My full feedback after 270 hours

Hi, I have about 6 days of playtime* since early access and I've been enjoying the game quite a lot. I want the game to continue growing and due to this I find myself thinking about some systems and changes I would like to see moving forwards. I also have about 1,000 hours in PoE1 but I think playtime is less important than actual critiques, and I hope you will see that they stand on their own.

*I've continued to play since initially writing this, now having 11 days of playtime. I'll use asterisks for later notes added now on a read through [*end note]

Campaign
The campaign is great, having bosses health reset is a very good change and the new boss designs are fantastic. Most people I've seen discuss the acts agree act 1 is the best. I think this may be due to it having more polish and "time in the oven" so to speak. I quite like all of act one, and the few issues I do have with the campaign don't come up until afterwards. There are a few minor tweaks I think could be made with regards to zone size, pack density, boss health, and early skill balance (and variety, especially with supports), but the main systems are already locked in very solidly and I don't think need many changes. The main thing to look at here in my opinion is simply continuing to develop points of interest into the later acts, and clarifying many of the map symbols for the ones that do exist.

Maps and Mechanics
When I first heard that maps would be completed by killing rares and bosses were option I quite liked the idea, as I often found the incentives to full clear in PoE1 were lacking and as a beginner something about leaving a map unfinished felt bad. I now understand why we were not incentivised to full clear maps. Having some maps with strong and difficult bosses which are more rewarding is good in many ways, but killing all rares in a map, especially with certain map layouts, is not a particularly enjoyable gameplay loop. The gameplay itself is good enough towhere I can keep playing, but I often find myself wandering a map aimlessly before realizing I've already completed the map without noticing, or on the contrary, getting to the end of a layout only to find there is a rare 2+ minutes back on the other side of the zone.

I'm unsure exactly how to resolve this, I think there are many ways, I've seen people suggest adding lesser, poe1-like bosses to each map, I've also seen adding a "door" at the end of a zone for completion suggested. I'm not sure if I prefer either of these solutions but one thing is clear, if we are going to have to kill every rare in a map, the map layouts need some work. I also think that icons for mechanics should linger, or at least add a breach/harvest like indicator to communicate when you're near a mechanic or rare, I find the telegraph for those two mechanics to be extremely helpful.

Speaking of map layouts, lets talk about Ritual. To my understanding, in poe1, Rituals are generated into the map itself, where the map generation will change around the ritual to ensure there is space for it - this behavior seems entirely absent from Ritual in PoE2. Another change is the removal of Splinters, now only offering an audience of the king directly. I cant figure out why either of these changes were made. the former feels more like a bug than anything else, and the latter makes it more difficult and punishing to get an Audience, instead of steady progress towards the fight like other mechanics, it is a complete coin toss if you see one. Both of these together also makes it so if you do see an audience of the king, you will likely be completely unable to afford it, sometimes even defer it. This has resulted in the price of the King of the Mist fight being ~3x that of the other end game encounters. None of this is to mention the wrong hazard spawning in a ritual can mean certain death due to the map generation.

Deliruim has a similar problem, with the splinters being extraordinarily rare, and won't even begin dropping until far into the late game. It is much less of an issue here, but it is worth mentioning. More so, Deliruim has two issues
- Visiblity
- Spawning mobs
An option to change or reduce the effects from deliruim would be greatly appreciated by a lot of players. Not only does it make playing against things like on death effects very difficult, it often significantly impacts performance and stops swathes of players from even having the ability to do the mechanic at all. I'm unsure if this will get any attention though as it has remained unchanged in PoE1. What I do hope will see changes, is the way the rifts in Delirium hold enemies until you are practically touching them, despite the enemies rushing out with invulnerability as though you were half a screen or further away from them. This results in being pushed around like a ragdoll any time you do deliruim, and I hope it will be tweaked. As an aside, it also kind of sucks that if you die in deli you lose all the rewards, since they don't drop progressively as you move through the tiers.

