A little feedback from the reveal and trailer.

As for the content I can say I generally liked the look of what I saw. Of course the proof is in the pudin' but at least things looked good. The one thing i didn't like is that we are still using the same atlas searching for nodes and clicking on them. We have no way to not play layouts we don't like and what we don't isn't just bad layouts that require lots of back tracking. Some builds don't like indoors maps, some don't like outdoors maps, some maps have issues with visibility because they have too many trees which block much of the screen. We already have an absolutely perfect atlas system in PoE 1 and while I understanding not wanting to copy or wanting to waste development time throwing away what you've already done, at the same we have to ask if it is better to keep trying to reinvent the wheel when every other shape has just proven to be substantially worse.

Now I want to address 2 things from the interview with Ziggy. First it's just an acknowledgement and I really hope the majority of people have really paid attention to this because it is important. When Johnathan talks about average players taking 7 to 15 minutes per map and Mark immediately interjecting saying those are not really average, those are pretty fast compared to the average.

Good players have unrealistic ideas of what average is and they base that on themselves because they believe they are average and believe anyone not as good as them is a bad player but they are very much unaware of what average is. I do appreciate the Devs coming forward and saying what average truly is like or at least show what is reality to the people who don't know what reality is.

With that in mind let's talk about defenses. Mark said that they are buffing defenses because at any level other than absolute best gear they are significantly lower than what they balance the game for and what they expect.

This ties in to average players once again and why I wanted to pull attention to it first. The average player will use what he found on the ground. The average player will RARELY use currency on items because currency is rare and he can't make currency fast despite needing constant upgrades on top of not having the skill to overcome gear issues.

This is why so many people have low defenses, this is why so many people quit the game early. In PoE 1 they can pick any viable atlas strategy and even just into yellow maps they can make enough currency to slowly progress their build since there are many means as well as some relatively easy crafts in good build guides that with low investment can make a build work. In PoE 2 none of this is true however. We cannot make currency other than play the map and hope for currency drops. There is no easy crafts, every piece of gear is not only absurdly expensive but with no good enough currency sinks everything gets exponentially more expensive very quickly, much quicker than the average player can farm currency.

This happens because crafting is still in a horrible state, rarity applying to currency and lack of side mechanics that provide easy bubblegum currency that can easily be sold in bulk since all the bubblegum is practically worthless.

So the average player is in this situation where he can't upgrade his own gear by crafting due to the ridiculous level of RNG that is already hundreds of times worse than PoE 1. He can't buy upgrades because not only they already start expensive but the price only gets higher at a faster rate than it's possible for him to farm currency. No matter which way the average player turns he is at a dead end and what happens when you put a hard gear wall in front of a player who has barely started mapping? He quits because no matter what he does he can't improve his gear therefore he can't progress any further and thus has seen anything the game will allow him to see.

This I believe is what needs addressing the most! PoE 1 only got rid of this problem with settlers of kalgur and the introduction of async trade for currency. Bubblegum currency could only be traded back then in places like TFT but the minimum batches were so high that the average player struggled to even get one batch done and by struggled I mean it took him weeks. The async trade solved all those issues and every player was now able to start progressing their builds. In PoE 2 however there is no bubblegum currency worth farming, there isn't content that just provides enough currency to allow for progression and there is not preventing the inflation from sky rocketing due to a major lack of currency sinks.

It is not an easily solved problem, it is a problem that needs to be addressed in many avenues as only addressing one part of it will not solve the issue but it is the number 1 issue that needs to be solved for PoE 2 to be successful.

Lastly I'd like to mention one more thing. Mark, you did say for us to keep telling things that are not working. We told you this before before 0.4 released but you heard none of it, you wanted us to give it a go. Well we did. Totems requiring charges is bad. It just doesn't works. It's not fun to play, it comes online super late and has so many artificial barriers it's not even funny.

You said before (or maybe it was Johnathan) that you need big nerfs to it or it's just straight up better than caster and that puts caster but this is not true. Casters will click once and clear anything hit by their spell which usually is the entire screen or most of it, very much par for the course. Totem click, wait the cast time, wait the raise time of the totem and then the totem starts casting. There is a big delay and a big delay in how long it takes to clear a map. Totem builds are already inherently bad mappers in terms of speed. Yes, they are safer. Yes they are theoretically better bossers although a good caster build will with good gear delete the strongest boss instantly so they can still be better than even totems due to their inherent cast delay. However at a lower investment we can say totems are better bossers but worse map clearers and that already excludes them from needing nerfs or silly limitations that make them bad to play or just unfun to play at all. They already have a natural balancer built in so we need to get off the mentality that totems make self cast obsolete. They are still better mappers at lower investment and are as good or better at high investment. Granted totems are a bit safer but again, that's not by a huge margin.

I hope all the feedback including mine about how totems are in an awful place right now is taken seriously. A form of playing shouldn't exist just cause it's expected even though it's not fun to play. Every forms of play should be fun so please. Remove the charge cost.

EDIT: I guess it's more than just a little.