The only problem with your "we need more build diversity" arguement, well we messed that up with poe1, what did EVERYONE say to new players? FOLLOW A BUILD GUIDE, now we have people that will only follow build guides and not make their own build. Theres prolly a few hundred builds that are more powerful than the ones that are being run, but until a streamer finds it, it wont be found cause we dont have enough people trying to do their own stuff....
Yeah this won't be the best game of its time sorry, they set out to make their own game with their own speed and boss designs and make fights impactful and make you care about the story but reality is just a joke bosses dead in seconds no mechanics no one really cares about the story, build diversity is garbage, ppl who think they are make money by messing with the trade economy so only no lifers can afford certain fun items sorry sooo Soo much to fix which I hope they do as I was super xcited for this game now I kinda wish I didn't waste my money on it.
This is the kind of feedback I hope GGG pays attention to. Great points, I def think PoE2 can be something incredible with the base they have. I just hope GGG's ability to craft bases is better than ours in-game
Being allowed only a singular attempt for a map/boss and more methodical, difficult gameplay are at odds with one another. Souls-like games, which is a cited inspiration for their boss design, are able to utilize have more difficult bosses where you need to learn the patterns and timing windows of their moves is achievable because you are allowed to attempt the boss again and again in a trial and error of learning with little opportunity cost lost between, its also what made the sudden spike in difficulty for campaign bosses, like Count Geonor, seem fair as you are able to attempt it multiple times and learn how the fight works. As it currently stands in end game, between the one attempt play style, PoE 1 styled design of mobs modifiers, ported over endgame systems with only small tweaks, and the gutting of tools to deal with those same problems from the first game, you run into a situation where your character is designed for a game you are no longer playing in and that further incentives this gravitation towards PoE 1 style builds. If anything, PoE2 is better designed for the 6-portal system than PoE1 is and GGG truly needs to move away from these punishing systems for death if they hand the harder more methodical gameplay that has been the driving selling point for the game.
@@circaen Then its the games fault for not teaching you well enough how to make a build to deal with that content, unless we only make a game for the best players?
i really wish they would chill the F down on the punishment when dying. when I die i brick my portal, the node effect and then lose xp. like maybe brick the portal and not the node or vice versa or not have 1 shot on death effects or maybe at least add a revive or two.
I'm lvl 94. 188 hours played. Defeated the Arbiter of Ash 3 times. I have found a grand total of 0 greater essences. I have found no King of the mist invitations. Not a single piece of gear I have equipped was self crafted. I still use a belt with one charm slot.
Damn! I’ve been lucky. 2 greater and 1 perfect. Perfect dropped in tier 1 map. 4 gear slots are self crafted with godly rng on exalt slams. Oh, also 7 raw div drop. Lvl 86 with 70% rarity gear
I also noticed the shift from methodical fights with meaningful skill interactions to one/two button combos near endgame for my monk. I had an "ah-ha!" moment during the campaign when I noticed that freezing enemies with wave of frost then hitting those frozen enemies with the final spike of glacial cascade caused big aoe damage. It became a little challenge of guessing the correct distance so that I could hit the final spike in the right spot. That became a nonviable approach at endgame because the enemies jumped on me too quickly. It was easier to spam ice strike so I could kill them faster. I would've liked to see those interactions more in endgame.
This was my exact same progression. Was loving it until maps. The mobs move to fast to do any sort of methodical play style. I was a huge poe1 zoomer and never expected to like the more methodical. It was fantastic. If they change the mobs then they can nerf power level. But if they just nerf the game will suck
Same with a standard Blood Mage focusing on bonestorm. Sure, it's fancy gathering splinters and firing them, but once you're mapping and doing breach, detonate dead takes over as a proper clearing ability. Still enjoyable though. I'll never tire of my witch laughing while yelling "Boom!"
Itd be cool but make endgame more of a slog than it already is, it needs to be sped up. It feels really bad, maps right now feel worse than diablo 4s nightmare dungeons at release.
I'm in SSF, not following a build and am nowhere near a good build maker (I do enjoy winging it though) and I'm already feeling this just in Act 2 😅 I COULD use four of five different skills in tandem, some of them situational whether there's a white or blue dot above an enemy's head, or I could just use one skill, dodge roll, use same skill again, dodge roll. Enemies are just too fast and laser focused IMO. And slow af enemies can just cause multiple huge AoEs that I can't dodge cause I'm getting stuck on things/other mobs. Feels bad so I just started to focus tankiness and life regeneration early, then I encounter the trial mechanic (which was a league mechanic from PoE1 I really hated) where I get punished for making my character like how I want them, tanky and able to take hits instead of turbo and killing stuff before it can attack
5:30 About the monsters and the poe 2 combos: I league started chronomancer comet and until white or yellow maps my entire build revolved around freezing rares, then one shotting them with comet. This worked really well, until somewhere around high reds where rare monsters started spawning with a lot more modifiers (it seems to scale with map tier, on top of the atlas keystone). Nearly all rares had some sort of aoe or projectile that you had to dodge. And I don't mean on-death effects. The rares in this game have many effects where they will put fire/cold/lightning circles below you, or they will do non-purple (but also purple) volatiles that follow you, all of which will force you to move. If your character has any type of skill that relies on slowly setting something up for a big combo, you can never get it off. Not because you can't cc the mobs (you actually can, pretty reliably even) but because the modifiers on rare monsters will still go off and will still continue to happen even if they are frozen, eletrocuted, or even TIME FROZEN. Seriously. You can time freeze a Prowling Shade monster and the dude can still proc his skill to go invulnerable/invisible. You can freeze or time freeze a rare with shroud walker, start casting your comet and then the rare will teleport towards you and dodge your comet. Oh hey, an enemy has proximity tangibility? Maybe if I freeze him and cast my comet right next to him, I'll get that cast o- nevermind, the rare will have a bunch of volatiles and ground effects that will force me to move mid-cast anyway. Until I changed my clearing skill to be something that could simultaneously clear the map and kill rares (like poe 1 skills), I actually had more trouble killing rares than any map boss. The whole situation is sad, because I had the character of my dreams, with all of my favorite combos and all, and I had to change my build not because the character sucks but because it is impossible to have any sort of setup in a game where rares have a bunch of special effects that completely ignore any form of crowd control.
It really sucks that end game is exactly back to poe 1 where if you don't clear whole screen in a second, you will die. There's really no meaningful combat at the moment outside campaign / bosses (especially for melees) and I really hope poe 2 goes away from this design
The design of skills, the CC options, the fact that the stun bar even exists; all that makes me think that they're committed to methodical combat, but we'll see.
I m glad that u took up the point that POE2 wants to be different and grittier than poe1. But the problem is that unless they revamp enemy mechanics just like they revamped boss and player mechanics at its core, the game is just going to become poe1 after the campaign. Infact, that kinda fcks up the endgame experience of player because their vision is not congruent with the way current endgame functions. I think they really should use this early access to gauge whether their vision can truly hold in endgame and if not then they should try to tune the endgame by enhancing areas which were limited by the poe1 engine.
Current endgame makes the game feel very Frankenstein. We sorta got GGG's original vision for the "expansion": We have a new act for PoE. Once we get into endgame there is no PoE 1 and 2, just two different acts. They achieved what they originally set out to do and it sucks. Why would I play PoE with 1 life per map instead of 6? Why am I playing semi-hardcore in softcore? Why should I give up all of the crafting options? Why should I farm in this barren wasteland with 0 raw divines after running 100s of huge maps? It's good that we got an endgame but it needs to be much more than nightmare version of PoE 1. It's a new game, it deserves a new endgame. I don't think we have to get rid of mindless one-to-zero button mashing and destroy your screen type of content. That can stay, but as all endgame content in PoE is, just be one of the optional content. PoE 2 deserves an action-combo oriented endgame content it is supposed to have. Looking forward to what GGG will come up on this front in 2025.
I couldn't agree more to this. I played as Choromancer in a first run with self-trial and error and I couldn't pass the end game after that. it lacks so much damage to clear a map no matter what I try to adjust the gear, the passive etc. Then I played a new one as Stromweaver and it was a whole different end game expeirence. I love Choromancer so much, like you know we have abilities to stop time like a weep in anime. and that made me feels so bad for how different it is. I hope they balancing all of the classes so that no class can clear maps and bosses with one skill while the other class struggle so much with 10 skills or whatever.
Rare mob modifiers are my biggest concern and complained in maps atm. Corpse explody rares, the thing they constantly ran into issues with for hardcore game design balance, is back to it's former state. It's basicly instant and with no visual feedback on whats going on. Same is true for the fire/lighting and ice explosions. With delirium on your screen or any other form of clutter you are once again unable to identify where something is happening. Then there are 'grounds' effects, most notably burning grounds, which have no counterplay except of 'avoid the effect' which is rarely an option and gets extremly frustrating during backtracking through maps. Which brings me to the map design. Giant spaces with no intell on your objectives, even if they are near you, feels extremly punishing. Missing a rare in a small corner at the start of your map can easily add 1 or more minutes of walking to a map, and it happens fairly frequently.
Damn I agree with everything here. Great feedback. The campaign feels fantastic and the exact game I wanted. Then you get to maps and you’re forced into a poe1 playstyle again. I hope they can get the endgame to feel more like the campaign combat
Excellent take on what the game should be. Totally agree. We already have POE1 and D4 for 1 button whole screen builds. POE 2 campaign and levelling feel so good. As soon as I reached the maps it started to fade off and became very similar to POE 1 type of playing the trading site (which isnt even usable due to bots and gold farmers at the moment).
imagine wanting to take 30 minutes to finish a map at level 100. I don't understand you people in the slightest. You are supposed to get more powerful, not continue being level 1.
I spent an alchemy , 2 exalts , and a vaal orb for a t15 waystone and got stun lucked , frozen then killed within me spawning into the zone . I lost my way stone , currency, Exp, and the boss that was on that not in a span of 3 seconds... 10/10 endgame .
Btw dont ex your map if you gonna vaal it lolz. It can change to something worse. Scratch that, dont waste your ex at all, just alch + vaal is expensive enough.
@Ventus_S You will want to ex it before vaaling if you're trying to get 8 modded maps, but from my experience it's still not worth it since the drops are not worth the difficulty
I'm convicned GGG can't balance melee at all. My first character was slam Titan, and it felt like what they were selling as a slow and methodical gameplay. Every boss took multiple attempts of watching and learning the boss moves and using the small damage windows to chip it down. It was a compelling challenge. Then I look at what all the other classes are doing and found out I was playing hard mode for some reason. Leveled a merc, easily breezed through everything, didn't even need to pay half the amount of attention my titan did. Titan couldn't even map well because the attacks from white mobs were a threat. All my attacks were slow and I couldn't even get them off in time and then you have rare mobs with temp bubble and 5 flavors of volitiles. How the hell are you supposed to play melee? Monk doesn't count, they have screen sized clear. Game felt a lot better after I rerolled into a corrupting cry gemling, still a bit meme but it's at least tanky enough to survive.
