Poe 2. I was wrong.

I supported PoE 2 as much as I could and genuinely believed it could become something special, but I have to admit—I’ve changed my mind. In its current state, it’s just boring. I truly appreciate the effort put into the bosses and the game’s atmosphere, but unfortunately, the gameplay is largely terrible.

I think many would agree: keeping bosses as the challenging part of the game while tuning regular mobs closer to PoE 1 (their HP, damage, etc.) would be a massive improvement. Bosses would still provide a challenge, but the overall pacing would feel far better. I’m just exhausted by maps where every single pack of mobs demands my full attention. I’m tired of everyone playing the same build—or rather, the same skill. I’m tired of constant nerfs instead of buffing underused skills. You might argue this would make the game too easy, but in my experience, players will always gravitate toward the strongest, highest-DPS builds anyway. So these ‘fixes’ mostly hurt casual players—especially when the campaign alone already takes 20 hours.

I have immense respect for you as developers, but I’ve lost the motivation to keep playing. Instead of feeling excited about character progression and power growth, all I feel is burnout.

I hope you find the right balance and reconnect with what made PoE 1 so beloved.

I'm feeling this a little bit too. A lot of the time I don't have the energy to get properly invested. I dont know if it's a problem with the game or just that maybe it's not the right game to play when I'm in that state of mind. If I don't have full days / weeks to devote to POE2 it kind of feels like it isn't worth playing at all. I've gone back to OSRS for the simple fact that I have a difficulty calibration dial in that game and there exists the possibility to relax. I think the tower situation in POE2's endgame is currently worse than it ever has been, and the lack of build diversity makes most items worthless. Guessing I won't play much until 0.3

"

Koshkodivka01#6470 написал:

I’m just exhausted by maps where every single pack of mobs demands my full attention.

I absolutely disagree with this. Why would I play an action game if I didn't have to pay attention? Why would I want to fight the cool bosses if road to them was a meaningless grind?

OP couldnt say it better myself. Burnout is a good way to say it because after I pulled the "nickel slot" enough times and was down about $1000 I left the casino asking myself where the fun was. Last season I forked over a lot of $ supporting GGG because the game was amazingly fun. The rewards and drops felt in line with most ARPG. DIV still always seemed on a timer vs. by chance but still they existed enough to feel like the joke wasnt on me.

Now the joke seems on me. No loot, XP loss, recombo fails, cratfting that is absolute garbage, no upgrades, crap market already way worse than last season, so many people all saying same thing... does GGG really not understand what they did?

Why bother? There is no WHY to play.

What BURNS ME is this was what I looked so forward to every day. Now its just empty space on the SSD. I still lurk hoping to see any good changea but alas all I see arw posts sounding how I feel.

+1

I agree.
I could add, we are forced to play builds visioned by devs, not the builds & skills we like and prefer.

Don't give up hope!


PoE 2 can still be a good game, they just need to abandon the vision.

"

Summoner#7705 написал:

"

Koshkodivka01#6470 написал:

I’m just exhausted by maps where every single pack of mobs demands my full attention.

I absolutely disagree with this. Why would I play an action game if I didn't have to pay attention? Why would I want to fight the cool bosses if road to them was a meaningless grind?

Full attention, focused, sweaty - the semantics don't matter. The underlying point is "Not every single pack in the game should be such a threat that I have to focus all the time".
Not only because it counters the entire "Power Fantasy" idea of ARPG if you have to shit your pants every time you see a pack of monsters, but more importantly, it's too much.
We don't just kill 10 mobs, or 100, or 1,000; not 10,000 or 100,000.
We kill way more than that. A million? More?
You don't want to be "on the edge" in a game every time you encounter trash mobs, especially not if you kill sooo many of them.

"

Summoner#7705 написал:

"

Koshkodivka01#6470 написал:

I’m just exhausted by maps where every single pack of mobs demands my full attention.

I absolutely disagree with this. Why would I play an action game if I didn't have to pay attention? Why would I want to fight the cool bosses if road to them was a meaningless grind?

This post shows very well the general misunderstanding of both the devs and parts of the 0.2 players. You are not playing an "action game". You are playing an ARPG that is labelled as such and advertised as such on Steam.

Differences in design:

Action game: Content can and maybe even should be challenging at all times as the main goal of such games is to complete them once or maybe a couple times at best and then move on. Main focus lies on story, atmosphere, satisfying attack animations and epic visuals. Representatives are God of War, Assassins Creed, Devil may cry series and so on.

ARPG: Live service games with seasonal format where content is supposed to be played repeatedly (and we are talking not dozens, rather hundreds if not thousands of times) to motivate constant seasonal resets and rebuilding your characters, grinding for hundreds of hours in search of perfection for the gear of your characters. Representatives are the Diablo series from Diablo 2 on, Torchlight, PoE, Titans Quest, Last Epoch, etc.

In order to make content repeatable hundreds or even thousands of times you need a certain concept of ebb and flow to not have players exhausted. Constant flow like in action games simply doesnt work with a game you want ppl to play for thousands of hours. You just cant sit down and do 1000 maps when each map has you sweating for your life at any moment in time, force you to dodge perfectly, evade each and every projectile to not get stunlocked, not step into one aoe once, have you lose 10% exp if you die, etc. but at the same time you MUST play over 1000 maps easily to get the loot to perfect your character. Thats how ARPGs work, its all farming for loot and farming again and again and again and again to eventually challenge the endgame bosses. Thats why since the beginning of the genre, there is content where you can allow to switch your mind off a bit (mapping, farming spots, in D2 it was Chaos Sanctuary/Baal runs unless there were Burning Souls spotted) with a decently geared character without having to worry too much. This content was btw still challenging the first time around when you arrived there - just not every time after that for all eternity).

And then theres of course content that demanded your full attention: Bosses and endgame quest stuff (Hellfire quest in Diablo 2 for example). Now you can choose whatever you wanna do also based on the time you have right now and the mindset. If you wanna zone in and have a night of fully diving into the game and perfecting your character, do these challenges. If you just happen to have 1-2 hours inbetween getting your kids from school and doing the laundry, just do some mapping to farm currency and improving your account a bit without having to think too much.

Again, we are not talking that non-boss content should be completely unchallenging at all times and especially when you arrive at a content the first time it can be challenging (like your first T15 map). But you should be able to build your character in a way that he has somewhat decent gear so that for farming trash, thats enough to not be in too much danger.

PoE2 at the moment is in a weird spot there as you have two worlds:
1) LS Amazon destroys everything and feels like from Diablo 2 with Infinity on your merc. It feels like an absolute endgame goddess and provides enjoyable farm content while bosses still remain a challenge and its very easy to reach this state with your Amazon (not even 5 div investment).
2) Most other characters and builds though suffer from the 0.2 nerfs such that even mapping with them is pretty hard even with really good gear. They took away most of their screen clears, movement speed options and one shot capabilities. Now they all feel very exhaustive to play in any content where you expect to not have to hyperfocus all the time and thus players like OP are complaining (and rightfully so).

What OP meant by full focus is that if you dare to take your hand off the controls for a split second you're 100% doomed. Happened too many times to me. But the righteous defenders of The Only Truthful Vision won't know that because they haven't really played the game.