General feedback from someone who did not play PoE1

I feel like with PoE1 development continuing and the stated goals of PoE2 being a different game, feedback from a player like myself who never got into PoE1 but LOVES PoE2 so far would be valuable to ensure a broader appeal between the two games combined.

I haven't had a top-down ARPG catch my attention since early Diablo 3, and I'm very glad PoE2 is fitting exactly what I've wanted for years.

To preface the feedback, I've played almost exclusively with a controller for a bit shy of 500 hours. My main class has been a minion focused witch, with some time on a spark build, monk, and poison based pathfinder.

I'll avoid discussing bugs/glitches and UI issues in detail since I expect those will be ironed out over time by full release. I'll just briefly mention that ESPECIALLY on controller, there needs to be better menus and tooltips to view ability details easily.

My biggest issue with the game from a design choice perspective is absolutely trading. There needs to be some way to smooth out the process of trading with other players, I would suggest an auction house or just the ability to direct-buy items for their exact price on the trade site. As someone who loves the idea of trading and loves that nothing is soulbound, I detest the way the system is set up here and how everything outside of basic currency exchanges requires a separate webpage and interruption of gameplay to accomplish.

For basic combat, ranged classes mostly feel good, although crossbows currently feel clunky. Melee classes both feel terrible at the start, monk quickly becomes pleasant due to semi-ranged abilities for quarterstaves, but still feels inferior to ranged options lategame even with the crazy combination of something like herald of ice and polcirkeln. The major contributing factors to this are the lack of mobility while attacking with melee, the massive amount of anti-melee mechanics, and the utter lack of reward for dealing with those two factors. A melee class should either pump out DPS to a very high degree, or be nigh on unkillable, ideally a mixture of both. Currently, ranged classes get all the best defensive AND offensive options, they should absolutely not be nerfed or brought down, but melee classes (Specifically armor and melee weapons) should be brought up to be in line.

Next up, crafting. Many players from PoE1 complain about this and the lack of determinism in the crafting system. I personally love the system, but feel it needs a serious overhaul in transparency and crafting item availability. Omens should be more readily accessible when you hit the endgame, to the extent that I feel you should have one crafting omen option guaranteed in every ritual map. There also MUST be some sort of clarifications done for what the items actually do, potentially a highlight preview of what modifiers will be effected (or could be effected) by an omen buffed currency item. It feels great having the RNG, but it feels awful having no real insight on what the RNG manipulating tools can do without a third party tool and/or a spreadsheet full of data.

A brief note on item rarity, based on my own experience as well as actual hard data I've seen collected and not anecdotal evidence, I love this stat being in the game and it makes for a fun additional puzzle piece for a build. As with most things I would like some more transparency about the exceedingly diminishing returns that happen after around 85-120% so people (including myself before I did research and testing) stop feeling like they must stack 300%+ rarity or they're missing every currency drop ever.

Minions are very fun, but also feel awful in over half of the maps. I mentioned my main build being a minion witch, the main reason I even made a secondary character that I played a lot in maps was due to the minion AI being awful and them de-spawning instead of warping to the player when out of range. Either minions need to be able to walk through one another and doorways/hallways, or they need to warp to the player when their range is exceeded. Either of those options would be acceptable and make playing with them much more fluid, both combined would be even better.

Regarding mobility, blink feels mandatory both from a fun perspective and an effectiveness perspective. This mostly comes down to how useful it is to blink across gaps, up/down from ledges, and through packs of enemies. I feel that every class should get SOME form of thematic "blink" mobility option, such as a high leap for dexterity classes, and some form of shoving roll/charge that just moves all but the largest enemies aside for strength classes and doesn't stop on contact. The addition of rolling getting through/around enemies recently was an excellent choice and I was glad to see it.

