Overly Punitive - Taking a break to play LE to relax and have fun - Feedback Post for GGG

I have about 1k hours into POE2 now. I have felt forced to play a meta lightning spear build this season. Even doing that the game has felt like an overly punitive slog.

I am clearing t15-16 maps, but the map and citadel bosses require almost perfect play. So many abilities one shot you and then the experience penalty just beats you down for making one mistake. I have invested a fair amount in defense with max resist, 78% evasion, 2300 health with 100 + health on any non-unique slots (no where else to add more health), 57% block, 155 ES. We all know armor isn't much use on high end bosses. I am not rich so getting better gear is really rough right now. I have about 5 divine in my stash. RMT has made prices of decent gear ridiculous.

I started the morning at half way through 89. I have been playing 2-3 mod maps at most trying to just get to 90 while still doing some regular map bosses and a couple citadels. After hours of play with deaths I have made no progress.

That has been an example of my experience this season. Lots of effort and time for little to no reward or progress, never feeling powerful, and not even remotely thinking about the pain I would endure to try something off meta. I see Jorgen on this shield and spear warrior and think how fun that theme "looks" then see his max defense character still easily getting one shot by bosses and think no thank you.

I play a fair amount at around 4 hours a day, more on weekends, and at this point this game just feels like a waste of my time for no fun.

GGG, for the love of god, please make defenses more meaningful and stop making everything one shot or almost one shot you where you can never relax. Save that for the very end game t2+ pinnacles (even then be better to allow mistakes expect for well telegraphed signature moves, at least allow 2 hits.)

Obviously at 1k hours there is a lot of things I like about this game, and I want it to succeed, but this version is not it. When I reflect on my almost 200 hours this season I realize this has been more of a job trying to accomplish a goal, with almost no fun. Its really a shame.

This post is just meant as feedback to GGG on my personal opinion. I understand other people may feel completely differently. Thank you.

The problem that you have is that you're copy pasting paper thin builds without using your brain. The reason you think you need to play perfectly every second of every map is because your character is shit, period.

At 1k+ hours it'd be nice to know how evasion actually works and what using it entails. Here you go, educate yourself: https://www.poe2wiki.net/wiki/Evasion.

Life scaling doesn't currently work in this game unless you're stacking strength. Hopefully someone at GGG is aware of that fact and have an actual solution in the pipeline. For now, if you're playing evasion, you NEED to go hybrid eva/es and scale the latter via the passive tree if you want to avoid 1 shots.

Can't take someone with your forum history seriously Arandan...

Its people like you who are the vocal minority and will cause this game to tank. Proof enough is the thousands of negative steam reviews with similar feed back to mine. Here is a link to educate yourself:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2694490/Path_of_Exile_2/#app_reviews_hash

You are not forced to play meta lightning spear. Im playing smith of kitava boneshatter build clearing screens on t16/17 maps just fine.

There’s definitely issues with defense that need reworking. They’ve acknowledged it and are attempting to make changes without making the game too easy. They’ll get it right eventually. They’re listening to feedback and are actively updating us every week. What more do you want? Way too many people are overreacting to the current state of the game. There’s plenty of viable builds but yeah, you’re pretty much forced to run ES/EV since armour is useless without any hp scaling available in the passive tree.

LE is a mindless ARPG where everything is handed to you and there’s a million one button builds to shoot you through the game without any skill. If that’s what you’re into, go for it, but I pray that this game doesn’t turn into a dopamine machine trash game like D4 and LE. Challenge and pacing are important. They were right to nerf things. They’re not even close to the final product. Have some patience.

It feels like GGG baseline balance is assumption that at minimum you will have 90% resists 75% armour 50% evasion and 2k ES.

I mean, if my entire character IS ABOUT DEFENCE then I should feel like a character who is a rolling tank, thats the whole point of ROLEPLAYING video game, I assume a role and imagine im a certain archetype of character.

Currently the game is about glass cannons vs glass cannons, and it sucks major d**k.

This is exactly the problem with the endgame. The regular white and blue mobs are ok. Occasionally a rare will have a mod combo that really annoys your build. But bosses are just HORRIBLE. Carefully dance around for ten minutes. Make one mistake and lose many hours of progress. Somehow take the boss down and get 1ex and a new map or two.

No one wants to play with such a stiff, horrible penalty for making a single mistake in a grueling fight. And there’s no sense of accomplishment when you succeed because the rewards are garbage.

If it takes you ten minutes to kill a boss in maps then your build is bad. Now before you say ohh no build diversity im playing warrior boneshatter that has bad single target damage. No boss lasts for more then two minutes except for pinnacles.

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Quiet_Conqueror3#2766 написал:

There’s definitely issues with defense that need reworking. They’ve acknowledged it and are attempting to make changes without making the game too easy. They’ll get it right eventually. They’re listening to feedback and are actively updating us every week. What more do you want? Way too many people are overreacting to the current state of the game. There’s plenty of viable builds but yeah, you’re pretty much forced to run ES/EV since armor is useless without any hp scaling available in the passive tree.

LE is a mindless ARPG where everything is handed to you and there’s a million one button builds to shoot you through the game without any skill. If that’s what you’re into, go for it, but I pray that this game doesn’t turn into a dopamine machine trash game like D4 and LE. Challenge and pacing are important. They were right to nerf things. They’re not even close to the final product. Have some patience.

Hi Quiet, this post was just meant as constructive feedback from someone who has put a lot of hours into this game and wants it to succeed.

I agree they are working on fixing the game and I am hoping my feedback on the one shots will help them make this more reasonable. I plan on continuing to play POE 2 as they make these changes, I really enjoyed the latest POE 1 season.

I agree, I do not want this to be LE. I think if they simply make all defenses more valuable so if you invest into them you can at least take one hit, except maybe for pinnacle signature moves, then things would feel better.

Right now so many map bosses shots are one shots or almost all your health to die a second or two later. This is even with 0 boss points on your tree and a citadel with only 3 affixes. I have beat these but usually with a few deaths, which again would be ok if not losing an hour of experience too. Sometimes Its a chain of 3 or 4 one shots and lose the boss, hours of exp, and no loot which really feels terrible. Again as noted in my post - overly punitive.

Maybe a good solution is take away experience death penalties from bosses only like they did with T0 pinnacles (epic change btw). I think losing the map and loot with sometimes an hour or two of your work to grind to a citadel is already a big hit, which I can live with. There should be some penalty for death that feels impactful.

Again this is my experience. My hope is GGG can still make this game challenging and just lighten up some on damage taken and the big negative experience hits at 90+.

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Nemmerle#4704 написал:

This is exactly the problem with the endgame. The regular white and blue mobs are ok. Occasionally a rare will have a mod combo that really annoys your build. But bosses are just HORRIBLE. Carefully dance around for ten minutes. Make one mistake and lose many hours of progress. Somehow take the boss down and get 1ex and a new map or two.

No one wants to play with such a stiff, horrible penalty for making a single mistake in a grueling fight. And there’s no sense of accomplishment when you succeed because the rewards are garbage.

especially when the biggest mistake was not to make a glass cannon who oneshots the boss, because it skips all the boss mechanics.