Comprehensive Feedback - 350+ hours in POE2

Hello GGG team and exiles. I am a big POE lover, I devoted all my gaming and digital entertainment time of my life to this game long ago and been playing it almost daily with no exceptions what so ever.
I usually play ~600 hours a league and always support GGG with everything I can around internet. I also think that this is the best gaming studio on the planet alongside CD Projekt Red and FromSoftware and I always support you with whatever I can so that all of us feel good.

As for now POE2 is the latest and greatest, so I hopped in the game on the launch day and played to this time daily around 12-15hrs a day. I made my December totally free for this game and devoted all my time to POE2.
I played Witch, SORC, Ranger, Warrior, Mercenary and Monk classes, got to endgame touched every inch of the game and wanted to write a comprehensive review about the game and my experience.

Some of the things that went into a draft of this note were fixed so I had to remove them and thank you for fixing those, but there are some things I want to address as an invested player.

I KNOW THAT YOU DEVS DON'T THINK THE GAME IS GOOD YET, BECAUSE YOU RELEASED IT IN AN EARLY ACCESS AND THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT. GIVING US A GAME TO PLAY THAT IS A WORK IN PROCESS.
THAT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT REASON WHY I AM WRITING THIS POST. TO GIVE YOU A FEEDBACK.

I will make sections for making post easy to read and navigate so let's begin with most logical start.


Overall new look and feel of the game

It looks fantastic, it sounds fantastic, feels sharp and over the standards of gaming industry in some sense. No objections what so ever on this part.
The atmosphere of the world is amazing, multi level areas look very cool, the quests are great.

Campaign

• Campaign is very cool. I like the new approach very much, at first I thought replaying it to level new character would be long and not fun but in reality I did not find it that redundant and painful as I originally thought. Although making cruel more easy to navigate would be very much appreciated.

• Storyline is cool if one listens to it, and boss fights are amazing choreography. ACT2 boss is my fav from campaign.

• At this point some of area "mini bosses" felt more challenging to beat than the main bosses of the same area. Mostly I got this feeling in act 3. I think rebalancing that would really make the overall feel much better.

• Also sometimes I got feeling that traversing area felt harder than the boss. For example some rares I fought took me serious effort and focus not to die and beat them, but after some time (like 20 minutes) as I got to face a boss of that area I just snapped him in minute and did not even feel that he was stronger than any monster I met on the road to him.

• As you implemented new system of campaign with zone resets on death, new way to acquire skills and gear , and new resource "spirit", I have some takes that I think are worth consideration. Take into mind that I am not stating anything here is bad or a good thing. it's just feedback,
- Resetting zones resulted me of not understanding what killed me in a way that I could not return to the actual reason of death with that system. In a way more damage could solve the problem but in the scenario of not being able to get more damage for the time being it makes hard to overcome challenge that can not be understood
- I lacked spirit. I think that player should get more spirit in some form to use spirit skills and play with them especially as it is a new system/resource. I understand the character traits but for example witch gets spirit on weapon on river bank and I even mulled that once to get more for the time being.
- Reducing resistances zone by zone, with small amounts did not leave me grateful have to say. I had to recalculate every time and sometimes was forgetting that I lacked them before looking up. I really think couple batches are better option. one final in endgame and once or twice for example in campaign. also getting res capped is very hard job to do early on. Trade makes it easy for sure, but SSF requires lot's of effort.
- I was not a fan of T17 maps mods in campaign when character was slow and weak compared to endgame.
- Damage output/input could potentially take a rebalance. Sometimes it really feels off.
Rebalancing math behind monster life or how it's scaled. Normal monsters sometimes had more health than Rares, same with Magic Monsters.

Skill Tree

• Getting rid of life from life builds on tree but on the other hand pumping ES for ES/Hybrid builds? Why is that a thing I can not understand.
- Being life build is not enough.
- Being ES build is basically go CI.
- Being Hybrid is challenging but achievable but still not enough. 6-8k HP gets deleted in seconds.
Amour is useless for warrior, wanted to go hybrid somehow but it was pretty much not possible.

