Path of Exile 2 base is good, but the direction is ambigous and unclear. My complete feedback.

Hello. I have been playing very slowly almost without trading, basically ssf. I am playing as a witch hunter. I have reached t15 maps and level 87 at the time of writing. So my feedback will be certainly biased around all of the above.

I really like the game in general, the quality, the lore, and most of the system PoE2 fixed from PoE1. And the foundation is really good.
I especially love how the gems are not part of the gear, and spirit. Having mana be actually mana is nice, even if the balance is similar in the end.

However, most of this feedback will be focused on the negatives, but that doesn't mean the game is bad. Also, I will try not to get too much into all the things that have already been said, but I might repeat some of it.

Campaign: wonderful. Some of the area towards act3 especially get very repetitive, otherwise I am invested in the story, even if it is not that deep.

Attributes: very restrictive, especially early, it makes it hard to try different stuff, and it seems you are pretty much locked into your class. Also, something you absolutely need to get on gear but never feels exciting to get, somehow.

Ascendancy trials: known issues. First 2 are not too bad. Endgame feels like it's not even worth the time waste, for something that should be my main pillar of my character build and flavor wise. I am still at 3 points, and as much as I'd like to go there, I just can't, it's very discouraging.
Otherwise, sekhemas trials on their own look cool.

Endgame: known issues. Just feels like PoE1 again. Is this what it should be? Perhaps we could have very different kinds and varieties of content, smaller maps with difficult monsters, based more on skill checks, rather than overgearing, catered towards different levels of progression. The atlas starts to feel empty and gets repetitive too quickly. Perhaps endgame could also have some sort of smaller story progression, when you have a goal and can beat the most difficult boss, to complete it.

Item progression: lottery. Yes it's cool hitting something good, but that can't be the only main way of crafting. Gearing in start of endgame is very annoying. You have almost no tools. Too many constraints on required affixes. Can't replace runes. This leads to the difficulty of even use a new cool item you picked up or "crafted", because everything just needs to go together perfectly. My best items have empty rune sockets, because i hope to get a good item with chaos res (for example), and then use the sockets when i need them. Essences are rare and only craft the first mod, which is the most irrelevant. There need to be either ways to balance your affixes, when you want to swap some gear (like bench-crafting), or like swapping runes, or anything. There need to be ways to get good 3-4 mods rares, at least sometimes. Perhaps some sort of content that rewards good rares on the atlas. At least those kind of rares that would make maps completions less annoying. Before t15s.

Difficulty: weirdly enough, the most difficult part of the game is act1. Games feels easy until you just lose everything, and you don't even know what is the issue, is it your damage, defenses, level, anything else? Having mechanics, that one shot you, single deaths in maps and bosses, and too much dangerous random mods on maps and mobs again pushes you towards overgearing, overlevelling, and trying to do as much as possible to ignore such mechanics rather than playing the game. In my opinion the game should give you a problem to solve in form of difficulty, a difficult boss, or certain types of content, skill difficulty or stats difficulty, and give you ways to solve that problem, and it should be straightforward and telegraphed, not just random oneshots. Bosses and difficult content should wall you with actual difficulty or stat checks, or both, not with single death.

Annoyances: in continuation of the previous, a lot of difficulty and frictions is caused by annoyances in path of exile 2, like trading, on death effects etc. Annoyances should be replaced by actual difficulty instead, or just removed. Like you did with gem sockets, or spirit.

Too slow or too fast: it always felt like the devs wanted the game to be slower, but the game wants you to be fast, so what should it be? The mechanics in maps, the drops, the randomness of all of it, the single death, the ascendancy trials, the endgame mapping and juicing, everything screams go fast, it'll give you more chances at succeeding than focusing on a single piece of content and trying to optimize for it and learn it.

Randomness: path of exile was always heavily based on randomness. Which is cool, it guarantees replayability. Right now randomness is the principal mechanic of the game and there isn't almost anything deterministic. I think there should be more ways to get deterministic content and prizes. Not everything 100% should be random. Randomness promotes going fast rather than taking your time. Juicing a single map is always worse, than running 5 maps. Spending time crafting a single item is worse, than just running 5 maps and picking loot from the ground, or buying random items from vendors. Unless you top tier craft I guess, which most of us don't do especially in ssf. Trying to kill a single difficult rare (if it didn't instakill you) is always worse than just ignoring it and running the rest of the map, you risk to lose map and exp, and rewards may not even be interesting at all, and you spend time, when you can just run another quicker.

Trade or ssf: seems like game is balanced around neither and is somewhere in the middle. Playing in ssf is very slow and often annoying, crafting items is random. Arbiter is just a dream for me. I haven't even tried citadels. Chaos res is a dream xdd. Trade sucks too, it trivializes the game in certain points, and after that it transforms your game into a currency grind. Trading also sucks, like it did in poe 1 as well, but worse, because a lot new players. Games seems to be built a lot more with ssf in mind, progression in general is more or less linear, but very slow and often annoying.

Variety of builds and experimenting: respecing should be easy (it's already better now). Experimenting should be easy. Trying new stuff shouldn't be locked behind grind. Variety and flexibility was always one of the key features in POE, and it should be even more so. If you want to try a different build, you'd need to almost change your complete set of gear, which is very difficult. Almost impossible in ssf, unless you basically level up a new character. Very annoying in trade, because you need to put everything together again. Ascendancy switching being locked behind levelling a new character is just bad. Again it defeats variety and experimenting. Very few people will level up a 2nd character in the same class, just to try the other ascendancy. Unironically, i think many would spend more time on a character if switching ascendancy would be possible.

Just look at games like baldur's gate 3 or the souls games. Baldur's gate has almost free respecing of your entire class. Yet people put thousands of hours into the game, because of both the story and trying different builds and complete the game with different builds and different difficulty. Because players want to experience every part of the game on a new build.
Souls games give you the chance to learn the enemies and boss mechanics, which is more interesting than just overlevelling and overgearing until you can just ignore the mechanics.

I hope GGG could give us a more clear understanding on what is the direction and the future of the game.

Anyway, thanks a lot for this great game and the effort, time and passion you put into it. Will be waiting for more fixes and new content. Also, hope bottom/left of the tree gets some buffs and some love too.