I gave this league 12 h but POE2 is Just Anti-Fun

GGG clearly has no clue what they are doing. They say one thing but do the other at every turn. I hope they actually start moving the game in a direction that their player base can fully enjoy, instead of just bricking every single build then adding 5 new on death effects to every sea of white monsters that run 3x faster than the player while dropping chilled ground everywhere. What a fucking tone deaf dev team. Theres multiple builds getting gutted every update yet 35% of the player base is running around speed clearing on deadeye like its POE1 because thats the only way to play the game. Combos and visceral combat my ass, any single one of these railroaded builds will have you taking more than 3 seconds to even get your damage off by which your fucking dead at that point or your entire combo gets interrupted. It blows my mind how they had such a great formula with POE1 then released POE2 and threw all of that out of the window. The only thing that feels good about POE2 over POE1 is WASD movement, more polished graphics, and the early campaign.

Pinnacles all done, build is rocking. I feel like I should say I'm not a Dead Eye; I'm playing Sorc.

At this point it feels like the only chase is pushing to 100 which is basically cancer.

Outside of levelling an alt...what's there to do?

Not saying it's a bad thing but it doesn't feel like there's much point to continue playing when it's just an EXP grind?

With my complaints i dropped, i also wanna offer possible solutions to make the post somewhat fruitful:

Complaint 1: Not enough fun/viable builds for campaign run-through

Solution for 1: STANDARDISATION OF DAMAGE BREAKPOINTS for LEVELING SKILLS!
I don't try to explain my perception of that basic concept for every company with the attempt of "quality" in detail. Just this, every damage skill in the first 3 acts OFFERED to you character SHOULD get you through the acts (without grinding every white mob) imho! Every skill is you cheeseburger, your whopper, your coke (it might not have the op taste, but its everywhere the same, you roughly know what you get). For designers: If I chose fireball, like in my case, make a standard scenario with a good SSF build that kills certain bosses of mobs within a DEFINED period of skill rotations/or time (because u need to dodge meanwhile:). A staff with decent rolls on 1) increased spell damage 2) increased fire damage should do the job almost REGARDLESS of your skill tree in act 1 or 2. In my case, my first character took every damage node on the skill tree and had SSF gear -> result was ok campaign. Second character with fireball leveling did some travelling on the skill tree and bought some very high tier gear for the acts -> result was WAY slower (the 30+ rotations to kill a boss instead something around 15) and u run circles to kills a single white monster. Hence, better gear could not compensate skill tree pathing. That means there is little choice in skill tree progression with some nasty dead ends if you go your 'desired path'. If change your build is the answer here in posts, I say "NO", then don't offer fireball/firebolt as skill for leveling at all. What i didn't mention, but should be clear, we assume to take decent damage (recommended) support gems (e.g. controlled destruction).

The testing:
I made the test for the opposite gameplay style. I started a thorn build. Investment = several 1 exalt items until act 3 (including some thorn specific uniques that are available early on!!!). Result, promised somewhat tanky build, it feels ok. BUT, its nowhere overpowered or over the curve and still needs to abuse some bleed mechanic combos for bosses. AND I still need to dodge role a lot. Conclusion -> Even with the intend of slow relaxing gameplay (#righteous fire) we need combo and dodge even though we invest early on into items that supposed to be somewhat op (in poe1, the leveling uniques). And again, there was the need to hit a mile stone passiv node with "thorn damage leeched as life" so the build felt tanky. If you don't take it, the build kinda fails. Not to difficult to find out, but i needed information from the inet to pay attention to that cluster. I wanted to travel first to the thorn nodes in a more nothern area... To mention something really positive: the respec early for gold is wonderful. You can solve pathing on the tree for an adequate fee.


Complaint 2: overtuned doge role needed
Solution for 2: make the initial sprint speed of monsters towards my character lower for most monsters! There can be some quick attacking monsters but the variety offered makes me to "fear"/to pay attention to every monster. If you don't want to the players to relax a bit, i get it. I just don't have fun being constantly(!) pressured.

slow zombies are fine for a lot of the gameplay. If i feel threatened by EVERY ENEMY on the screen we're are back at poe1 late game(try kill everything before you even see it) except that the clearspeed meta is not intended for POE2 by design.


Complaint 3: not enough ways to solve problems.
Solution for 3: Before I give to much example of how i tried to get fire resistance for an act 2 boss (going back to act 1 and gamble rings till i found a ruby ring). I recommend this solution: WATCH MARKET PRICES! If the need for certain goods in the campaign is costly, increase the supply^^ Example: a simple +x lighting resistance rune is more expensive for pre level 30 builds (in my case a lightning res rune was about 2 chaos^^^^^), and the rune that is actually a tier higher but only for lvl 30+ builds and you get 4-5 runes for 1 exalt, then you know players are desperate to get lightning resistance in act 2!!!!!! Watch the prices. if it makes sense to pay so much for lightning res (hello Bosses end of act 2) then I'm back to design vs balance....

One real positive example: Abyssal crafting, just loving it.



4) Not a specific complaint, but an accusation that I made "Things I consider problems are intentionally designed rather than overlooked balance issues". To distinguish between both aspects with certainly fluent borders: Options being to weak/op -> balance issue. Option not being accessible at a point -> design. Example: Automatic-/easy-trade tabs available only on act 4 and not earlier, while resistance run drops low, means you cut a whole branch (compensation through easy-access itemization).

5) Trying to summarize: The easy-trade tab is GOOD, like i a lot of the things in the game are GOOD. It's just frustrating for me to see it in blocked behind some walls for reasons that i don't agree with.

P.S.: To all this posts about 'Skill' or 'change your build'. If i wanna have skillchecks, I play PvP <- a lot better suited to talk about skill in such a game environment. If i wanna play a riddle game where i have to find out the working builds, i play monkey island style adventure games <- a lot more humor to cover the tedious puzzles to solve :). POE (at least POE1) was and is for me centered around the art of customizing your experience. It's more art then tedious work or question of skill.

Good luck out there, have fun xD !