Ascension

• I like the new look and thought behind ascension system although I did not like everything about it.
• In general sanctum redesign is good! it's not a divine prison as it was in POE1 and player can actually run it for oneself to get loot from there and progress in that sense. Although one needs specific build as it always needed in POE1
• Inscribed Ultimatum redesign is good! Moving from room to room from challenge to challenge and different arenas really felt better compared to POE1 inscribed ultimatum system.
- [as we speak about it, it has nothing to do with ascension but I would love to see in ultimatums that drop in maps and are there to run for fun/farming having the "sacrifice X to get Y system]
• I really think that some mods, specifically on an ascension trials that give you points, must be rebalanced on both of the systems to be RNG but not crazy one like being stuck in a room that will remove all your defenses upon entering, or getting into an area that will without a doubt kill you, and has nothing to do with skill or will of a player.
• The other option is to go back to basics and well leave everything as it is but make first three ascensions free to try. Because entering maps without at least 3 ascendancies is not the best thing to do.
Anyone who want's to skip that headache will (one way or another) buy a carry or ask a friend and there is no way around that. So making something more pleasant to people who want to do that themselves will be very appreciated I am so sure.

• In trial of Chaos, encountered a horrible game design is - that you need 3 fragments to kill Tiralmaster to get ascendancy and you will find that out when you did your first 10 rounds and got one. And then in the best scenario you need to do 2 more like why GGG, why? I thought I missed other fragments in previous rooms first, then I got mad I was not warned in advance that I need them at all, then I put one in to check if it fits there or not at all and could not get it out. As I had only one I was scared that it will be deleted on the next run. So many problems why? just make all bosses drop one, or last boss drop all IDK, but not that horrible experience please. or at least on token write that u need 3 fragments to enter the boss.

Ascendancies

Well, I will not talk a lot about it but most of Ascendancy nodes/Ascendancies themselves don't feel empowering. Don't feel like "man I will grind those trials with blood and sweat until I win to get those awesome node/nodes on my tree."

Loot | Crafting | Items

• Loot in general felt good. I have seen lot's of useful items on the ground, crafted on them and sold them, some sold for small but as I say if you understand items it's all fine. I filtered out good bases to show up on filter and potentially it can all be crafted into something useful.
• Although I can say that crafting something worth with trade market or not is very hard. Deterministic ways are not affordable in my honest opinion. And for most of the players, it's not a good news. I really think that omens must be more common and drop a lot at least at this time of the game, because it's out of the budget prices just leave regular players to transmute, augment, regal and some essences, but even though it's not enough most of the time as chaos orbs are way too "blind bullet". I would never raw chaos orb item with +# to skills mod. This also creates situation that market is not filled with worthy items, just some lucky drops or trash crafts. Anything that is deterministically crafted goes way overpriced. (and I understand why, just facts)
• Runes - firstly runes must be destroyable on items and replaceable, it would solve so many problems, and items on market would be way more usable. I have not bought so many good items just because of "lightning resist" rune in it when I wanted to put chaos res for example inside, or maximum life rune.
• We need a way to swap resists, (miss harvest, I know EA but we might not even get it at all.) Right now, changing one item may result in a full set of gear reset to res cap.
• Also the fact that we can't essence runed items is very bad game design. I did not like that a bit! And learned that very expensive way. I was crafting and wanted to check how much DPS increase would "40% INCREASED PHYS DAMAGE" mod give to qualitied weapon on magic level with 2 good Phys mods on it, before essencing and that base was ~250 exalts, and I bricked it. had to slam exalts to finish crafting and basically I lost all my investment on weapon
• I just don't like new +# of skill gems system. makes the 20lvl gems pretty much not worthy to pursue/powerful on their own. I see +# as an amazing mod on weapon without which weapon itself would be still very good but with it becomes amazing. now? if u don't have +5 to all "X" gems on a weapon and/or another +5 on something else skill is kind of useless in endgame as the damage output is not corresponding with the difficulty of instance. at that rate we could just get level 25 uncut gems for real. Makes no big difference. And the fact that everyone NEEDS it, makes weapon with the mod either scarce or very expensive on the trade league. and not being able to afford a weapon without which you are basically doomed to never go high tiers is unfun. and for SSF guys? I mean good luck getting it in the first place anywhere.
• If an item has a stat on it like int/dex/str/ and I can wear it after I equip it but not before, please let us equip that kind of items. Why do we need to item swap something to wear it. it's silly. We have been asking this from POE1 times.


