General Version-Agnostic EA Feedback

Hello! I have been meaning to write a feedback post for a long long time (since 0.1), but have never gotten around to it until now. Many of the biggest things I have worried about have actually been addressed over the patches, and the latest live + patch notes give me even more confidence that GGG can get the game into a great place. There are still a few topics that have yet to be addressed that I would like to cover.
Build variety and potential are my absolute favorite parts of Path of Exile 1+2. I will often just play long enough each league to see a wacky build idea to fruition, with the majority of my builds becoming bricked by changes shortly after the end of the league (that's fine!). My outlook on game design is to expand the reaches of creative boundaries, and I do think that PoE2 limits possibilities a bit too much.

The Passive Tree
It is too large. The number of cluster options is great, but the distances you have to travel to traverse the tree are much greater than in PoE1. To reach the outer ring along an attribute boundary it is 9 points in PoE1 vs 14 points in PoE2. For reaching the opposite side of the tree it is an investment of ~26 vs 33 points. The outer ring of each class slice is roughly 7 points vs 10 points. The outer ring of PoE1 is technically the middle ring of PoE2's skill tree, so there is also technically just MORE TREE to traverse.

This would be great fun in theory, but in both games you end up with 122 passive points. The effective passive point tax from travel nodes puts a higher price on those clusters in the outer ring, but worst of all, it absolutely kills builds that hope to utilize node clusters from other class slices or from multiple areas of the tree simultaneously. Creating builds outside of intended class themes is nigh impossible save for especially powerful outliers.
Outside of adding new passive tree mechanics similar to the warp gates of PoE1's mapping skill tree, realistically the only solution is to lessen the amount of travel nodes to try and allow for a greater coverage of the tree. This would of course lead to regular builds ending up with 1-2 more clusters, but the benefits of less travel nodes would be primarily seen in diversification of your tree locations.

Uniques
I was pleasantly surprised to hear this topic briefly discussed in the latest live, but the issue is clear: Uniques do not scale. Uniques are just that, unique. They should fulfill roles that no other items can. PoE1 has a multitude of ways to scale builds to insane values that effectively negate the downsides of many uniques, but in PoE2, a lack of defenses, life, resistances, and especially base damage is something that cannot be ignored or substituted (save for some extreme outliers). Weapons especially become unusable very quickly. While inherent skills in some base types do scale with item level, weapons are left in the dust without heavy investment into flat added damage to compensate for their lack of base damage.

Plainly, uniques need to scale with item level, and/or be able to appear on multiple different base types that appear with higher item levels. Unique modifiers could contain tiers only seen as ilvl increases to keep them from falling too far behind as an option. Uniques do not need to (and should not) scale better than a rare alternative, but they should be scaled into build-specific competitive relevancy. Completely casting lower level uniques aside due to their abysmal level-related downsides is a complete waste of well designed items, and the running joke of uniques being useless needs to be put to an end.
Mark's recent idea of having methods to upgrade uniques plagued by these issues is sound, but I believe item level scaling should be done first and foremost.

Game Speed and Combo Oriented Gameplay
Act 1 is PoE2 in its prime, and the other acts aren't too far behind. Unfortunately there is a problem that develops as you progress through the game - how to scale difficulty. PoE2 still holds remnants of its PoE1 origins: the zoom zoom stat check where you kill everything before it can kill you while watching your health bar ping pong back and forth from extremely deadly damage. The original promise of PoE2 gameplay was more combo oriented fights that required some modicum of critical thinking to outmaneuver enemies. The game actually accomplishes this quite well, but it begins to fall apart once difficulty is cranked up and it begins to revert back to PoE1.

I believe the core of this is something Johnathon realized back in the 0.2(?) live, that this game is not soulslike in nature in the slightest. The core of soulslike gameplay is not the dodge rolling, boss memorization, or backtracking, but the management of resources in an intense environment. What PoE2 needs is not boss slams or hyper rares that can kill you instantly, but a gradual deterioration of your resources in an encounter and in a zone. Gaining flask charges on kill or on boss damage effectively negates the need to manage their usage. Zones may be difficult to effectively manage this due to the complete lack of opportunity cost of portaling, but when you enter a boss fight, what should kill you isn't a failed dodge, its running out of recovery options.

