My experience with Path of Exile 2 so far

So I'll give a little history because I already know the responses I'm likely to get for my points.
I first tried Path of Exile when I was in my teens. At around 2015-2016. I didn't really get into it at all, mostly due to being burned by so many microtransaction hellholes back then and I had a bias against free-to-play games.
Years later a friend of mine talked to me about how much he's enjoying PoE so I decided to give it a shot with his guidance. I enjoyed it but got stuck at early mapping, my build was subpar and I basically needed to create a new character to have a chance to get properly into mapping. That was it for me then. Then fast forward a couple years again and I decide to try again. After that I have clocked in 1200 hours into PoE. I know, small numbers compared to most people active in the community.
Well I enjoyed the game a lot and bought several supporter packs so I got an early access key sent to me. I was very excited about PoE 2 as a lot of the changes they were talking about during interviews were things I'd been annoyed with in PoE 1. So I excitedly began playing on the 2nd or 3rd day from the release of Early Access.
My first character became unplayable after I chose the Blood Mage and was unable to recoup the health lost with casting.
My second character I never got far with before I lost interest. The miniscule amount of damage you're able to output at the beginning of the game makes the gameplay feel extremely sluggish and tedious.
I let a bit of time go until I saw some build guides pop up. I figured the problem was with my builds.
Well now that I've tried to level up with build guides my last character is the one I've gotten the farthest with and I'm completely stuck at the abomination boss at the later portion of act 2.
And just to clarify, I've tried several different archetypes and defense layers and offensive skill combinations and support combinations. I simply haven't yet found any that are in any way satisfying.
I have to say, there is not really a moment where I've found the gameplay of PoE 2 even a quarter of how satisfying PoE 1 gameplay is from the very beginning. It has been an absolute slog throughout. It pains me to face the reality of how much I've disliked my time with it, because I really WANT to like the game. I just CAN'T. Now I know I'm not an experienced or a skilled player, so take all my feedback with a grain of salt. I just don't want to be the guy to come with all complaints and no ideas on how to solve the problems.
This is from a perspective of an unskilled player who is tired and thus cannot dedicate significant time and effort into learning to play well.
My idea which is more a bandage patch rather than a full fix is to rebalance early game. GGG has made it clear they do not like the attitudes of many PoE 1 players when it comes to the campaign that it is just something you have to slog through to get to the fun part. But I don't see how making it more tedious helps with that. People will enjoy what they enjoy and I think developers should cater to that. If people see the campaign as something that they just need to get out of the way before they get to the fun part, is that really a problem? There's still the fun part. People still enjoy the game. I might have enjoyed the endgame of PoE2. I just can't know if I would, because I can't get there. So my bandage fix would be to rebalance skills so that normal packs are easier to kill and more satisfying to fight.
I currently also consider some bossfights to be severely unsatisfying to fight. Notably the end boss of act 1 and the abomination which I'm assuming is the end boss of act 2.

An idea which would be a lot more work is something I think the game desperately needs but is obviously difficult to execute.
Something I noticed with PoE 1 is that the balancing was done with the top players in mind for a good reason. They don't want the market of trade to be completely dominated by those players. A valid concern.
The issue with that attitude is that it will make PoE into essentially a competitive game. Where if you're not at the top, you can't really do much. Your build options get funnelled into a handful of meta options because you can't get anywhere with anything else. It wastes the huge potential that the game's extensive systems have. The fix for this is difficult as I said.
You could create an SSF league which cannot be migrated from where drops are easier to come by and where balance isn't quite as fragile. WHere you can let things be a bit more powerful and let the less skilled people enjoy the experience to the fullest.
Why I suggest this league would not allow migrating is because skilled players would obviously exploit this, they would stack up a huge inventory and then migrate to trade leagues and flood the market. Which would obviously ruin the economy. But if it's an SSF league with no migrating it would not ruin the trade market.
Why I suggest such a drastic measure is because I myself and several friends of mine consider the game unapproachable because of the difficulty. And personally I am tired of chasing a meta. I want to experiment and do weird not so powerful things. But I currently feel like if I try anything like that the game simply is not playable.