New Gem System

In general I liked the presentation of new gem system, how it suggests potential supports, how they are sorted by class etc.
Although I have some concerns regarding it. They are as follows:
1. I did not quite like how the gem leveling works, the system in POE1 to me is far more superior. Main reason for that is that it does not give you the opportunity to over level your gem a bit by farming a zone to get some more power to character. Couple levels on tree vs couple levels on gem I will always take gem. Also the fact that it's zone dropped makes this inconvenient as it locks you within the build, and in case of not having enough power to defeat a boss you are locked in a zone limbo.
2. Not being able to downgrade, a gem is also sort of a problem. I can't say I encountered that more than wanting to upgrade one, but there were cases that I wish I could do that. For example I had "testing" gear on and accidently over leveled gem with 4 sockets as gear had more attributes. As an experienced player I came up with idea to cut every new level gem to have lower level spare just in case and slam jewelers on them in case of need. but some people may not come up with this solution or not even want to do so if they came up.
3. Forgetting to upgrade a gem. In POE1 I loved the notification that popped up when your gem was ready to be leveled up. I had full stash of uncut spirit and skill gems but I was so taken away with optimizing builds that I really forgot that gems must be leveled. In result I was mapping in T13-14 maps with LVL 10 gems.
4. Not being able to cut gem if u don't use it, can't use it or don't have corresponding weapon type I don't understand why is that a thing. I wanted to prepare all gems upfront for a build in a stash tab but I simply could not. Also I wanted to quality and sell some gems and "quality and corrupt" high level gems but I again was not able to do that.
5. Not being able to use skill until a certain level. I also don't think it's a good design. I would be happy to be able use any available gem in game at every character level and with low damage on lower levels obviously.
6. The function to open skill/support/spirit gems menu by only clicking the uncut gem. It would be great to have a dedicated button or NPC to be able to browse through gems and gem types without actually clicking on uncut ones.
I also was in a position on league start where I did not have spirit gem but wanted to look up what were the requirements for one but I was not able to do so, so I had to pause upgrading gear until it dropped.
7. would be great to be able to see all applicable support gems when choosing a skill on the left side of the window instead of just the recommended ones. Could be 3-9 recommended gems on top and "rest" on bottom with some divider between them. "Show all gems" kind of makes you browse all supports but would be cool to browse all support gems that literally support any chosen skill.
8. Please Please Please - Add collapse/expand all button in "G" skill menu. Please. Or at least let the game memorize the last setup a player did. e.g. collapse all.

Movement/Mobility

1. We need travel skills even more so as maps became bigger areas.
2. The dodge slow down by the end of the roll feels kind of sticky.
3. Enemies that roll or keep moving as part of their attack design become very annoying as they continue to roll and drag you like a scrap of paper around the map. Would be cool if rolling enemies deal damage to you on impact and stop or continue moving without you. Impact can scale with distance for example. if they rolled 10 meters more damage than 1 meter.
4. Body slamming, and death in crowd - even though the new code was implemented in game and now we can dodge out of mostly all crowds I get very quickly surrounded by enemies even if I try to be tactical and careful. I think it would be reasonable to adjust alertness radius of monsters. If not universal to all characters then maybe depending on character archetype or something else.

UX/UI

• Invite and whispering buttons don't register clicks on a whole button but on the bottom slim part in some cases like inviting from in game chat.
• Some checkboxes and functions are not intuitive.
• Acts map needs a better icon for the player position. Looks a bit too similar to the objective markers and they overlap each other in a way it was hard to understand where the player is.
• Secondary/bonus objective icons on the map are not too clear on whether they are completed or not.
- Secondary/bonus objective icons on the map are not "logically" placed in terms of the actual location in the area they're in. Would be cool If the icon is on the left of the area on the map, you'd expect it to be on the west side when you explore.
• The energy shield bar design doesn't appeal to me. It's too small. When I receive damage, I can't see it at all. Some find comfort in using an overhead icon that can be turned in settings, some of us have great peripheral vision and when I saw ES drop/fluctuate in POE1 I could clearly react. I personally don't like overhead indicator. It distracts me and I prefer using peripheral vision that works well with life fore example.
• In trail of Sekhinma - pacts opening menu is either bugged or does not open sometimes or is not intuitive how to in the first couple tries.
• When we click Doriyani to respec points it would be cool to see what respecing will cause in terms of attributes right away before confirming the choice. It's not about cost, it's about convenience and QOL.
• Would be great to have a button that explains what reforging bench does. (what it can reforge) I experimented with everything there until I understood what can and can not be reforged. For example maps, I accidently miskicked map instead of boots. Why just don't explain it right away when it's introduced or in any other time you think is better.
• We need expedition locker. Also before we get that, NPCs don't see my items in stash tab, so I have to rearrange them constantly back and forth to craft or reroll NPCs and it was so stupid I ditched expedition NPCs in general.
• Lacking Map/Waystone, fragments and catalysts tabs are very bad experience. okay, no tabs for some reason, no worries but at least would be cool to have affinities to sort items comfortably.
• Anointing items is not intuitive, why don't we have a window in the middle of tab to be able to put item into it and anoint. Also the fact that anointing order is important must be stated somewhere, I know lot's of players who could not anoint ammys just because of that and thought it was bugged.
Regarding anointing maps: While atlas is open and I click to anoint map the new deli window opens but if I have map traversal window also clicked control-clicking map does not transfer item to deli window even though it was the latest window that opened. Also after anointing taking it and putting into a map slot on is sometimes bugged and I need to put map first in inventory then into slot on atlas.
• Minion AI needs to be balanced. I really think they should have phasing between them. Also would be cool to be able to respawn them on a new spot if you went a bit far from them.

