My feedback of the early access

This is my total accumulated opinion so far, based on playing to the end and doing endgame, and as someone entirely new to POE's endgame. I played the original for a time but never stuck with it too long. These are as usual subjective opinions combined with observations.

My witch specific feedback is at https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3632153.

General:
The "purity" line of buffs on scepters seem like they need to add more than just resists, as otherwise it's not very appealing, maybe a boost to element damage as part of the aura?

I like that there appears to be good base level support for finding out how things work in the UI but there are issues where in some cases the information isn't presented clearly, or accurately for example with minion stats and other interactions.

Currency exchange feels very unintuitive to use to me ui/mechanically.

Gold amount received is still atrocious, getting mostly 10 - 50 gold up to act 3 of cruel is silly.

Loot still ought to be adjusted further, not in quantity but quality. Endgame and in act 3 cruel you can still get gear drops that are far below the level of the area you are in.

There are still cases where despite being near a checkpoint, you get respawned way far away somewhere else.

Personally think the random rare/unique bosses aren't distinct enough, should probably at least be slightly scaled up in size, or given an odd color or some other visual distinction that makes them pop more than simply a different name color plus aura.

I feel like the player made portal should have a toggleable confirmation before teleporting you back.

Salvage bench could be closer in act 3 and 4, overall the various merchants and facilities ought to be closeby. The salvage bench feels very strange to use to me for some reason.

Should be some better form of visual and auditory cue of the player standing in stuff like poison gas, fire, acid, etc. because of the amount of stuff that lingers and can kill without warning, that or turn off enemy spells after death.

Boss hitboxes for attacks definitely need tuning, best to do a full sweep on them overall to ensure they match up. Especially notable is Blackjaw whose triple hit has a hitbox way bigger than the visual implies.

Map POIs should stay regardless of distance from them once discovered

Inventory feels slightly too small, not asking for it to go full Diablo 4, but at least want a separate quest items page. Overall frequent trips back being a necessity due to low passive gold income incentivizing picking everything up is disruptive to co op but more okay solo and could be remedied by much higher gold drops vs item sell price to disensentivise picking up everything.

Co-op in general needs adjustment so the host progresses everything quest wise and other players get to smoothly move along.

Visual clarity needs some kind of help and options, especially co-op where you can have giant spell effects everywhere going on from multiple players hiding boss telegraphs.

Although graphically and design wise pretty good, gear overall has felt kind of bland colorwise for most cases, like it is lacking more variation to stand out.

Needing to go through two portals when porting to and from late act 3 areas is annoying.

Left an ultimatum in the chaos temple, when I came back it was gone for some reason.

Both ascendency trials are as many have already said, completely unfun garbage that exists to only waste your time, especially in order to get the later ascendancy points with the sekhema one being especially terrible needing you to not die through multiple tests or you start all the way from the first of 3 or so.

Would really like an armor/weapon transmog system outside the mtx stuff, like just to reuse appearances you like, would also probably add alternative value to gear.

Feels unintuitive/awkward that you can only check skill and support gems if you have one on you.

The map screen having to engage a mini loading screen is very bizarre and feels clunky/poorly made.

NPC dialog interface at the moment is slightly annoying as the boxes change position and size, and clicking continue generally feels like it lacks feedback and responsiveness at times.


Main Campaign:

The special found items in Utzaal for trade to Oswald in act 3 seem hilariously undervalued.

There are a lot of empty passages, areas, deadends, and seemingly pointless openable doors throughout the various maps that I couldn't help feeling more could do with either a rare boss, or some treasure or something more interesting added. Maps in general have too many straight up dead ends, wouldn't be as big an issue if there were actual things there worth seeking out, as well as some form of subtle tells as to what the story path is.

Base move speed should probably be bumped up by 10% to feel better.

Feel like Matlan Waterway definitely should have had a boss, also second time through on cruel coincidentally encountered a lot of unusual performance spikes and mild warping there. Felt similarly about having at least one more spectacle boss per act, not like the big ones but more like say Balballa/Blackjaw/Executioner.

On the Jamanra fight, I think it makes sense for p1 to add a brief voice line from Asala to call attention to her just before the sand attack as otherwise there's not much indication to what to do and the visual itself does not give a good indication of what the actual protected area size is.

In act 2 during the scene where the Hooded One speaks to the player and reveals their identity, for me the Witch's dialogue always cuts out around 70% of the way through and is interrupted by him.

Overall the campaign is great so far and I'm very interested in the remaining acts however othrer concerns apply such as regarding level size.


End game:

Waystones are a disaster to store/manage.

Too much floor hazard/on death effect spam. This is absolutely going to be why a lot of people quit.

Not sure if a bug but from limited playing (did around eight?) encountered a map that had no end boss so no message saying you beat the map and the map was considered still unbeaten.

Seems real bad that extra belt slots are tied only to high level affix and not to just item level itself.

One life per map is terrible, and absolutely ridiculously punishing for anyone wanting to co-op and play with friends.

The overall feel is drastically different from the main campaign, and more like POE 1 clumsily added on top, which is a damn shame.

Overall, the grind feels pretty heavy even this rather early in, and combined with the long campaign, it feels to me at least that the existing league/season system may need some sort of rework before being applied to POE 2. As it is now, I feel that if they just slap on the same make new characters every few months to grind back to the top, it will massively burn people out because the long structure of the campaign and more involved mechanics for gameplay and bosses feel more suited to much longer term character building like in a single player rpg or traditional mmo.

All valid points.

Never played maps in group, but I thought it was one life per person. It's one death and your group is out of the map? That's bad... lol...

As for your map without a boss : Most maps don't have bosses. It's a modifier (some kind of circle when you select your maps on your atlas. Some are Irradiated, some Corrupted or something, some would indicateurs Delirium, etc. and sometimes, one of these cercles will show a boss. It's possible your map had a glitch, but it's also possible that there were some rare mobs left as the usual "mission" of these maps is to kill all rare mobs.