I will preemptively now answer to criticism of my points.
1. "You have skill-issue." Yes, I know I have "skill-issue".
2. "Git gud." I am very tired and learning games is the last thing in my priorities currently. I need to conserve my energy for more meaningful things.
3. "This game isn't for you." This game WOULD be for me, if only I could get anywhere in it. I enjoy the core concept and the opportunities the idea has.
4. "The devs shouldn't listen to people like this." Of course developers should follow their vision. And if they want their playerbase to only be people who do not have "skill-issue" then so be it. I will look elsewhere. Ultimately this isn't a hill I will die on. I want to play the game as I find it interesting, but if players of a lesser skill level are not wanted then I will accept the fact. It is up to the developers.

I am replying, to let you know that your idea is something very unlikely to happen.

This problem was discussed a lot by Chris himself. He said (it's from memory so it's not a perfect quote) that letting people have an easy, more fun time in a private league will make the base game look unfun and dull and thus no one will want to play the base anymore. That is the main reason why private leagues never had any bonuses, just curses (you could make the game only more difficult and unrewarding than the base).

Regarding poe2 being too difficult for you. I think that ggg had an idea of making and having two games at the same time, one that is more casual friendly and the other one less. My initial thought was that the more casual from the two would be Poe2, but after experiencing it I am not so sure anymore. The sad truth is, poe 2 is not really in enjoyable state yet (it is just my opinion thou), but i am quite confident it will get better.

I think their idea was that their game (poe 1) is considered "difficult" and unproachable by broad audience because of convoluted tree and people feel overwhelmed by lots of options, so poe 2 is now just a very simplified dumbed down reskin of poe 1. The main problem is that they also went with their initial "vision" from the age of dinosaurs that good arpgs should punish you at every step. The more it is punishing and unfun the better it is, you should suffer. I think their vision will clash eventually with the market and poe 2 will become what you are looking for. You just need to give the broad casual audience and their money some time to make it happen. If not, there are other games on the market from that genre that may suit you better.

I would advise to play poe 1 right now instead. Current league is exceptionally good for newbies, it is very rewarding and the loop is great. You can write me personally if you need any help with anything there.

I understand. Though I find that perspective rather odd. Imagine it through this lens.
"We have an idea which people would love so much they would make a mass exodus from the old idea to the new one. Let's not do that because we want to preserve the old idea. Nevermind that our worry is that we're making something people would CLEARLY PREFER."
As you phrased it "will make the base game look unfun and dull". Wouldn't that imply that the new version is more fun and exciting? Isn't that kind of what we want from games?
Please correct the logic there if there is fault with it. Because I don't see how that would DISCOURAGE you from doing it. Unless you're making the game for yourself rather than your players. Which, I'm not saying is strictly bad. It's good for developers to have a vision and stick with it. But it's also good to not be blinded by that when new ideas come up.

Besides, you can still hold on to that old vision, maybe it wouldn't be the most popular way to play anymore, but if it really is about GGG just wanting their game to be that way regardless of what the players want, they can have it. Just let us have what we want too, please.

Ultimately, I like the idea of SSF. Being able to build it all yourself. But the systems in both games currently require insane time investment if you want to do that. Even trade is a massive time investment. And I feel it's asking a bit too much from the general player.

Another criticism of PoE 2 that I forgot to mention. The passive skill tree of PoE 2 has a lot more completely useless nodes and clusters in it. Complete waste of points, for any build. I find this to be extremely odd if their idea was to make it more approachable for the general audience. I've heard others talk about this too so it doesn't seem to be just me.

PS. As you might have noticed from my original post. I expected a very different response. Thank you for being reasonable. I haven't spent a huge amount of time in these forums so I'm not sure if this is the standard, but when it comes to general interactions over the internet... I suppose this was a very pleasant surprise. So thank you again for being great.