Endgame

General thoughts:
• Considering what POE2 wants to be there are some issues I encountered as a player in endgame so here are my takes on it. First of all I know it's not quite there because of EA of course but reactive, methodical combat does not combine well with constant threat of on death effects, deadly AOEs, ground effects with 4-6+ mods monsters.
Especially games like Elden Ring and Dark souls (as all compare POE2 to them) need to be maximally fair and respect the player, ones time and effort. These games are often, visually very clear, minimize death pain/punishment and focus on player mastery and character progression.
• It's impossible to engage with rare enemies without playing very defensively or reading every mod. they are all very easy to miss unless you read the mod early. Missing these is a almost guaranteed death.
• It's very easy to miss a rare. Rares are often hard to spot. They don't have a distinct visual.
• Many encounters and rares spam too hard. The plants and most of projectile monsters are so spammy that even when knowing and prepared I will frequently die to their intensity.
• Purple orbital laser from another screen killing player. No please.
• It's hard to recognize the real threats. The things that will kill you are often not dangerously looking. More often these are tiny spheres or souls or some ice ghost that teleported behind you while you're fighting a different pack.
• Grindy game can't expect constant focused gameplay. Keeping up maximum concentration to look out for rare monsters and inspect their mods and all the other monsters and tracking their AOEs and effects/attacks gets tiring fast.
The result is that this game has no chill playstyle and having no chill playstyle where you can't even scratch your had without pausing a game or look away to see what your friend does or watch something on different monitor while playing game is very bad characteristic in my honest opinion for a game like POE. Sometimes we want challenge, sometimes we want chill and blasting easy content. At this point in game there is not relaxing content presented. Also this is an issue when player is tired from real life and wants to spend some time playing POE. at this time you can't play POE2 when you are tired and have bad focus.