This is of course not a change easily made, nor one without side effects. Other sources of recovery would become more powerful, and nerfing them would have cascading side effects on builds that rely on them to offset drain effects. Flask related characters would need considerable changes. There is a whole slew of fundamental changes this would required, but I believe that this would at the very least fix the volatility found as the game get progressively more difficult.

Combo oriented gameplay is working well, but it could use some improvements. I have utilized combos between skills in every build I have done so far (0.1 arc + lightning arrow + orb of storms + mana storm | 0.3 ice strike + shattering palm + temple bell + falling thunder + strike combo). My primary feedback for them is that, again, as difficulty progresses and enemies become faster/more swarmy/more damaging, the time you have to kill the enemies before they kill you gradually gets smaller and smaller. You eventually lose the option to combo 3+ skills together, because if the first skill or two don't kill or hard CC - you die. While less deadly enemies and attrition related death would make this seem better, in the end it comes down to the opportunities you have to mix in combo pieces.

I would like to see much faster attack/cast speeds on utility and combo skills, while also ensuring that effects created by these skills last for enough time to allow you to avoid attacks while weaving in CC. The change to armour break duration is a great example, but the duration/availability of many other skills and debuffs could use improvements (i.e. make mana storm persist for X seconds if you leave it temporarily, or increasing the duration of skills like temple bell). Additionally, combos need to be worth pulling off. Wasting a full second to apply a debuff first for 40% more damage on your next hit makes no sense if you could just use your DPS skill an additional time for an effective 100% more damage. One, or even two button builds should not outperform active comboing of skills ever.

An aside on combat speed: the recent changes to map scaling pack size and the monster speed mod are fantastic changes. I'm not 100% sure if this note of mine is still valid, but GGG, please ensure that combat mechanics never check the player's clear speed with timers or fog dissipation or otherwise. Letting players play and do combos at their own pace is integral to a more enjoyable experience.

Misc Feedback Notes
Charms are an AWESOME replacement for utility flasks. I want to see more charms, both base types and uniques, as well as more and more useful mods on them. Also for the love of god please increase the charm cap to 6-10. Ritualist is screaming and crying in the corner.

I don't have a comprehensive grasp on the current state of every ascendency, but please ensure that ascendencies lack downsides almost completely. They should exist as pure power upgrades, and they could in fact be even stronger across then board than they are now. Currently, going out of your way to obtain ascendency points is something I dread doing because the payoff is no where near worth the time and effort. Ascendency nodes with downsides would cause me to avoid the mechanic entirely until far after the intended time.

Boots need movement speed as an implicit value. It shocks me that they aren't already like this. Movement speed isn't a nicety, its a requirement. It the intended balance with which map sizes, enemy attack patterns and movement speeds, and boss fights are all designed around. Boots without a relevant movement speed roll are bricked items. Give the intended player speed to players without RNG please.

Get rid of tiered currency. They are clutter. Base the possible rolled mod tiers purely off of item level instead. Finding and crafting upgrades is hard enough as is, even utilizing essences and abyss crafting. Getting a +4 life mod on a potential upgrade in early maps instead of +80 is demoralizing and drives the average player away from spending their currency on crafting items, instead saving it all for trades. I'm not asking for 6 mod T1 items, simply that the mod floor needs to be brought up into bare minimum usable levels for the appropriate zone level. We already need to fight against the mod pool, and the complete and utter lack of alterations and scourings means that each solid item base is worth that much more as a find.

Leech needs to have leech resistance removed, as well as a broader spectrum of use. Purely physical builds are a niche, and to have leech as a mechanic limited purely to those sorts of builds feels out of place. Amazon and Chayula monk allow its use with other damage types, but these nodes could be stronger, and leech could use more sources of damage leeched as life. Leech resistance is obtuse and makes leech a trap. I have also not heard great things about the efficacy of leech, granted I haven't played one of the 3 builds capable of utilizing it.

Other notes (already improved things, good job GGG): in 0.1 I had severe issues with the disparity between defenses (ES too strong, the others too weak), but deflection and % armour applies to elemental/chaos are great!! I believe waystone sustain is better now. And improvements to runes and rune options have been 10/10. Love runes, better than the crafting table for sure. The end game obviously needs heaps of work to be perfected, but I'll save comments on that for after the acts are completed.

Thanks for reading. Keep up the great work GGG, and have a good 0.4 launch.