Atm doing warbringer boneshat, playing with a stormweaver spark friend, i have to play 10x better than he does even with better gear. I am going to reroll soon, it feels so bad
In their current design, melee will only work if they're like 3-5x tankier than ranged. I use stampede as a clear skill and I have to be so careful on engage and the angle to engage in because projectiles can shotgun and kill me instantly from 4000 life. Sometimes I just spam earthquake while kiting mobs if it's actually impossible to engage. That's not the melee gameplay style I signed up for lol. It feels like armour does nothing against higher tier maps damage (probably because it works the same way as poe 1) But also, end game should change so it's not just poe 1 all over again. I really liked slow methodical gameplay of warrior in campaign. That goes out of the window if monsters start hitting you for 30% of your life per hit and there's a rare with a volatile mod, chasing aoe mod, random ground mod and hinder aura. You need to explode things before they can even touch you just like poe 1 and that's very disappointing.
Yeah, it feels really bad since poe2 was pitched as the game that will "solve" melee...and this is what they have to show after all these years? I'm holding out hope for the unreleased weapon types, but 2h maces at the very least definitely feel bad atm. I also hope armour gets a rework and doesn't follow the poe1 nonsensical formula.
@@TheAluvisify Honestly having leveled a titan and a warbringer, I will say it really only feels bad early on, act 2 felt the worse with mace anyways. After that, and after a build got more fleshed out it did feel a lot better. And I’m fine with mace skills being “slow but hard hitting” def needs a few tweaks. Only other melee rn is quarterstaff which feels amazing lol. So I am looking forward to swords, axes, daggers, spear. Idk how melee centric flail may be but if it has some melee will be interesting to see that to. But I can agree in the current state melee doesn’t feel as good as anything else. I wouldn’t call it horrible. There is still a lot to come. But I can definitely understand peoples skepticism with melee considering how bad it was for the most part in poe1.
let this video blow up. so much good points. the thing what most resonated with me was the difference in playstile while mapping and the campaign. I just said to a friend of mine that on monk you could use like 4, 5 different abilitys while playing the campaign, while in maps i dialed it down to the main frost attack and the bell for rares and the rest of the gem slots is support stuff, heralds, auras etc. rly sad. not only do you need the supports for the dmg you just havent the gem space for more cool spells.
It will be very difficult to keep player power at a point where you actually have to deal with boss mechanics, but I would like to see it. I hope the community doesn't run amok. A lot of other things would have to change to make that more palatablle. 1-portal, map sizes, something to help make gearing more flexible, towers, map mechanics, one-shots; everything that makes the game exhausting to play long-term.
I absolutely love the game, i definitely see its flaws, but im expecting by the end of January a lot of things will have been addressed, and by 1.0 should be a much more polished experience.
I totally agree on your point about breach and mechanics in general, even if they dont change how you get the points, why can't I get any breachstone splinters until red maps? It just takes the fun out of the mechanic early on I agree so much with what you were saying about mechanics and gameplay encouraging builds like PoE 1, as a warrior player, i absolutely loved playing melee. Its not for everyone, its slow and weighty, but that was ok with me because i did lots of damage and could still clear maps, just slower. But then you have these league mechancis that encourage speed more than anything. Like, how am i supposed to do breaches or delirium on a slow build? I had this complaint in PoE 1when i started that too, but came to be fine with that game being mire about speed. But i thought PoE 2 was supposed to be slower, yet it still has the same issue, because they basically just directly copy pasted these mechanics into PoE 2 without many changes at all. What i think they should do is add more mechanical complexity to enemies and maybe even make them tankier. Make it so a fast character can outplay the enemies while slower characters are able to exploit there weaknesses better. My first thought is something like the d2 immunities because that made it so casters couldn't just do everything so easily but that has a lot of it's own issues, but just something along those lines. Like maybe some enemies have shields and melee characters can break them with some attacks but ranged characters have to go around them or hit them from behind or something. Just more mechanics to llay around and give the characters/classes you play more build identity
My only issue is one death per map. Like you said, the end game is mostly a placeholder so hopefully we will get six deaths per map back. The only thing one death per map does is make me play a boring tanky build that I don't like playing just so I don't lose and get punished.
7/10? Oh come on, the most IGN-o-rant rating ever ?=P That said, I think you basically nailed it. A good campaign into trash crafting, and an endgame that ultimately still wants players to turn it into "clunky PoE1" (unless they get a Temporalis, at which point, it's...exactly PoE1, if not faster?). One thing I do take issue with is the idea that PoE1's crafting is deterministic. It isn't until you get to obnoxious amounts of currency. Basically, the journey from the shore to 2 voidstones is basically "pick up item, crafting bench it", maybe throw a couple of essences on something. But certainly, we're not doing various "spam a hundred essences -> metamod lock -> reforge tagged mod" stuff until way past 2 voidsstones. Last Epoch addresses this, but that game has plenty of other flaws. But certainly, the fact that the game *wants* you to make item progression isn't a flaw. But as one person in Tenkiei's discord put it: "I love the idea of having mods A and B on base C while looking at the moon from the west on a Wednesday and using method D means I get this super-rare mod". I think PoE2 needs to have MORE of this. And absolutely agreed on endgame progression, which is all gated behind endgame bossing, rather than "complete 5 breaches in white/yellow/red maps" for 2-4-6 points, beat Xesht for 8th, or maybe complete 5 -> 15 -> 30 -> beat Xesht could be the breach route, 5 -> 15 -> logbook -> Olroth for expedition, 5 -> 15 -> 30 -> King for rituals, 3 -> 10 -> boss in deli -> simulacrum for deli tree. Furthermore, the pinnacle boss being that hard to access is just ???? IMO. I remember back in the days of shaper/elder atlas that you ran 4 maps for shaper -> another 4 for uber elder -> lather, rinse, repeat to your heart's content. Maven, these days, I think is "run witnessed shaper guardians -> invitation for 5 splinters -> do it again for Maven's writ", though t17s for ubers take things up a notch, but are still much faster than "get incredibly lucky finding the keys in Delve 0.5" That said, at the end of the day, it feels like if PoE2's gem setup (not the uncut stuff, just the tons of 6Ls)/weapon swap system were brought into PoE1, we might just have had the best of all worlds. Instead, it seems GGG's making a whole new game only for the endgame to wind up at...largely the same place PoE1 is? It'll be interesting to see which way GGG takes this, but so far, the hype was off the scale, while PoE2 right now is...well, early access is early access. Hence the need for feedback. Good video.
That would work similar to alteration orb which would prevent you from getting hundreds of bases from the ground. Why wouldn't you want to portal back to put a full inventory of bases to your stash?
I 100% agree that we are playing POE2 and the mobs are playing POE1. They need to tone down a lot of the stuff they copied from POE1. With that, they need to fix the broken builds. My biggest complaint with POE1 was how overpowered group play was. Its as bad if not worse in POE2. Group players dominate the markets and push normal players out.
Every map should have a boss fight, they should lean into them. We need more than one attempt for maps and bosses, I don't feel like I am able to learn and get better, I just feel bad when I die. For melee, in maps, the movement is terrible. I think they need to prioritize player movement in some way when all you have for clear is Stampede. Getting stuck on a mob and going nowhere feels awful.
I agree. When you have 500 STR and you're Stampeding, we should not be getting stuck on mobs, they should for the most part (except really massive ones perhaps), be pushed out of the way. God knows they do it to us all the time.
Strongly agree with atlas progression being backwards, it seems so hard to find the expedition boss - I've ran like 20 logbooks without finding them. Also, them empty nodes feel bad. Love the game - cant wait to see where they take it.
let me try a map with all the content even after dying. losing the waystone is enough punishment. after death effect killed me way too much for it to be 1 try. heck, I even died TWICE in the same map because of an on death chaos effect on the floor (not the explosion, just a purple puddle) ON A DARK FLOOR LITTERED WITH CORPSES IN A PITCH BLACK ROOM. like, how the fuck am I supposed to see that while dodging projectiles flying at me with monster running towards me at the same time? I was literally speechless watching my hp just drops in a second without knowing what the fuck happened
I gave up on mapping for a lot of reasons you mentioned, empty maps feel really bad but mostly because there'd be no surprise. In PoE1 early mapping, anything might happen and I never know what I'll find. In PoE2 since the extra mechanics are written on the map I know everything I'll find in there, there isn't much surprise or exploration in maps.
Another thing ly husband and I experienced, is the dps discrepancy between mobs and boss. We cleared a campaign map with no problem, killed all the rares we encountered and got to the boss and suddenly we felt a lack of dps to take it down. Usually because we are dodging a million things and that we dont have time to cast or attack. Might be a skill issue, as the usual reply is to this sort of comment, but for a new player (like my husband) its frustrating and he doesnt understand why there is such a difficult jump in the same map. We have also tested a few character starts and noticed not all skills and classes are equal. Find a melee weapon with a bit of damage on it and you can one shot the starting mobs. Play with minions and you suffer until you get your first buff gem in freythorn (and why is raging spirits in the sorceress section? only discovered that late in act 2, making all previous content a real pain). And why are nearly all sorceress playing spark instead of arc or embers, or... (insert class and skill here). I really like the game and look forward to discovering rhe next acts and classes and evrything, but the game also needs some balancing on a lot of fronts. Luckily this is early access and it can be addressed. No regrets experiencing it all from the beginning and had a blast until now.
I think the idea is good. And the game is great.. But it has issues. One of my biggest concerns is the way they talked about how this game was made to make melee feel smooth and good. I played a physical wind monk. Not only are wind skills very undertuned right now.. Many of them have minimum attack times which make them not scale with attack speed. On top of not scaling with attack speed, they make you lose all your momentum at the start and end of the animation. (Talking about the whirling skill) which makes it feel like you lose control of your character. It doesn't feel smooth. I also hate that the movement speed is half as fast as poe 1 but the maps are 4-6x bigger. Makes it feel really obnoxious to have to backtrack to find that one rare that you missed at the start of the map. I see potential, but right now.. I am getting annoyed with a lot of things. It feels like at every split of direction, they could choose fun or tedious. And they chose tedious at every stop of the way.
Hot take: If they do what you say and turn the game into poe dark souls where the campaign power level is literally the entire game and you have to fight bosses for 10 minutes then people wont play the game long term.
Subtractum has a lot of bad takes game design wise. I am sorry but, despite his positivity, he always comes across whiny. Destroying hordes of monsters is what ARPGs are all about. It's absolutely boggling that people want the slow methodical gameplay in maps
@@EyesFireable The thing is they actually don't want that, you can literally just listen to them complain about things being a "slog". Well duh, that's what you asked for.
I recall a few conversation where they've talked about the amount of scaling that they feel is necessary to provide the power fantasy. It may have been Chris, so this isn't necessarily fate for PoE 2, but they were very much explaining the need for exponential growth -- for 100-1000x differences between decent builds and optimal ones. I agree with your take. 10x is enough.
