ALL My Feedback After 730 Hours (Warning: Essay)

I have played 730 hours since 0.1 so I finally have firm enough observations to write a big feedback post.

Good Stuff

- 0.3.1 endgame is not perfect, but I'm liking it way more than before. The swwet spot for me has been 3-4 mod maps with 2 tablets, chilling and farming ritual deferrals.
- I don't particularly care about the Rare icons, but I think it's nicer not to have them. Cruising through the map, hitting a few rares, killing the big bad boss, then portal home. It's a lot nicer than 0.2.
- Drop rates are quite a bit better with just one gold charm and rarity mods on tablets. I've had like 4 Divs on the ground and Exalts everywhere like potatoes.
- Act 4 is hands down the best campaign content, period. However, I feel like Makoru's voice belongs in Ange's model and Ange's voice belongs in Makoru's model.
- Essence crafting is great. Abyss crafting is fun, but more on this later.
- The Abyss league in general is just a great upgrade to the game.
- Lineage supports enabled some cool interactions and upgrades, so I'd love to have more of them in the future.
- Async trade is very nice, but it does clearly feel unfinished.
- Interludes are nice maps to go through with a couple surprisingly useful permanent buffs.
- Sprinting is nice, but c'mon now GGG, just put movespeed on boots implicit. PoE1 has a lot of movement skills so you can't do that, but there are zero movement skills in PoE2, so movespeed should just be a boots implicit already.

Not Great Stuff

- Elephant in the room: the Atlas skill trees are simply bad. By the time I spec'd 34/40 points into it + difficulty 3 endgame bosses, the maps still feel the same and not enough transformation. I couldn't feel any of my customisation come through.
- I still very much dislike probing around to find citadels. Just not fun.
- Everytime an Abyss or Expedition pops, I go from 120fps to 11fps. I played Contagion/ED last patch and there was a lot of vfx in that build, yet I never dropped below 60 then.
- 90% of Abyssal rares are unplayable garbage, especially Shroud Walker + Descecrated Ground. This league makes me the sickest of ground effects I've ever been. These Abyssal rares are truly a torture and I have 5 Ant spectres, can't imagine playing melee or even deadeye into them.
- Many Unique items are still not relevant for builds.
- I'm sure Act2 and Act4 were programmed in very similar ways, but for some reason Act2 is simply nowhere near as fun to go through as Act4. And for some reason, it appears to me as though Act2 final boss is far tankier than other Act bosses, but I'm not so sure.
- I am very worried about bloats and overcomplications. Abyss crafting is rudimentary compared to PoE1 and yet Ghazzy already made a Masters degree video on it, which also requires people to use PoE2Wiki and CraftOfExile to learn it. The day Zizaran makes a real PhD video on PoE2 will be the day we have a discussion on making PoE3 for the beginners again.
- I think Homogenising omens are not an ideal way to influence crafting outcomes. It requires you to open a third party database to see your options. Holding Alt and pointing your cursor at the T1,T2 icon on the affix isn't gonna help anyone get a clear idea.
- On the other hand, Essences are in a pretty good place. The lower tier ones are nice, but they need like a 99x drop rate in the campaign to fulfill their purpose. Jonathan did say in the video that GGG want players to pick small essences off the ground and craft, but my ground bore absolutely zero essences throughout most of the campaign. Then, in the endgame, I have enough greater essences to build the Karui archipelago out of crystal, and obviously most of them are worth nothing on trade league (this does feel better in SSF I think). Meanwhile, smaller essences that were supposed to be worthless cost a liver for 2nd 3rd characters to have while levelling.
- Lesser Runes are also nowhere near dropping enough to fulfill their purpose in the campaign.

Expanded Thoughts on Some Specific Topics

- Alright let's talk about Act3. I firmly believe this Act has been permanently damaged by Cruel difficulty. From the interview by DM with the senior environment dev, I know GGG have secretly done map size reductions, but I don't think the size is the real problem here. As it is right now, Act3 will always feel kinda terrible for those who have played it with Cruel difficulty, and that's a lot of people. Jonathan did say that a lot of the time, the lack of content can manifest as "the slog," but I didn't feel like I lacked content in Act3. I knew there were meaningful upgrades to get and a kickass boss fight to end the Act on (Doryani is the best character and one of the best fights in PoE2 in my opinion). The only thing I felt I lacked - was the ability to not do Act3. Doesn't help that this is the Act where you have to think about Ultimatum either. Ultimatum is just some of the worst content in the game, in my opinion of course. Jonathan said in an interview that the great character dialogues in Act4 made him want to go back to previous acts to change things up, so I'm kinda holding out some hope for Act3 to be restructured in some kinda way, though this hope is already starting to have the T1 suffix -pium clinging to it as I'm typing this.

- Now, about the infinite atlas map. I am an avid fan of this. I would not like for the infinite atlas map to go away. That said, there is a fatal flaw in its core design: the player should not start on the atlas at the centre of the continent. The sense of loss of goal and direction that Mark Roberts was talking about on ZiggyD live QnA is a direct result of starting in the middle of nowhere. The funny thing is, GGG already have a pretty good base to model the solution off of: the memory threads in Secrets of the Atlas. I really do think you should start on the atlas at the edge of the continent, with your back against the ocean, then follow (at first) a singular thread of nodes. Then as you go deeper into the continent on the atlas map, you start to unveil more and more objectives and points of interest from the fog of war. Dropping the player into the middle of nowhere and telling us to start searching for objectives in a 360 degree fog of war is less of a challenge and more of an annoyance. I don't think redesigning the questline around mapping will solve the problem either. I went from T1 to T15 in like 20-30 maps by following the questlines and they weren't that fun when I had to keep going aimlessly around to find the Nexus'. And so, putting the player at the edge of the continent then asking us to make our way back toward the centre will immediately provide a sense of direction. This will work with the lore too, because let's say after Act6 we were pushed all the way back to the far side of wraeclast by the beast, now we have a reason to fight our way back into the continent.

- Next, Runes vs. Crafting bench. As they are now, I think Runes just fail as Crafting Bench replacement. There's a really simple question that can be brought up, and it would kinda just tear down the way Runes currently work instantly: Would any player in their right mind punch a socket in a white item? I think the answer is a resounding No. Here's a really interesting comparison though: in PoE1 it cost 1 Transmute to craft a simple affix, and in PoE2 it also costs just 1 orb to allow it to be crafted on. But I think you can already tell, it feels awful to (theoretically) put a socket in a white item, yet it felt amazing to use a Transmute to craft an item in PoE1. And so, I suggest GGG let campaign-tier Runes skip sockets entirely. Just let us punch a Rune into a white item and add a crafted affix to it like the crafting bench. I think that's a much better way to simplify and replace the crafting bench. Naturally, chase runes, soul cores and talismans should still require sockets. Not convinced? Here's another funny fact: some Runes on the trade league are worth 45 Exalts when GGG wanted them to be an easier way to do crafting bench. Meanwhile, most useful affixes from the bench cost 1 Transmute, not 45 Exalts. Allowing campaign-tier runes to skip sockets will skyrocket the value of picking up white bases on the ground (I hope) and the value of learning which item base is more worth it (I hope). Naturally, something will have to be tuned about Essences if this was a thing, but I trust GGG.

Whoever actually read all the way through, I salute you lol.