End game just doesn't really work the way it's designed atm.

POE 1 mapping works because you can get in and out quickly, you can just grab your maps alch and go. This system is just soooo overbloated that the game comes to a screeching halt once you hit maps.

For one, the atlas design itself is just bad. I know you put a lot of work into making the terrain look cool but it's so cluttered and hard to read (especially on gamepad). Every time I want to do a map I have to doom scroll around to see where I want to go. This was kinda cool in 0.1 but since then it already got old and honestly it just feels like a hassle to even interact with the atlas from the start.

Then the maps themselves have too many steps, we have to juice the waystones then doom scroll the atlas to find a map we like or leading to some direction that may have something we want, then make it to a tower to actually run the maps we want with the mechanics we like (maybe as this is even rng for some reason). This is so many extra steps to just juice a map that again it just feels like a hassle rather something fun to do.

I think the entire thing needs to either be scrapped or made completely different from POE 1.

For one maybe just remove half the amount of maps on the atlas and make them much more rewarding to run in some way (more juice, quicker pathing to the actual content, anything really). Or maybe add the maps to the waystones so we can just grab the one we want to run and make it more like POE 1(maybe not ideal since you all probably want the endgame to feel a lot different, but I dunno at this point it just feels way worse in every way). Also just let us add the mechanic we want to run to the waystones and/or block the ones we don't want.

To make this not completely negative, the campaign is in a really good state, I have much more fun honestly just re-rolling characters and running the campaign atm. The interludes were fun, and honestly that could be a potential way to do a much better endgame maybe. Sprint was a great addition as well.

In the end everything has too many steps to do something that was already solved in the first game, even just taking away one or two steps in the process of doing something will go a long way to making the end game more playable.