We welcome First Impression posts! Please be nice to those posts.

if i want the poe from 10 years ago? no thanks, the game improved a lot

The game in its current state is unrewarding and very little fun.

Everything is RNG with just more gambling mechanics introduced every league. Crafting, bosses, map drops, everything. A matryoshka RNG. No reason to do any specific content. So, between Hailrake and the conquerors you have no agency over what you grind for, what you look for... at all. Sure there are some cards, which tend to drop long before whatever they were rewarding can be called an improvement to one's gear.

Then, we have the crawl:
1. The variety of gems is pointless, since, as per Chris'es advice, we should only be playing what the streamers do. More so, the builds on PoE Ninja are almost cast in stone, regardless of buffs and nerfs. The skill tree is pointless, because you still need the gear and for the gear we have to look at the paragraph above.

2. The trip between Lioneye's Watch and the center of the Atlas is a snorefest. Not because of the story being bad, but because there are only so many times you can rerun it without any other incentive than reaching the maps. GGG has created an unskippable tutorial that stretches all the way to lvl 65. With no reason to return to any of the areas outside the prophecies and no reason to be happy about what's to come: same rng with tougher mobs.

3. Character progression grinds into a crawl after level 80, with the 10% xp punishment and the low xp per mob. Along with offscreen kills, one shot mechanics and the abysmal chance to get anything worthwhile, there's very little enjoyment to be had.

Lastly, we have the challenge rewards. A hideout dildo for the most part. Sure, there are some MTXes there as well, but neither support a new player learning the ropes. There's also the feeling of pride and accomplishment, true, but we kinda know what's the overall opinion on that.

I played and supported the game for a few leagues now, but I'm at the point where I find a Korean grind-focused MMO to be more generous and more rewarding that this.

Currently I'm kinda losing hope for PoE2 as well. If GGG can only come up with more frustrating casino mechanics and label them as "rewards", I genuinely don't care how good the graphics are or how challenging the fights are.

Like someone said in a different thread, there's a lot of stick in this game, but no carrot.

Apologies in advance for my bad english (this is google translate)

Since there is no topic on the Russian forum (following the link, it gives an error that the page does not exist) I will write here. Do you understand what you are doing badly to the gaming community of your game? By doing the supposedly "balance" you simply kill the action component of the game. But the balance among other things means equating strengths with weaknesses, and not killing everything that can be reached. For which league in a row I open patch notes, and I read about the fact that you nerf and nerf summoners. Either hp, then the number of zombies, then the damage, then the hp of ghosts, then you add an essentially useless support gem "feeding frenzy", although the summons by default should be aggressive, and not poke at the boss and DO NOT BEAT (if you think logically). And now you decided to just take and subtract another half of the total damage figure. But on summoners (in my case, on zombies) it is impossible to efficiently overclock the DPS. So, we have come to the heart of the matter. When will you get your action / slasher RPG back to what it was originally? If you haven't noticed, then you have lost half of the Steam players (yes, yes, you can't hide online statistics there). But there are also players from your launcher. I'm sure they don't like what you did either. When will damage return to builds? (I do not mean those builds on which 5% of players spend 5 mirrors, and those on which 70% of the community plays). Maybe right now you just remove all the nerfs of this league, and return the state of the game at least at the moment of the last one?

Dear GGG,

This league is a disaster and i miss trialmaster very much.

Please understand that the numbers of players leaving this league (me also) is NOT due to your difficulty increase. It is due to not listening to your community that have been constantly posting threads about improving variety of things that you did not seem to even bat your eye on. So let's start:

1) Crafting - painful, full of rng with very little to almost no ways to control the outcome you would like no matter if you put 200 or 1800 orbs of alteration to just get the item going. Delve and harvest are not a solution. Deterministic ways of crafting to rather work towards certain goal (and them tiers) rather than another roll of rng maybe? I do not like to gather currency to just buy my item but if i want to progress towards endgame its a must. Buying gear was never fun and never will be maybe because it gives zero satisfaction? Path of Trading at this point where our main server is PoE trade. Meh...

2) Give us reason to run bosses other than meeting a challenge to check on your league to do list. You made so many maps with so many bosses for what? Ah...to drop more trash loot. I want to see ways to get unique items, farm certain maps to get it, not again farm chaos orbs to buy it or randomly get it from duck knows where. Same with cards. Sort them and stop decreasing their drop because our level is too high. I want to either drop belly of the beast in maps related to very belly of the beast or be able to get it from cards without murdering my character to prevent the % of drop from cards to get it that way. I have been running since the legacy league and now i'm really starting to be fed of buying my all gear from poe trade.

