Dear GGG,
This is coming from someone with over 1000 hours invested in the game. I love it to death, I really do. For some context, I've min-maxxed 3 seperate characters in 0.1, a deadeye, a bloodmage, and a spark sorcerer with a 2.2mil unbuffed hideout damage tooltip. I also practiced 15 runs of the campaign with different characters in SSF in preparation for 0.2. By the end of 0.1 I felt super accomplished, and was super hyped of 0.2, especially since huntress was the class I was looking forward to the most. But 0.2 has really made me quite sad seeing where the game is going.
Lets start off with the good things that came with 0.2:
QOL:
Affinities, great, love them, need more!
Runes:
Having the ability to fix attribute requirements with runes was a great addition, love it. However, I still feel like stat requirements are way too high for certain weapons and skills, tunneling you into a single stat with not much room for experimentation.
Corruption/Cleansing:
A cool mechanic, needs more loot though. Atlas is also very visually appealing now. Unique maps are cool to find with cool things to do, but also unrewarding.
Act changes:
Great step in the right direction. However, mobs (especially some bosses like Jamanra) are still too tanky, and the campaign is way too long.
The guaranteed drops for artificers orbs and runes were a great addition.
Now lets get to the Problems:
Campaign:
Having to slog through a huge map killing white monsters and rares that drop zero MEANINGFUL loot is NOT FUN. Campaign needs to be looked at, and I disagree wholeheartedly that it is because there isnt many things to do in a large area. The area is just simply too too huge, this coupled with low character movespeed (if im not lucky enough for MS boots to show up in my vendor) and the random level generation (with little to no clues as to where to head to) leads to absurd amounts of backtracking.
Bosses are also way way way way way too tanky. Either that or players just have too little damage right now. Yes, I might be able to get a lucky drop that will make me kill a boss a lot faster, but that relies on huge RNG (be it the weapon that your class can use, or having currency drop so u can trade for a gear upgrade). There has to be SOME sort of crafting to fix this, and no, runes do NOT solve this in any way, it's just a band-aid solution. When im stuck, I just feel like there's nothing I can do.
Loot:
Think this can go without saying. From my own experience as well as many others on forums as well as streamers, there seems to be much less loot in maps right now in 0.2 with the nerfs to rarity (on gear), quantity (on tablets) and the removal of additional rare monster modifiers on the atlas tree. Most of the time, I don't even get back the exalts I used to get the map to 6 modifiers, which is a big big problem.
There is a severe lack of dopamine even when running extremely juiced maps (4 tower overlaps with quantity/rarity). All the league mechanics are barely worth doing as they don't feel rewarding with league mechanic monsters dropping barely any rare items or currency. Rogue exiles and Wisps are extremely unrewarding and boring, a shame as I was really looking forward to them.
Most unique items are really worthless, and get outscaled fast even if I do find one for my build. And once they get outscaled, again, im relying on vendor/drop/currency RNG for an upgrade.
Jewels:
The removal of jewel slots
One of the things that kept me playing for hours on end was the min-maxxing of my character through the passive tree, primarily jewels. Eg. Thinking if adding one jewel was more valuable vs an ES wheel or damage cluster.
Removing half the jewel slots on the skill tree made the passive tree a lot less exciting to try optimizing, and I find myself set on the passive tree and not incentivised to try to minmax it with the lack of jewel slots to farm for or trade for.
This also amplifies the issue of attributes, as we are no longer able to sacrifice a passive cluster for a jewel slot to get attributes on the way to meet requirements of gear.
Crafting:
I get it, RNG is fun. There is a reason why the ventor's strongbox is so well recieved. But when I'm trying to play a game, I do not like feeling helpless with no agency of my gear and upgrades, and when I'm stuck, I just feel like quitting because I have no clear track on how to upgrade my gear to clear an obstacle, and having to rely on RNG just makes it an even worse time. Please change your mind about crafting in general, as this is not a healthy way to make an ARPG.
Spears:
Yes, lightning spear is overtuned and way too powerful in endgame right now. But I'm speaking in general here. No. We do NOT want to parry. Just, no. Look at your endgame, with 20 different on death effects and monsters that swarm you, there is no shot anyone is going to parry. I league started with a huntress and went with the spear. I thought hey, lightning spear looks very very cool so I tried it out and had the worst time imaginable in acts 1 and 2. After that I quit the game for 2 whole days before coming back.