For a mechanic which I think has been getting splinters right lets look at Breach. Breach for the most part is great. While yes it functions more similarly to a PoE1 mechanic than a PoE2 mechanic (because it is), I think there is still a place for blasting hordes of monsters even in a slower game. If people don't want to blast packs they don't have to do Breach, this has always been a wonderful part of Path of Exile and it allows for diversity of mechanics which I hope we will continue to see. One thing I dislike though, is how Breach is presented. For most people, their first interaction with Breach will be coming out of the campaign excited to try maps, stepping on a glowing hand, getting swarmed and dying immediately, losing the whole map.

I think this is an issue for a game trying to bring in new players. Players' first interactions with a mechanic often determine how they interact with it in the future, and for many people Breach has been written off as a thing that kills you, and due to a single life in maps, many players will likely rarely if ever attempt breach again, skipping it out of fear more than an informed decision. The game should slowly introduce players to mechanics like Breach. Lower tier maps should in my opinion, significantly tone down the density of monsters coming out of breaches. PoE1 does this well for most mechanics, introducing them to players slowly during the campaign. The difference between player's pack clear in the campaign in PoE1 and 2 is quite significant though and I think even a breach with appropriately toned down health values would kill most players in the campaign - hence the suggestion at lower monster density (which may already exist to a degree but likely not enough). A similar change could potentially be made to ritual, as they're extremely deadly right now, but doing so would effect the tribute gained.

This is a problem throughout a lot of the early access, throwing players into things with high stakes and no introductory experience - I'll come back to it later

One last thing, I dont actually mind one portal for mapping all that much. What I do mind is the balance surrounding it. I would honestly prefer it be changed, but I think it is extremely unlikely that GGG will give us more portals without trying to balance things around it first. If they can't fix some of the rougher edges (certain hasted rares, some poorly telegraphed on death effects, etc) then it should be removed, but they're clearly working on this, so we'll see where it ends up. Balancing a game like this around one portal seems like an impossible task, but again, we'll see.

Bossing
Before I talk about the encounters with the bosses themselves and my thoughts on community feedback, I should say: I currently have 170 hours in game and I have not fought a single end game boss*. Could I be playing more effecient and attempt bosses if I really wanted to? Yes, probably. Should I have to? No, almost certainly not.

This is a big part of the problem in my opinion. Bosses are extremely rare and late game exclusive, while also giving you only one attempt, so most people are either going to sell their bosses or look up guides to fight them. GGG said they're making bosses rare and have one attempt so they can make them more rewarding, but I think they're missing the forest for the trees. I and most other people I know would rather fight a boss 5 times for a good drop than twice for the same drop - because bossing is fun. When people say "we want bosses to be rewarding" they're not saying "I want bosses to drop things first attempt" they're saying they want to be able to fight bosses and not lose money doing so, or be unable to make the same amount of money they could by alching maps.

I would think this is something GGG understands, which is why I'm so baffled by their decision to make bosses both rare and deathless. The one death per map system isn't too terrible, though it has downsides, but one death per boss causes so many problems. It scares people out of attempting them, and makes them much more expensive to attempt (since there is a sink from people dying, which effectively lowers the drop rate), and it also means the devs are incentivized to make the fights easier and less likely to kill you. Allowing for more portals doesn't ruin the integrity of boss fights. Reset their health like they do in the campaign, and let players go again, up to 6 times. That lets the devs make the fights harder and more skill based while letting players learn the fights over time. Bosses should be scary because they're dangerous and hard to beat, not because you lose 30 hours of progress if you mess up. From all the videos I've seen, most boss fights are actually relatively easy, which baffles me. A lot of people talk about PoE2 being more difficult than PoE1, and in some ways it is, but in this regard I would argue its easier, only more punishing.

Perhaps some people like punishing gameplay, but personally I would much prefer Hard gameplay over punishing gameplay. Dying to a boss would still lose you XP, and its not as though players aren't going to face any pressures to beat a boss with more attempts, Most players will still want to beat it as early as possible and losing portals each attempt is enough of pressure to make the danger of the fight meaningful in my opinion, so I'm unsure why they changed it.