Their perspective, and I am playing devil's advocate here, is that a game as a service has limitations to what it can give out. Even what basically would be considered fun.

To explain it further we can do this on currency drops. For most people if in a league divines are dropping like crazy left and right it would mean more fun, more rewards yay..(part of why this league is so great) ..the problem starts next league as it has to increase it again to be felt as something good, better than the previous one.. right? It never stops, because people don't really remember talisman league from 2016, they remember the two last leagues and compare the new one to them.

If you do not balance power ups every season you end up like D3 with 60000% multipliers on items and bosses with crazy inflated hp pools and everything costing a mirror..

And it's even worse because the fun of raining divines now became standard, you can't go back. People will take it as a baseline. That is the second important thing. It is easy to give, extremely difficult to take back in live service games. That is also why I think poe2 is so absolutely unforgiving with drops and other things so they can tune it up, not down.

Poe nerfs things every season and I am pretty sure they would nerf something even if everything would be absolutely balanced. Why? To teach you that they are nerfing every season so it is absolutely normal to you.. so you are prepared for it and when it is needed they don't face crazy backlash for doing so. Because nerfing is something people dislike like a plague, they need to get used to it. Most games avoid it like fire, poe made it part of its character to be able to live as a service for longer. Even with those tactics poe 1 is in an extremely inflated state and thus poe2 is needed.

This probably affects everything. Trials, the tree, the on death effects, the death penalty.. if there was no penalty for dying you wouldn't accept its introduction, but if there are tons of those penalties and they erase one or two you will see it as "good devs, they listened to our feedback, they made it better" and you will be happy its just the 10% XD, that's basically how people work. I am quite sure all of it will be better incrementally, poe live service just needed a reboot. We just went back in time to 2015 or earlier so we can experience the same thing again, but with better graphics XD.

"

Anduvriel#4240 wrote:

Their perspective, and I am playing devil's advocate here, is that a game as a service has limitations to what it can give out. Even what basically would be considered fun.

To explain it further we can do this on currency drops. For most people if in a league divines are dropping like crazy left and right it would mean more fun, more rewards yay..(part of why this league is so great) ..the problem starts next league as it has to increase it again to be felt as something good, better than the previous one.. right? It never stops, because people don't really remember talisman league from 2016, they remember the two last leagues and compare the new one to them.

If you do not balance power ups every season you end up like D3 with 60000% multipliers on items and bosses with crazy inflated hp pools and everything costing a mirror..

And it's even worse because the fun of raining divines now became standard, you can't go back. People will take it as a baseline. That is the second important thing. It is easy to give, extremely difficult to take back in live service games. That is also why I think poe2 is so absolutely unforgiving with drops and other things so they can tune it up, not down.

Poe nerfs things every season and I am pretty sure they would nerf something even if everything would be absolutely balanced. Why? To teach you that they are nerfing every season so it is absolutely normal to you.. so you are prepared for it and when it is needed they don't face crazy backlash for doing so. Because nerfing is something people dislike like a plague, they need to get used to it. Most games avoid it like fire, poe made it part of its character to be able to live as a service for longer. Even with those tactics poe 1 is in an extremely inflated state and thus poe2 is needed.

This probably affects everything. Trials, the tree, the on death effects, the death penalty.. if there was no penalty for dying you wouldn't accept its introduction, but if there are tons of those penalties and they erase one or two you will see it as "good devs, they listened to our feedback, they made it better" and you will be happy its just the 10% XD, that's basically how people work. I am quite sure all of it will be better incrementally, poe live service just needed a reboot. We just went back in time to 2015 or earlier so we can experience the same thing again, but with better graphics XD.

It doesn't need to be more currency than last league to be fun. Settlers is popular, but not because of any features from settlers - but because it has all the good features from necropolis WITHOUT BEING NECROPOLIS.

