Honest Feedback after 80+ hours of 0.2

There is a lot of negativity floating around, and I am not one to jump on the hate wagon, so I will try to sum up my experience and the things that I like and don't like in the game as of now as well as some suggestions on what I think could fix these issues.

Campaign:

To me, the campaign is the best part of the game. I stopped playing poe 1 because I found the campaign experience boring and too easy. I always thought of Dark Souls as the spiritual successor of Diablo 2 because it made me feel the same way as D2 made me feel when I played it for the first time, and poe 2 does the same thing. I understand people feeling frustrated by having to play through the campaign multiple times every league, but for me this is a sweet spot of challenge and reward, when I am able to make a build work for the first time or beat some tough boss. Of course the issue this patch was with some underpowered builds in particular, but I can't comment on that, because I played mercenary with a crossbow which felt just fine. The only issues I had was with the size of some areas on act 3, but ggg already has taken steps to fix those.

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Endgame:

Unfortunately, I have many issues with the endgame, and I will try to lay all of them down here:

- Defences:
My first issue with the endgame is that the game seems to be balanced around some characters having an obscene amount of energy shield, and that leaves armour/evasion characters out to dry. I have been getting one-shot so often, it feels demoralizing to keep playing and no matter what I have tried, something will exist to one-shot me. I don't think the issue is armour to be honest, I think the issue is the lack of options to scale life. I am saying this, because it's not only physical damage that one-shots me, it's elemental as well. There is a very easy solution to this problem, and that's to give us some nodes for scaling life at the bottom of the tree. I think two clusters, one in the bottom left and one in the bottom right, that would allow for doubling your life should go a long way of solving this issue. The one cluster should be easy to reach for warrior and the other for ranger, and both should be easy to reach for mercenary, who in my opinion is the one suffering the most from this issue.

- Combat:
Combat in the endgame can be exhausting. Combo gameplay is fun, but in the endgame, much of the content is on steroids and even for me that enjoyed doing a 3-4 skill rotation during the campaign, I felt an immense mental strain after a couple maps, especially if these maps contained mechanics like Breach or Delirium. Those mechanics are both such a mismatch to the slow, methodical gameplay GGG wants to incentivize. They are both mechanics that push for one button builds, and they are not fun at all if you need to waste so much time rotating skills to kill a group of enemies. It was so demoralizing to struggle to keep up with my grenade rotations only to see the breach close with only 1-2 splinters dropped, and honestly made me throw away my build and do some galvanic shards, one button clear build just so I could do these mechanics. I don't mind superfast one button builds like spark/archmage or self-chaining heralds or inevitably lightning spear being nerfed, but the mechanics and progression of the game needs to accommodate the slower play style, which brings me to my next big point.

- Progression:
My third issue with the endgame is progression. As I am playing the game, I reached a point where I feel there is no progress happening within a reasonable timeframe. By progress, I don't only mean loot, though certainly this is by a wide margin the largest issue, I also mean that my character feels like it's not progressing in general. I think this is also why many people turn to Lighting Spear, as a way to progress through the endgame faster.

I would like to see more significant and impactful loot, acquired at a faster pace. If we want the game to be slower and more methodical, that also means people are not able to burn through maps at a lightning fast pace and therefore the loot per map should be much more significant.

This brings me to the second point on progression. I would like to see a more dense atlas. We should be able to find points of corruption closer together, maybe a corruption area should have multiple nexuses clustered together, towers should be more dense and players should be expected to travel less distance to get to citadels and other interesting maps around the atlas.

My last issue with progression has to do with levelling in the endgame. The problem here is that levelling happens extremely slow and is of very small impact. I really think that the xp penalty for death is extremely harsh and kills any progress. I guess we are expected to get stronger via itemization in the endgame, but I think it would be really cool if levelling mattered more. Another issue with levelling in the endgame is that we don't have many points on our tree to look forward to, as soon as we hit 85-90 level. To that end, I would like to either see a reduction or removal of the death penalty, or to make the end levels matter more, like an idea could be to make levels 90-100 give 2 points in the tree instead of 1.

Would like to weigh in on this:

"

Angelbot5000#9073 wrote:

There is a lot of negativity floating around, and I am
- Defences:
My first issue with the endgame is that the game seems to be balanced around some characters having an obscene amount of energy shield, and that leaves armour/evasion characters out to dry. I have been getting one-shot so often, it feels demoralizing to keep playing and no matter what I have tried, something will exist to one-shot me. I don't think the issue is armour to be honest, I think the issue is the lack of options to scale life. I am saying this, because it's not only physical damage that one-shots me, it's elemental as well. There is a very easy solution to this problem, and that's to give us some nodes for scaling life at the bottom of the tree. I think two clusters, one in the bottom left and one in the bottom right, that would allow for doubling your life should go a long way of solving this issue. The one cluster should be easy to reach for warrior and the other for ranger, and both should be easy to reach for mercenary, who in my opinion is the one suffering the most from this issue.