There is absolutely no way PoE 2 will be able to retain new players unless they drastically change their approach to end-game. Most new players are still playing through the campaign and enjoying it, but they will just smash into a brick wall once they reach the end. Even this slimmed down version of the endgame is very incomprehensible to new players, and full of idiosyncrasies with absolutely no on-boarding. Players that don't actively seek out guidance outside the game will be completely lost and quit playing almost immediately after beating the campaign. They need to make the choice of either ditching their current vision for end-game and starting fresh with new players in mind, or lean hard into pandering to the PoE 1 audience. It's a big problem with the approach they've taken with PoE 2. The campaign seems designed to broaden their audience, but the core philosophies behind their design of game systems are still the same ones that kept this wider audience from playing and enjoying PoE 1.
this game has an identity crisis. It wants to appeal to a mass audience (so it dumbed down some mechanics like the gem system and crafting), but also wants to be hardcore like dark souls (so they make it difficult and dont give you much access to resources), but then want it to be a power fantasy isometric ARPG with build variety like POE1. I don't think you can mesh all those together. They need to pick a direction and run with it.
funny how paul tassi made a vid a week ago about most of these points and the whole community bashed him and now regular content poe creators are coming with their reviews and making similar points, looking at you quin
If this overall situation stays the same as it is, PoE2 will never eclipse PoE1. Just imagine spending 2k+ hours in a game of constant stress about being oneshoted, terrible crafting and mandatory rarity to actually drop anything (T15s, still didnt drop a single greater jeweller and I actually have some 30% rarity+ tree). You either play screen destroying build or it feels clunky because white trash swarms you since they aggro from 3 screens away. If you have one attempt to Boss, then ofc most ppl will watch it on YT- it's even worse than soulslikes, where death on boss just takes your souls/runes away (you Can still pick them up) and forces you to run to the boss room again (or not, like for most bosses in Elden Ring). If GGG makes the same mistakes again + some questionable or just straight bad design decisions, I don't think it gets better in a way that matters soon. I'm sorry but campaign experience overhyped this game, in campaign you were encouraged to use multiple skills, some combos, dodge attacks, it no longer works for maps because in maps we have to play PoE1 or we play the game wrong.
Imagine you want the players to combo skills and then you choose Breach, Deli and Ritual as endgame mechanics. That's beyond stupidity, Metamorphosis or Beasts (of course newly reworked) would have been the much better choice
My biggest complaint is the way Spirit is balanced. If you have any kind of summoner build you HAVE to use a scepter. It forces that option because only scepters give base spirit without modifiers and is the biggest source. They should remove that stat and make spirit a base stat across armor sets based on the armor type like energy shield and evasion. This way there will be far more build options and gear variety.
One problem that I have/see is how weapons get + levels to skills. When comparing say a melee build (double 2 handed weapons) you can reach almost +14 skill level, whereas any skill used by a crossbow is limited to +7. Given how skill levels scale especially at high levels this to me creates an inbalance between characters and specific weapon skills.
Archmage needs to be removed grill the game. They've never been able to tune it. Then buff Stormweaver. Nerf invoker monk 33% Make armour great again Nerf energy shield scaling 20% Buff ALL CURRENCY DROPS 200-300% AND remove rarity interacting with and scaling currency drops. This currently rewards metaslaves beyond reason. This might be the biggest one.. Remove 70% of on death effects. Improve telegraphing of remaining effects. Remove 70% of obstructing foreground environment like trees, cliffs, hills, ledge, etc. Make a final, higher tier of each belt [expert] type available at lvl 65 zones and higher that gives an extra implicit charm slot. Set charm slot mod to only +1. Still available at lower levels Bring back scouring orb. HUGE
You are correct that the 90th percentile build just farms 3 times faster than median build. It cannibalizes the variety of gameplay because no one would want to play the median endgame builds.
Mobs move too fast, that's a big problem. That forces players to try to go all out DPS to kill them before they get killed. If mobs moved slower, then players could be defensive, or offensive, or whatever, and not get punished for moving three steps from a waypoint. I can't imagine any sort of casual (the kind of player that GGG keeps saying they want to capture) to put up with something like the Drednought, where there a bunch of things moving fast, chaincasting, while on a very narrow area with mobs in the front that have a shield. or the mobs in Act 3 chain casting that slow spell in narrow areas.
I agree completely. It's no wonder everyone is playing Invoker, Stormweaver and Deadeye at the moment. Those classes can zoom around 1-shotting/freezing/electrocuting mobs from afar before they become a factor. This seems at odds with what they seem to want for their game. Having mobs on PoE 1 juice is not condusive to creating skill combos so people are playing one-button builds.
We need to get u an interview with Jonathan after the holiday season cuz you are on point sir. I've played poe 1 for a decade now and will still play it when they release updates but I'd love to see poe 2 be different. And you hit the nail on the head when u said that monsters are still playing poe 1
Thank you. I have been having many of the same feelings about gameplay in campaign vs maps and dreading the poe 1.5 situation. Glad someone brings these thoughts as feedback in such a well put together manner.
I think your thoughts are where builds should be relative to each other (50% to 90%) is spot on! I was feeling exactly this today but couldn't quite articulate it.
My gripe is the game is just not as fun as it is frustrating and stressful. I can’t just log in and kill monsters and chill like in D4 and make meaningful progress. I have to push my map level to get any exp and then I have to hold my breath through every rare. Also I have to be a power stock broker if I want to get good gear. D4 is not slip, D4 is fun. Feels more fun to play. When s7 comes I will be there.
While i agree with many of the points it's still funny to me how people expected terrible, on a verge of total garbage, developer (from a professional standpoint) suddenly change and not do mistakes they did all through out PoE1 development cycle (a 13 years at least, mind you). With all the patches thus far we see that no fun is allowed, so expect ES nerf in the near future instead of fixing other defenses. Expect one button builds to be hammered into the ground instead of remaking monsters to be slower with better telegraphed attacks and less barely visible on death effects so classes dependent on animations feel better. Expect increase in loot drops when you get more garbage to sell to vendor while 1% of player base farms with 5000% more efficiency than you instead of returning deterministic crafting methods so even a casual player can get a ssf build going that doesn't feel like complete shite. Expect a nerf hammer being dropped onto problematic location like dreadnought, with hp and damage of monsters being lowered instead of acknowledging the problem of monsters being too fast and constantly jumping over and surrounding you. And so on and on and on. I could write a 500 pages book how and why PoE2 is bad where it doesn't have to be. But worst of all expect PoE fanboys applauding every garbage decision future GGG will make taking it for granted with a truly masochistic joy instead of realizing that the game is deeply flawed when it didn't have to be if we had a development team with at least an ounce of common sense and an ability to actually play their own game and testing it extensively instead of relegating this "privilege" onto the player base. The fanboys gleefully tossing the problems aside as if the game is really is in some sort of early access instead of realizing that it is the same game as before just with the added hoops. And same fanboys looking at the player base dwindling exponentially, already down to half in two weeks (completely expected by anyone with a half a brain), yelling into the internet that the game "is not for you/everyone" as if to reassure themselves that they are not feces consumption aficionados instead of having the best game of all time with a competent developer behind it. But alas, we get a half baked abomination requiring months if not years of fixing to become what it should have been in its core at least right from the get go. And the funniest of all is the fact that the competition for PoE is so hilariously more trash than PoE that even a barely functional game is still better than everything else in the genre just from the sheer power of a genius idea behind it. Pretty much tells you how completely incompetent an entirety of arpg development segment is. All of this is tragicomedy at it's finest.
The balance will always be a hard task for them to accomplish. They can try to make it so people can just use what they want, average players can have a comfortable time with any skills, mastering the dodge in different encounters etc, but no matter what happens, there will always be people that are going to do whatever it takes to make these fast builds. And the market for it is there because once that RUclips video goes up and it gets 100k views and the prices for all that gear skyrockets. I keep seeing all across Reddit and RUclips and in discords etc - how much everyone likes this version of a more slowed down PoE where you take your time and bosses require knowledge and skill, but what I don’t see are “this extra tanky build with fair damage” videos getting any traction.
I made an armor pierce shot witchhunter with 2h mace sunder weapon swap with masterfully constructed skill tree. It was great for the campaign but hitting maps caused me to respec to speed clearing galvanic nonsense. I too feel the campaign felt better than maps. Slow it back down GGG, you have the winning formula in the campaign!
I like the idea behind one portal per map. It’s making everything more fun. I’m getting that hardcore adrenaline rush without losing my character. Also, it should be forcing people to think about defense.
Your performance issues seem strange to me. I'm playing at 1440p with everything maxed except GI quality on High with a 4070, ryzen 7900, and never ever dip below 100. I'm playing the Lightning rod-Orb of storms ranger thing which certainly eat up a lot of frames when everything is firing in breaches etc. One of the things I really appreciated with the game almost immediately was how smooth it ran for that level of graphics, even with GI and lights maxed. I have friends who can't play Poe1 anymore due to performance issues with older hardware who play Poe2. Anyway hope you resolve it or they optimize better.
great vid. wroge a review yesterday and you echo a lot of the things i wrote. its nice to see how most of the community seems to agree on a lot of criticisms and mostly only differs on offered solutions
Thx for acknowledging the performance issues, ive tried highest and lowest graphical settings and it seems like the game likew to hit a minimum 37 fps wall and only then choose to stabilize, trying to tweak settings with upscaling sometimes the framerate would drop and just decide to stay there, also the particle effects can look aweful at times no matter what, without culling
In my opinion non-campaign bosses should have a repeatable quest state version for their lowest level difficulty, this would help with learning the boss
another thing GGG should look at is Monsters Penetrate X resists, its basically a bricking mod on a waystone (even more now since you can't scour them) They should buff the resist penalty for the elemental weakness mod and either tone down or remove Pen
We’ve also got to remember though; we have half the acts and half the weapons and supports, and a third of the classes, so we should probably wait and see with a lot of the character power feedback and focus on the underbaked mechanical progression of mapping and finding the severe outliers to easy access power.
RE: Performance Enable Dynamic Resolution, Dynamic Culling. And depending on what minimum FPS you want, set the Target Framerate (at the very bottom) at that. When your FPS drop to 60, it downscales internal resolution, upscales it through Dynamic Resolution feature (e.g. Nvidia DLSS, GGG NIS, Bilinear). The target framerate freature (quasi minimum FPS) is badly communicated. --- I have a AMD RX 7800xt and am GPU bound as well on full quality, 1440p.
big agree, i want boss maps to just be boss maps. it was a cool idea and separates the builds to where one can excel. But of course that would require tuning since right now boss maps are like how you sustain mapping.
Amazingly identical feedback we have, also a bit worried that it can just go an "easy route" of becoming a visually updated and more "on rails" poe1 instead of being it's own distinct game, that I would personally prefer them to do. Not just because I'd prefer it slower and more methodic but because there was also a vision for that game, that I want to succeed from what was proposed to us throughout the years as PoE 2.