You just need to make a league that ISN'T utter garbage, the bar isn't that high. Ancestors league was popular but nobody actually did the league content.

PoE2 is comparable to lake of kalandra league - as in the worst league in recent memory when it comes to loot.

I didn't mean to compare leagues just using an example to show a mechanism that prevents live service games from giving what many of us would consider fun (making things easier, more approachable, requiring less time etc). Many of us would be happy with not having to do campaign each season, but once it would happen it could never go back to way it was.

Interesting points. I can see how that'd be a conclusion some might come to.

You mentioned you were playing devil's advocate so I will assume this isn't what you personally think.
There is another live-service I play, Warframe. In Warframe they have described their logic with nerfs as such "we don't want it to seem like you only have the option to use this weapon and this warframe. When things are so powerful that they seem like the only option, that's bad, we don't want that."
The interesting thing with that logic is that you get to the same point with excessive nerfing. When everything else is unusable, only a handful of things are left to be playable. If you look at poe.ninja there are honestly only a handful of skills that are generally usable. Some crackheads make crazy things happen with some bad skills but those require insanely high investment, investment which the vast majority of players will never be able to get because of the league rotation.
The crazy thing is that Warframe has no progress resets yet they give players much more easily attainable power than PoE and still manage to keep a very healthy live-service. And they even make it so that some of the more early game options get upgrades later on so that power creep isn't really a thing.

I'm not saying PoE needs to be the same as Warframe. I'm just saying that people won't leave the game if it becomes more rewarding. Yes, people might remember that one league more favourably than others because the change came in it, but you don't need to keep doing it. You don't need to keep increasing rewards and buffing skills all the time. Just make it so that more things are usable and rewards are satisfying even if you don't do the absolute highest of meta. When you're at that point, the game will be approachable for more people and if you nerf the absolute top end consistently so that the top players don't get completely out of hand, it will keep the game satisfying for them too as they need to always find the new meta.

I'm just tired of having only 5-6 options for builds if I want to play. Others are simply not good enough to play on a budget.

It's a bit funny that you mentioned Warframe. I was a veteran there, quit about a year after they took down raids and annihilated my raiding community.

You see, perfect balance in a game is a multidimentional problem. If you would want almost perfect balance the complexity is on par with rocket science.. it's very costly and not very effective. It is doable by all means, but the truth is.. no one really wants it XD.

1. First and foremost you have your customers, people. People think they want a lot of options to choose from, that the more, the better. It is often compared to freedom. The truth is, and there are hundreds of researches done about it, confirming it, that too many choices stunlock people and earn far less money. A good example is selling t-shirts, you want 3-10 options for your customers to choose from. Never just one and never too many. It turns out that people need to make a decision to choose one, the best one in their opinion. If there are too many to choose from they can't make a good decision (in their opinion) and don't buy anything, if there is just one they feel they don't have a choice so they don't buy as much as well. When you limit their options the choice becomes easier and they make the call and you sell more. It just works like that. Look at all of the shops inventories, 3-10 different options for every segment of products.

In Poe it means GGG chooses around 10 skills that players feel good with and make them better than the average. And what's funny peoples view is not linear, its more logarithmic, so it can be better even 2-5 times than average and they won't really have a backlash. When it's 10-20 times better people start to notice thou. If it's 50 times better they probably start raging, but you have crazy leeway with balance. In Warframe they don't even care, when they nerf it's from one shot map wide exterminator to a pew pew and new toys come even stronger. How is that possible? How they retain players with such absolute imbalance?

2. Imbalance is fun for the most.. when it rotates and doesn't become stale and boring. You can have a skill that is absolutely the best map wide busting thing, completely out of balance, but for a season or two, you can't keep it busted forever or people will bore and start whining. The other thing it can never be just one. So you just need to rotate a pretty small and fun meta and this will sell far more than perfect balance ever would.. and it's absolutely hundreds of times easier to do and cheaper to maintain.. and it has other good qualities..

