Please Don't Nerf It....

I am a casual player. But I think differently about games I play. I'm about 35-40% through Act II after this weekend. I signed up for something that would be interesting for years not weeks. The difficulty is excellent. I'm just starting to really dig into to stats. The game forced me to think deeply about all of them and it was fun to slightly rebuild for a boss I was getting stuck at. PoE2 is more then just mindlessly progressing through mobs. It puts the crawl in dungeon crawling. I'm always looking for that next boost to my skill points to get even the slightest advantage.

It's perspective though. I'm coming from No Man's Sky and Hollow Knight. This is essentially combining both of those games in a way. The exploration and item depth of NMS and the difficulty of HK. It's somewhere in the middle. Because I've died way more in HK than in this game. But NMS has infinite exploration to the point I couldn't explore it all in 1000 lifetimes. PoE2 really lands between these two titles for me borrowing great parts from both.

I don't need to beat it tonight, next week, next year...... I just need it to be interesting at any of those points. I think a lot of players have an expectation of progress built up from years of other ARPGS and FOMO drains the fun out of your experience. I've heard some players are at end game. Doesn't matter. I think you've managed to (for the most part) make each part immersive and thought provoking.

I get it though. When I started Hollow Knight it was painful for a long time. But once you Git Gud there's really no going back. Enemies you can mow down like grass are no longer fun. I need those enemies that are capable of agitating me and driving me forward (In a good way). LOL

Ah well hope you don't nerf it. It would be quite boring then. Tuning the experience is one thing. But I won't stick around to suffer through enemies that go out of their way to let me win.

The issue with the difficulty of the game is related to gear drops. Getting a +level to abilities turns an insanely hard game into a good challenge.

Fights are so much shorter for me now thanks to this one change in my gear.

I now don't have to worry about making a small mistake costing me the fight, because right now I am above the damage curve.

I really think giving the player an item as a reward with this on it, and then running a brief tutorial on how crafting works for new players would really resolve the issue a lot of people have with the early game experience.

It might also be that the bosses in the middle of act 1 are a bit overtuned, and then it gets much better, but it has felt like a different game after getting the one item (which I got from the vendors, and ARPG vendors normally just have absolute garbage).