@subtractem in regards to runes, they could introduces a use-count on the runes and maybe dial down the droprate on them to make them worthwhile to pickup. Eg. each runeswap takes away 1 use of 3 and goes poof on the 3rd swap. Just a thought.
there is not a single poe 1 feature that poe 2 copied but made better, it either went a totally different way(good) or just made it worse(tradeside, sanctum, movement skills, boss fomo, QoL feature(i know poe2 is basicly poe 1 from 2 years ago in that regard) etc.)
I don't want to hear anything about early access, this crafting system is completely inexcusable when this developer has 10+ years of experience. This is the worst crafting system in possibly any game I've ever played. Star Ocean: Til the End of Time had better crafting on the PS2. At least I could reuse my base in that game, and reroll. Copy and paste Last Epoch for Christ's sake. They served up an amazing system that could be expanded upon. Or follow your roots and embrace your very good PoE1 system. I personally would prefer an improved PoE1 just because I don't think GGG is gonna make this game good. I have kind of lost a lot of faith in this project.
the crafting is fine ... the problem is ggg fetishizes scarcity too much ... we have tools just not the accessability to those tools to use them in any meaningful way
@@toukoenriaze9870if I had a thousand of every currency it would still suck. slamming each step from base to completion is no different than pulling a slot machine.
@@cellamuert except it's not just slamming if we had better access to greater essences and omens ... And obviously runes are good (could be better with being overwriteable but meh)
@toukoenriaze9870 so a PoE1 resource from a PoE1 mechanic built around PoE1 crafting. Which is deterministic - if you choose to work for that - and allows for alterations in its path and to its base item. But you built your game to remove all of that except the resource. Right. And I'm supposed to say 'its good if only'...? It's just bad dude.
Agree with everything you said. My experience peaked at fighting the Act 1 boss and went steadily downhill from there because we outscaled the monsters too fast. It did lose that souls-like feel really fast. Endgame is essentially Poe1. Talking about boss mechanics etc, you should check out Lost Ark. They truly pushed the limit on what these Isometric ARPGs can be.
Definitely agree you should get easier access to beginning points in mechanic trees, also new players need more direction given from introduction quests to all mechanics. I'd love a boss rush map
One thing GGG really needs to think about, is not just balance between the classes, but balance between players. Obviously someone playing 12-14 hours a day is always going to have a massive advantage over someone who isn’t but putting one movement skill in the game that is far superior to anything else, or having builds that aren’t as gear affix starved so they can slap on a shitload of Rarity is just going to force everyone into a very few builds. Give us movement skills or tree move blink. Remove rarity from gear or make it not affect currency. This game could be amazing, but it is a long way off from their vision. Also, I would take your performance levels all day long, I have a lower end setup and I hope they optimize it better because I am boarder line unplayable at times. Thanks for your input, hope they think about all that, great stuff!
Nicely articulated, agree with pretty much everything, at least everything I can actually have an opinion on as I'm still progressing through the endgame.
as someone who loves poe1 blasting I really hope poe2 doesnt devolve into that and focuses on mechanics and bossing. I also hope poe1 focuses more on that crazy blasting and leans more into that to create a clear distinction between the 2 games
Its always puzzled me that they say it was made tih console in mind but in fact even pc starts to struggle on fps. Im on. Im on ps5 base model. Act 1 is kinda smooth. IBut act 2 onwards its crazy.
IMO late game can be easily solved by just few tweaks. Completely remove rarity from character power aspect. Jewels, gear - all of it. Give more loot the harder content you run, so you are actually rewarded for being strong, not for being weak and running less hard content. A lot of fubguns out there would argue that rarity is just one mod and maybe a base (if its jewelry). Which is true, yes. However, it's not poe 1 where you can craft so deterministically, power is obtained from a much-much harder challenge in poe 2 than 1. So what happens is, you pick the most safe to play class, that also would ideally be faster - deadeye is obvious. At a beginning you can afford to trade off some of your power and have rarity because of above things. And the closer to late game you can obtain more and more power without trading off your rarity. And this turns into awful situation where basically you cheat the game and instead of being rewarded for the character power and harder content, you are rewarded for GIVING AWAY your character power. In a game that is all about getting your character more powerful. This needs to be gone IMO. sorry
I don't want Trade being the only method of getting gear. TBF I'm not mapping yet but the gear drops are hot garbage during campaign, literally 85-90% of my drops are Basic (White). Maybe I missed something but the whole reason I play is to get gear - more powerful? And IMO the skill gem system is inferior to POE 1, by a LOT.
This is the one thing most PoE players will never talk about, because to them it's such a given. PoE is THE aRPG designed for traders. Yes, there are people that play SSF, but the game is through and through designed for trading. This is something either game never really states explicitly or illustrates in any way to new players, but if you don't partake in trading your enjoyment of these games will (almost certainly) be vastly inferior compared to people who do. The fact that this is so poorly presented is a massive contributor to why there's such a gap between the people who "get it" and are extremely into PoE and the people that can't get into it.
The campaign, with a few tweaks, like A3 maps being huge, is a masterpiece. Once you get to maps, you start the PoE 1 dynamic again, but shittier. That's why I have like 5 lvl 60+ chars. I love doing the campaign, because I can try builds and not feel stupid. Once I get to maps, it's exactly how you described it. I just wish they turn the endgame into something more Monster Hunter like, in the terms of being slower, more methodical and not having to blast enemies before they rush and overwhelm you
I especially agree on the build point. One thing that i especially disliked about Poe1 was the one button spam zoom zoom build. I was hyped for Poe2 because i thought i would be REQUIRED to use multiple skills all the time in order to succeed - which is only somewhat true on bosses. My build idea was 4 ailment stormweaver with all hits can shock ascendancy, ignite from firewall an mostly using frost skills. I would set up shocked ground underneath the boss using lightning orb and lightning warp, use few eyes of winter through firewall, freeze the boss and nuke with comets from elemental invocation - and it works, i deal massive damage to the boss, however setting this up in any other environment, especially breach and delirium is just not possible, the game literally forces you to spam 1-2 skills and make them as strong as possible, and then you don't have to worry about using anything else. I just wish some sort of rotation based multi skill gameplay would be more rewarded than "watch me spam this one skill and melt everything off screen"
I like the one portal and also that bosses are something special that you dont oneshot on every map. That said, other ways than kill x rares would be nice.
I’m hoping with their quick patches they moved it into a Poe 1 style because it was their quick solution and easy for them and would quell the complaints but given time when they come back they will revamp toward the vision they had
One of the more intelligent PoE2 reviews I've seen. I think PoE2 is going to be a great game, once the EA lessons have been learned. Glad to be in EA though, and having a blast in spite of the things need changing. Keep up the good work.
About using Gold - I wonder if GGG is planning to implement something similar to the Kingsmarch-City-building mechanic later on - like upgrading your merchants, salvage bench & reforge bench. Also, i think it would be a nice touch if the well could be upgraded via gold during the campaign (and for campaign only!) once per act - and you could choose to get a small, but stacking time-based buff if you click it - there will be 6 acts, and the well could give you 2% movement speed or 1% Mana or Life regeneration for 10 minutes or so. The flasks should be refilled when entering town similar to PoE 1 imo - i like the RPG-touch of filling flasks at a well, but it is not practical, and if you forget to click it, it just feels not great. Another (from my view) great idea, that Ghazzy mentioned - if they would have one traverse-point in every section of the passive skill tree, similar to those in the Atlas-passive-tree in PoE1, and you could use those to "jump" once from your side of the tree to a different section, that would really open up build diversity - as a trade-off these traverse points should then cost more than one skill point each (i think 3 could be fine) - so, you "pay" like 6 skill points that do "nothing" - but you can traverse from the Mercenary to the Witch-Section for instance.
As a veteran PoE player (some 38/40s, a few magebloods, nothing too special), I absolutely love the more deliberate, methodical feeling of the gameplay early on, especially the boss fights. I wish it were a bit faster-I started Warrior, and the slow skills feel pretty bad-especially when it comes to movement speed, but I really hope they figure out how to have both character _and_ monster power scale much closer to linearly or even logarithmically, instead of the exponential scaling that we're seeing in endgame, which as you've said resembles PoE 1. Also strongly agreed that one portal for maps and especially for bosses just feels terrible, and disincentivizes people actually trying the boss on their first attempt. I don't even mind the idea of resetting the fight when you die, but the reason that people love boss fights in FromSoft games so much is precisely because while they can be extremely challenging, you always have the option of trying to fight the boss yet another time or coming back to it later when you're more powerful. Most importantly, dying to a boss doesn't cost you anything except the souls you dropped (and that can easily be worked around). Having only one portal makes both repeated attempts and returning later impossible except at significant and often prohibitive cost, which just feels bad to play. It feels like PoE 2 has this almost backwards at the moment-the bosses are incredibly cool and present interesting challenges, but you'd have to be a fool to go into them unless you already pretty much know you can beat them, because the cost of getting to them is so high.
Yeah. I'm probably going to just put this game aside for a year or two and hope GGG cooks up something good. I finally got to maps right now and everything you said is pretty accurate. I just don't have time to heavy grind for little reward. The campaign was fun and felt rewarding. Maps and the mechanics they chose to bring over ... just suck. I'm just patiently waiting for the next POE1 league that i hope is a great league.
Despite the criticisms I want to emphasize that I'm VERY excited for the future of PoE 2 and I trust the team to make it the best ARPG of all time.
The only problem with your "we need more build diversity" arguement, well we messed that up with poe1, what did EVERYONE say to new players? FOLLOW A BUILD GUIDE, now we have people that will only follow build guides and not make their own build. Theres prolly a few hundred builds that are more powerful than the ones that are being run, but until a streamer finds it, it wont be found cause we dont have enough people trying to do their own stuff....
@nealpool hilarious how everyonr said they are doing there own thing there own way and then everyone proceeds to mass produce meta builds.
Yeah this won't be the best game of its time sorry, they set out to make their own game with their own speed and boss designs and make fights impactful and make you care about the story but reality is just a joke bosses dead in seconds no mechanics no one really cares about the story, build diversity is garbage, ppl who think they are make money by messing with the trade economy so only no lifers can afford certain fun items sorry sooo Soo much to fix which I hope they do as I was super xcited for this game now I kinda wish I didn't waste my money on it.
Don't get your hopes up. This game sucks. Push button, dodge... Boring ...
@@justinmaynard8305 amazing, every word of what you just said was wrong.
This is the kind of feedback I hope GGG pays attention to. Great points, I def think PoE2 can be something incredible with the base they have.
I just hope GGG's ability to craft bases is better than ours in-game
"Close your eyes and slam" "okay" "crap, you hit monsters have onslaught".
Being allowed only a singular attempt for a map/boss and more methodical, difficult gameplay are at odds with one another. Souls-like games, which is a cited inspiration for their boss design, are able to utilize have more difficult bosses where you need to learn the patterns and timing windows of their moves is achievable because you are allowed to attempt the boss again and again in a trial and error of learning with little opportunity cost lost between, its also what made the sudden spike in difficulty for campaign bosses, like Count Geonor, seem fair as you are able to attempt it multiple times and learn how the fight works.