- loot. There are thousands of uniques probably now, if everything is in balance most are viable.. and as I already mentioned people love loot explosions. We are reward driven, the whole genre is exactly that.. so what happens to economy when each and every one of uniques is actually good to use? If drop is the same, economy would be busted in moments.. but when only 3-10 selected builds are opie, and most play them, only few of those uniques suit them.. which means only 10 out of 1000 will have value, the economy lives longer (obviously only on those items, rest is trash no one even picks)..
- feeling of making the right choice. Have you ever made a really good choice and it paid out? That's a good feeling right? When they make you choose out of few choices they can make them feel like you made the right choice by creating content that is suited for the meta they themselves created. It works wonders. You are happy and that sells skins (btw if they rotate skills you will need mtxs for many of them right?)
- it is very healthy for broad complex games like arpgs. By shifting the meta you get to play different things you might not play if everything would be good. A lot of people like to be stuck to a certain power fantasy (a guy with a sword and shield, only farming uber izaro). By making it less viable than other options there is a chance they will shift and experience something else. It is difficult to create a ton of engaging content when you have people stuck in little comfort nests. Like how many new skills you can make for a warrior with a shield and a sword? 10, 20? That's a lot of work. It is easier to try to get that guy to try and like mages or archers that you already have made.. your game feels bigger even if it is not that big. And it's cheaper, far cheaper.
- people can whine. That's actually a very good thing. Streamers can make videos, friends can talk while playing, you have feelings about it, you start to care, you are driven into the community, engaged.. we are what we are.. we don't talk to each other when everything is fine.. and we want to have opinions, we want to be listened to..

I could go on.. but if you think that a thriving business that poe 1 or warframe service are don't know what they are doing - think twice. If you think they can't balance few skills they made or are incompetent or don't play their game - think twice. It is a company that works, by now they absolutely know what you want from them (maybe even better than you do actually XD) and they are selling you the cheapest version of it that they can make that will make you buy stuff from them. It is not an easy business, but after more than 10 years they absolutely know how to do it.

There are several interesting points here.

First of all, I'm sorry to hear that you felt Warframe wasn't worth playing without raids. Personally I think the game has gotten some of the best updates it's ever gotten in the most recent ones.

Also, I'm not asking for perfect balance. I'm asking for basically the opposite, a more relaxed grip on balance. The meta is so small in PoE that in many leagues the most powerful builds are also the most boring or tedious to play. Back when DD was the meta for... like 6 leagues in a row, the way the skill was used was far too tedious for me. Only being able to do proper damage by casting two separate spells and also having to find the right corpse to blow up. Then in this last league when DD got nerfed the most powerful skill was Lightning Strike, a painfully simple skill. You simply slap the ground and projectiles shoot out. Not to mention how es and evasion have been running so far ahead of armour for so long that it's almost become a meme how bad armour is. The meta is tiny. There are no real options for people who like several build archetypes. Relax the grip on the meta, and yes, the top players will come up with things that trivialise even the most difficult content, but that happens no matter what. The top players are always ahead of the designers and create insanely strong things out of very unusual tools. But those things tend to be so expensive that the general audience has no chance of getting to that point even if the meta isn't quite as strict.

As for your point about choice paralysis. You make a fair point. There's just one problem. People who are new to the game are already hit with choice paralysis as soon as they open the passive skill tree. And again when they reach the end of act 1 when they see the amount of gems, not to even mention reaching Siosa. They don't understand how few options they actually have. As for the top players, they aren't hit with that no matter what the meta is. Because they will always have to scour through a ton of options to find the new meta. They're used to it. So is it about the people who look at guides? There are already hundreds of guides per league. Most of them actually not even playable, complete bait. So choice paralysis is typically avoided by those people by looking at builds made by trusted build makers. Again, paralysis avoided. So I'm afraid I don't agree that choice paralysis applies here at all.

