PoE 2 not an offering for the middle-ground gamer? Tired of hardcore vs casual.

I really loved PoE. I quit because I raged over not being able to get to level 100, and blamed it on the game.

I was wrong about that one. Getting to level 100 should be hard. I’m okay with that.

What I did love about PoE 1 was that it felt like a company giving an option to a gamer that is too often neglected: the mid-tier. They didn’t hit it perfectly, but it felt like an effort. You had the option to make it challenging, but you couldn’t coast through either. Yes, you could clear waves a little too fast early on, but you had to put effort into crafting because it was complex. You did have maps that were not delete with 1 button, getting to level 100 was really hard, and most of the bosses were challenging.

Oh, and you had a whole mode called hardcore.

But where is the middle-ground?

I want strategy and good positioning. I don’t want to clear a wave or boss with 1 button at level 10. That isn’t fun.

But the direction of PoE so far doesn’t seem to be fun either. It feels like GGG is making a game for elite players only. And the defense always comes down to “get good”.

Again, missing the point. I want to “get good”, but I want to invest a reasonable amount of time into it. I don’t want to turn my brain off, but I don’t want to beat my head against a wall trying to get through the first act.

So, we’ll see. As I said, I’m tired of top-tier gamers being dismissive about difficulty complaints and just lumping all of us together as if we’re all noobs. I want a challenge, but giving moderate players an option doesn’t take away anything away from you. That’s why you have end-game and hardcore mode. It doesn’t take anything away from you to lower the base a bit for the moderate player. I’m not asking for Diablo IV, but this is not the in between.

And I can’t imagine that if GGG wants PoE 2 to surpass PoE in terms of popularity and sales, this is direction to go. But maybe that was never the plan. Maybe the plan was always to cater to elite gamers only. Time will tell.

I hear your complaints here brother and I can sympathize with you. I felt the same way, to an extent. However, once I pushed through the initial wall the game opens up dramatically. I'm on my second playthrough on another character (my first is in tier 2 maps) and its INFINITELY easier. I think once I "got the hang of it" the game sort of became easy.

I think we take for granted how big the initial "get the hang of it" gap was when we first started with PoE1. It's MASSIVE and not at all intuitive. PoE2 also has a wall but its actually much smaller than PoE1. I tell you this only to give some extra "you got this!". Trust me, push through the initial learning phase and it'll skyrocket for you. I finished act 1 in an hour my second time through.