3) This league was giving me hope that before release you considered the two topic above but instead you literally added more rng on top of rng with a crew of Gheed like npcs from which the one even will haggle currency. Ahh so that's the reason why till act 3 i didn't even see a single orb of alchemy and i have no currency whatsoever to even start rolling some basic items to get through acts in a more comfy way. All my loot and currencies went to the new expedition crew to haggle my way with yet bunch of variety splinters that promise me that if i squeeze my fingers hard enough i might get something decent.

I ran the last month of ultimatum league on SSF to test my build and what to look out for in terms of gear. It was very pleasnt - loot was ok - i had currency to play with items at act 2 already - trialmaster provided an interesting fast meeting like challenge and rewarded me in a way that helped me to further enjoy my gameplay by more currency, unique items and even some 5-6 socketed gear *yay. It was still rng but healthy one in comparison to what you presented this league. Screen if full of white and useless loot, including the expedition chests that gives fairly high chance to be a death wish but for what price? Bunch of splinters and blue/white loot...*shrug, no thank you. I don't need it and see no reason to even do it.

Conclusion:

The expedition league is an failed attempt to balance the top players power and introduce new ways of playing by removing the carrot from the stick this round. It's an unrewarding, boring and pointless adventure with still a same goal, to put your hands on keyboard to go to market to get the gear you need since tho the game provides a huge variety of maps it still doesn't give ways to actually get it on your own. Even the free mtx's won't do it for me this round. Ultimatum was done with 36 challenges - Expedition is done after act 3.

The amount of ways of creating your build is dumped by the reality that the 70% of gems won't perform in atlas no matter what and instead of reworking what we already have they prefer to just keep adding more shiny ways to disappoint yourself in a long run and go back to the old ways or streamers.

League mechanic feels boring, the mobs total resistances are unfair to players who like you said in live stream - want them to be creative. Well they can't be if instead of one log under their feet you throw them a truck. New players might still find act 1 - 10 interesting but if they can't get past Oak i doubt they will have chance to taste anything else other then bitter reality that this game has become. Don't make the game for 1% because no matter what they will be fine, the rest will just leave and it's a shame because you made something that even diablo could not beat at some point for me. Right now the korean MMO felt more rewarding than your league and it just sounds so wrong.

The content past elder/shaper feels like a different company made it. Bosses with off screen shooting mechanics - more punishing - less interesting - with crazy disco like arenas or just a laser beam from space greeting you, trying to see how many limits you can break and squeeze out the players fun completely for reward that is....what? Ahhh that i still have a portal left. War for the atlas was a great content, metamorph was fun encounter, blight was something new and interesting, even ultimatum made it for me because it felt like something new and you created a really good npc for it AND it was party friendly as well. Expedition is the worst league and worst attempt of balancing your game that rewards literally nothing - not even fun. Playing it in party is also with big minus of rewards because shard are given out to each player seperatly...so solo for the win = gamble!

I really wish to see a bunch of guys from GGG who were responsible for this and make a live stream where they get to maps, with no trade and builds they make themselves, with no guide - just their knowledge and see the results and the fun meter along with it.

I hope you consider and take in the real community voice and turn the game back intro rewarding - action packed experience with interesting boss mechanics instead of killer one shot health pool sponges with more stages than a depressed teenager. (Yes Maven, i'm looking at you)

I wish you all patience and fun (if you have one) this league and see you in 3 months.

Cheers.

Why dont u just say you dont want us to play the game ? Its gonna be easier..

CMON MAN I MISS THIS GAME

C'mon GGG....the expedition monsters are way too strong, even at lower monster levels and not juiced maps

In the previous league, I felt good on t12-13 maps with 5 links. Now you have to stop at each exile, or a rare mob, in order to spend 5 seconds on it. You seriously need to return damage to support gems. I generally keep quiet about the flasks. They just don't charge. You use them for the card several times and that's it. The whole point of the flasks in the game just disappeared! Please come to your senses and reconsider the system of "slowing down" the game. Limit the number of auras, or increase the experience for pumping gems as an option, and not what you did. At the end of the day, you position your game as an action / RPG game. But now it looks more like a regular adventure.

my very first impression was that I was going to enjoy the newer more challenging game play, then I got to maps and died over and over and over on white maps I used to do easily. Now I am strongly opposed to the "balance" changes. I have not had fun, I have experienced extreme frustration.

My first impression was good, especially expectations regarding the new Summon Reaper gem. I thought that it would be a great new experience for the summoner with the ultimate summon ant variants of its scaling. But.... have looked through the gem levels on the release... and it sucks. Looked through the other builds for some build with the interesting mechanics, and... there are no viable off-meta builds (I hate meta builds most of the time) to start with. They were "killed" or just cost now several mirrors to reach at least the level of the ~15 ex meta builds...

"Thanks", GGG

P.S. New content is cool