As for you saying "GGG chooses around 10 skills". I'm afraid I completely disagree that it's a choice by them to leave certain skills unbalanced on purpose. As I said before, build makers find holes in the balance, bypasses for things meant to nerf things. GGG is always behind build makers, but not on purpose, I would bet on it.

GGG is currently very rarely balancing mid league. Likely to avoid ruining existing builds people are actively playing. But this makes it so that they have to be certain of the balance before the league starts. An alternative approach to this could be that GGG when balancing mid league give a handful of respec resources or other resources to people who are currently using the nerfed skills, passive or active. And more easily make bandage patches mid league.

I chose Warframe as an example because the balance is very different in that game. In Warframe you can make even the worst things usable in the endgame is you know what you're doing. It won't be efficient, but it's usable. In PoE, you need to know what you're doing to get even the most powerful things to work. It's a completely different attitude which makes the game very rigid, it's essentially wasting the huge potential for player choice. The game has strong negative aspects due to the vastness of it, yet because of the balance, that vastness loses its greatest advantage, choice. Why I want to play the game is because the blueprint has massive player choice, but because the game is balanced with only the top end in mind I lose all that choice. It's like I was playing a game with 2 classes, 4 subclasses and 10 skills, that all rotate once in a while. This is obviously an exaggeration but that's what it feels like.

Many of your other points are also made from a very cynical perspective. One where players need to essentially be manipulated into engagement and spending. I will not mince words here. I despise that attitude. That attitude is what is creating shit like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Genshin Impact, First Descendant. These games want to extract every small bit of engagement and money from their players. It is a very unhealthy relationship between player and developer, and I very much hope GGG does not make their decisions from that perspective.

I will again refer to Warframe, that game has safeguards to get people to engage longer, but PoE already has that, league rotation. That will keep people returning, the game doesn't have to live exclusively off of trade. Warframe gives the players however a massive amount of options, just the same way PoE does, and it suffers from certain players not starting to play it because of that choice paralysis, yet because Warframe balances with the idea of everything being usable it retains the positive aspect that they already suffer the negative aspects of, the player choice. Players can choose from a massive amount of different playstyles and land on one they love. And when the meta shifts and new things are added, they might find something new they like more, or they will find something new because they've already spent a significant time with the old set up and want variation. What are my variation options in PoE? I can create a handful of characters using the meta skills, none of which feel satisfying to use. That's the unfortunate reality of it.

Another point I don't like is the myth that swords and shields are boring. Magic is flashy and appealing to mass audiences, but I don't like the attitude that swords are boring and you can't make many interesting skills for them. Swords are ultimately in real life a weapon with an insanley high skill ceiling. There are a million different ways to create interesting skills for swords, generally mobility should be the core principle because of the importance of footwork in real swordsmanship.

You also mention the feeling of the right choice. How about the feeling of there not being a right choice? Where the best choice is still kind of boring. That has been my feeling most of the time I've played. This league I settled on Frostblades of Katabasis, and the gameplay itself could have been executed by a lobotomite. It was the height of dull and boring gameplay. But it was effective, and since I found nothing else I could make into being effective, I played with that.
Another perspective on the same question is, would you not feel a sense of satisfaction from making the right choice when you find something you personally enjoy even if it's not the strongest thing in the game at the moment?

Ultimately, there seems to have happened a severe misunderstanding. I never advocated for perfect balance. I'm not an idiot. I understand that is it an unreasonable request.

Again, thank you for being civil. I hope I don't seem too confrontational in my reply. This has been a very interesting and thought provoking interaction. I'm looking forward to your response.

It's all good my friend.

I know I might came negative in my posts, I am not a trusting person and somewhat of an ass** at times;) , but I do have a tough skin, as long as we are civil with words i can fully take different opinions, even when said with harsher wording, don't worry.

