Just not fun.

I really wanted to love this game. I have the holidays off until January 2nd and was genuinely looking forward to spending that time here. Unfortunately, each update continues to push a very specific design vision that makes the experience feel slower and more punishing rather than more engaging.

Replaying the campaign at such a slow pace doesn’t feel rewarding. It feels padded. The most recent patch reinforced that direction by adding more friction and further slowing progression, instead of addressing replayability and momentum.

I’m hoping another ARPG like Last Epoch eventually pulls everything together, because right now it’s hard to see this direction changing, and it’s not the experience I was hoping PoE 2 would become.

Annddd ... posts incoming that: bash your opinion, acuse you of wanting to zoom, praising the direction of the game .. in 3 . 2 .1 ....

PoE2 just might not be your jam. Nothing wrong with that.

I agree, if we're going to be forced to have to play through the entire campaign for every single character to level up to max level just to get to the maps and to do all of the things like that. Why it's the beginning of the game so difficult? That is not how beginnings go. What is the point and starting a game having a level 1 character and starting at the end of the game City or Village that doesn't make sense. You're level one and everything around you out levels you by drastic margins or if they are the same level, their stats out level your stats by drastic margins. It's quite ridiculous. You're mid to end game should be where the difficulty starts to set in. Your early game is so that you can learn mechanics. Take your time, pick up your items, do the things you need to do. Get a little grindy if you want, but no, for some reason grinding gear games has this direction that they want to go in where fun and creativity do not exist. I too want to love this game. I actually do love this game. I take my breaks and I come back and I play it and I am enjoying the new druid abilities. My problem right now is after getting the time to where I can sit down and actually play the game making my druid my first 20 minutes. I have gotten no items and I'm not counting the item you get from the zombie and the item in the spell gem you get out of the boxes, I'm referring to drops from enemies. The Miller dropped one item for me. A pair of leather gloves or something. They give me one to five lightning damage on attacks, going into Clearfield I am being mutilated by everything. The little pygmy zombies, the old witch thingies and the wolves as well as other wandering zombies for some reason are applying bleeding or corrupted blood to me. Something like that and I am just dying instantaneously what is up with that?

i felt like act 1 got gutted so hard it's trivial af. like the game is now so fast that it makes hitting a wall feel that much harder. the areas are laughably small. and the mobs are a bit too low on overall hp.
i even accidentally wasted my first vaal dungeon and i still feel overpowered and overgeared. i am building out intending to use as many interactions/skills/combos/payoffs/builder-spenders as possible. not just hold click.

We are punished for the fact that they can't competently design a game so crashes, bugs, flawed stuff all punishes the player.

Moving is insane who thought any of this was good to go.

I cannot believe they are confident putting these updates out. This game is a fucking literal dumpster fire.

yeah i agree, i think poe 2 is just dogshit tbh. I know they wanted to be their own game but they still have the poe in their name, and this is just a complete disappointment