Skill balancing early game feels inexplicable awful

Since the EA start i played about 10 Chars to maps or further. In 0.4 i have an lev 80 Titan bear.

Now i wanted to try Cold Sorc. Why, bc i like Frozen Orb in d2. (what a mistake)

I can not beat the act2 boss. Oc i am not a godgamer, but i got all my SC chars to maps. The singel target dmg with cold spells early game is horrendous. Clearing of trash mobs is ok, bc you can freez them with Nova and then use Snap. This is completely useless at a boss. So i am stuck with Frost Bomb, Frostbolt and Frost Darts.... they do no dmg.

I dont talk about some endgame, where you eventually need a fine tuned char. I talk about act2 where you dont have anything.

The difference from titan bear to cold spell Sorc is insanity.

You just playing in way not intended by GGG. Just hop on rails and you good.

I might be in the minority, but campaign walkthrough is a "do it by any available means" and not "keep the archetype of being a Cold Mage" in my opinion.
You struggle as a novice sorcery apprentice to grow in strength and specialize in what you want in the endgame.

I get your approach, but when abilities I use are unlocked on skill gem level 13, I had to make up a coping mechanism for myself, so the campaign doesn't feel bad. (learning new abilities is also pretty interesting)

I'm as sorc fan, particularly arc, and early spells have been very, very bad since 0.1 IMO. The issue is the only actual way to scale them well is to get +skills but that's just very rare. Doing any martial weapon class there's a reasonable chance something at least semi-usable will drop but with the caster classes that's not the case.

I've relegated my sorcs to alts cause I can trade gear for them and buff the gems a lot easier.

I want to make one of those new djinn ascendancies once I'm comfortable with T15 maps on my current pathfinder.

Yea unfortunately most casters in PoE 2 are downbad, especially in campaign - which is ironic because in PoE 2 for the longest time casters were the superior archetype.

I remember trying to kill Lochlan on a spark sorc and wanting to pull my hair out. Boss arena far too large to get spark projs to hit off walls to kill him. Took me far too many tries to get through it.