My thoughts on a variety of things so far.

While on the whole I have been having fun, I do have a "few" issues with the current state of the game. Luckily, this is early access, so plenty of time to improve a variety of things. And my list of stuff:

First off, the very start and the lack of choice:
- Inability to choose the character I want for the start I want. I'm going to make multiple of the same "class", due to leagues, ascendancies, and so on. I'd like variety in how they look.
- ascensions tied to class feels like you're forced to play a certain way, while at the same time you can't really use other cool ascensions to do nifty things with a different start. I feel like builds are kind of forced on you, especially with Ascensions in the mix. A creativity killer.

Next, gaining Ascendancy points:
- The trials need to be unlinked from points 3-8. The more stages to these trials, the more of a quit point moment it is when you fail and don't get your points. F the trials. I know you guys probably think the ascendancies are some sort of awesome reward for completing a task, but the reality is that they are our classes, far more than the actual so called classes are, as they are nothing more than where we start on the passive tree. So I repeat again, F the trials. Let us do a trial 1x to pick and gain 2 points, and give us 1 point per act completed. 8 points, minimal hatred of trials.

- If for some reason you insist on keeping the stupidity of making all the points tied to trials, then let us do the trials at the minimal level, without having to rely on a random drop that can have a variety of levels. Because F the trials.

Also, F the trials being needed for ascendancy.

General trial note:
- Trial of Sekhma should give honuor to a character using a melee attack in melee range. Actual melee attacks, not stuff like the Bell. And I'd say scale the amount by the attack speed. The slower the attack, the more honour.

Character skill sets:

Mace:
Mace feels horrible. It starts out bad right out the gate, with Earthquake having a long delay, Rolling Slam being clunky, and the armor breaking move just being garbage. And from there, it has skill after skill that feel bad, due to things like +time to cast and so on. The whole entire design does not work with how enemies are set up and the lack of solid defensive options.

Also, 1h maces are way too weak compared to 2h ones, which makes warriors feel forced into Giant's Blood. And then they complain about that 3x str requirement.

Elemental:
It feels better than mace, but is also loaded with design issues.

First up, Archmage. Whoever designed and/or approved this needs to go to remedial designer school. Its numbers are utterly broken, and that's before quality. And quality... I don't think there's any other skill that remotely gains as much from quality as this one. It should never have made it into our hands with anything near these numbers.

Next up, Ice Bomb, Ember Fusillade, and probably some others. These have a delay between when we use them and when they go off. And that delay gets bigger if we increase our durations. Which we want to do because so many things, like the resist debuffs, have relatively short duration. These skills need to either be capped at their starting duration, scale inversely so that buff duration shortens them, or else have their power scale with the duration.

On the whole, the entire set lacks clearly defined single target abilities (aside from the afore mentioned duration issue ones), to a point that Ice Wall is one of the few choices. This makes the entire skill set overly dependent on Archmage and Shock.

There's also clear favoritism for Lightning, a tolerance for cold, and an obvious disdain for fire. Fire just feels bad. Ignite is near worthless. Lacks defense. Way out in the tree. Skills that tie into ignite are bad as well. And this extends across the board, to all classes. Lighting dominates everywhere, some cold follows, and fire is, ironically, left out in the cold.

Elemental Conflux: Just a bad idea. With how few slots we have, limited hotkeys, inability to re-use support gems, we can't make builds that can swap from element to element to match this. You can use Painter's Gloves so your damage starts out evenly divided between the three, meaning you always get some benefit, but A) this requires using Painter's Gloves and B) at a third of its power, it is pretty weak. This should probably be changed so that it provides a general all element buff, all the time, and then an extra bit of buffage to another element that changes around like the current buff does.

Quarterstaff:
There is a lack of physical options later in the tree, as well as a general lack of chaos options for a weapon associated with a chaos based ascendancy. If you're going to have these things in the tree at all, then have them properly throughout the tree.

The unarmed strikes feel bad, basically being single target and just not good to use.

Charge generation is lackluster, to a degree that the standard is to take a node on the passive tree that changes what charges do, just to avoid having to use what is innate in the monk tree.

The Bell: Archmage guy design this one too?

Occult:
Minions get jammed up on doors all the time. And then they need to respawn, with timer, rather than porting to you.

The healer should be available earlier, I think, as he makes a huge difference in minion survivability. But he's probably a bit too powerful, so that you only really need 1 currently, so should probably be toned down a little.

Bloodmage... it's bad.

Brutes should have an activatable "taunt" command, that taunts things close to their master.

Act 1-6

Rathbreaker fight (especially on Cruel) needs to be toned down. The quantity of adds, plus the unkillable ranged enemies, plus him, makes this fight very frustrating for energy shield reliant characters, particularly sorceress, who lack pets to draw the aggro of the adds. He also bugs out very easily if dragged too far away from his spawn point. At the very least, the ranged supports need to be killable.

Viper is probably the worst fight in the game. Horribly unbalanced, easily bugged, spends all that time flying, too much AoE, horrible spear throwing segment.

Final act 3 boss, on the other hand, is probably too easy. I'd say he's probably the easiest boss of all of them.