As it currently stands in end game, between the one attempt play style, PoE 1 styled design of mobs modifiers, ported over endgame systems with only small tweaks, and the gutting of tools to deal with those same problems from the first game, you run into a situation where your character is designed for a game you are no longer playing in and that further incentives this gravitation towards PoE 1 style builds.
If anything, PoE2 is better designed for the 6-portal system than PoE1 is and GGG truly needs to move away from these punishing systems for death if they hand the harder more methodical gameplay that has been the driving selling point for the game.
No game is designed to let you die 6 times. If you need more than 3 you are doing content you ought not be doing.
@@circaenand if that's the only content you have left then that's poor game design correct?
@@disturbed1734 No, it's poor build design.
@@circaen Then its the games fault for not teaching you well enough how to make a build to deal with that content, unless we only make a game for the best players?
i really wish they would chill the F down on the punishment when dying. when I die i brick my portal, the node effect and then lose xp. like maybe brick the portal and not the node or vice versa or not have 1 shot on death effects or maybe at least add a revive or two.
Good Video & Good Review.
I'm lvl 94. 188 hours played. Defeated the Arbiter of Ash 3 times. I have found a grand total of 0 greater essences. I have found no King of the mist invitations. Not a single piece of gear I have equipped was self crafted. I still use a belt with one charm slot.
very accurate summary of some of the issues lmao
I played around 40 hours.
Then I switched to another game cause i was having now fun.
Best decision ever.
The quintessential Poe experience
Completely accurate, and the main reason why i quit POE1 after a year of play.
Damn! I’ve been lucky. 2 greater and 1 perfect. Perfect dropped in tier 1 map. 4 gear slots are self crafted with godly rng on exalt slams. Oh, also 7 raw div drop. Lvl 86 with 70% rarity gear
I also noticed the shift from methodical fights with meaningful skill interactions to one/two button combos near endgame for my monk. I had an "ah-ha!" moment during the campaign when I noticed that freezing enemies with wave of frost then hitting those frozen enemies with the final spike of glacial cascade caused big aoe damage. It became a little challenge of guessing the correct distance so that I could hit the final spike in the right spot.
That became a nonviable approach at endgame because the enemies jumped on me too quickly. It was easier to spam ice strike so I could kill them faster. I would've liked to see those interactions more in endgame.
This was my exact same progression. Was loving it until maps. The mobs move to fast to do any sort of methodical play style. I was a huge poe1 zoomer and never expected to like the more methodical. It was fantastic. If they change the mobs then they can nerf power level. But if they just nerf the game will suck
Same with a standard Blood Mage focusing on bonestorm. Sure, it's fancy gathering splinters and firing them, but once you're mapping and doing breach, detonate dead takes over as a proper clearing ability. Still enjoyable though. I'll never tire of my witch laughing while yelling "Boom!"
Itd be cool but make endgame more of a slog than it already is, it needs to be sped up. It feels really bad, maps right now feel worse than diablo 4s nightmare dungeons at release.
I'm in SSF, not following a build and am nowhere near a good build maker (I do enjoy winging it though) and I'm already feeling this just in Act 2 😅 I COULD use four of five different skills in tandem, some of them situational whether there's a white or blue dot above an enemy's head, or I could just use one skill, dodge roll, use same skill again, dodge roll. Enemies are just too fast and laser focused IMO. And slow af enemies can just cause multiple huge AoEs that I can't dodge cause I'm getting stuck on things/other mobs. Feels bad so I just started to focus tankiness and life regeneration early, then I encounter the trial mechanic (which was a league mechanic from PoE1 I really hated) where I get punished for making my character like how I want them, tanky and able to take hits instead of turbo and killing stuff before it can attack
5:30 About the monsters and the poe 2 combos: I league started chronomancer comet and until white or yellow maps my entire build revolved around freezing rares, then one shotting them with comet. This worked really well, until somewhere around high reds where rare monsters started spawning with a lot more modifiers (it seems to scale with map tier, on top of the atlas keystone). Nearly all rares had some sort of aoe or projectile that you had to dodge. And I don't mean on-death effects. The rares in this game have many effects where they will put fire/cold/lightning circles below you, or they will do non-purple (but also purple) volatiles that follow you, all of which will force you to move. If your character has any type of skill that relies on slowly setting something up for a big combo, you can never get it off. Not because you can't cc the mobs (you actually can, pretty reliably even) but because the modifiers on rare monsters will still go off and will still continue to happen even if they are frozen, eletrocuted, or even TIME FROZEN.
Seriously. You can time freeze a Prowling Shade monster and the dude can still proc his skill to go invulnerable/invisible. You can freeze or time freeze a rare with shroud walker, start casting your comet and then the rare will teleport towards you and dodge your comet. Oh hey, an enemy has proximity tangibility? Maybe if I freeze him and cast my comet right next to him, I'll get that cast o- nevermind, the rare will have a bunch of volatiles and ground effects that will force me to move mid-cast anyway.
Until I changed my clearing skill to be something that could simultaneously clear the map and kill rares (like poe 1 skills), I actually had more trouble killing rares than any map boss.
The whole situation is sad, because I had the character of my dreams, with all of my favorite combos and all, and I had to change my build not because the character sucks but because it is impossible to have any sort of setup in a game where rares have a bunch of special effects that completely ignore any form of crowd control.
I straight up ignore prowling shades and move on to do the rest of the map it's ridiculous because my build has instant freeze
It really sucks that end game is exactly back to poe 1 where if you don't clear whole screen in a second, you will die. There's really no meaningful combat at the moment outside campaign / bosses (especially for melees) and I really hope poe 2 goes away from this design
The design of skills, the CC options, the fact that the stun bar even exists; all that makes me think that they're committed to methodical combat, but we'll see.
When you get a rare thats already fast with haste and mana siphon...Holy fucking shit dude that feels bad.
open 10 breaches -> get a free quest breachstone
I m glad that u took up the point that POE2 wants to be different and grittier than poe1. But the problem is that unless they revamp enemy mechanics just like they revamped boss and player mechanics at its core, the game is just going to become poe1 after the campaign. Infact, that kinda fcks up the endgame experience of player because their vision is not congruent with the way current endgame functions. I think they really should use this early access to gauge whether their vision can truly hold in endgame and if not then they should try to tune the endgame by enhancing areas which were limited by the poe1 engine.
Current endgame makes the game feel very Frankenstein. We sorta got GGG's original vision for the "expansion": We have a new act for PoE. Once we get into endgame there is no PoE 1 and 2, just two different acts. They achieved what they originally set out to do and it sucks. Why would I play PoE with 1 life per map instead of 6? Why am I playing semi-hardcore in softcore? Why should I give up all of the crafting options? Why should I farm in this barren wasteland with 0 raw divines after running 100s of huge maps?
It's good that we got an endgame but it needs to be much more than nightmare version of PoE 1. It's a new game, it deserves a new endgame. I don't think we have to get rid of mindless one-to-zero button mashing and destroy your screen type of content. That can stay, but as all endgame content in PoE is, just be one of the optional content. PoE 2 deserves an action-combo oriented endgame content it is supposed to have. Looking forward to what GGG will come up on this front in 2025.
Yeah, every softcore content now is mediumcore and that stresses me the fuck out. It's the reason I always hated Labyrinth :/
All good feedback, I cannot disagree with anything you said!
I couldn't agree more to this. I played as Choromancer in a first run with self-trial and error and I couldn't pass the end game after that. it lacks so much damage to clear a map no matter what I try to adjust the gear, the passive etc. Then I played a new one as Stromweaver and it was a whole different end game expeirence. I love Choromancer so much, like you know we have abilities to stop time like a weep in anime. and that made me feels so bad for how different it is. I hope they balancing all of the classes so that no class can clear maps and bosses with one skill while the other class struggle so much with 10 skills or whatever.
Rare mob modifiers are my biggest concern and complained in maps atm. Corpse explody rares, the thing they constantly ran into issues with for hardcore game design balance, is back to it's former state. It's basicly instant and with no visual feedback on whats going on. Same is true for the fire/lighting and ice explosions. With delirium on your screen or any other form of clutter you are once again unable to identify where something is happening. Then there are 'grounds' effects, most notably burning grounds, which have no counterplay except of 'avoid the effect' which is rarely an option and gets extremly frustrating during backtracking through maps. Which brings me to the map design. Giant spaces with no intell on your objectives, even if they are near you, feels extremly punishing. Missing a rare in a small corner at the start of your map can easily add 1 or more minutes of walking to a map, and it happens fairly frequently.
Damn I agree with everything here. Great feedback. The campaign feels fantastic and the exact game I wanted. Then you get to maps and you’re forced into a poe1 playstyle again. I hope they can get the endgame to feel more like the campaign combat
Excellent take on what the game should be. Totally agree. We already have POE1 and D4 for 1 button whole screen builds. POE 2 campaign and levelling feel so good. As soon as I reached the maps it started to fade off and became very similar to POE 1 type of playing the trading site (which isnt even usable due to bots and gold farmers at the moment).
imagine wanting to take 30 minutes to finish a map at level 100. I don't understand you people in the slightest. You are supposed to get more powerful, not continue being level 1.
I spent an alchemy , 2 exalts , and a vaal orb for a t15 waystone and got stun lucked , frozen then killed within me spawning into the zone . I lost my way stone , currency, Exp, and the boss that was on that not in a span of 3 seconds... 10/10 endgame .
Lmao, most would say get gud. Then again, it’s still a beta game. 😅
feels like alpha+ tbh
Btw dont ex your map if you gonna vaal it lolz.
It can change to something worse.
Scratch that, dont waste your ex at all, just alch + vaal is expensive enough.
@Ventus_S You will want to ex it before vaaling if you're trying to get 8 modded maps, but from my experience it's still not worth it since the drops are not worth the difficulty
I'm convicned GGG can't balance melee at all. My first character was slam Titan, and it felt like what they were selling as a slow and methodical gameplay. Every boss took multiple attempts of watching and learning the boss moves and using the small damage windows to chip it down. It was a compelling challenge.
Then I look at what all the other classes are doing and found out I was playing hard mode for some reason. Leveled a merc, easily breezed through everything, didn't even need to pay half the amount of attention my titan did. Titan couldn't even map well because the attacks from white mobs were a threat. All my attacks were slow and I couldn't even get them off in time and then you have rare mobs with temp bubble and 5 flavors of volitiles. How the hell are you supposed to play melee? Monk doesn't count, they have screen sized clear.
Game felt a lot better after I rerolled into a corrupting cry gemling, still a bit meme but it's at least tanky enough to survive.
Atm doing warbringer boneshat, playing with a stormweaver spark friend, i have to play 10x better than he does even with better gear. I am going to reroll soon, it feels so bad
In their current design, melee will only work if they're like 3-5x tankier than ranged. I use stampede as a clear skill and I have to be so careful on engage and the angle to engage in because projectiles can shotgun and kill me instantly from 4000 life. Sometimes I just spam earthquake while kiting mobs if it's actually impossible to engage. That's not the melee gameplay style I signed up for lol. It feels like armour does nothing against higher tier maps damage (probably because it works the same way as poe 1)
But also, end game should change so it's not just poe 1 all over again. I really liked slow methodical gameplay of warrior in campaign. That goes out of the window if monsters start hitting you for 30% of your life per hit and there's a rare with a volatile mod, chasing aoe mod, random ground mod and hinder aura. You need to explode things before they can even touch you just like poe 1 and that's very disappointing.