While agreeing that Armor/Evasion is underpowered (it does not matter how much you have, every second thing in this game does hit and one shot you so only ES serves as an effective defense), I dont agree with the solution being life nodes. That still would leave Armor/Evasion in the dumpster and thats where we need to get them out of. Reason being that Warriors, Rangers, Huntress, etc. need to get over 200 STR/DEX to use level 20 skill gems which then leaves them to use either full Armor/Evasion gear or Armor/ES or Evasion/ES hybrid gear respectively (but they cant go full ES gear and thus have much less ES than INT classes). Even +attributes on most gear pieces doesn't solve this issue that these classes are pretty much force locked into Armor/Evasion gearing with a little bit of ES which is per se not a bad thing, every class should be built different. However it becomes a bad thing when Armor/Evasion sucks so hard compared to ES. Increasing life via nodes would mean to further abandon Armor/Evasion, essentially solidifying their uselessness. Imo instead we should aim to buff these mechanics to actively help us survive all the huge layered aoe stuff, on death explosions and one shots in a similar way ES does (that you still can die sometimes but tank/dodge most of the stuff that a thick ES would also allow you to tank).

As for endgame progression: I feel you. I think the biggest mistake they made was nerf the jewel slots on the passive tree and all the chase items we had in 0.1 (Temporalis, Prism of Belief, Against the Darkness, Morior Invictus, Ingenuity Belt, HoWA gloves, Adorned Diamond, Heroic Tragedy) so that theres nothing to farm towards anymore and thus progression ends around LV90 indeed. Either revert these nerfs or rebuff these things to lets say 80% of their power to not make them completely alternativeless but give enough incentive to farm them in the endgame and get huge rewards for your dozens of hours spent optimizing your character to master certain content.

"

LW187#4876 wrote:

Would like to weigh in on this:

While agreeing that Armor/Evasion is underpowered (it does not matter how much you have, every second thing in this game does hit and one shot you so only ES serves as an effective defense), I dont agree with the solution being life nodes. That still would leave Armor/Evasion in the dumpster and thats where we need to get them out of. Reason being that Warriors, Rangers, Huntress, etc. need to get over 200 STR/DEX to use level 20 skill gems which then leaves them to use either full Armor/Evasion gear or Armor/ES or Evasion/ES hybrid gear respectively (but they cant go full ES gear and thus have much less ES than INT classes). Even +attributes on most gear pieces doesn't solve this issue that these classes are pretty much force locked into Armor/Evasion gearing with a little bit of ES which is per se not a bad thing, every class should be built different. However it becomes a bad thing when Armor/Evasion sucks so hard compared to ES. Increasing life via nodes would mean to further abandon Armor/Evasion, essentially solidifying their uselessness. Imo instead we should aim to buff these mechanics to actively help us survive all the huge layered aoe stuff, on death explosions and one shots in a similar way ES does (that you still can die sometimes but tank/dodge most of the stuff that a thick ES would also allow you to tank).

You might be right, but I think this would require much more fundamental changes to the armour and evasion formulas. What I am proposing is a quick and dirty fix that is easy to implement and will make the game playable for those kinds of builds and classes. I would pair it with some nerfs to es recovery. It should be easy to get to 5K health and that should be balanced for armour/evasion characters because of life regen/healing potions, compared to a 10K es build that can't recover as easily

I agree with your feedback. I think the maps are beautiful. They really feel alive. So, kudos to the map devs. However, I logged in this morning to clear a few maps (lvl 82). I was one-shotted three times in a row. I uninstalled the game. I've simply reached the end of my patience. The monsters are crazy fast in some instances. And they shoot you from 5 screens over. It's frustrating not fun, which is sad because the game is cool. The loot still feels uninspired save for a few select drops that have true game shaping abilities. Most of the other loot is boring, imo. I rolled a stormweaver pre-launch. When hunt was dropped, I rolled a witchhunter.

XP loss for me is a killer. To spend time clearing a map only to lose all of that gained XP when I'm randomly one-shotted (while on full energy shield and life) is deflating to say the least. I know, I know...my energy shield isn't high enough. I need better gear. Yada, yada. There are always way to improve. However, when a game stops being fun and starts feeling overly frustrating, it's time to move on to a new game. But that saddens me because I believe GGG created a good game. They obviously put a lot of love and care into it.

I can't remember the mob's name - probably because it has caused me so much frustration - but the one with the laser beam that tracks you like an elite sniper and can reach past a full screen. I despise that enemy so much. It's like sun something. Anyway, the worst enemy ever created in my opinion. That and the mages that throw chaos or freeze bolts every .2 seconds, which are also sniper level shots. Unfun enemies.

All just one guy's opinions. Fun game. I'll be back when they fix this stuff.

"

MaximumShamrock#8758 wrote:

I agree with your feedback. I think the maps are beautiful. They really feel alive. So, kudos to the map devs. However, I logged in this morning to clear a few maps (lvl 82). I was one-shotted three times in a row. I uninstalled the game.

I feel you so much. I kid you not, I did my first logbook and I got oneshot 5 times by some runic monsters that did this insane frost arrow rain from outside the screen, then proceeded to fight Olroth with no respawns remaining, beat him on the first try, then went to the second underground area and a white mob run up to me before my grenades went off and just one-tapped me. It wasn't some crazy yellow runic remnant or something, it was a white bird mob. I calculated the damage I can tank, and it must have done more than 3K damage to oneshot me :-(. Like, the pinnacle boss is easier than the random white mobs in this game...

What if juicing maps removed lower tier rolls on gear? Like instead of seeing tier 8 on gear it could only drop 1-7 maybe superjuiced would only be 1-4 tier. That way you have more chances at REALLY good loot.