Colossus is another that needs toning down. As is, standard strategy is to hug his armpit, which neuters most of what he does. That also needs fixing.

The End Game:
I wound up asking myself if it was fun and the conclusion I came to: No, it isn't. There are numerous reasons for this.
1) Waystones are way too rare. Can't have fun when you can't run maps that are appropriate to your level. And if you have to pick the right choices in the Atlas tree, plus juice correctly just do the end game, your end game is a failure. The guy should really sell all 15 levels of maps. Let us run what we can handle, and if we're able to do too high ones too soon, that sounds like a power level balance issue.
2) Death penalties. You lose 10% xp, the node's benefits, the tower's benefits to the node, the waystone, any loot on the ground, and so on, all for a single death. And heaven forbid if it was one of those "farm a ton to get the drops so you can even fight them" bosses.
3) Way too easy to die. As a result, the game play, if you aren't playing an instant kill type build, involves running away so you don't die. And good luck with that with how often you get stunned, frozen, blasted from offscreen, have something you can't see blow up under your feet, or run into super fast mobs that insist on going for you, that a map mod has boosted.
4) The maps. So many bad map types. Bad doors, bad visibility (hiya, towers!), patches of effects on grounds obscuring other effects (sulfuric caverns... green gas... that's used for poison), stuff obstructing movement (crypt even has an area with a nice gap between a pillar and the wall that you should be able to easily walk through, but you can't), and so on. Only a few good ones.
5) The reliance on PoE1 mechanics. This has two negative impacts:
a) These are meant for PoE1, and therefore, encourage PoE1 type builds, because when you trap a player in a small area with a lot of mobs, give them low survivability, and then have garbage maps that constantly interfere with your ability to move, yeah, they might just want builds that one shot everything.
b) There is a lack of explanation of what they are, as if knowledge from PoE1 is assumed.
All of these should be sent back to the drawing board and completely redesigned to fit the "slower, more tactical" idea PoE2 was supposed to be.
6) Tablets only drop in maps that have the things they can grant. So if a player follows juicing advice and avoids those to save them until they can juice them with tableted up towers, they don't get these, and this leads to more frustration.
7) On ground patches (shock, ignite, chill) are horrible to play on. Just not fun. Get rid of them, unless we can just always buy baseline waystones, and then I'll happily reforge them away myself.
8) Remove the movement speed boost from the attack/cast speed one as well. Plenty of fast mobs already.
9) The shades. Just not a fun mob. They are immune to damage much of the time, and hard to see then. They freeze you. So it is the great combo of dragging out the fight and hitting you with a CC in a game where your only reliable defense is to not get hit.

General issues:
Drops:
- Currency drop rates without magic find feel bad.
- Greater Alchemist Orbs just don't drop. Way too rare.
- Magic Find shouldn't impact currency.
- No weighting toward your class. If I'm playing a Monk, I should see more quarterstaff drops than, say, crossbow ones. And sure, we can go with any weapon/armor type we want, but that's why I said more, not "only". And the neighboring weapons should probably also be more common than ones on the opposite side of the tree. The same goes for armor.
- Drops on the whole: Way too many factors, meaning way too much RNG, meaning the benefit of trading far, far outstrips any other option. What's the point to a game about killing and getting loot if the loot only exists to sell? And nope, solo self-found isn't the solution, because I do want to be able to team. Declutter some stuff.
- Can't deconstruct flasks, yet the drops to up the quality on them are very uncommon. Best fixed by letting us decontruct them like we can the other stuff, but if not that, then up the drop rate.

Uniques:
Most of these feel bad/worthless.
- Some just make you wonder why they exist at all, what their use is meant to be.
- Others seem to be designed to build around, but have a set level. For example, Painter's Gloves seem like a unique designed to build around. Now, it is great that you can do this right out of the gate. But the further you go into the game, the worse it feels to use them. Part of that is because the poor balancing among the elements/skills, but assuming that's fixed, it would leave the stats on the item. The further you go, the more opportunity cost of using these.
- Other still are just horribly outclassed/worthless, in part because of things like +skill level stat lines that exist on their non-unique alternatives.

Overall, uniques should be special, and it would be nice to have an NPC that lets us scale them, level-wise, up/down in exchange for gold, at least for the ones that are meant to be built around. Some are meant to be used for early leveling, and that's fine, those obviously shouldn't scale.

Must have stats:
+ skill feels way too required. These should probably all have their max benefit halved, if not be utterly removed from the general item option pool.

Boots without speed are garbage. Either make it so playing the game without speedy boots is viable, or all boots need to have speed on them.

Stats in general:
Too many low tier stat lines on higher level items. This just makes them garbage. Sure, we have the T2, T3, and so on drops, but not too many of those, and, well, T2 is also garbage.

Can't tell if a T5 of a stat is a good or bad roll, when we don't know if T9, T7, or T5 is the max.

Armour:
The whole armour is less effective against hard hits was bad in PoE1. Bringing it over to PoE2 was not a good idea. Making its issues even worse, even less of a good idea. Nobody wants a defense that is at its worst when you need it most. PoE2 was your chance to fix this mistake, not double down on it.


And that should do it for now.