Final Thoughts

No, this is not a rage quit or that kind of thread. I gave enough time to this game. I leveled all classes and took those through end game. I shared my experience and tutorials on YouTube. Yes, I did play POE1 over 10 years ago.

All good things come to an end. I guess this is time for POE2 for now.
Before I hang my sword, I will share my thoughts for GGG.

Game Philosophy
Casuals like me play games to have fun with sprinkle of challenge. In current form, POE2 is neither. May be at some point it will be.

A person who plays for about 30-45m in a day to wind down, losing XP is not something they look for. I am OK with losing progress of those 30-45m. I am not OK with losing progress of last 7 days with one death.

Consider creating a game mode where XP loss works differently. All pros can play in the current form. Then you will figure out how many players really like your thinking. Give people a choice.

Combat & Survival Design
After playing all classes, I have reached a conclusion that mele play style viability is questionable. The defensive stats are a big part of the problem. Armor & Evasion do not provide mitigation to handle big hits. Evasion is just busted. Either you don't get hit or you get hit. If you get hit, you are toast.

Health+ES seems to be only viable defensive stats. This is a problem for non-INT classes. To get decent ES, you need gear with lot of INT. If you start stacking INT then you end up losing STR & DEX stats. Now you can't use your class specific skills. For reasons beyond imagination, GGG decided to not to provide any passive nodes that will allow all classes to gain some ES related stats. Those nodes seem to be clustered around INT bases classes.

Minion/Companion Play Style
Till 0.1, Necro minion play style was viable. Now that whole play style is busted. Minion/Companion do not survive a big swing from rare/unique monsters.

As Huntress, I found a way to use Companion to my advantage. I used Companion that will put de-buffs on monsters. But survival is still an issue.

Loot
I see lot of people talking about the issues related to loot. To some extent I agree with lot of complaints. Heart of the issue is quality and not quantity of loot. This is the part that GGG is not addressing. With 0.2g, GGG gave some empty statements about raising loot floor. All I saw was quantity. The quality is still not addressed. I completed a brown (unique) Wisp. At the end of fight, I had a screen full of loot. Nothing was usable other than T15 Waystones. Rares drop a ton of Orbs, but loot is still low quality.

You can raise the floor by raising the range of Tier modifiers as the person is progressing through the end game. I do not see any point in a T1 modifier on a loot that requires a player to be Level 70+. A common sense approach will be to keep raising the modifier numbers with progress. Then player is working towards next goal.

If your goal is for people to use Trade to find items, then there is no discussion on this topic.

Build Diversity
I have a feeling GGG is not a big fan of DEI when it comes to play styles. Everybody is looking for a build that will clear the screen in one shot and kill the boss in less than a minute. No, it is not player's fault that they look for those builds and game play. The big part of the problem is imbalance of incoming damage and survival. Other issue is very long campaign areas. Nobody wants to spend lot of time. If this game is all about end game activities, then take people to end game quickly. People want fast clears with screen clears.

When you have things hitting you from 2 screens out, only way to survive is somehow to find a way to hit what is 2 screens out.

Invisible Killers
This has been a pain point for me from the beginning. There are so many monsters that will hit you before you even know what is coming. A lot of time you will die and you will not know what hit you.

Do something about threat table and threat indicator.

After Death Effects
The after death effects are too long. Monsters leaving puddle of ailments slows down progress because players have to wait for those puddles to clear when there is no other safe passage.

This needs to be looked into.

Rare Modifiers - RNG with Feasibility
I have run into lot of cases where certain combinations of modifiers are close to infeasible. I have a feeling that GGG has not created a comprehensive table of combinations. RNG for mods is fine, but needs to have some exclusions as well.

Trial & Temple
I like doing Temple of Chaos. It is short and has a challenge. Trial is not rewarding considering how long it takes to complete.

With Temple, if you fail, you fail fast. With Trial, going all the way into 3rd room and then a death is frustrating.

Consider redesign of Trial challenge.

Development & Testing
This goes without saying, please do test your work.

Please do some basic functional and regression testing. I understand that it is EA, still you have to do testing before subjecting others to the pain.

Conclusion
I will say it again. No, it is not a rage quit. It is "Let's wait till all Acts have been released with all classes". With Elden Ring - Nightreign about to drop followed by Ghost of Yotei, may be GGG will get its act together by that time.

Happy Hunting!

Agree with damn near all of it. GGG seems to want to reach out to 'more market' with POE2, and i am guaranteeing you, this won't happen with their current 'vision'. Not at all. And in fact, it has alienated many ole skool poe1 players, myself not included... Yet.

Defenses seriously need new formulas, its been this way far too bloody long, and they know it, as POE1 sufferes from much the same. Its either that, or... they need to get real and reel the monsters spike damages in fucking big time.

Loot: yea, its never been about quantity of loot, its always been about quality. Their drop rates, just not gonna work for most people. Its that simple. Throwing the same shitty lvl 10 uniques on the ground, while gating anything even remotely fun behind seemingly rmt based rates, yea. Nope, most people this shit just dont fly with. Those days are long gone for most. They just want a fun game. Especially if they are planning to return and replay it every few months...

Diluting the mod pools with absolutely useless bs shit , like light radius... Thats old. It served no purpose beyond diablo 1, and should have been left there. But, no, these companies still use these for no other reason but to heavily weight and dilute chances of anything useful. Why not just create ALL useful mods, and stop weighting things so badly, that iLvl 65+ items still only usually see Light Radius and a buncha other bullshit useless low tier mods 99.9% of the time.

And ofc, well, theres much more, as you and many others have listed over and over again.

The most recent patch is pretty okay.

My biggest gripe right now is that the trials (chaos/sekhema) are by far the most frustrating experiences in any Diablo-like ARPG I've ever played. I actually don't mind Sekhema for the first and second set of ascendancy points - I find at that early level, it is easier than chaos, but the third and fourth sets are absolute slogs to get in either trial.

I spent a couple hours today trying to get my final sets. Did a couple chaos runs and got one-tapped by something I couldn't see.

Did a few Sekhema runs and got to the final boss, only for me to have not quite enough move speed to get all the hour glasses in time.

Huge, huge waste of time and it pissed me the f off. In Sekhema, because it takes so damn long, at Olroth you should at least be able to redo him once. Chaos is quicker, but they should at least tone down the boss speeds a little bit. It's insane how fast they are - particularly the sky seer.

I'm just ranting a bit because failing a few trials took out all my will to play the game for the week.