I tried giving PoE2 a chance

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Ondrashek06#5795 wrote:

A lot of people describe it as the "tutorial to PoE1", but for some reason it feels that PoE2 has the difficulty dialed up all the way to 1000.

People said that my build was "above average" for my stage of the game and yet I still kept constantly and endlessly dying to an early-game boss.

This never happened in PoE1, if I kept dying to a boss, there was always an improvement to my build I could make to easily get rid of the boss.

Why did GGG make the sequel so punishing? Do they really want PoE to become Dark Souls or something?

It's a slog Dark Souls wannabe, and fails at Dark Soul hilariously.

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lupasvasile#5385 wrote:

In theory they wanted POE 2 to be slower, with more methodical and meaningful game-play;

In theory, they wanted this in POE1 also, but they don’t understand that to do this, they also need to slow down enemies.

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Rabarbar_Lichy#7553 wrote:

This league I made 5 or 6 characters just to see how it plays now, zero optimization just what's fun to use in the beginning, tree just wing it for what kinda fits skill, in act 1 I died maybe 2 times total, once to Geonor I think and once checking the controller zoom feature. Act 2 din't finish on everyone but similarly easy, the game got so trivialized in comparison to what it was in the beginning, no idea how there can be such a divide in opinions on difficulty.

Lack of gear can explain it. You can get lucky and get some nice drops to start off with. A well-rolled weapon can carry you to Act 3 and beyond.

Yeah concerning above comment, my opinion is the first act should be less difficult than it is. By the time you hit act2, a lot of factors start unlocking and more gear starts to drop. NPC's functions are less restrictive, skill choices are less restrictive, it seems to me that the game gets easier in many regards.

I see no good reason for having it like this, especially for HC. Let the difficulty build. POE1 is like this as well to a certain extent, but in POE1 it is much easier to farm out a bit more power where needed, where as in POE2 it is more gated behind rng. As above comment, if you manage to get a good weapon, things get a lot easier. By act2 it is less of a problem, but I found as a casual, the first act was a bit grindy, particularly the first half.