Feedback from a casual player

I don't know how much a feedback is worth from someone who has about 200 hours in game but I do enjoy the game overall and hope that I could help it improve in someway.

for some context I have played 3 characters so far got them to some point in endgame, engaged with different builds, trading and most of the activities offered.

my main bone to pick,
ENDGAME:

This is by far the biggest issue for me. I will play through the acts enjoy progressing and getting stronger trying out new skills and builds but at some point during endgame I just lose all motivation to keep playing. I think there are several things happening here.

Currently the endgame only offers 1 experience to the player, getting stronger. With rare exceptions here and there you are mostly doing the same activity over and over again. This would be fine if it was all worth it but for me it just isn't. Outside of a few endgame exclusive gear that is very likely not to fit your super specialized build, what else is there? The loop doesn't make sense.

Play harder maps to get stronger... get stronger only to play harder maps?
This is a fundamental issue with pve only endames not exclusive to poe but there are ways to resolve this issue without pvp:

-proper trophy system
-earnable cosmetics exclusive to endgame
-meaningful persistent league/server where you get to carry these trophies/cosmetics into.
-skills/movesets exclusive to endgame
-experiences/missions exclusive to endgame

I'm sure there are other solutions but also a massive component of this is the lack of social interactivity to flex your achievements. I would love to see something like matchmade activities where maybe end of the activity all the titles and gear of the players are listed, features like these give meaning and context to the endgame grind and right now there is none of it.

Now maybe the game is designed in a way where the devs want you in every season for 50-60 hours, leave and then come back the next season start from scratch, but personally I could sink in thousands of hours to a persistent live server that continuously gets content and updates.

lastly a couple QoL changes that I'd want to see:

Resetting passive points should be free. There's no sane argument that could stand against this. If you want players to engage and experiment with a huge tree, there is no point discouraging it. Respec cost is an ancient game practice that is dying out rightfully so and has no place in 2025.

Life leech should refill honor in someway. I currently have a life leech as my main means for survivability and it does good work. This is heavily punished inside of trials however as honor amount can't predict how much you're going to leech and it's just based off my flat hp.

Anyway I'd love to hear what the community thinks about these points and maybe provide corrections if needed.

SSF

Nice feedback.

Regarding the leech and suckhemas, recoup as well, thorns builds as well.

Designed an entire system that completely ignores viability of particular builds that the game is designed to enable. Uh, guys?


Agreed on endgame. It is fun, but it does feel pretty aimless and massively repetitive. It would be cool if we were actually fighting to eliminate corruption or something, moving towards some sort of overall goal that would come to a head at some point.

Obviously in SSF there is also a massive lack of interaction. It'd be nice to have something. For instance, hideouts split everyone up- the only way you see people is if you're in the home base endgame zone. These interest directly conflict.

I don't do anything with hideout stuff, I'd rather see people every once in a while.

There could be some sort of comparison boards or something. I really enjoyed in hardcore that you could see when players died. Although it would be really cool if they could still chat for like five minutes after they die or something.

I always wanted to yell nooooooooo with them and hear the death rant, lol.

I don't really want to play with other people, but I would like to see other players. Otherwise it just feels like a solo game.

It would be cool if you could inspect gear and see how people are setup.

Oh yeah, passive resets. Yeah- its so stupid that it costs gold. Costs anything. I've posted about this exact thing before. I'm not sure why its that way, obviously stupid.

Huge passive tree, not many points, takes forever to get the points. Once you get to endgame you finally want to play with the points and try shit. Theres shit in the way to try shit. Not smart.

Not to mention getting to level 100 is only for the extra special boys. So you never actually have full build.

The way I think of games is, get to end- which means max level. Then start thinking about builds. Why try to build when you don't have all the ingredients, its stupid. Thats this game though- they feel like level 100 should mean something.

Why? I have no idea. All it actually is, is that the game stops scaling at 90. If the game scaled properly to 100, everyone would actually get there- unless its difficult.

Its not difficulty gated, its time gated. Which is not something I respect as a gamer. The game doesn't even really scale to 90.

Someone over there doesn't want to have a phenomenal game, they just want a really good game- with a ton of annoying things in it that the vast majority of the population will just stop playing.