That being said, I do think its still possible to make the one portal system work. Though even harder than one death per map, if bosses were more common or had an introductory version I think one death per boss would be acceptable. The problem is, bosses are so extremely rare and there are no introductory fights. PoE1 has quest versions of almost every boss which you can do to learn the fight, gain points for your tree, and they're much easier to access than the full pinnacle versions. The fact that bosses are locked behind 150+ hours of grinding is extremely prohibitive to almost the entire playerbase. This amount of time might be okay for one playthrough into a DLC boss or something, but for the first tier of a boss in a game you're supposed to replay every couple months, that is a LONG time. The one death per attempt only exacerabtes this issue.

The fights themselves look wonderful and I look forward to trying them. I think relying less on RNG rates for boss fights would help these issues a lot, bring ritual splinters back, give us some directional or closeness indicator for citadels, and many of these issues would die away. (I've heard rumors of indicator for being close to citadels but I have no idea if they're true, and I haven't seen any)

*Having now complete Xesht up to the max tier multiple times, I can say the bosses are great, and while I think from a gameplay engagement perspective, having more portals would benefit, I have come to realize the economic value of having them be a single portal, as it allows the reward to be large without requiring the fight to take a long time. the risk inherent to the fights creates more margin for profit, which can be great for farming late game. However, the earlier points about the rarity of the bosses still stands. 1 portal is okay for late game farming, not for a first attempt that requires 10s of hours to farm.

I have still fought no other bosses, though I could if wanted. I don't want to try log books and hope I get lucky, nor have I found any citadels. Sim seems weirdly tuned, and I've still not seen a single king invite [*end note]

The Atlas
I quite like the end game system but I do think it needs some systems changes. There are 3 main issues I have with the atlas itself
- The complete x map quest feels entirely fungible
- Selecting a map feels directionless, and
- Atlas skill points are backloaded
Before I address these, here are some more minor thoughts: I really like being able to see what mechanics are on a node, I like the biomes, though they could be bigger, and I think towers are really cool. I know a lot of people are tired of them and I understand that but honestly, I don't mind them too much, I just think the visibility of the map layout could use some work (cull the walls earlier please). Some nodes are disconnected and untraversible which needs to be fixed, I do agree that we need to be able to search and zoom out more, and I also quite like the tree being separated by mechanic.

To address the system changes I think theres a few things that could be done. I believe ZiggyD talked about some potential changes in a stream with Ziz a little while back, you could find it for their thoughts but I mostly agree, I think that adding some form of unique completion to the quests rather than complete 10 t1, t2, t3, maps, would help a lot. Having it be maps on the atlas itself would provide direction so you don't feel so aimless, and at the end of quests there could be quest version of the bosses, which would help fix some of the earlier issues I raised with bossing, as well as giving a particular things to check off your list/atlas, instead of doing a seemingly arbitrary number of maps which could all be the same map type.

I also think there should be earlier access to atlas skill points. It is very strange that you have to beat a boss before getting any points for the mechanic. Putting points behind quest versions or behind completing the mechanic in t15s or something similar would provide a lot of benefit, allowing people to have something of a tree allowing them to customize their experience as they farm up to their boss encounter, instead of having to farm the mechanic with no customization or investment for hours or longer.

*Another issue I've realized which spawns from the "kill all rares" objective is that what was formerly "boss rushing" is gone, and now there is no good way to speed complete maps which is important considering traversing the atlas is an important part of this new end game system. If you're looking for Citadels or trying to get to a tower, you can't run to the boss, kill it and go next, you have to kill every rare regardless of whether or not your intention for the map is running it for profit or for traversal. [*end note]

Crafting, Items, and Trade

This section can be summed up by saying the base of crafting and drops are good, the base of trade is bad. I know this is a classic and overdone argument, but please hear me out, I'm not interesting in flaming GGG for their choices- just discussing them.