Yeah, it feels really bad since poe2 was pitched as the game that will "solve" melee...and this is what they have to show after all these years? I'm holding out hope for the unreleased weapon types, but 2h maces at the very least definitely feel bad atm. I also hope armour gets a rework and doesn't follow the poe1 nonsensical formula.
@@TheAluvisify Honestly having leveled a titan and a warbringer, I will say it really only feels bad early on, act 2 felt the worse with mace anyways. After that, and after a build got more fleshed out it did feel a lot better. And I’m fine with mace skills being “slow but hard hitting” def needs a few tweaks. Only other melee rn is quarterstaff which feels amazing lol. So I am looking forward to swords, axes, daggers, spear. Idk how melee centric flail may be but if it has some melee will be interesting to see that to.
But I can agree in the current state melee doesn’t feel as good as anything else. I wouldn’t call it horrible. There is still a lot to come. But I can definitely understand peoples skepticism with melee considering how bad it was for the most part in poe1.
let this video blow up. so much good points.
the thing what most resonated with me was the difference in playstile while mapping and the campaign. I just said to a friend of mine that on monk you could use like 4, 5 different abilitys while playing the campaign, while in maps i dialed it down to the main frost attack and the bell for rares and the rest of the gem slots is support stuff, heralds, auras etc. rly sad.
not only do you need the supports for the dmg you just havent the gem space for more cool spells.
It will be very difficult to keep player power at a point where you actually have to deal with boss mechanics, but I would like to see it. I hope the community doesn't run amok. A lot of other things would have to change to make that more palatablle. 1-portal, map sizes, something to help make gearing more flexible, towers, map mechanics, one-shots; everything that makes the game exhausting to play long-term.
I absolutely love the game, i definitely see its flaws, but im expecting by the end of January a lot of things will have been addressed, and by 1.0 should be a much more polished experience.
I totally agree on your point about breach and mechanics in general, even if they dont change how you get the points, why can't I get any breachstone splinters until red maps? It just takes the fun out of the mechanic early on
I agree so much with what you were saying about mechanics and gameplay encouraging builds like PoE 1, as a warrior player, i absolutely loved playing melee. Its not for everyone, its slow and weighty, but that was ok with me because i did lots of damage and could still clear maps, just slower. But then you have these league mechancis that encourage speed more than anything. Like, how am i supposed to do breaches or delirium on a slow build? I had this complaint in PoE 1when i started that too, but came to be fine with that game being mire about speed. But i thought PoE 2 was supposed to be slower, yet it still has the same issue, because they basically just directly copy pasted these mechanics into PoE 2 without many changes at all.
What i think they should do is add more mechanical complexity to enemies and maybe even make them tankier. Make it so a fast character can outplay the enemies while slower characters are able to exploit there weaknesses better. My first thought is something like the d2 immunities because that made it so casters couldn't just do everything so easily but that has a lot of it's own issues, but just something along those lines. Like maybe some enemies have shields and melee characters can break them with some attacks but ranged characters have to go around them or hit them from behind or something. Just more mechanics to llay around and give the characters/classes you play more build identity
Drasticly reduce the number of items that drop, drasticly enhance the odds of good outcomes on said items. The tier system is nice, but fails late.
My only issue is one death per map. Like you said, the end game is mostly a placeholder so hopefully we will get six deaths per map back. The only thing one death per map does is make me play a boring tanky build that I don't like playing just so I don't lose and get punished.
7/10? Oh come on, the most IGN-o-rant rating ever ?=P
That said, I think you basically nailed it. A good campaign into trash crafting, and an endgame that ultimately still wants players to turn it into "clunky PoE1" (unless they get a Temporalis, at which point, it's...exactly PoE1, if not faster?).
One thing I do take issue with is the idea that PoE1's crafting is deterministic. It isn't until you get to obnoxious amounts of currency. Basically, the journey from the shore to 2 voidstones is basically "pick up item, crafting bench it", maybe throw a couple of essences on something. But certainly, we're not doing various "spam a hundred essences -> metamod lock -> reforge tagged mod" stuff until way past 2 voidsstones. Last Epoch addresses this, but that game has plenty of other flaws. But certainly, the fact that the game *wants* you to make item progression isn't a flaw.
But as one person in Tenkiei's discord put it:
"I love the idea of having mods A and B on base C while looking at the moon from the west on a Wednesday and using method D means I get this super-rare mod". I think PoE2 needs to have MORE of this.
And absolutely agreed on endgame progression, which is all gated behind endgame bossing, rather than "complete 5 breaches in white/yellow/red maps" for 2-4-6 points, beat Xesht for 8th, or maybe complete 5 -> 15 -> 30 -> beat Xesht could be the breach route, 5 -> 15 -> logbook -> Olroth for expedition, 5 -> 15 -> 30 -> King for rituals, 3 -> 10 -> boss in deli -> simulacrum for deli tree.
Furthermore, the pinnacle boss being that hard to access is just ???? IMO. I remember back in the days of shaper/elder atlas that you ran 4 maps for shaper -> another 4 for uber elder -> lather, rinse, repeat to your heart's content. Maven, these days, I think is "run witnessed shaper guardians -> invitation for 5 splinters -> do it again for Maven's writ", though t17s for ubers take things up a notch, but are still much faster than "get incredibly lucky finding the keys in Delve 0.5"
That said, at the end of the day, it feels like if PoE2's gem setup (not the uncut stuff, just the tons of 6Ls)/weapon swap system were brought into PoE1, we might just have had the best of all worlds. Instead, it seems GGG's making a whole new game only for the endgame to wind up at...largely the same place PoE1 is?
It'll be interesting to see which way GGG takes this, but so far, the hype was off the scale, while PoE2 right now is...well, early access is early access. Hence the need for feedback.
Good video.
I would like to see another currency for blue items that functions like a chaos orb
That would work similar to alteration orb which would prevent you from getting hundreds of bases from the ground. Why wouldn't you want to portal back to put a full inventory of bases to your stash?
I 100% agree that we are playing POE2 and the mobs are playing POE1. They need to tone down a lot of the stuff they copied from POE1. With that, they need to fix the broken builds.
My biggest complaint with POE1 was how overpowered group play was. Its as bad if not worse in POE2. Group players dominate the markets and push normal players out.
They said from the beginning it would be 80% the speed of poe1 in end game and I think on average that’s mostly true
Every map should have a boss fight, they should lean into them. We need more than one attempt for maps and bosses, I don't feel like I am able to learn and get better, I just feel bad when I die. For melee, in maps, the movement is terrible. I think they need to prioritize player movement in some way when all you have for clear is Stampede. Getting stuck on a mob and going nowhere feels awful.
I agree. When you have 500 STR and you're Stampeding, we should not be getting stuck on mobs, they should for the most part (except really massive ones perhaps), be pushed out of the way. God knows they do it to us all the time.
Strongly agree with atlas progression being backwards, it seems so hard to find the expedition boss - I've ran like 20 logbooks without finding them. Also, them empty nodes feel bad. Love the game - cant wait to see where they take it.
let me try a map with all the content even after dying. losing the waystone is enough punishment. after death effect killed me way too much for it to be 1 try. heck, I even died TWICE in the same map because of an on death chaos effect on the floor (not the explosion, just a purple puddle) ON A DARK FLOOR LITTERED WITH CORPSES IN A PITCH BLACK ROOM. like, how the fuck am I supposed to see that while dodging projectiles flying at me with monster running towards me at the same time? I was literally speechless watching my hp just drops in a second without knowing what the fuck happened
I gave up on mapping for a lot of reasons you mentioned, empty maps feel really bad but mostly because there'd be no surprise.
In PoE1 early mapping, anything might happen and I never know what I'll find. In PoE2 since the extra mechanics are written on the map I know everything I'll find in there, there isn't much surprise or exploration in maps.
Another thing ly husband and I experienced, is the dps discrepancy between mobs and boss. We cleared a campaign map with no problem, killed all the rares we encountered and got to the boss and suddenly we felt a lack of dps to take it down. Usually because we are dodging a million things and that we dont have time to cast or attack. Might be a skill issue, as the usual reply is to this sort of comment, but for a new player (like my husband) its frustrating and he doesnt understand why there is such a difficult jump in the same map.
We have also tested a few character starts and noticed not all skills and classes are equal. Find a melee weapon with a bit of damage on it and you can one shot the starting mobs. Play with minions and you suffer until you get your first buff gem in freythorn (and why is raging spirits in the sorceress section? only discovered that late in act 2, making all previous content a real pain). And why are nearly all sorceress playing spark instead of arc or embers, or... (insert class and skill here).
I really like the game and look forward to discovering rhe next acts and classes and evrything, but the game also needs some balancing on a lot of fronts. Luckily this is early access and it can be addressed. No regrets experiencing it all from the beginning and had a blast until now.
balance is just horrible but it s classic ggg. at one point you have to wonder if it s not on purpose
I think the idea is good. And the game is great.. But it has issues.
One of my biggest concerns is the way they talked about how this game was made to make melee feel smooth and good.
I played a physical wind monk. Not only are wind skills very undertuned right now.. Many of them have minimum attack times which make them not scale with attack speed.
On top of not scaling with attack speed, they make you lose all your momentum at the start and end of the animation. (Talking about the whirling skill) which makes it feel like you lose control of your character. It doesn't feel smooth.
I also hate that the movement speed is half as fast as poe 1 but the maps are 4-6x bigger. Makes it feel really obnoxious to have to backtrack to find that one rare that you missed at the start of the map.
I see potential, but right now.. I am getting annoyed with a lot of things. It feels like at every split of direction, they could choose fun or tedious. And they chose tedious at every stop of the way.
Hot take: If they do what you say and turn the game into poe dark souls where the campaign power level is literally the entire game and you have to fight bosses for 10 minutes then people wont play the game long term.
Subtractum has a lot of bad takes game design wise. I am sorry but, despite his positivity, he always comes across whiny. Destroying hordes of monsters is what ARPGs are all about. It's absolutely boggling that people want the slow methodical gameplay in maps
@@EyesFireable The thing is they actually don't want that, you can literally just listen to them complain about things being a "slog". Well duh, that's what you asked for.
I recall a few conversation where they've talked about the amount of scaling that they feel is necessary to provide the power fantasy. It may have been Chris, so this isn't necessarily fate for PoE 2, but they were very much explaining the need for exponential growth -- for 100-1000x differences between decent builds and optimal ones. I agree with your take. 10x is enough.
There is absolutely no way PoE 2 will be able to retain new players unless they drastically change their approach to end-game. Most new players are still playing through the campaign and enjoying it, but they will just smash into a brick wall once they reach the end. Even this slimmed down version of the endgame is very incomprehensible to new players, and full of idiosyncrasies with absolutely no on-boarding. Players that don't actively seek out guidance outside the game will be completely lost and quit playing almost immediately after beating the campaign.
