PoE 2 Fun Begins at Level 1 (You Aren't Having Fun because YOU were Conditioned to End Game)

When an ARPG comes out usually you Min/Max from the start and race through the trivial campaign so you can begin your journey of loot hunting at 70+ level.

The ARPG community has been conditioned that the fun starts ONCE you are in End Game. I must admit I have been one of them. Even in MMORPGs you get to max level as fast as possible so you can BEGIN gearing. (this has never made sense)

The game starts at level 1 and it should be an adventure soon as you take up your first quest. There should be challenges at level 2, level 5 and so on. Which PoE 2 has actually nailed in it's design!

The farming starts now at your first few levels. You can't beat an Act 1 boss you go and farm some gear, get a level, change your build to overcome that challenge!! It's very refreshing that we get to play the game so early for a change and I really hope other gaming Devs pick up on this.

I think the age of internet guides and gaming Devs making bad decisions over the years to cater to this mentality that only Max level End Game is the adventure. It's not! It's starts when you pick select your character.

I just hope people can start to realize they have been conditioned to this and take a step back. Realize PoE 2 is amazing because it is breaking the mold of ARPGs and MMORPGs. The leveling process and adventure too End Game should be as meaningful as the End Game. PoE 2 is the entire package and genre tranforming.

Just like many of you I've been conditioned to buy level boost in WoW and race to Min/Max or follow guides in ARPGs to blizt through mobs. All this time I forgot what a great game looks like and that it starts at level 1.

Good luck out there, have fun.

So are you saying someone who was infamous for grinding The Ledge in Closed Beta and later made a Twilight Strand-exclusive quest that demands people focus on their level 2-8 characters might actually like PoE 2?

That's a new one. So far it's been a lot of griping about soulsiness, dodge roll spam, ludicrously large areas, punitive death measures, highly imbalanced classes, forced repetition of campaign, and gear sparsity.

But I imagine none of those really invalidate your claim that the game starts at level 1, not map 1.

Which I will admit is VERY intriguing to me.

Hard disagree to an extent. A little difficulty is fine, but the current level of it just feels unfun. The campaign is a story and you should be able to progress through it at a reasonable pace. Boss fights at current difficulty feel like having to rewatch the same episode of a TV series ten times in a row before I can move on to the next, and it just makes me less and less interested in what comes after

Like, let's compare this to a game like elden ring for a minute. Sure, elden ring is hard, but there's tricks to make your journey easier like getting on your horse-cow and riding to caelid to sit on a hill and watch soldiers kill dogs for 10 mins to reach a decent level where you won't struggle as much. So far, this game doesn't seem to have that. It's just either do an unnecessarily long grind to get low level gear you're gonna throw in the trash later anyway or "lol get good at dodging, scrub". That just isn't a fun play experience.

I'm trying to stick with it and push through. The game is fun at times, but the difficulty at low levels right now is the annoying kind rather than the fun kind

Got through the title and hard disagree. Im not enjoying it because there are no item drops and the currency drops are so minimal I cant craft gear to prog without spending hours in a zone hoping 1 mob out of the 400-500 drop a rare that I can actually use or drop a currency item I can use to essentially gamble an upgrade. Im fine with the difficulty level of the bosses, those are great. But when they said "New Player" will take 25 hours to finish the first three acts, I wasnt expecting 90% of POE 1 players to be included in that. Your damage will feel good on a build and then suddenly you go to a new zone and out of no where you do basically no damage. I was blasting through a zone went to the next and took 3-4x as much time to kill packs of mobs. The sudden swap on difficulty is a problem coupled with the inability to get upgrades. Most people get through most of act 2 with at minimum 1 piece of gear they found in the first 3 zones of Act 1, not because its so good but because there is nothing they can find to replace it.

Nothing about PoE 2 is amazing, and that is the problem. It's all meh.
They had years of PoE 1 to figure out what folks like...

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DarkBiCin#3750 wrote:

Got through the title and hard disagree. Im not enjoying it because there are no item drops and the currency drops are so minimal I cant craft gear to prog without spending hours in a zone hoping 1 mob out of the 400-500 drop a rare that I can actually use or drop a currency item I can use to essentially gamble an upgrade. Im fine with the difficulty level of the bosses, those are great. But when they said "New Player" will take 25 hours to finish the first three acts, I wasnt expecting 90% of POE 1 players to be included in that. Your damage will feel good on a build and then suddenly you go to a new zone and out of no where you do basically no damage. I was blasting through a zone went to the next and took 3-4x as much time to kill packs of mobs. The sudden swap on difficulty is a problem coupled with the inability to get upgrades. Most people get through most of act 2 with at minimum 1 piece of gear they found in the first 3 zones of Act 1, not because its so good but because there is nothing they can find to replace it.

I agree.
I had 0 issues with campaign bosses(died a few times but nothing crazy)
But little to no loot is very disappointing. Right now if feels more like PoE1 during a bad league when u get no currency drops and no rare items until u hit Act 10 lol
Rare mobs should drop more loot aswell as rare chests and "gamba" NPC should not be that expensive.. 5k gold for an amulet at lvl 25 is WILD.

Guess not. Oh well.

Funny to read comparisons to ER since I am deeply back into that: i love finding little shortcuts to power early on each new run. Bleeding Greyoll. Farming vulgars at farum greatbridge. Doing the Noks for mimic +10 and somber +9. Rushing the medallions to get to altus and gelmir for all those seeds and stones.

All before even looking at Stormveil if I want.

THAT is how you make a soulslike appealing to a player like me. Give me an early game place to grind and I will ignore the world.

So I ask again: does PoE 2 have such a place?

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DeathPunch79#7219 wrote:

Nothing about PoE 2 is amazing, and that is the problem. It's all meh.
They had years of PoE 1 to figure out what folks like...

The goal in a standalone PoE 2 was to make a different game than the original.

There is no reason to duplicate the same type of ARPG game that has been around for decades. We don't need another one of those types of games. It's time to be bold and move the genre into the future...aka PoE 2 is born.

It's obviously early access so some balancing and bugs wil be fixed but there is a reason why PoE 2 is a massive success and that is the fact it's NOT PoE 1.

I tried PoE 1 about 5 years ago and I get why people like it but it's not for most people. It also has many design issues and 10 years of bloat.

PoE 2 will be more mainstream and popular because GGG didn't remake PoE 1. I know this will upset people that have been conditioned to like the same ole blast, zoom zoom.

PoE 2 is amazing because it's fresh and pushing the genre to evolve into something the ARPG market has needed for a long time.

Edit - (I don't disagree with more curency drops and perhaps early quest that reward some impactful items as you journey through the campaign. ex. movement speed boots.)

People forget how poe1 was when it came out. It was almost like ruthless and they gradually started powercreeping and loot bombing. I dont see how poe2 is gonna be but i can tell, lootsplosions and screen delete are not far in the future

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Fausimo#7255 wrote:

People forget how poe1 was when it came out. It was almost like ruthless and they gradually started powercreeping and loot bombing. I dont see how poe2 is gonna be but i can tell, lootsplosions and screen delete are not far in the future

i sure hope they learned their lessons but you are probably right