First, crafting. I'm actually really glad alts and scours are gone. Bases being valuable is a nice change as alt spamming was really annoying. The reforger is also a good bridge between being able to retry while still having bases be important. Personally I can't alt spam for more than 10-20 alts before my vision goes blurry due to disability and I can't continue. I think they could add a highlight to mods that match a searched term, as well as highlight new mods from exalts/etc, and it would help with the vision issues, but that is a side issue. Aside from agreeing with the change to bases, I think crafting is lacking. Its not a particularly uncommon take, but I want to be clear that I don't just want PoE1 crafting back, nor do I want last epoch crafting. I like the base that PoE2 has, I like clicking with currency rather than a button, I like not spamming alts or beastcrafts, I even think for early game pure RNG crafting is okay, because you have the ability to stop or continue a craft which gives you some control over the RNG. This degree of crafting doesn't hold up late game though, and omens are both very limited in what they can do, and prohibitively expensive. Essences are a very helpful item and I think there should be more items like essences. I hope as the game develops we get a few more methods for crafting similar to how PoE1 did as its lifetime went on. In particular, currency to cap/finish off an item add a semi deterministic last mod. maybe just a particular tag, even if the roll is low or its not the affix you want.

Runes and sockets are supposed to fill a similar purpose to this "last mod" slot, but thats not what they are right now. To give an idea of the problem, I've been playing this entire time with 3 sockets open in my gear. I don't want to fill my sockets when I know I will replace my gear soon, so its not worth using soul cores, and if I replace another piece of gear, my res needs will change, so I don't want to socket those either. But if I end up keeping a piece of gear, I shouldn't socket an armor/es/eva rune either, because they're strictly worse than soul cores on everything but body armor. Soul cores ruin the socket system, as you will never socket a rune in a piece you might socket a soul core into later. they either need to remove soul cores, which would be strange, Or let us overwrite runes call it optimizing the fun out of the game, call it gamer psychology, call it whatever you want, but I'm willing to bet most players are not socketing their gear. I'd rather have harvest crafting back to change res' but I doubt that will be added and we need a way to adjust our res as our builds develop. This game is largely about progressive gear upgrades, runes make changing your gear feel bad, soul cores makes it even worse, and also make socketing runes feel like a waste of potential power. We need wiggle room in our gear. I'm also baffled why casters get a socket penalty, only having one in focus' and none in wands or staffs, while shields get 2 and most melee weapons get at least 1 if not 2 sockets.

Speaking of casters, I feel like +level of skill gems should be an implicit with rolls similar to physical weapons having their roll implicit. caster weapons without at least +2 are completely worthless. I don't know exactly how to handle this, my solution probably isn't the best but the current system feels very poor right now. I'm also unsure about the skills implicit inside a wand or staff or even melee weapons, most of them feel fairly useless and I'm not totally sold on the system, Im also baffled by Arcanist Etchers, they feel very out of place and not at all equivalent to Blacksmiths Whestones. The implicit argument here also applies to boots, if not more so. Movement speed in this game is mandantory, even more so than PoE1, and now would be a perfect time to make the change. They got rid of life nodes because you always take them and there wasn't a choice, well you always take movespeed, there is no choice. Not only this but leaving new players without MS is actively hindering their progress and likely contributes to the early struggles so many people were having, because its very easy to think MS is a QoL stat thats unnecessary, which is completely wrong.

Belts and Charm slots also work similarly. Its very strange to have no charm slots when using a unique belt. I've also seen people say charms in general are very weak. Its very possible they are, but my guess is that charms are actually very strong. The problem is we cant see them. at all. Charms should have an animation when they activate and a clear communication of how many charges they have. Its impossible to tell if charms are working or what they're doing, and I hope this gets fixed.

Then we have everybodies favorite topic, trade.

Many people have correctly identified that trade is able to massively boost the power of almost any build. People have also correctly identified that trade sucks to use. If you've read this far you're probably aware of GGGs stance on trade, and in many ways I agree. I do think friction is neccessary to keep trade in check, otherwise drops and crafting is worthless, and I also think player interaction is really good. That being said, I don't think intentionally kneecapping trade is a good solution to this.

For the former issue, I think there are ways to add friction without creating an entire market for scammers and creating an extremely negative experience. The currency exchange is doing fairly well with this, requiring gold to utilize, which is a layer of friction! I would much rather pay 100k or even 500k gold to buy an item than whisper 20 people and run into scammers trading. Base the gold cost off item like the exchange does- base type, rarity, quality, etc... I think its also possible to be more creative with drops and crafting as to allow players to make their own items. The current RNG system is partly responsible for trade being so strong. I doubt I have the solutions for this, but there are certainly methods of crafting and influencing drops to allow crafting to compete with trade more effectively. Rather than throwing trade into the ground, I really think they could simply lift crafting up, with currencies more creative than "add a mod" or "change a suffix", I think the difficulty crafting items you want is in large part responsible for trade being so strong relatively speaking.