More specific thoughts/concerns:
• All of us players have least and most favorite maps as they do not have the most loving layout for the time being. Would be cool to reintroduce favorite map system. As we now have different biomes, we can choose favorite map per biome e.g. favorite cave, forest, desert, jungle etc. map.
• As we basically play delve on flat surface, it would also be cool to have bigger biomes for different types of mechanics and discovering for example a large desert biome would make someone happy and want to farm all maps in that biome. (for some reason) rather than having small different biomes next to each other like swam, desert and snowy back to back.
• Endgame is too punishing. Now it's not challenging. it's irritating, exhausting and progress erasing. Player gets punished on all levels. We loose atlas nodes, Waystones, XP, loot, booses, and most importantly time. all at the same time and sometimes sanity with all of that.
- To play a significant amount of time and not get anything if you have a bad luck strike per se, what player is even doing except loosing time at that point. all of this does punish players, is unfun and makes player want to play less not more there for it's bad for a game.
- I am sure most of the players if not all want to play a game and don't think that their time is wasted. and whenever talking about things like that we should come to every aspect of the game from the only right perspective and way - why is having something in game is a good thing for the game, why it makes the game a better game.
- There must be some kind of balance, either mapping should not be one death system, or we must not loose XP, or we must not lose node. Something/s must be balanced.
• Early maps have no sense to it. It does not have purpose and is not rewarding. I am not talking about loot, I am talking about early farming, one of the most important stages of the grinding game. This is very tightly bound with new atlas system that is also something I did not like.
- Getting general 30 points is truly hard and you must basically do all high tiers of maps white, without any mods and somehow you can slip through the hard phase of getting the nodes but the nodes themselves are not as impactful as I thought they would be. On the other hand if u can't grind nodes and you are stuck with small amount to spend on atlas tree, you are in a terrible position.
• I also don't like the system where to spec into a league mechanic you have to defeat it's boss continuously and more importantly the harder ones each time.
- Farming is for getting money/loot and upgrading character to defeat hard bosses and hard pinnacle content. In POE2 it's somehow twisted, player must defeat pinnacle bosses to spec into farming points. I just can't understand why was this a better thing for game. when even the points are not worth that much of an effort in the first place.
- Plus you don't even get 2 functioning points you get 1 functioning and one +hard boss/simulacrum next time point. Atlas tree in POE1 feels far more superior to POE2 for me as there you could do 30-40 maps and get enough nodes to spec into one mechanic and do them on low tiers. it would not be super juicy maybe but you'd get stuff. Stuff for yourself, or for sale to make money.
- Basically regular player with not so complete build can not kill 4 different difficulty bosses for couple mechanics and get those nodes as fast as one needs them. For example simulacrum. Simulacrum in POE1 even the 15 waves was like a build tester, can we handle that pressure or no, take into consideration levels of defense and offence a player can have there. How is a player that just reached mid maps, barely is res capped and want to spec into deli considered to clear simulacrum to get some nodes on atlass. Same goes with all the other mechanics. I would love to see different approach to endgame nodes and how we take them.
• ODEs need to be rebalanced. be more clear to see and react to, and less common. because there is so much overlays on screen with all the skills, effects, delirium fog etc. etc. that it's almost impossible to track everything always. Even though you GGG want POE2 to be more slow paced you still left monsters with POE1 speed and player is rushed and can't afford to be slow.
• There is a big lack of endgame defensive layers to push hard content. Would love to see some back on gear, tree or anywhere in general. I would never step a foot in endgame farming without ailment immunity, some mitigation/Phys damage reduction with spell suppression and one other defense. Here in POE2 defense is basically resistances, evasion and huge ES. which is not for every character and still not enough for ones that have.
• Visual clarity needs revisiting. I thing the phenomenal graphic with what POE2 is presented actually make monsters too hard to notice on their native terrains, I played on 3 different PCs and on all of them I encountered same problem, on two 2k monitors and one 1080 with good and normal graphic settings. I just shoot around on wild guess that everyone is dead near me. I guess having monster life bars always on all enemies not the ones that get hit by a player would fix this issue on beginning stages, on further stages I guess rebalancing contrast and lights may improve overall visibility.
• Doriyani is useless. you could just switched him with Kirac model and it would have been more than enough. at level 90 he is offering tier 1-2-3 maps? why does he even offer anything at that point. Also speaking of him, make endgame respec available without him please. Really does not make any sense, having gold must be like having regret points in skill tree window.
• Pinnacle, atlass point and citadel bosses must have multiple portal entries. end of story for real.
• We already had that problem in POE1 solved and now somehow it appeared in POE2 and I can't understand why. Why does a high and a low level boss have same token to enter. It makes no sense. other than that it also loops back to the farming (especially early farming) problem I noted. To start farming u need to be rich and powerful, and I am pretty sure it must be vice versa, to get strong rich and powerful player needs to start farming. Neglecting the atlass nodes acquisition problem, the cost for tokens is so much high that even if u can't get the item yourself you can't even buy in the first place. Firstly because of money, like 7 divines for king of the mist, then you are not sure if u even can kill it, and do it at least 2-3 times. So like risking in the best case scenario 21 divs for couple points? Naah, you are encouraged to not play at all and drop or buy a carry or ask for a help. why? I never bought any carry for atlass in POE1 for example, it's so easy and logical to get all one needs for early atlass.
• Also new atlass map feels chore and not fun in one more way: maps sustain is quite bad and u have to play good nodes with good maps and shit nodes with shit low tier maps, same goes with towers. repeat this and here you go. that's all we do. I really hope old atlas will be back even with new interface because now most of the nodes are travel nodes that are not fun and are not part of mapping process.
• Speaking of maps, A lot of maps require backtracking or inefficient pathing to complete. I'm spending too much time walking around and not playing the game.
• Not being able to revive a friend in group play mapping is bad design. it does not make game a better game. Also in group play we all grinded splinters for boss and when we killed one, only map owner got the points... That's also does not make game a better game.


P.S.
I know that, that any statement that implies on any kind of difficulty balance usually is followed by some non relevant to topic comments at all like "skill issue " or "get good" etc. so I will use a moment to reply to all of that in advance.
To everyone who says to other people "skill issue", "don't die", get good, get better and etc. First of all you all are hypocritical and to have an audacity to think players who have years and thousands of hours of experience in POE, and more so in gaming in any way lack skill to dodge a monster AOE continuously is absurd.
I honestly consider that all people saying that, can't construct an argument or reason besides that and can't actually rationally think about a topic and have to discuss it in an insulting way so I just ghost all of that.
The reason game like Elden ring for example was such a breakout success, was that they were not listening to people like that. It did not listen to people who say "oh it's good to have things in game that are super punishing and waste your time". That's why they added checkpoints and removed everything that wasted time and effort.
and they focused on an actual difficulty that players find genuinely fulfilling like actually beating hard bosses, or monsters or areas. So people like me don't want to make game easier, we want shift of difficulty go towards more challenge and less punishment.