lot. I would like to see the rest brought up to their level.


#Spark has no damage. True, with Archmage it's almost broken, but with any straight-forward build, it caps out too low. I'd advice reducing the effect of archmage, and up the base damage of the skill itself, so that they both meet somewhere in the middle.


Ascendancies:

# Blood mage has the silliest starting node. I had to wait until I got my next two ascendancy points in order to choose it. Because the life regen you need in order to persevere when you first aquire it is really high. I have 400 life regen on my Blood Mage (Every single life regen node on the tree) and it's still not enough to not loose life, casting 500 mana fireballs. (which does no damage, due to having to spec into regen in the first place.

# Mana Storm does not work with Blood Magic either, which again lost me half my dps. And that after I had already been casting it with life for about 40 levels using Lifetap. It really confuses me.
When you choose Blood Magic, you should merely be able to drop the Lifetap for something else.
I'd go so far as to say it should convert mana based enchancement skills like Archmage into using your life as a measure, instead of maximum mana, as well.
Blood Magic is not powerful enough to restrict players to the base damage of any skill.

#I really like the Gemling Ascendancy. Straight forward and to the point. I want all the nodes, and it's hard to choose between them. Really well designed.


# I never unlocked the ascendancy for my archer, because the pain it was to do sanctum is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. And how are you supposed to do the final sanctum boss as a sword and board dude with a 5k autoattack?
Luckily my sword and board dude got my only chaos temple unlock.

I suggest giving people ALL ascendancy points from quest item coins. So you get one in both acts in normal, and both acts in cruel, for 4 points each. Allowing for unlimited tries. THEN if people like the mechanics, they can continue doing these minigames as long as they want with disappearing coins whom they loot in the endgame.


#The Chaos Temple Chimera is the worst boss design I've ever seen. Anywhere.
I did this fight with a shield character. It took over an hour. The chimera does NOT fight you. It breathes fire, then flies to the other side of the map. Again, and again, and again. At most, it could be hit three times, then it was running across the oversized room again, to hit it maybe three more times if I was lucky. Then a time or two, I could shoot it with an under-levelled crossbow autoattack from a perch. Most unfun time I've had, and I was near quitting several times.


#Speaking of size, the maps are at least 30% too large. It's just the same circle of tunnels pasted again, and again.

#Gem slots are too rare. It's not necessary to tie this to gems and socket items. Wasn't this what you said in interviews that you were trying to move away from? At least in poe1 I could put a 6-link white robe on my twink and run through the campaign when I was tired of it.
Here I will have to slog through with a single 3-link until maps.

A better solution, and the way I thought it would work when I started out was that it tied to character level. Start with 2 slots, and increase one slot every 15 levels. On all skills.
This will cause people to run around with a lot of empty slots when starting out their first character, but give a lot of room to play around. You will max out at 6 slots on level 90.
Right now it looks like it was designed with the intent of selling these gem-links for cash in the shop (which I know is not the case, it just reminds me of the type of grind that would be in a free to play mobile game.).


# These are the things I remember now, from the top of my head. All in all I am really happy with the game. I think I have the most fun with my "Sword and Board", although he is not the most powerful or effective.

I wanted to add that in general, you should be able to choose a skill type and if you do nothing else, than pick passives that correspond to it; Like choosing chaos spells, and picking every +%chaos damage node on the tree with surrounding defenses.. You should be fairly viable to play most content. It could, or probably should fall off somewhere around tier 6-10, allowing for more character building at later stages.
Currently this is not the case.

At the reforge bench, I feel like you should be able to make three lower tier Jeweller orbs into a larger one. Probably all currency, too. Just like shops in PoE1. Keeping people socket starved if not able to do high tier maps are only hurting your more casual players. It will not affect the 1%.

After playing 2.0 I feel like many of my first impressions still linger.

I was one of those who did not have trouble with the initial campaign (before monster health was lowered). I was playing a spectre/minion build, and got to maps relatively quickly.

After playing both a crit, and non-crit rake build as my second character, I think the rake skill needs to be adjusted so that it is a little less powerful with critical strikes, and a little stronger without. This can be done by boosting magnitude nodes, or just overall improving the skill and then removing the ability to crit.

Lightning Spear doesn't need to be mentioned. It's too strong. Especially in the Blood Mage ascendancy.

The other spear skills, I could not find viable use for. Although I might have missed something, I think just about every other spear skill needs a significant buff.

Currently, all spell damage nodes are a trap. You can't as a new player pick f.ex. fireball, and stack +fire, +ignite nodes, plus a defense of choice and have a working build. This should probably be viable.


I am having a lot of fun with the game, still trying to develop my own builds, but having something cookie-cutter work decently (doesn't have to be viable past T2) would be good for the game as a whole.


I still think the game tried to be two things. I seems it might have started as a graphical fidelity upgrade to PoE1, before someone decided to make it something more unique.

This creates identity problems.
I feel you should probably lean all the way into the dark souls vibe, and ditch the PoE1 connection with large group of monsters and screen clearing skills. You can learn a lot from No Rest of the Wicked here. Lower mob density. More abilities and movement skills for regular monsters. Have monsters do attack patterns that we can learn and interrupt, and either increase loot drops so 3-5 mob groups will drop enough. Or up quality so that when something rarely do drop, it's useful.


On the other hand, you could go the way of PoE1, and give players the power fantasy that the 1 second screen clear community wants, but then you are actively competing with yourself on PoE1, and might as well just apply the fidelity upgrade to the first game instead.

The way it is designed at the moment, as a hybrid creates all the problems people have been very loud about this league. Too fast, interrupting monsters, no combo play etc.

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jawsofhana#6369 написал:

I still think the game tried to be two things. I seems it might have started as a graphical fidelity upgrade to PoE1, before someone decided to make it something more unique.

This creates identity problems.
I feel you should probably lean all the way into the dark souls vibe, and ditch the PoE1 connection with large group of monsters and screen clearing skills. You can learn a lot from No Rest of the Wicked here. Lower mob density. More abilities and movement skills for regular monsters. Have monsters do attack patterns that we can learn and interrupt, and either increase loot drops so 3-5 mob groups will drop enough. Or up quality so that when something rarely do drop, it's useful.


On the other hand, you could go the way of PoE1, and give players the power fantasy that the 1 second screen clear community wants, but then you are actively competing with yourself on PoE1, and might as well just apply the fidelity upgrade to the first game instead.

The way it is designed at the moment, as a hybrid creates all the problems people have been very loud about this league. Too fast, interrupting monsters, no combo play etc.

Well said. Just decide and stick to it but change the game into one clear direction instead of this mixed mess we have now.