Endgame mapping, this needs to be tweaked in some major ways. With the current breakpoints of modifier levels and when certain items can show up based on area level, waystones should be able to get pushed up to tier 20 to make obtaining the higher level gear drops that aren't boss specific more possible. I'd love to see it push all the way up to tier 30 for the purposes of leveling and exp grinding, but the part that feels bad to me currently is that I can have tier 15 or even 16 waystones and still not have any chance of an upgrade over an item level 81 drop beyond getting the perfect modifiers on a piece of gear, and even then the ilvl 80 gear simply can't match up to that slightly higher ilvl gear if it has a modifier that comes available at 81. The other major issue with mapping is the total loss of modifiers, waystone, and loot if you die, the game crashes, or you lose your connection for any reason. I understand wanting to not have abuse of juiced up maps, and not wanting to reward failure, but the punishment right now feels unfair especially in cases of crashes/disconnects.

Pinnacle bosses and league mechanics, I've only maxed out breaches due to their profitability, however these all seem to be good and well tied to their mechanics. The citadel rarity is already being addressed, so I feel bringing them up would be a moot point. I have a minor issue with how quickly the delerium fog vanishes from maps but they otherwise are a fun mechanic. My only big issue with them is the Kalguur mechanics, the boss being a random chance feels bad, and the mechanic itself feels unrewarding due to the shops having such low tier gear. I would much rather see a bit more of a pre-set mechanic for them, such as the explosives being laid out for you and removing build-killers like immunity to certain damage types, and make the high level logbooks guarantee a boss spawn.

Lastly I wanted to touch on economy resets especially in regards to early access. Given the game's success thus far even with it only being early access, I feel that the early access should become the standard league on release, with there being a temporary league on full release similar to PoE1 doing full economy resets. It would feel awful to have the standard league on the full game release lose all of my hundreds of hours of gameplay and be locked into an economy with only early access players. That being said, with all the bugs and such, I would also understand if a full reset was done on game release both to give a clean slate after said bugs, and to put everyone who joins once it's free on an equal playing field if they want to just play the standard league.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, there REALLY needs to be a way to set up some form of loot filter while in-game. Even a super basic one that simply filters item based on ilvl, item tier, or item types would be an amazing addition. Needing to go to third party websites and either link an account or download and install a filter feels... Very wrong from a security perspective.



That was a whole lot of yapping, hopefully some of the feedback helped! Again, this is all coming from someone who never could get into PoE1 but has sunk nearly 500 hours into the early access already, with plans to do more depending on how development proceeds.

Coming from someone who also did not play POE1: Trading doesn't matter

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LeFlesh#9979 написал:

Coming from someone who also did not play POE1: Trading doesn't matter

That's the beautiful thing about trade in general, for people who don't care about trading they can play SSF or simply not trade. But for anyone who enjoys trading, the system really needs to be brought up to date. There's games that have had auction house style trading for over a decade at this point and it feels incredibly dated to not have that with the focus GGG has had on the in game economy.

The trade debate has been going on for decade. Good luck with that changing.

Currency exchange is already "too nice" - you must understand that it is NOT born out of "modernizing" the game; instead, it is introduced because there were too many price fixing bots in POE1, causing massive amount of listings were just fake.

There already billions of discussion on trading I don't think I need to waste time on another one.

//--

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A melee class should either pump out DPS to a very high degree

actually they do. Even in POE1 the problem is the same, melee feels not as good as ranged / caster in early general game play. But when comes to end game bossing... their scaling are absolute insane.

Crafting issue will be iron out overtime, as many of the systems were actually pass-league contents. Delve, Harvest for example. Currently we only got a few options like Essence - but feels a lot weaker than essence in poe1 as it only create a magic instead of rare (unless there are higher variation i didn't aware yet, I'm still in early mapping). I certainly hope they introduce back the crafting bench for adding one selected crafted modifier.

They specifically want to nerf movement in POE2 so not sure what I want to say about it. It is fine to have a slower game, I don't zoom zoom in poe1 either so this don't impact me much. Although I would like the blink skill to be a standalone skill rather than replacing dodge, the current way it works kinda... "inconvenient I don't even want to use it", and it costs a freaking 60 spirit............. STR class can just use leap slam.

General map has never went above T17, not seeing that changes anytime soon. The general life cycle of POE is more about introducing more contents variations, trying to keep power creep in check; keyword "try"...

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Unlucky1307#6618 написал:

But for anyone who enjoys trading, the system really needs to be brought up to date.

No, it doesn't.