Constructive & negative feedback on early access and 0.4

Some things I think would warrant a bit of improvement:

Mace and melee in general feels pretty bad. There's an inherent disadvantage on melee for survivability and clear speed, and that is in having to be close to the monsters. If damage-wise possible, the melee skills with high range or associated fast movement are always preferred. Like Storm Wave, Flicker Strike, power-charged Rend, etc.

But from some reason, these skills often also simply do more damage than other skills. Storm Wave for example just simply does 30% more damage than Tempest Flurry while having much better reach and AoE.

And even the best melee skills - where the "best" don't really even feel melee - pale in comparison to the true ranged skills. Not only due to better clear and range, but in simple damage numbers too. Arc sorc kills bosses faster than the best melee builds. Poison Burst/Toxic Growth builds kill bosses faster than the best melee builds. Essence Drain kills bosses faster than any melee build.

Currently mace skills in particular are almost plain unviable. You can barely play through the campaign without dying (relevant as I play only HC) without piling gear from previous characters. Shield Wall is pretty much the only useful skill.

I don't understand the reasoning for this and proper melee skills where you actually have to get close to the enemies have underperformed in raw damage since 0.2.

Skill synergies feel enforced and premade, as in, a lot of skills have an "obvious" pairing skill you are supposed to use with them, and often there's no other alternative. Like if you want to use Entangle or Thrashing Vines, you pretty much automatically need Thunderstorm. If you want to use Essence Drain, you will have Contagion, and by proxy, Dark Effigy.

On a related topic, charge/infusion generation doesn't feel great. This feels a bit better with the added special support gems and some other changes, but still. Especially in early game, there's really just 1 clunky way for you to generate charges, and it usually has such a poor flow or low amount of opportunities that it's best to not bother with it. Like Killing Palm + Falling Thunder is clunkier and slower than just spamming Glacial Cascade.

A lot of charge generation techniques are also completely based on mobs, and mobs die so fast compared to bosses that they don't really matter. While bosses often don't have mobs with them.

The "good" charge generation techniques are few and are essentially ones where you don't have to care about any timing etc and can rotate a couple of skills regularly. E.g. for Charged Staff, you put Culmination and Ailith's Chimes on your default attack once you can and then you just incorporate a default attack here and there. Before that you are just running Hand of Chayula with the appropriate charge-generating Marks and using Resonance to go Frenzy to Power Charge - and before level 31, you just don't generate charges.

Most of the charge generation/consumption mechanics are such that they just aren't done. Like if you happen to use Bonestorm, it's better to not try to get the charges into it. Endurance Charges have pretty much zero use except with Bear shenanigans, for which I do foresee a nerf coming.

Infusions.. Ok ok, I know some players like these. But honestly I don't think the vast majority want to be picking up infusions from the ground. It just isn't an engaging game mechanic. What's really unfortunate is that now most elemental spell builds 100% need the infusions or they are just too weak. So if you want to play a fire sorc or whatnot - tho on that point, fire is still awfully weak compared to the two others - you have to also be into the infusion system.

Most builds feel like they are on rails, which relates to many of the above points. A lot of potential sources for more creative builds are restricted. You lose combo on weapon swap. Thing X only works with tag Y. If you want to use skill A, you always pair it with skill B. You can't regenerate N while using use L. In my opinion too many skills are also tied to a specific weapon. I understand that this is in part due to the animation system and it's a reasonable reason, but I do feel like there's also lots of more skills that just wouldn't necessarily need a particular weapon, either because their animation is anyway kind of low-key or because the animation could sensibly be made for other weapons as well.

Damage scaling has also overall become perhaps a bit too simplistic; essentially meaning that it's very easy to figure out the modifiers you need and the notables you need. It's really hard to carve your own path by exploiting some less commonly used way of scaling damage.

I do understand that there's balance considerations. PoE1 has its damage and defense scaling systems so convoluted and there's so many ways to reach multiplicative/exponential growth that it's become a balance nightmare. But now it feels like a lot of restrictions are put in place just in case, without there being a shown way of exploiting those skills or mechanics without those restrictions.

Overbuffing and overnerfing. I think these might be done somewhat on purpose, to push players to play other builds and to make sure that the meta is shuffled now and then. However, on the negative side, it often feels pretty bad for players who want to play specific builds. Take Perfect Strike for example. It was a bit overtuned in 0.1, but wasn't stronger than like Arc/Spark or quarterstaff stuff. Yet, Perfect Strike got completely gutted in 0.2 and since then is not worth using. Its use on the ladder is 0.1% and I think most of those players have just left it in their setup after trying it and figuring it wasn't worth it. A couple of builds use it for Endurance generation.

Meanwhile, that Arc/Spark and e.g. Storm Wave have been fully playable every league.

The campaign is just too long and gets repetitive. I imagine this is a problem on SC too, but on HC it's even worse. You might die a couple of times on a build you want to try in end game and you can't zoom quite as fast as on SC.

Acts 2 and 3 are just too long, especially 3. Act 2 takes twice longer than Act 1, and Act 3 takes as long as 1 and 2 combined. Not yet sure about 4, played it through too few times to say, but feels at least as long as act 3.

Feels like that if I put let's say, 150 hours to the game per league, half of that is going to be spent in the campaign, to get a couple of characters that are fun to play to the end game. I really don't think I am going to keep doing that every league. Let alone when there's 6 campaigns.

Suggestions:

- Melee needs a fair bit of work. Esp the actual melee skills on builds that don't have obscene range/AoE on their attacks. The damage just generally should be buffed a bit, while adding a bit of attack speed here and there. The synergies should be slightly easier to do.

- Charge and infusion systems need some kind of rethinking in my opinion. Especially infusions. Perhaps tone down the skill-tied buff from infusions and add more buffs to it via the skill tree; so that players who want to use them can get a bit higher damage, but not so much higher that playing without them is not feasible.

- Make nerfs less radical. For example, going from 45% to 30% attack speed is just too much. Maybe instead do both a small nerf to attack speed and damage.

- Pull back a bit on the various restrictions. Leave enough of them in place so that players understand that they can be used as a means of nerfing skills and synergies. But don't put them on skills just because; only if it's clear when designing and testing that they are needed.

- Allow some kind of a way of skipping or shortening the campaign for players who have finished it a couple of times. One interesting suggestion I saw was that when you finish the campaign, you get a single consumable that allows you to skip the campaign one time. That can then be sellable on the currency store. On a fresh league, no one yet has them, so people will finish the campaign at least once per league.

Finishing on a positive note, I think the druid is honestly really well made. The animations have nice flow to them and the skill synergies work pretty well and are more fun to use than on most other builds. The druid really ties together a lot of the good things about PoE2's character design, both visually, thematically and game mechanics wise.