Having half of the skill locked behind frenzy charges early game is abominable design, and you are practically FORCING us to use parry + disengage to do any form of meaningful damage to even WHITE monsters (which did not even die to a frenzy empowered attack pre-patch). Did you guys even test parry against bosses?
The recent skill addition does help solve this problem, but not entirely.
Skill and support gem design:
We as players do not like being told how to play. We want to experiment and NATURALLY find cool synergies and combos to play and experiment with. That's where the excitement comes from. Building our characters and finding cool synergies. Thats what you did in poe1, what changed? Why does lightning rod HAVE to be used with lightning arrow? Why can't I use a crossbow on a Rhoa? Or even throw a spark off the rhoa? Why limit our creativity? Am I just supposed to play how YOU want us to play? Where's the fun in that?
If you want us to use combos, make it such that all the skills are already good, and that using combos only enhances the experience when we find out about them. That way, we will use the combos if they are powerful. What you guys are doing now is practically FORCING us to use a combo that is clunky and unfun.
Where is the experimentation to "build our own characters"? All these restrictions makes us just disheartened whenever we theorycraft and try to find new ways to make our characters, and I find myself just giving up and logging off after realising the overwhelming restriction in regards to skill gems and support gems.
Let's also talk about support gems here. 90% of the new support gems are not being used at all. Why? Because of the restrictions and INSANE downsides that come with them. It comes back to the "deal damage on tuesdays" meme. Why give us these downsides that make my character feel so so much worse in exchange for SOME damage? Look at the play rate of support gems like alignment. A total of less than 20 people total are using that support gem.
Again, we do not like being told how to play the game. Let us find the synergies ourselves and not just restrict them to how you want us to play. You're actively killing build diversity.
Yes, some support gems are going to be used more than others, it is only natural. But we want them to be all good, and the choice will come down to which are BETTER than others, and not just most of them be flat out unusable. Take a look at your most used support gems and you'll see why they are the most used. This logic also applies to the passive tree.
Economy:
With no proper way to sink currency that most players will use, currency floods the market really quickly, resulting in an inflated economy really early into the league. Exalts can only be used twice max on a rare item/map and less if they show no promise. Give us more ways to use our exalts and divines like a crafting bench, additional map modifiers, something.
Endgane:
I do hope more content is coming soon. The endgame feels so dry with no real challenge (here's where your challenges should come, not in the campaign) and no reward. It gets boring real quick with how fast map progression is, and there's no worthy items to chase for currently. Last patch we had stat stackers and spark sorcs that could chase for items to min max their character. With all of that being lost and no new WORTHY chase uniques (other than that gold charm) to go for, we're just left with not much to discover or grind for. Boss uniques are all pretty much worthless now except arbiter's sceptre for lightning spear builds.
Towers:
Towers just don't work. The atlas was marketed to be this huge never ending map to discover with unique maps to find and random content to be discovered. Which is great! But what's stopping it from being great? TOWERS.
Man. I cannot begin to describe how HORRIBLE towers are for the game. Having map modifiers locked behind completing a tower is the most TEDIOUS and UNFUN experience ever. I know you guys tried something with towers this patch, but I am here to say that the tower change has made it even worse.
Now that towers are even more powerful, each tower holds more value, and as such, the difference between a 2 tower overlap and 3 tower overlap is even more than missing a tower in 0.1. This combined with the fact that base loot is already so bad leads to even more HOURS searching for overlapping layouts and running no-loot maps just to complete those towers to get to play some juiced content for 30mins (which drops even less loot now), at which point i have to repeat the process over again.
Running multiple towers, then running the maps in bewteen actively kills the whole "exploration" aspect of the atlas. Please, either remove towers, or move the juice to our maps or atlas tree. There is already an incentive to explore the atlas: unique maps, citadels. But towers, please no. If towers or the mechanic of juicing stay the way it is for 0.3, I quite literally will not play the game, unfortunately. I want to kill monsters, get loot. Not spend 2h killing monsters with no loot, to get to towers, to still get no loot.
RMT:
Bots. Annoying. Ruin the integrity of the game. Please look into this.
Concluding remarks:
Overall, the game is in a terrible state right now, and I hope you guys will take some feedback from a player that fell in love with this game. I will be taking a break now, but I really do hope to come back soon.
Love,
Me
