I don't know what they were thinking with making this game but they need to go back to the drawing board and actually analyze what people liked about PoE 1 to begin with. It almost feels like they made PoE 2 so they can force people into playing Ruthless whether they like it or not.
There is so much wrong with this game that it's difficult to put into words.
Basically, everything that I liked about PoE 1, they either removed or made worse.
Let's start with the positives:
- It visually looks better than PoE 1. The boss & character animations look much better. The music is good and I like the voice acting. That's it. That's as far as the positives go.
Negatives:
- The game is extremely slow. The BASE movement of your character is already slow. Now compound that with basically ZERO movement speed nodes on the tree. Almost non-existent movement speed gear AND no ability to gain phasing to actually move past mobs that are blocking your way. This slow movement of your character makes it even more annoying when having to deal with all the campaign areas and maps being way too large. How is anyone supposed to start over with a character and actually enjoy it when the game feels like this much of a chore?
- The movement is bad enough but then they decided, let's make the travel ability of the game into DarkSouls/God of War. Because who needs choice for a movement skill/ability, just force our players into dodge rolling because it's popular in other games and we love "innovating" even though the original system we had worked fine. Another sad case of the devs not understanding what made their original game good in the first place. PoE 1 already had a great system for movement to begin with, it's called travel skills (dash, whirling blades, shield charge, lightning warp, flame dash, frostblink, phase run, whithering step). All they had to do was port these movement skills over to PoE 2 and make the dodge roll a gem that is OPTIONAL. Making a movement skill mandatory as part of the gameplay loop makes it very limiting for gameplay options.
- Speaking of shield charge, they actually put it into the game but managed to ruin it by putting a cooldown on it. So you can only use shield charge once every 2-3 seconds instead of without a cooldown how it was with PoE 1
- Difficulty is awful. According to the devs, players LOVE not being able to choose the difficulty of the game. Just make the game into Ruthless because the devs like it so the players must ALSO like it. In fact, have the streamers and sweats tell you the game being unbearably difficult & slow is actually somehow a good thing. It's fun being frustrated all the time guys. You don't play an arpg to feel like a God. You play it to feel frustrated, obviously.
- There are only a couple of builds that are playable in the game. Those builds are immediately nerfed as indicated by their Twitter instead of focusing on game breaking bugs or our mtx not working so we know where the devs priorities are.
- The skill gems themselves are not fun and require too much synergy for them to even work. It's like they want you to spam down 5-6 skills at once on a pack of mobs for you to actually output any type of reasonable damage. Where is Empower? Enhance? Enlighten? No Increased Critical Damage (crit strike) support gem, no mirage archer? No Molten Shell. A couple of auras are available but not many important ones, no precision, hatred or haste. No golems. No Blood rage. No Automation. The fact that RF is not currently in the game should be a crime against humanity.
- The actual system for gems I thought would be good because of not having to link your gear but the fact that they only give you 2 sockets to work with in the majority of the game's beginning doesn't make it very reasonable. In PoE 1, if you actually got a 6 socket item and used a fusing, you had the CHANCE to get a 6 link. This isn't a thing in PoE 2.
- Bug wise from what I experience and have seen, there are people with bricked characters they can't get their time back on. I personally can't use any herald skills and my mtx that I was able to use on the first day is now all of a sudden not available anymore.
- Forcing you to do the worst league mechanic of poe 1 to get your ascendancy points (Sanctum)
- Cost of respec is way too much at the high levels. You practically have to respec your entire tree when the devs nerf builds as much as they do. Basically, any build/skill that is remotely decent is getting nerfed so you HAVE TO play how they want you to play. That's not fun to me, it's discouraging.
- Ridiculous drop rates making it not worth bothering to play
- No crafting bench
- No ability to use the same support gem in a different skill gem
- No ability to respawn in a party unless you get revived
- They make an NPC that identifies everything yet still have the game drop wisdom scrolls. For what? Talk about redundant. Then at the same time, they for some reason decided portal scrolls are not in the game anymore so you get to enjoy wasting 3-4 seconds each time you want to make a portal instead of doing it instantly with a portal scroll.
- I LOVE going back to town mid-fight to refill my flasks. Because when they did this with PoE 1 back in 2013 and realized it wasn't a good mechanic, they made it so you don't do that anymore. Let's make the same mistake TWICE and not learn from it.
- Only being able to use 1 portal in a map when the game disconnects you all the time is insane. If you think that's bad, they then decided to make this a thing with the regular campaign where if you die in just a regular campaign area and you had a drop, the drop just disappears. You can't make this up. Whoever designed this has to be a masochist.
Half the time I'm playing this game, I'm either frustrated or falling asleep. It feels mentally draining. That's not what I want to feel when I play a video game.
There is so much bad that what I outlined is just scratching the surface. Take one look at the discussion posts, Reddit posts, Twitter comments and YouTube comments. People are complaining for a reason.
I didn't sign up to play Ruthless. If you're going to make a different game, fine, but to make it this different from the original is absurd. PoE 1 was fun for a reason. If you can't recognize what made it fun then maybe the devs need to go back and understand the fundamentals of what made their original game fun in the first place.
This is very reminiscent of when EA/DICE made Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and it was loved by everyone and players kept asking for a sequel and instead of making a sequel or at least a remaster, they responded by saying "we don't know what made players like Bad Company 2 in the first place."
It's that level of tone-deaf.
I hope they actually listen to feedback but I'm doubtful. If nothing changes I'll stick with PoE 1 so thank god they made them separate games.
I don't even play PoE 1 leagues anymore because of all the constant nerfs. I only play PoE 1 Standard because it doesn't make me reset and do everything over again to make a decent build. I don't have the time, energy, or patience to start over every league.
Ruthless is a horrible mode imo. It's essentially making an extreme difficulty version of a game and labeling it as innovation.
To then apply this mentality to PoE 2 and thinking everyone will enjoy it because the devs like it is really tone deaf and out of touch. I don't want to even bother with PoE 2 anymore because it's just annoying. Let the sweats, tryhards and streamers have their fun. It's not for me.
