Thoughts on PoE2 0.3

Hello. I would like to share my ideas about PoE 2. I'm not very experienced at either PoE 1 or 2, but I still think this could be useful to someone.

For the reference, here are the builds I've played:




From my experience the biggest problem this game has from the ones that aren't looked into much, like endgame systems and skill balance, is itemization. Progression of character is heavily dictated by what kind of items character is wearing, and that's not a bad thing. You are encouraged to find better gear, gear pieces are important so they are able to be a big part of game's economy. This system is proven to be working, but my problem is how it is managed in PoE 2.

Through campaign and atlas progression, the monster threat is rising. You can imagine it as a linear graph of both DPS and defence demands. You can also map the 'player threat to monsters', which represents how well you used your resources.

Red line being monster threat and black line being player threat. The line that separates fun and unfun time could differ based on your tolerance, but it still correlates with a certain power level.
Here are takeaways from the graph:
1. To constantly have fun you need to be stronger than monsters.
2. Finding new and better equipment frequently is essential.
3. The stronger you are relative to the area, the more fun you have.
4. Bosses would be powerspikes on the graph, therefore to have fun bossfights means having boss encounters be at equal or easier levels than regular monsters.
There is more to it, like you can get bored from being too powerful for too long, but generally I think it correctly shows how I feel about the game.

Now, what does this have to do with itemization? Player power mostly grows in powerspikes that are created by upgrading gear. There are two main vectors of interacting with equipment, raising DPS and raising defences. DPS scaling feels fine. It is mostly contained to weapons, it has many multiplicative components, and it is calculable somewhat easily. PoE 2 loosely follows the philosophy of "stronger player gets better stuff", and it generally is clear which of two weapons is more desireable. Also most problems in PoE are solvable with hitting harder and killing faster.
What about defence? Defence consists of hitpool, mitigation, recovery and avoidance. Most of these follow the rule "the more you have, the better", which is understandable but is not fun. While it kind of is multiplicative, effects of different layers aren't immediately useful in differing situations. Defence isn't particularly great against dedicated oneshot attacks and ground dots, bleed, ignite and poison require expensive solutions. You never have enough defences and more than that, you are often encoureged to sacrifice it for more offence. PoE 2 feels built for glasscannon-y builds because you need to collect your defences throughout your helmet, body armour, gloves, boots and jewellery, and neither of these items will give you immediate comfort boost you would get from a new weapon.

Part of the problem is that there are certain stats, like life, that are necessary for an item to be good. Crafting system in PoE 2 is put in a way so every consecutive modifier exponentially increases the difficulty of obtaining such item, which means having locked stats makes finding a replacement harder. As game becomes more complex, we saw that with addition of deflect and armor to ele, getting a good item randomly becomes harder, including the fact that the standard for a 'good item' becomes higher. You still need a lot of resists to play comfortably even in campaign.

Players, I suppose, are supposed to be excited about new bases or unique items dropping, getting to higher level areas and finding higher item level items with higher implicit skill levels. In reality uniques could just drop as a chance shard, which is better than PoE 1 of course, but they still don't feel amazing, and the notion of unique weapons being bad and armour being gimmicky and bad is mostly true here too. Implicits barely matter, unless your name is Dualstring bow. And for higher item levels - you will find better items eventually, but most likely after you struggled a lot to get through the content.

I struggled a lot in acts 2 and 3 and I would've struggled a lot in act 4 if trade wasn't accessible. In previous versions regular trade in acts 2 and 3 was also limited, as I couldn't tp to storylocked locations players were at, and they usually kicked me from party after messaging about it. Having to trade for gear also feels not that great and I would like to have more instruments to progress my gear in 'intended' way. Crafting might be good, but it isn't cheap.

Other than that I think PoE 2 is moving in right direction and I'm curious what will it look like by the end of, like, 2026.

I have several solutions or rather thoughts about how to make PoE 2 more fun to play at least for me.




Here's a quick FAQ I've prepaired, because I'm familiar with what kind of people play these games.