In my defense I am pretty salty right now. I didn't want to play Poe 2 EA, because I was quite sure I wouldn't like it from the previews, I wanted to wait for the release. Another point was my PC couldn't handle the specs... but I played Poe 1 since talisman with a real-life friend and he felt that playing poe 2 without me feels bad so he gifted me a key.. so than I felt the need to invest into cloud gaming service to be able to play it. And I can't play it anymore. I really don't like it. For me it's a very shallow graphical reskin of early poe 1 with so much negative punishing content that it makes the game absolutely unfun and it kinda feels twice as bad because its a gift..and thrice because its so poorly optimised that cloud service gaming can't reach stable 60fps without resorting to full soap with dlss.. so I might came overly salty, so sorry for that.

About the points i made. I am kinda a bit trusting towards a small indie game company that made their first title, but I am very untrusting to a corporate company owned by a tencent giant. I assume they are just businesses and act like ones first. They are no different than EA, current blizzard etc. Imagine that EA would release Poe 2 on Early Access for 30$ in this state.. would you rate it 10/10 goty? I would rate it a poor reskin 5-6/10 game. And that's how i rate it.

About sword and shield - it was just an example, I see i picked very poorly XD. What I meant is that making 20, 100 skills for any character is more difficult and costlier than to use "marketing" techniques to shift players to play other things that are already in the game. It's just cheaper and if you think about it, it's not a bad thing to push people a bit out of their comfort zones to experience some other things. It's actually a great quality of games in my opinion.

About Warframe. There was around 40-50 of us playing every day, logging the same hour and the glue was to do raids together, everyday 7 PM. Not everyone was participating, we run 3-4 groups and it was challenging (it was a pseudo carry teaching process about the game and the most endgame experience you could have in Warframe at the same time). You had to make certain builds, fullfil a role and the raids were completely broken, and we pushed them using everything we had to break them further, find all the holes, all the quirks in them.. and it was an absolute blast of fun, I think the most fun I ever had with gaming communities ever. Once they took them away people stopped logging at the same hour and the community dissipated slowly into other titles, there are 5 of us left, two are still playing WF. Maybe it will sound "childish", but they really lost me there. They didn't update the raids for many years, they could just left it the same way lunaro is (or whatever it is called), a dead zone few people play that they don't really care about and never patch. We wouldn't really mind at all.

About the "paralysis". I just gave a probable "why" they don't broaden the meta. I don't really know why they do what they do. I assume it's because they want it like that, because I am treating them as a capable entity that could if they wanted to. I honestly don't buy the "they don't know their game".. but it is just my opinion.
It might look cynical on my part, but it isn't really. They want to make a game and make it the way that most will like it and they can keep the lights on and profit and expand. The titles you mentioned like GI are basically the worst of the worst in terms of using the most cynical ways to get you to pay. I don't think ggg is even remotely close to be that bad, but they are relying on our serotonin loop, they even talk openly about it.. I am quite sure they use many "tactics" to make us like the game more. Is it bad? Guys that make meat stick it with sugar so it's addictive and tasty, that's the reality.. why assume that ggg is that one company that knows how to make more money and doesn't do it?

I think I understand what you would want, but let me ask you a question? What makes a successful build for you? I assume from what I learned from your posts that it needs to be foremost fun and engaging to play and don't suck too much in defense and damage department. To be honest I think that it is somewhat already there. Most skills, if not all of them and every class can be made pretty easily t15 viable on a few divine budget, not many will be fun thou, making builds is usually not about making the defense or offense, but mostly about setting the supports right so it feels good. A lot of skills will fall apart most likely on ubers and t17s without heavy budgets, but pinnacle should be very much doable if you are willing to tune them up.. do you feel you need to do the uber pinnacles to have a successful character (for you, not in a broad sense)?

Maybe you set yourself too harsh goals with the budget you can get with the amount of time you want to spend? Creating 5 or 6 endgame characters that are fully built so well that they can easily do ubers, that is something that requires heavy commitment in a league if you don't resort to cheap meta skills..