POE2 EA feedback

1. The areas are way too big. In the campaign, all you do is backtrack.
Luckily,the game is awesome, so it’s somewhat bearable, but it’s still
really annoying.

2. The same goes for maps. I always end up missing one rare monster and have
to backtrack all the way to the start.

3. The monsters deal too much damage. Regular hits do close to nothing, but
all the lightning, fire, and cold circles that spawn on the ground+on death
effects are way too powerful. All it takes is a little stun, or getting
caught in the freeze circle, and you're dead. I’m capped on resistances
with 63% armor and 4k health, yet I die to those effects like it’s nothing.

4. It would be great to have more bosses—they're fantastic and drop good loot.

5. The rarity of items is a massive problem. I’d remove it from the game
completely—it ruins the whole idea of "trying to get more powerful." I’m
running around with 130% rarity and have never seen a Divine Orb. All the
good gear now costs Divines, and I can’t afford anything.

6. The lack of proper crafting is an issue. I understand it can't be
introduced on day one, as people could get overwhelmed quickly, but with
the economy being ruined due to rarity, we need a way to craft good gear.
What we have now isn’t crafting—it’s gambling.

7. It feels like armor is almost useless—energy shield is much better.

8. Towers are extremely boring, drop nothing, and have layers of unnecessary
stalling.

9. Having a map/tablet stash tab would be a big QoL improvement. Also, not
being able to replace runes sucks. I switched an item and needed to replace
cold with fire resist to cap again, but I couldn’t.

10.Ritual feels horrible. You're in a closed space that's often cut in half
due to the map layout, getting chased by a ton of chaos spells that follow
you around, dodging poison clouds while trying to avoid enemies that
actively spawn more spells. It’s really bad, and the loot sucks.

I’m not a fan of Expedition either, but that’s mostly a personal
preference. Breach is awesome, and Delirium is decent enough.

I related a lot to this post so I am going to piggyback onto it.

1. Didn't really mind this except for the bugged quests.
2. Some map layouts are unbearable, vaal factory feels awful with its size. There is also a weird asset in seepage (I think), where it looks like your character should be able to walk through a spot, but clearly cannot.
3. The level of danger seems pretty normal, freeze seems to be way "deadlier" compared to the other ailments. Personally, I havent even noticed bleeding or ignite in any meaningful way. If the belts with charm slots are going to be so stingy, might want to dial back the freeze threshold a bit.
4. The snake boss that dives underground is really annoying when it gets an energy shield mod. It starts to regen because its underground time is spent not taking damage (even when I dot it before the dive). Bosses should not have these 1 shot mechanics unless they lose health. Not everyone uses the cookie cutter meta build, so if im fighting something for like 2-5 minutes, I dont want it to immediately end because i mis timed a single dodge.
5. I played around with rarity %. Until the 400+% range, it doesnt feel impactful and divines are unreasonably scarce for people not able to stack rarity. As a player I feel forced into certain builds so that I can add the magic find into the build without completely crippling myself.
6. Crafting is abysmal and the good omens/essences are unreasonably expensive. There needs to be a crafting bench so that we can at least plug some holes in our builds. Right now if I want to do any major change i need 10-20 divines so that i can balance things off. Long story short, if I find or buy a good item, I cant use it. The skill tree is also not as rich with defensive nodes when it comes to resistances when compared to poe1.
7. Evasion and Armour look like complete crap compared to ES. and grim harvest that lets you get an overshield is way too overpowered. 15k ES is unparallelled compared to life -centric builds.
8. Towers have very poor room "reveal" points and the choke points make them death traps. I never want to do a normal map, literally stuff a t1 and race to the end. They feel bad and running to the tower at the end was cool the first time, the 100th time, its a chore.
9. Yes. The runes being permanent are a good mechanic in my opinion.
10. Ritual on maps with bad layouts is genuinely not ggood. Getting trapped on something or stuck in a corner for characters that cant get around well make the content less appealing. The good rewards are great tho.

My own points:

I often feel "stun locked" where I wont be casting. Recovering from this sort of bad surrounded position makes things even worse.

Some on death effects happen too fast and the amount of screen clutter from effects makes it very hard to see a lot of the mechanics.

Spirit gems take too much for classes that do not have ascendancies that support them. Basically everyone is an infernalist for a reason. There needs to be more spirit on different gear.

The amount of support gems feels kind of bland. There really is not a lot of ways to build certain skills and that feels kind of lame.

The economy is so out of whack, I basically didnt play for a week and when I came back I could not afford anything anymore.

I have probably done a couple hundred maps and I have yet to see the end game quest citadels. They should be tied to tablets and waystones much like influenced maps worked in POE 1.

The first skill points in all the special atlas trees should be "hand holding" where it gives you the item, non tradeable and a quest to finish it with unlimited tries. If you see one of these items once a month, and you fail it because you arent a sweaty power gamer who uses meta builds and reads about the game in your spare time, well isnt what I would call fun.

The one death on maps is a bad change. Reverting this to the POE 1 style would be much better.

Exp loss on death should be removed from trials/sekemahs. I literally wont do these contents unless I have freshly leveled. When it takes 1-3 hours to get 10% exp @ 93, it literally prevents me from doing the content I otherwise would do. I would highly recommend putting a "exp gained off" toggle. That means you wont get exp but you wont lose it either. I dont mind dieing and losing a juiced map, but I really dont want to do that high risk high reward content if I want to progress my level.

Thats all I got off the top of my head.

Overall POE2 is still a brilliant game and this BETA is better than most releases I play. I am only pointing out the negatives in my reply here, there are a lot of redeeming things but I dont want to type them all out (even though its important to tell GGG what they are doing right, because its a lot!!).