My 5 cents after making it to maps.

Act 4

Good:
Phenomenal art and sound work
Good story telling

Bad:
Some Zones are long/big with few PoI(point of interest)s
The waves in prison, while amazing thematically is not great to play through. Atleast make it slow the enemies too. And maybe reduce frequency to like 1/3

Balancing

As infernalist/archon/ignite:

First act is decently balanced, it's challenging until you start getting some gear.

Act 2 felt WAY over tuned. Last boss took several minutes to kill.

Act 3 Still some areas feel a bit big, think this is exasperated by the scaling of mobs feeling off, though somewhat better than act 2.

Act 4 Felt decent after getting some better dps gear and unlocking later gems.

As mercenary trying out ballista totems:
Only made it to start of act 4(to unlock trading) and table flipped since I didn't want to play grenade and the damage was just reaaally bad.


Bugs:

Chimera got stuck in the wall during my second ascendency and wasn't able to attack me. Not that I complain. Same thing happened to Dread crab in fuc- eh, Whakapanu.

Drum kins knockback is very buggy. Feels bad aswell at the moment. I tried just standing in it for a bit and literally got tped to the other side of the mob. Needs some love.



Very bad:
Merchant tabs being labled as an "upgrade". I have made a separate thread about this, check here if you want https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3832853
Very good:
Async trading feels GREAT.


Personal dislike:
I don't like certain parts of itemization. There's too many mandatory stats to make finding upgrades feel fluent and worth considering on your own.
To rng roll +6 skills, high spell damage, high fire damage, good cast speed + flam/crit etc is just not feasible.

In ssf I can see it being "better" but in trade it just makes it so that I never try crafting any gear since it's too many parameters I have to try to hit. Something that would take like 50+exalts to craft for your specific build is usually up for like 5-10 exalts on trade.

With all that being said, thanks for all the hard work you're putting in GGG :)

Oh, another bug I forgot to mention!

The Solitary Confinement boss ballista didn't fire.

I think it outranged him since he went kinda out of screen (he was towards the entrance I dashed to the one furthest inside). It pressed, wasn't pressable again, made "targetting" animation and everything but didn't fire a bolt.

Power fantasy
I'm now farming t15 and it's feeling very nice. I keep on being reminded that the power fantasy really is there as a fire mage in this case. It feels violent, chaotic and destructive! Love it.

Act 2 and 3:
After some thinking about why act 2 and 3 feels bad I think it is because the balancing, in my opinion, feels geared towards the power curve that you get to when you've unlocked all the gems and, let's say maybe 50% of your passive tree.
If it gets scaled down I think it will be great.

Atlas:
I still dislike the atlas, even though I am enjoying it more this time around. I can still see the same issue I've had previously where coming back after a hiatus will just be a pain to navigate the atlas to try to figure out what maps to run and so on.
It's also slow on the loading and sometimes it renders in different paths.
I've had multiple times where I go towards a tower and a node connecting to it, for it then not being connected any more when I open the atlas just a map later, during the same game session.
It's getting quite cluttered as well with now pretty much every map having 2-6 modifiers on them(breach etc.) which makes it quite hard on the eyes.

Defenses:
This is the first time I decided to try out full ES. Having mostly played armor, armor/evasion and one evasion/ES build I can confidently say ES is over powered compared to the others.
I figured I would wait for GGG to balance ES after seeing how OP it was in 0.1 and I can say that at level 20 I felt more powerful AND more tanky than my level 45 merc, though that is with having market unlocked and buying some semi decent gear that I probably would not have naturally at that point.
That being said ES actually feels quite good, I think life builds needs to be brought up a peg or two.

Sprinting:
Sprinting feels GREAT except for when it doesn't. Numerous times me, and obviously a lot of others run into the case where we might've been holding in space a TAD too long on dodging and as a result getting insta stunned after the dodge. This feels yanky. There's a bunch of proposed solutions to this and my take would be to have a grace period after the dodge roll where you can't get stunned, like a 0.1 sec or something like that. I think that would cover most of the cases where it would feel bad and still punish you if you actually tried to sprint in bad situations.
It also feels like it trivializes combat in mapping to some extent. I can easily get out of combat and run away and regen in situations where I normally wouldn't. This feels good in some obvious ways but I can't help but feel that it makes it a bit too easy aswell against certain enemies.
I would love to have a flat like 10% increase movement speed and maybe make sprint only usable after not being hit for like 4 seconds or something like that.

Trial of Chaos:
I feel like trial of chaos has WAY too many punishing and build disabling modifiers. I avoid it like the plague. Combined with the extremely deadly bird boss it's just not great at the moment to run it. The rewards are also lackluster compared to Sekhama. You get some corrupted rares and some soul cores.
In Sekhema you can get any type of base item(targeted), jewels, timeless jewels, currency, relics etc. that all have a bunch of worth in their own way.
You also have POSITIVE modifiers through the boon/affliction system which gives the players way more agency in how to influence their run. I think I've had like one run in total be bricked by a mod that ruined my build in 0.1 and I farmed Sekhema in that league.
Where as in chaos you only get bad options and if you're lucky there's atleast one option or two that doesn't brick your run totally.
Trial of chaos needs some love, I can see myself enjoying it if balanced correctly, but right now it's just unrewarding and way too difficult compared to Sekhema.

Abyss:
Love abyss. Only issue is performance every now and then.

Keep on kicking GGG <3

Second build, Smith of Kitava strength stacker manifest weapon.

The acts were smooth enough, and manifest weapon felt like a decent "extra damage" node at first, nothing that I would consider build defining at the point where I picked it up (second ascend after fire res share).

It's better than my first xbow build where I tried siege ballista, but not as strong as my Infernalist by a long shot.

I tried going for a full armour, full life build on this go around.
My stats is as follow:
Level 84
Life 4230
Strength 997
Dexterity 343
Intelligence 179
Armour 10k
Ele armour 11k
75 all res.
38% block
620 life regen.

The idea for the build was to scale manifest weapon damage as much as I could. I've spent about 20 div at this point, which should land you a decent build investment wise.

Manifest weapons gets 1% damage increase per 1 strength and 1% increased attack speed per 3 dexterity. It also uses the weapon you have equipped(mace, spear or quarterstaff).
I went with spear and have a 630dps spear at the moment with 2.05 base attack speed. (wanted high base AS so the scaling from dex would be better).

On top of that I use war banner to boost the damage and accuracy.

Conclusion

Defenses
While armour feels decent, it's still not even close to being at par with energy shield. I invested in regen and life scaling more than most build probably ever will and it still feels miles off.
Trying shield for the first time felt alot better than I thought it would, and it does offer an interesting defensive layer with active block etc.


Damage
Damage was serviceable through acts, more or less doubling my damage on bosses and rares and some decent assistance with clearing.
The scaling just isn't there though. In maps it feels like having a wet noodle zipping around hitting mobs with the targeting sense of a toddler.
I struggle to see the point of having this as an ascendancy point when it's so unimpactful. Either make it scale better in some way, have it use your skills as well maybe? I don't really know the solution, but this is not it.
There might be some use cases for this that I'm not aware of, but the scaling of it is either extreeemely niche or just not viable.
Either rework it to make it feel worth picking or building around, or just replace it with something that actually makes a difference, in my opinion.

Manifest weapon stats
Damage per second: 28042
Main hand total damage 4449 - 7718
attacks per second: 4.39
Estimated accuracy 100%