Things PoE2 could change to break away from PoE1 a bit

PoE2 still feels rather a lot like PoE1 at the moment. Some spitballing ideas for changes, rather than just upping currency drops substantially to buy our way out of trouble:

- Make life leech useful, encouraging melee brawling

- Actually change the itemisation, including:
- Reworking defenses and affixes/suffixes to provide more interesting defenses against bleed, stun, poison (dots), phys, etc.
- Rebalance monster damage against new assumptions for damaging the player other than 'player avoids or kills everything first'
- Tuning down weapon damage (avoid becoming D3), so that skills themselves and other stats become more interesting and provide more player power. This allows more flexibility in build choices and stops builds feeling trash if you don't drop high +flat, +%damage.
- Maybe move some support gem effects to gear instead, like dualstring bow's extra arrow. More stuff like that so you don't just rely on support gems
- Make good loot actually drop in normal gameplay. We should all be hunting for awesome gear drops in maps (and in general), not currency (leave that to PoE1)

- Don't go crazy into crafting complexity again. Deterministic crafting is necessary when itemisation is otherwise unbalanced or lacking in availability. Do more with crafting instead:
- Example, runes are a good start, could be expanded.
- Add blueprints (i.e. Grim Dawn) where you can then craft specific items with the right currency/base, not just hoping for only GG stats.

- Add more item skills on weapons:
- For instance, add proc skills on melee weapons that have %chance to activate. Could be buffs, debuffs, creating power charges, damage skills

- Make weapon swap better:
- faster swap speed
- add some minor global benefits as affix/prefix, to encourage its use while not becoming mandatory (e.g. global speed to counter swap delay), for instance make them benefits that apply for a duration after swapping.
- allow weapon set passive points to be added/removed at will, don't make it require respec cost.

- Do something more than maps
- New game++ for campaign that adds all those fun league mechanics to a 'hell' difficulty. No mandatory loot hidden in there, just scaling equivalent to maps progression and rewarding boss fights.
- Remove 'juicing.' Leave that to PoE1 and just balance maps better. The hardest maps should give best loot and that's where you go, no need to juice them up as that just says the maps either aren't hard enough and/or not rewarding enough
- For maps, if you unlock a tier, just make it always usable. E.g. you unlock T8 maps, then you can always start one when you want. The drops instead provide modifiers or add extra bosses, etc. Don't make us need RNG just to play the level of content we're at.

These are just ideas, some I'm sure are controversial, but I'd like to see PoE2 do more new, and more with the new things it has.

Ha, just saw DM's video where he rolled %phys + flat + %ele +crit on his staff and it DOUBLED his overall skill damage. Not doubled from nothing, but doubled already decent stats.

I think this highlights the point I made on weapon damage. If most of your power comes straight from a couple of stats on your weapon, it diminishes itemisation quite a bit.