Feedback to the topic of "why we feel weak early"

The reasons why we feel weak early
you asked for feedback to this topic and i have some.

first of all i am not a new player, i have well over 5k hours in poe1 and 500+ in poe2, so this is not any kind of hate or something, this is what i (and some friends) think and feel about the current state of early game.

we are to slow compared to monster or they to fast comparing to us: (and by that i do not mean SOME, i mean ALL monsters).
here is a summary why and what i think contributes to this feeling:

- i think one of the most reasons is the overal low maximum zoom level we can do. many monsters (mostly and most elites) can see us from "offscreen" and already attack us before we even can see them, one extreme example is one of their "lightning storm/strike" skills target us even before the elite can see us. this force us to play in a specific way where we have to be more careful and "kite" the mobs and that slows us down alot.

- one of the reason why our move-/attack-/cast-speed feels bad is because the only way we can travel faster than normal is the stat movement speed and you do not get enough early to have enough impact. many times you can't even out-dodge monster skills, it feels like they know where you go and have 100% accuracy, so the dodge against range mobs feel not good because of that, at close combat it feels better. but because the dodgeroll is linked to movement speed it feels so slow early. this also affects the feeling of slow attacking and casting.

- the lack of early skill choice. well i think that is self explainatory. we just dont have a way to experiment with early things because we get not enough skill and support gems early. just to let you know this is a core thing for us players, we love to experiment!

- early on you don't have a relevant way to make normal items magic, i found like 3-5 transmutes in act 1, that makes it feel i need to look at every single magic item i pick up and have no way to experiment with my stats. in the later act i found more but still i felt bad using them because i had not enough to what i would say i can waste some. i had found like 70-80 in total at the end of campaign. i am at t5 maps and have picked up 121 in total (i have the pilfering ring so i see how much i picked up, i will add a screenshot to show what i got in total with 1 char up to t5 maps)

- the lack of early ways to get rare items, be it by drop or by craft, you have almost nothing to make magic/normal items rare. so your main focus is a rare weapon, but even that is hard to get. so you almost stuck with magic items in the other slots if you do not find any usable rare on the ground, and rares drop very rarely. (i found 3 alch in total, and all in maps. and i had about 3-4 essences durin campaign)

- almost no way to metigate debuffs, in poe1 you have many different sources for metigation, like with flasks itself but also with the affixes on flasks, you can even get them on life and mana flasks. so you have kind of 5 slots with 5+ metigations alone from this. in poe2 we have 1 charm slot and the way it metigates is not even close to be as effective as in poe1, also the 2 extra slots are way to hard to get overal, imo they should unlock at certain char level or something like that, i hate it is a mandatory belt stat we have to use.

- one problem is, ES is just goodlike, while evasion is not good early but good later, while ARMOUR is straight up bad. i don't have any answer to that but armour NEEDS to change ASAP.

so in total my feeling during the acts was, i needed to sell everything to get enough gold to get my damage, so weapon, upgraded. because i had no other ways to get upgrades, almost every rare you find, you just use because they are mostly better than any blue you could find, so you can't just salvage them. and because you find so few of them, at least I, ended up to PRIORIZE weapons above everything else to not get overwhelmed by monsters in first place, defense was almost non-existant and so ofc you end up dying more because of unlucky drops than because of bad gameplay what is frustrating to say at least. early on you just have not a good way to get meaningful defense outside of Resist/ES.

here is a screenshot of what i have picked up this league during campaign and until Tier5 maps now. (i did 22 maps till now). i equped the ring right at the start, so everything should be in there.

(edit: the divine i found just an hour before i wrote this)

for everybody who do not know, this is a microtaransaction ring skin, called "exile's pilfering ring" and it tracks what you have picked up since you equiped the microtransaction.

i hope that helps you to bring some light to the topic why we feel the way we do right now.
keep on the good work, i like the direction the game goes.

here is a follow up from the first point of my feedback.
the zoom level and enemy offscreening issue.
this is only one example, ofc it is an extreme one, but many many mobs doing this.
so i can only repeat myself... we need more zoom


here you can see how far away some mobs even can kill you.
the RED ARROW is my corpse location on the minimap.
the RED CIRCLE is the enemy location.
the YELLOW SQUARE is my screen.
the BROWN SQUARE is the same size as my screen.
so you can see he can shoot at me even a FULL DIAGONAL SCREEN away, there is no way to even see this attack before it hits you.

and another follow up i forgot to mention.

Checkpoints

while it is good to have them, they are almost never at a point where you need them, other than the start and boss one.
also it feels so bad to need to run to one, just to be able to use them at all.

so instead of adding more and more to "random" places,
why not make every elite just drop a checkpoint on death?
also (i know you talked about it) we need ASAP a way to teleport to checkpoints without the need of clicking one in first place, so let us just teleport from everywhere on the map to any checkpoint, but with the casting animation of the portal to prvent any kind of "abuse".