Open Letter to GGG From Hardcore Player

At this point if you play HC you just like the pain.

No such thing as perfect design - one can only approximate upon an iteratively improving design.

Personal opinion: D2's HC is frustrating, PoE2's isn't. Reason mostly being that some auras/monster mods that would be good to be visible in D2 aren't, and you can get swamped by hasted resistant quadruple damage pack running to you from outside the screen and just die immediately unless you've tele.

I agree that there's unnecessarily many on-death effects in PoE2 and some of them are difficult to see beforehand. Some are completely unknownable until you experience them like with some bosses that explode on death.

I've so far died 0 times to them, but that's mostly having quickly realized that I have to always keep distance from dying monsters unless I explicitly 100% know they aren't gonna explode (with significant damage, at least).

I don't have an issue with ground effects. In some fights there's too much visual clutter and the effects are hard to see, but principally, I'm fine with them.

When people paste their unfair deaths, I'd say more than half of the time those would have been predictable and avoidable.

Personally, I've not played this season all too much - only to early mapping - but I haven't actually yet died. Maybe there's more issues in late mapping. But campaign and early maps feel fine aside of that melee characters got a low blow from the crazy amounts of mirages/lava balls/lightning strike stuff that is going on now.