Pre-empting an argument that lifting up crafting lifts up trade too- people list good items for cheap on trade because they often craft items with great rolls but not for their build, this is because of the RNG nature of crafting. If people could craft items that were either good for them, or not good at all, then trade wouldn't be flooded with amazing items for super cheap. Allowing people to target what they want but making the rolls likely to be poor instead of giving them different affixes entirely is only one potential angle of doing this, hopefully you can imagine a few ways this might be possible and understand the point im making. If your craft goes wrong, its value to other players should only be moderate.

To address the latter issue, i.e. player interactions, I think there are ways to do this, but trade isn't it. Most people I know do not enjoy trading with other players or have a positive experience doing so. Most positive player experience comes from talking in global or running into people in towns. I've seen many many posts and friends saying they're going to play SSF specifically to avoid trade. If your method of causing player interaction is making people play the version of the game where player interaction is impossible, you've failed. So then how do we get player interaction? Unfortunately most solutions would require dev time, creating events or reasons to hang out in towns or certain areas. proper guild infrastructure, party play, even something akin to raids would all help. I understand raids are super unlikely but damn they'd be cool lol. Even PvP like poe1 had, with moderate rewards, could bring player about player interactions. There are ways to do it without making everyone hate eachother and try to scam constantly or go SSF, and we already know they have the tech to do an auction house.

I genuinely do want friction in trade, I also want player interactions, but this just isn't where its at. I don't want to belabor the point because by now it feels hopeless but this is a new game, and I figured I should at least lay out the argument for people unfamiliar or if for some reason GGG is interested in a perspective that attempts to address their concerns.

UnID'd tiers are a step in the right direction for helping ground loot feel good, but I think they could do more with the system

one last nitpick, im not sure why they changed tiers to be backwards, its hard to tell when a roll is good now because the top tiers for affixes differ wildly depending on the mod.

Builds, Trees, and Skill gems

Builds are in a suprisingly good spot for early access. While of course there needs to be more balancing, I think theres a fairly large diversity of builds right now and thats great. I think a fair number of them are a bit too close to poe1 style zoom zoom while still having great single target, but its not a massive issue at the moment and can easily be changed with time. My main hope here is just that they continue to not be shy with nerfs and make sure powercreep doesn't get out of control this early into the game. I think maps in general are a bit closer to PoE1 style Clear focused builds but everyone has already said this so I'll move on.

Skill gems are in an okay state. I'm not sure how I feel about the calls to be allowed to reforge them into higher tiers. Personally, I prefered levelling them with XP. It bridged the gap between player levels and gear upgrades in terms of player power curve and really smoothed out progression in a satisfying way. Now they're locked to area level so if you're stuck somewhere in the campaign its very difficult to level your gems to get some much needed power. Gem levels served almost as a soft pity system to help people with subpar builds or power curves, and thats gone now. I'm not a big fan of it but I can understand why its gone. I also understand why support gems have less levels, seems to be to reduce clutter and simplifying things, but I do think the simplification in this aspect does remove some depth, in particularly with regards to quality. It feels weird to be missing an entire aspect of our build to be able to upgrade, and having it instead all piled into one gem drop. Progressively qualitying and leveling support gems is something I liked and I'm sad its gone. I do think the old UI was overwhelming and I'm glad thats gone though. Maybe some hybrid of the systems could help, but thats just my take.

