Personal feedback from a 13+ years PoE player

Sorry for not perfect English in advance.

I'm sure 1.0 will be a very good experience but I don't think some things are right with the current state of PoE2. My current main concerns which prevent me (and many other players I'd assume) from having more fun in the game are:


1. Long, slow campaign. Historically speaking, campaign is only some-hours gateway to the real fun part - hundreds of hours of endgame farm. In PoE1 even you aren't that good at games, with some experience you can clear fresh league campaign in under 6hrs and under 5hrs on subsequent characters. Before when I had a 'I wonder how this class+build feels' thought I just went and leveled it. In PoE2 I just don't want to bother unless the build interests me very much. No matter how good and challenging campaign is, PoE is an aRPG, not a souls-like where you clear the game how many times? 4-6 max? People level dozens of characters over the time and there should be some solution to make that part more enjoyable.

Possible solutions: Movespeed increase (at the very least out of combat). Zones are huge, traveling between mob packs takes time and the more times you start the campaign the more glaring the problem is, the leveling gear doesn't help much. Maybe 5-10% movespeed increase (only for the campaign part) per character who completed the campaign in the current league with 30-50% cap?


2. Everything in the game tries to slow you down - stuns, slows, extra skill animation frames, HP sponges, etc. The overall feeling is that your progress equals you trying to get out of the janky quagmire but no matter how much you try there are still things that make everything clunky. As an exemple - Ritualist's ascendancy headhunter skill. ~3 seconds to perform it. ~3. Every time I cast it I want to level something else but then 1. prevents me from doing it.

Possible solutions: I'm not a game designer so I can't suggest much. Increasing deadliness of monsters AND action speed of players at the same time maybe? The feeling of 'these mobs will die, this skill will be cast, I'll get from point A to point B, that's 100% for sure but why make me feel miserable and slow while doing all this?' shouldn't be present in my opinion.


I won't mention the obvious things like servers rollbacks, lag spikes, poor optimisation (on 4090 at that) since they are obviously not part of the design and I'm pretty sure they'll be fixed in the future. Hard encounters? Very good, I like them.

I don't care that much about the loot (even though I understand that most of the players do) and mostly play SSF because the weight of each drop in it feels much better than on trade. But when THE PROCESS OF LOOT ACQUISITION itself feels unsatisfying then I can't enjoy the game to the fullest.


In any case, thanks for improving the game and keep up the good work.