They need to make the choice of either ditching their current vision for end-game and starting fresh with new players in mind, or lean hard into pandering to the PoE 1 audience. It's a big problem with the approach they've taken with PoE 2. The campaign seems designed to broaden their audience, but the core philosophies behind their design of game systems are still the same ones that kept this wider audience from playing and enjoying PoE 1.
this game has an identity crisis. It wants to appeal to a mass audience (so it dumbed down some mechanics like the gem system and crafting), but also wants to be hardcore like dark souls (so they make it difficult and dont give you much access to resources), but then want it to be a power fantasy isometric ARPG with build variety like POE1. I don't think you can mesh all those together. They need to pick a direction and run with it.
funny how paul tassi made a vid a week ago about most of these points and the whole community bashed him and now regular content poe creators are coming with their reviews and making similar points, looking at you quin
If this overall situation stays the same as it is, PoE2 will never eclipse PoE1. Just imagine spending 2k+ hours in a game of constant stress about being oneshoted, terrible crafting and mandatory rarity to actually drop anything (T15s, still didnt drop a single greater jeweller and I actually have some 30% rarity+ tree). You either play screen destroying build or it feels clunky because white trash swarms you since they aggro from 3 screens away. If you have one attempt to Boss, then ofc most ppl will watch it on YT- it's even worse than soulslikes, where death on boss just takes your souls/runes away (you Can still pick them up) and forces you to run to the boss room again (or not, like for most bosses in Elden Ring). If GGG makes the same mistakes again + some questionable or just straight bad design decisions, I don't think it gets better in a way that matters soon. I'm sorry but campaign experience overhyped this game, in campaign you were encouraged to use multiple skills, some combos, dodge attacks, it no longer works for maps because in maps we have to play PoE1 or we play the game wrong.
Imagine you want the players to combo skills and then you choose Breach, Deli and Ritual as endgame mechanics. That's beyond stupidity, Metamorphosis or Beasts (of course newly reworked) would have been the much better choice
My biggest complaint is the way Spirit is balanced. If you have any kind of summoner build you HAVE to use a scepter. It forces that option because only scepters give base spirit without modifiers and is the biggest source. They should remove that stat and make spirit a base stat across armor sets based on the armor type like energy shield and evasion. This way there will be far more build options and gear variety.
endgame needs to be like campaign. difficult slow but rewarding
Slow is gahb
Agree. Sweeping generic monsters is kinda boring tbh, it just poe1 once again.
Agreed. Bosses specable into every map as well! I'd also like 6 portals back. 🥲
It's not unheard of for them to remove mechanics from the game, but the only endgame system that would vaguely fit a "slower" game is Expedition.
Good way to get people to quit, go look at how that worked out for Diablo 4 when it launched.
One problem that I have/see is how weapons get + levels to skills. When comparing say a melee build (double 2 handed weapons) you can reach almost +14 skill level, whereas any skill used by a crossbow is limited to +7. Given how skill levels scale especially at high levels this to me creates an inbalance between characters and specific weapon skills.
Archmage needs to be removed grill the game. They've never been able to tune it. Then buff Stormweaver.
Nerf invoker monk 33%
Make armour great again
Nerf energy shield scaling 20%
Buff ALL CURRENCY DROPS 200-300%
AND remove rarity interacting with and scaling currency drops.
This currently rewards metaslaves beyond reason. This might be the biggest one..
Remove 70% of on death effects.
Improve telegraphing of remaining effects.
Remove 70% of obstructing foreground environment like trees, cliffs, hills, ledge, etc.
Make a final, higher tier of each belt [expert] type available at lvl 65 zones and higher that gives an extra implicit charm slot. Set charm slot mod to only +1. Still available at lower levels
Bring back scouring orb. HUGE
You are correct that the 90th percentile build just farms 3 times faster than median build. It cannibalizes the variety of gameplay because no one would want to play the median endgame builds.
ARPGs are the only genre I feel happy about playing every iteration of while they improve
Mobs move too fast, that's a big problem. That forces players to try to go all out DPS to kill them before they get killed. If mobs moved slower, then players could be defensive, or offensive, or whatever, and not get punished for moving three steps from a waypoint. I can't imagine any sort of casual (the kind of player that GGG keeps saying they want to capture) to put up with something like the Drednought, where there a bunch of things moving fast, chaincasting, while on a very narrow area with mobs in the front that have a shield. or the mobs in Act 3 chain casting that slow spell in narrow areas.
I agree completely. It's no wonder everyone is playing Invoker, Stormweaver and Deadeye at the moment. Those classes can zoom around 1-shotting/freezing/electrocuting mobs from afar before they become a factor. This seems at odds with what they seem to want for their game. Having mobs on PoE 1 juice is not condusive to creating skill combos so people are playing one-button builds.
We need to get u an interview with Jonathan after the holiday season cuz you are on point sir. I've played poe 1 for a decade now and will still play it when they release updates but I'd love to see poe 2 be different. And you hit the nail on the head when u said that monsters are still playing poe 1
Thank you. I have been having many of the same feelings about gameplay in campaign vs maps and dreading the poe 1.5 situation. Glad someone brings these thoughts as feedback in such a well put together manner.
Jewels can corrupt resistances (6-10% each jewel). They're really good for rounding out gear adjustments.
I think your thoughts are where builds should be relative to each other (50% to 90%) is spot on! I was feeling exactly this today but couldn't quite articulate it.
My gripe is the game is just not as fun as it is frustrating and stressful. I can’t just log in and kill monsters and chill like in D4 and make meaningful progress. I have to push my map level to get any exp and then I have to hold my breath through every rare. Also I have to be a power stock broker if I want to get good gear. D4 is not slip, D4 is fun. Feels more fun to play. When s7 comes I will be there.
While i agree with many of the points it's still funny to me how people expected terrible, on a verge of total garbage, developer (from a professional standpoint) suddenly change and not do mistakes they did all through out PoE1 development cycle (a 13 years at least, mind you). With all the patches thus far we see that no fun is allowed, so expect ES nerf in the near future instead of fixing other defenses. Expect one button builds to be hammered into the ground instead of remaking monsters to be slower with better telegraphed attacks and less barely visible on death effects so classes dependent on animations feel better. Expect increase in loot drops when you get more garbage to sell to vendor while 1% of player base farms with 5000% more efficiency than you instead of returning deterministic crafting methods so even a casual player can get a ssf build going that doesn't feel like complete shite. Expect a nerf hammer being dropped onto problematic location like dreadnought, with hp and damage of monsters being lowered instead of acknowledging the problem of monsters being too fast and constantly jumping over and surrounding you. And so on and on and on. I could write a 500 pages book how and why PoE2 is bad where it doesn't have to be. But worst of all expect PoE fanboys applauding every garbage decision future GGG will make taking it for granted with a truly masochistic joy instead of realizing that the game is deeply flawed when it didn't have to be if we had a development team with at least an ounce of common sense and an ability to actually play their own game and testing it extensively instead of relegating this "privilege" onto the player base. The fanboys gleefully tossing the problems aside as if the game is really is in some sort of early access instead of realizing that it is the same game as before just with the added hoops. And same fanboys looking at the player base dwindling exponentially, already down to half in two weeks (completely expected by anyone with a half a brain), yelling into the internet that the game "is not for you/everyone" as if to reassure themselves that they are not feces consumption aficionados instead of having the best game of all time with a competent developer behind it. But alas, we get a half baked abomination requiring months if not years of fixing to become what it should have been in its core at least right from the get go. And the funniest of all is the fact that the competition for PoE is so hilariously more trash than PoE that even a barely functional game is still better than everything else in the genre just from the sheer power of a genius idea behind it. Pretty much tells you how completely incompetent an entirety of arpg development segment is. All of this is tragicomedy at it's finest.
would love to see a rollable mod on the map that determines the amount of portals, like ‘only one portal, increased rarity’ . risk vs reward
Good review. I’m enjoying the game a lot and excited for the future.
Very very great feedback!
The balance will always be a hard task for them to accomplish. They can try to make it so people can just use what they want, average players can have a comfortable time with any skills, mastering the dodge in different encounters etc, but no matter what happens, there will always be people that are going to do whatever it takes to make these fast builds. And the market for it is there because once that RUclips video goes up and it gets 100k views and the prices for all that gear skyrockets.
I keep seeing all across Reddit and RUclips and in discords etc - how much everyone likes this version of a more slowed down PoE where you take your time and bosses require knowledge and skill, but what I don’t see are “this extra tanky build with fair damage” videos getting any traction.
Because nobody actually wants to play a slow ass game, durrrr. not that hard to figure out.
I made an armor pierce shot witchhunter with 2h mace sunder weapon swap with masterfully constructed skill tree. It was great for the campaign but hitting maps caused me to respec to speed clearing galvanic nonsense. I too feel the campaign felt better than maps. Slow it back down GGG, you have the winning formula in the campaign!
I like the idea behind one portal per map. It’s making everything more fun. I’m getting that hardcore adrenaline rush without losing my character. Also, it should be forcing people to think about defense.
Your performance issues seem strange to me. I'm playing at 1440p with everything maxed except GI quality on High with a 4070, ryzen 7900, and never ever dip below 100. I'm playing the Lightning rod-Orb of storms ranger thing which certainly eat up a lot of frames when everything is firing in breaches etc. One of the things I really appreciated with the game almost immediately was how smooth it ran for that level of graphics, even with GI and lights maxed. I have friends who can't play Poe1 anymore due to performance issues with older hardware who play Poe2. Anyway hope you resolve it or they optimize better.
great vid. wroge a review yesterday and you echo a lot of the things i wrote. its nice to see how most of the community seems to agree on a lot of criticisms and mostly only differs on offered solutions
Great review. I agree with your points. I’m sorry for being so tough on your content in the past.
1.0 will be the real test as to what kind of game they want to make. Looking forward to more of your content.
Act 3 stargate dancing to do trades or sync zones is a gigantic PITA though
Thx for acknowledging the performance issues, ive tried highest and lowest graphical settings and it seems like the game likew to hit a minimum 37 fps wall and only then choose to stabilize, trying to tweak settings with upscaling sometimes the framerate would drop and just decide to stay there, also the particle effects can look aweful at times no matter what, without culling
In my opinion non-campaign bosses should have a repeatable quest state version for their lowest level difficulty, this would help with learning the boss
another thing GGG should look at is Monsters Penetrate X resists, its basically a bricking mod on a waystone (even more now since you can't scour them)
They should buff the resist penalty for the elemental weakness mod and either tone down or remove Pen
We’ve also got to remember though; we have half the acts and half the weapons and supports, and a third of the classes, so we should probably wait and see with a lot of the character power feedback and focus on the underbaked mechanical progression of mapping and finding the severe outliers to easy access power.