One problem I do have is that one support gem per character restricts builds to only using one main damage ability. they stated one of their goals was skill diversity, and support skills definitely feel better and more useful in several cases, but as far as damage or clear, it's still a largely one button playstyle. I wanted to use multiple similar spells to clear maps but I can't because I genuinely don't have enough support gem options to fully fill out each skill. I am forced to pick one skill to have the best supports, and in doing so the game pushed me more into one skill than even some poe1 builds. really hope they do something about this, whether it's add more gems or remove the cap, I think it needs attention as it's currently doing the opposite of their stated goal

The level and attribute requirements also feel very strict, I think a lot of people feel funneled into a specific build especially early when they only have access to a couple gems and nodes. as level and attribute requirements scale, it becomes clear that its harder to dip into multiple attribute and gem types in a given build. Part of this is likely due to how new the game is, I'm sure people will figure out how to play strength builds as a witch with time, especially given the ability to swap the attribute that nodes give, but the attribute requirements are definitely worth keeping an eye on because they can very easily stop creative combinations of game mechanics.

*Implicit skills in weapons also feel extremely bad as they only go up to level 18 so they're unusable end game outside of niche interactions, and they're stuck to the weapon so the only place you'd use them (early game) they're functionally useless as well - you can't keep a weapon skill on-content level with the frequency that they drop. I wanted to use freezing shards while levelling but its simply not feasible. They're relegated solely to supplimentary skills like weapon swap Sigil of Power [*end note]

The skill tree is okay. Its not great, its not awful. I really like weapon set passives, they allow for a lot of creativity and were a great idea. respecing in general is a bit buggy, but I'm sure that will be worked out with time. There does seem to be a suprising increase in travel nodes and small nodes and I cant say I'm a big fan of this. it seems to artificially stretch out the time between power increases on a character and is especially noticable very early and very late, when you first hit travel nodes and then again once you're 85+ and only level once every couple hours, because your power progression slows to a crawl in those instances. I really like the pictographs for the tree, they're really fun and add some great flavor. They do make the tree feel a bit spaced out though and I wonder how responsible they are for the increase of small passive nodes relative to notables, if I had to pick one or the other, I'd ask for the notables back lol. I'm also really unsure how I feel about some classes having different starting nodes. If I want to play a minion chronomancer for example, I'm kind of out of luck, at least for most of early game.

Some of the nodes are also not super interesting and many have too harsh penalties as others have noted, hopefully these will be developed as more classes are introduced and the tree gets adjustments. Waiter waiter, more interesting nodes please!

Trials
I dont actually think Trial of the Sekhema's is that bad. The issue is people being forced to do it unchanged for their ascension. I think the problem is actually on Ultimatum. Ultimatum should be the alternative to Sekhemas, but in many ways its far worse. The mods are punishing and you have to do a whole 10 challenge run to get a chance at a 3rd of the last ascendancy. Its very silly and from what I can tell most people feel forced into Sekhema's due to this, and many have given up on their ascensions all together. I know Sekhema's has balancing issues, I hated my first couple runs personally, but the main issues are locking ascending behind it, and the poor communication of things like honor resistence. The mechanic itself is actually pretty engaging and they've already made a pass at balancing it. As others have pointed out, Ultimatum is in a very strange spot because previously the point was that you stop for your rewards once you've had enough, but putting it as a trial you must complete to ascend, all that goes out the window. Several mods are death sentences and some of the bosses are quite overtuned (bird tornado in particular), its also strange that the fight requires 3 random drop keys which you must farm for your ascension.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the next trial is, I hope its Trial of the Ancestors mostly unchanged from its original state. I really enjoyed that league and would play it a lot in this game. It would also likely take a lot of pressure off the other mechanics.

General other stuff
- WASD is a game changer for me I can barely play PoE1 now but I do find I keep getting stuck on things because some ground objects/hitboxes are designed strangely
- Why can leveling uniques like lifesprig drop with lvl18 skill and require level 78 to use?
- Visual clarity is messy in general but its especially bad for people who are color blind. I hope they utilize height to communicate more effects. Most of the orbs that follow you are pretty easy to see because they have telegraphs that reach further into the sky, theres also an ability in PoE1 that makes a little beacon go into the sky so you can note the explosion about to happen.
- its very strange that map drops decrease over level 79, I think this is a bug but if not, it should probably be changed or at least communicated. *I've since stopped having an issue with this [*end note]
- I miss PoB and Filterblade
- Can we get Waystone and breach affinity pls 🥺
- Alt for keywords is a great addition, could use a few more terms on there but overall A+ on that mechanic