A Middle-Aged Dad's Thoughts

Hey GGG,

First off, great work on poe2. I love this game, it's very fun and we're only in early access. Can't wait to see how y'all continue to improve.

The quality of life improvements to mapping has been appreciated (multiple deaths per map), and knowing where the rare monsters are from the mini-map update is also so nice.

Overall, the game looks and sounds great. The voice acting is phenomenal. Act2 and Act3 campaign bosses feel epic and are visually impressive. I can't wait for acts 4-6.

As far as criticism goes, the biggest thing is crafting. It's honestly a bit hard to properly gauge feedback until crafting becomes a bit more fleshed out and/or deterministic, since so much of the player experience relies on it. I think the correct balance will be when the delta between the level of Trade league equipment and SSF equipment is consistently much smaller than today, and I'm pretty sure that crafting is the only way to bridge this gap without just dropping loot willy nilly.

Couple of other smaller gripes:
-The Trial of Sekhemas is especially punishing/difficult for the warrior class. Not sure how to fix, but having played several toons past 80, warrior really stands out as needing help. Less so for Chaos, but even that Trial is still harder than I think it should be for war.
-I don't like experience penalties from death as punishment-only. I'd prefer to be able to "wager" my experience punishment on death with some commensurate experience boost or some other reward. E.g., a feature where I can set my experience boost to 10% for that Waystone, but each time I die, I lose 15% of my exp bar. (in other words, gamify the existing penalty by indexing fun/power with some risk/punishment)
-In act3, after beating the big winged gryphon looking monster (that hops on top of his 3 pillars), the exit door is really easy to miss. Please make it more obvious, lol.