RE: Performance
Enable Dynamic Resolution, Dynamic Culling. And depending on what minimum FPS you want, set the Target Framerate (at the very bottom) at that. When your FPS drop to 60, it downscales internal resolution, upscales it through Dynamic Resolution feature (e.g. Nvidia DLSS, GGG NIS, Bilinear).
The target framerate freature (quasi minimum FPS) is badly communicated.
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I have a AMD RX 7800xt and am GPU bound as well on full quality, 1440p.
Best revive i've seen so far! Ty for your honest and fair opinion!!!
big agree, i want boss maps to just be boss maps. it was a cool idea and separates the builds to where one can excel. But of course that would require tuning since right now boss maps are like how you sustain mapping.
One of my favorite reviews so far, I wholeheartedly agree.
New to the genre and having a blast. Happy to be part of early access and think they’ll definitely improve
Amazingly identical feedback we have, also a bit worried that it can just go an "easy route" of becoming a visually updated and more "on rails" poe1 instead of being it's own distinct game, that I would personally prefer them to do. Not just because I'd prefer it slower and more methodic but because there was also a vision for that game, that I want to succeed from what was proposed to us throughout the years as PoE 2.
@subtractem in regards to runes, they could introduces a use-count on the runes and maybe dial down the droprate on them to make them worthwhile to pickup. Eg. each runeswap takes away 1 use of 3 and goes poof on the 3rd swap. Just a thought.
there is not a single poe 1 feature that poe 2 copied but made better, it either went a totally different way(good) or just made it worse(tradeside, sanctum, movement skills, boss fomo, QoL feature(i know poe2 is basicly poe 1 from 2 years ago in that regard) etc.)
I don't want to hear anything about early access, this crafting system is completely inexcusable when this developer has 10+ years of experience. This is the worst crafting system in possibly any game I've ever played. Star Ocean: Til the End of Time had better crafting on the PS2. At least I could reuse my base in that game, and reroll.
Copy and paste Last Epoch for Christ's sake. They served up an amazing system that could be expanded upon. Or follow your roots and embrace your very good PoE1 system.
I personally would prefer an improved PoE1 just because I don't think GGG is gonna make this game good. I have kind of lost a lot of faith in this project.
the crafting is fine ... the problem is ggg fetishizes scarcity too much ... we have tools just not the accessability to those tools to use them in any meaningful way
@@toukoenriaze9870if I had a thousand of every currency it would still suck. slamming each step from base to completion is no different than pulling a slot machine.
@@cellamuert except it's not just slamming if we had better access to greater essences and omens ... And obviously runes are good (could be better with being overwriteable but meh)
@toukoenriaze9870 so a PoE1 resource from a PoE1 mechanic built around PoE1 crafting. Which is deterministic - if you choose to work for that - and allows for alterations in its path and to its base item. But you built your game to remove all of that except the resource. Right. And I'm supposed to say 'its good if only'...? It's just bad dude.
@@cellamuert it's good that they simplified it to a few things
Agree with everything you said. My experience peaked at fighting the Act 1 boss and went steadily downhill from there because we outscaled the monsters too fast. It did lose that souls-like feel really fast. Endgame is essentially Poe1. Talking about boss mechanics etc, you should check out Lost Ark. They truly pushed the limit on what these Isometric ARPGs can be.
Definitely agree you should get easier access to beginning points in mechanic trees, also new players need more direction given from introduction quests to all mechanics.
I'd love a boss rush map
I love crafting in poe2. Especially how Chaos works. Much better then before. No more spaming and clicking. Actually currency has a meaning now
One thing GGG really needs to think about, is not just balance between the classes, but balance between players. Obviously someone playing 12-14 hours a day is always going to have a massive advantage over someone who isn’t but putting one movement skill in the game that is far superior to anything else, or having builds that aren’t as gear affix starved so they can slap on a shitload of Rarity is just going to force everyone into a very few builds. Give us movement skills or tree move blink. Remove rarity from gear or make it not affect currency. This game could be amazing, but it is a long way off from their vision. Also, I would take your performance levels all day long, I have a lower end setup and I hope they optimize it better because I am boarder line unplayable at times. Thanks for your input, hope they think about all that, great stuff!
If we keep the 1 death per map and exp and lose everything in the map im going to crashout
Nicely articulated, agree with pretty much everything, at least everything I can actually have an opinion on as I'm still progressing through the endgame.
Good impression and thanks for testing. Curious to see which of those two roads they will take it. I'll let it simmer for half a year or so.
as someone who loves poe1 blasting I really hope poe2 doesnt devolve into that and focuses on mechanics and bossing. I also hope poe1 focuses more on that crazy blasting and leans more into that to create a clear distinction between the 2 games
Its always puzzled me that they say it was made tih console in mind but in fact even pc starts to struggle on fps. Im on. Im on ps5 base model. Act 1 is kinda smooth. IBut act 2 onwards its crazy.
I want a "Maven's Arena" where she throws bosses at u that get harder and harder every round. They could attach a leaderboard to it
0:30 What is this mtx?
IMO late game can be easily solved by just few tweaks.
Completely remove rarity from character power aspect. Jewels, gear - all of it.
Give more loot the harder content you run, so you are actually rewarded for being strong, not for being weak and running less hard content.
A lot of fubguns out there would argue that rarity is just one mod and maybe a base (if its jewelry). Which is true, yes. However, it's not poe 1 where you can craft so deterministically, power is obtained from a much-much harder challenge in poe 2 than 1. So what happens is, you pick the most safe to play class, that also would ideally be faster - deadeye is obvious. At a beginning you can afford to trade off some of your power and have rarity because of above things. And the closer to late game you can obtain more and more power without trading off your rarity. And this turns into awful situation where basically you cheat the game and instead of being rewarded for the character power and harder content, you are rewarded for GIVING AWAY your character power. In a game that is all about getting your character more powerful. This needs to be gone IMO. sorry
no, stop trying to remove rarity.
I don't want Trade being the only method of getting gear. TBF I'm not mapping yet but the gear drops are hot garbage during campaign, literally 85-90% of my drops are Basic (White). Maybe I missed something but the whole reason I play is to get gear - more powerful? And IMO the skill gem system is inferior to POE 1, by a LOT.
This is the one thing most PoE players will never talk about, because to them it's such a given. PoE is THE aRPG designed for traders. Yes, there are people that play SSF, but the game is through and through designed for trading. This is something either game never really states explicitly or illustrates in any way to new players, but if you don't partake in trading your enjoyment of these games will (almost certainly) be vastly inferior compared to people who do. The fact that this is so poorly presented is a massive contributor to why there's such a gap between the people who "get it" and are extremely into PoE and the people that can't get into it.
All the great points.
I hope GGG takes notes. Some really good feedback there.
The campaign, with a few tweaks, like A3 maps being huge, is a masterpiece. Once you get to maps, you start the PoE 1 dynamic again, but shittier. That's why I have like 5 lvl 60+ chars. I love doing the campaign, because I can try builds and not feel stupid. Once I get to maps, it's exactly how you described it. I just wish they turn the endgame into something more Monster Hunter like, in the terms of being slower, more methodical and not having to blast enemies before they rush and overwhelm you
I especially agree on the build point.
One thing that i especially disliked about Poe1 was the one button spam zoom zoom build. I was hyped for Poe2 because i thought i would be REQUIRED to use multiple skills all the time in order to succeed - which is only somewhat true on bosses.
My build idea was 4 ailment stormweaver with all hits can shock ascendancy, ignite from firewall an mostly using frost skills. I would set up shocked ground underneath the boss using lightning orb and lightning warp, use few eyes of winter through firewall, freeze the boss and nuke with comets from elemental invocation - and it works, i deal massive damage to the boss, however setting this up in any other environment, especially breach and delirium is just not possible, the game literally forces you to spam 1-2 skills and make them as strong as possible, and then you don't have to worry about using anything else.
I just wish some sort of rotation based multi skill gameplay would be more rewarded than "watch me spam this one skill and melt everything off screen"
I like the one portal and also that bosses are something special that you dont oneshot on every map. That said, other ways than kill x rares would be nice.
Completely agree with all your points. Thank you for the review 👍👍
I’m hoping with their quick patches they moved it into a Poe 1 style because it was their quick solution and easy for them and would quell the complaints but given time when they come back they will revamp toward the vision they had
One of the more intelligent PoE2 reviews I've seen. I think PoE2 is going to be a great game, once the EA lessons have been learned. Glad to be in EA though, and having a blast in spite of the things need changing. Keep up the good work.
About using Gold - I wonder if GGG is planning to implement something similar to the Kingsmarch-City-building mechanic later on - like upgrading your merchants, salvage bench & reforge bench.
Also, i think it would be a nice touch if the well could be upgraded via gold during the campaign (and for campaign only!) once per act - and you could choose to get a small, but stacking time-based buff if you click it - there will be 6 acts, and the well could give you 2% movement speed or 1% Mana or Life regeneration for 10 minutes or so. The flasks should be refilled when entering town similar to PoE 1 imo - i like the RPG-touch of filling flasks at a well, but it is not practical, and if you forget to click it, it just feels not great.
Another (from my view) great idea, that Ghazzy mentioned - if they would have one traverse-point in every section of the passive skill tree, similar to those in the Atlas-passive-tree in PoE1, and you could use those to "jump" once from your side of the tree to a different section, that would really open up build diversity - as a trade-off these traverse points should then cost more than one skill point each (i think 3 could be fine) - so, you "pay" like 6 skill points that do "nothing" - but you can traverse from the Mercenary to the Witch-Section for instance.
As a veteran PoE player (some 38/40s, a few magebloods, nothing too special), I absolutely love the more deliberate, methodical feeling of the gameplay early on, especially the boss fights. I wish it were a bit faster-I started Warrior, and the slow skills feel pretty bad-especially when it comes to movement speed, but I really hope they figure out how to have both character _and_ monster power scale much closer to linearly or even logarithmically, instead of the exponential scaling that we're seeing in endgame, which as you've said resembles PoE 1.
Also strongly agreed that one portal for maps and especially for bosses just feels terrible, and disincentivizes people actually trying the boss on their first attempt. I don't even mind the idea of resetting the fight when you die, but the reason that people love boss fights in FromSoft games so much is precisely because while they can be extremely challenging, you always have the option of trying to fight the boss yet another time or coming back to it later when you're more powerful. Most importantly, dying to a boss doesn't cost you anything except the souls you dropped (and that can easily be worked around). Having only one portal makes both repeated attempts and returning later impossible except at significant and often prohibitive cost, which just feels bad to play. It feels like PoE 2 has this almost backwards at the moment-the bosses are incredibly cool and present interesting challenges, but you'd have to be a fool to go into them unless you already pretty much know you can beat them, because the cost of getting to them is so high.
Yeah. I'm probably going to just put this game aside for a year or two and hope GGG cooks up something good. I finally got to maps right now and everything you said is pretty accurate. I just don't have time to heavy grind for little reward. The campaign was fun and felt rewarding. Maps and the mechanics they chose to bring over ... just suck.
I'm just patiently waiting for the next POE1 league that i hope is a great league.