Ascendencies feel "blah" - not enough differentiation

Don't get me wrong - not all ascendencies.

Smith of Kitava feels good. Amazon is nice. Infernalist and Bloodmage feel different enough.

But there are too many ascendency classes that feel like they are utilities instead of ascendencies.

PoE 1 was great with Ascendencies, because it really felt like each one had cooked into it 2 completely different play styles. Things that helped each choice feel extremely diverse.

PoE 2 needs help and some ascendencies feel half done.

Ritualist?

Pseudo Headhunter is interesting but not build-defining.

Blood Boil? A chance to have a class centered around Corrupted Blood?!? Cool...oh wait, it's just a weak clear skill and there's nothing else corrupted blood-related in the ascendency. But hey, here's a token free ring slot!

It feels a little lazy and half done.

Monk went from powerhouse because of a skill to just meh for both ascendencies.

Mercenary witch Hunter is interesting but tactician is meh and gemling legionarie has no interesting play style choices - just "here, have a vanilla cheat code character that can pile on skills."

Pathfinder has the cool flask skills, but very few if any ways to scale most of them

You get the idea. Each ascendency needs at least a couple of identities that can be taken into endgame.

Just my 2 cents.

I get that. IMO most of the classes seem like they have 1 good ascendancy, and then just 1 or 2 other token options. I've only played 4 classes so far, and I don't claim to be an expert in how some of the other ascendancies may synergize with certain builds, but reading through the ascendancies some of them just seem really lackluster. At least not interesting enough for me to grind out the class so see how it feels in the higher levels when you can really experiment with them.

The current passive tree was not developed with full consideration for the available ascendancies. Monk is the most egregious, in my opinion. It is tailor-made for the Invoker and any Chaos nodes that haphazardly ended up near it are the residuals of being Witch adjacent. Quarterstaff as well has this problem.