POE2 EA Feedback (After 400+ hours)

Hi GGG and fellow Exiles,

Below is a summary of the top 15 things I would change in POE2 EA, after 400+ hours of no-life blasting / playing / testing. The first 300 hours of testing was on a Bloodmage and the last 100 hours was on a Storm Sorc. Overall its a been a fun (even though sometimes frustrating) experience. Honestly I do have a lot more to say, but I know GGG prefer short-form points (this is my shortened list - apologies if its too long for some lol).

Disclaimer: The below is my own personal opinion. Feel free to listen to it or not as you see fit. It all comes from a place of love for the game and wanting to see it flourish.


Top 15 Things I'd change in POE2
#1 Monster on-death effects. The damage and overlapping AOE is a big issue and just cheapens the game. I would like to collect my loot in peace, not being fearful for my life after I kill every rare =)

#2 Inventory Management. We need affinities for everything we had in POE1 (And Missing currency tabs - Map tab etc) and also new affinities for each gear slot.

#3 Sort / Filter Buttons. Ties in with the above but this game desparately needs a sort button. I know its clinging onto d2-oldschoolness but its 2025 now... I would like to see filter by: ilvl, base type, quality, sockets etc etc etc. (Also can we get a generic loot filter for my console peeps?)

#4 Ascendancy Trials. Trials too hard and too brutal for new players / crappy builds. All trials that reward ascendancy points should be free and repeatable. Keep the Djinn Baryas and Inscribed Ultimatums for end-game activities

#5 One attempt on Pinnacle Bosses. Similar to the above point, all the Bosses that award passive points for the Atlas Skill tree should let us have 6 attempts. Right now because its so punishing, the only outplay is to overgear/overlevel the content and insta-gib the bosses - which once again cheapens the bosses (skipping all mechanics).
Also on a side note, we could just cheese this by using a logout macro at the first sign of fear / panick. Turns out Bosses health doesnt reset once you go back in.

#6 Knowing what killed you / Learning from your deaths. Right now the only way to learn in this game is by dying. And for un-seasoned players thats very discouraging. I think we should have a deathlog or at minimum say the last 'big hit' you took and what element / dmg type it was. In the best case scenario we need a 'death recount' like WOW (they do it with 3rd party addons).

#7 Knowing where your next upgrade is / Stats / Mods. So much of the gearing aspect is reliant on knowing what base types are important because certain stats are tied to specific base types. Nothing in the game gives you this information. So for an aspiring player, the only choice is POE2DB. If they don't know it exists, they are left in the dark.

#8 Uniques. Some uniques are super lack luster, and also are presented on the worst possible base types. Will we get better Uniques when Acts 4,5 & 6 release?

#9 Loss of Control Effects. Bad Terrain. Overly pushy monsters (Deli) and mobs that push you away when they spawn (Strongboxes). Anything that moves you without having an outplay is a 'Feelsbadman' moment.

#10 League Mechanics. Breach feels good. The rest feel lackluster. Sanctum actually feels good once you start investing in some good relics. Ultimatum is a shitshow. Lets not talk about strongboxes or Essences (these need their own tree). Strongboxes needs a mechanics rework. Can they spawn from the box itself? Please also give Ultimatum and Sanctum some Atlas trees - thank you.

#11 Interesting Implicits / Quality. Chest armour implicits are great. Would like to see movement speed on boots implicit and charm slots on belt implicit. Breach Ring implicits are cool and strong if you get a well rolled combo. But what happened to quality on caster wands / staves. Right now it does SFA. Also sockets on wands / staves???

#12 Gems / Runes / Cores. The whole point of making the gem system was to remove "gear locking" during gear progression. Right now you're still locked to a gem by applying a high value jeweller to it. Also the Sockets on gear are locked because we cant change / swap out runes and cores. If this was the replacement for the Crafting Bench, I would rather the crafting bench come back lol. Or just let us remove / replace the sockets. Please and thank you.

#13 Flasks. Would like the option to use two life flasks, or two mana flasks. What use is a mana flask for a blood magic build? What use is a Life flask to a CI+MOM+EB build?
Would also like to see one more flask tier that gives % health or % mana instead of a #value. Even in Early Access we outscale Ultimate flasks so hard our only option is a Melting. Only issue is that its too expensive for the average player (currently 40 div).

#14 Atlas. Mapping is fine conceptually. Citadels need some clear direction to find them. Quest for Arbiter needs to say it requires keys from ALL Citadel bosses. Overworld map needs some help to track things like # of Citadels Found. Would be nice if we could turn those buttons in the legend into toggleable / interactive buttons that light up the chosen item(s) on the relevant map nodes. I.e. If I click 'Breach' it lights them all up purple (purple beam). And let us 'toggle' more than one - that would be great. Thank you.

#15 Monster Specific Affixes. I would rather have monster mods / affixes tied to the monster type, than have a random pool that it draws from. The truth is that the Archnemesis system works when you have time to read the mobs / symbols. Gameplay now is just too fast for it to matter. Atleast if its based on mob type, you have a rough idea of what to expect. And you can gain mastery over it through repeated play (much like Sanctum).

Thanks very much for reading.
Good luck with the rest of the game development. And I look forward to seeing what's to come.

Kind regards,
Tylicius

+1

It's pretty obvious why there's no map tab. They will release one eventually and charge you for it. They want you to really want one so you spend more money. Just like other "free to play" games, they deliberately leave stuff out that is almost required after you get sucked into the game and advance.

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CovidPatientZero#0332 wrote:

It's pretty obvious why there's no map tab. They will release one eventually and charge you for it. They want you to really want one so you spend more money. Just like other "free to play" games, they deliberately leave stuff out that is almost required after you get sucked into the game and advance.

They should just convert map tab because they already said that microtransactions bought in POE1 will transfer to POE2.

Great post! Agree with all your points. Here are some of my thoughts:

#4. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we already have repeatable trials for ones that reward ascencion? Or is this only for your first coin/chaos token? I was able to repeat both multiple times. Also, I don't think Acencion 3 or 4 trials should be repeatable. U drop plenty of keys for these in maps.

#6 Definitely a good idea. Even better would be an in-game encyclopia of all the monsters, showing you what damage type they deal, their resistances, etc. This can also address your #15. Would be best to have both though.

I agree with everything.

It's frustrating to make a map, lose XP, die without knowing what killed you because of so many animations on screen, and off screen a mob hits you and kills you with an almost invisible skill. And you only have one chance per map/bosses. Defense, evasion and life in this game are useless, unless you have spent more than 100 divs and made a build immune to chaos with an energy shield.

I gave up on making pinnacle bosses. I did some until LvL 4, but I died several times and the resource I missed was big, but I wanted to learn about the bosses. Even with a lot of health, all resistances at maximum, good defense, I still keep getting hit killed in several skills. The only option the game gives you is to ignore defenses, just focus on more damage, become absurdly strong and kill the boss without him doing anything.

The market for this game is horrible. The droped items are excessive and 99.99% are trash, including the only ones that could be removed because they are so useless.

More than anything, I'd like to see my adventure being a bit more rewarding. Being told that I'll get good stuff once I hit T15 maps does nothing, if all the way there the only reliable way to gear up is the trade system. I want to cheer at a good drop every other map, at least. Not every other week. Cus it makes it extremely frustrating to SSF through, when the game's main pillar of gear progression is trading.

Drops rates during the campaign don't seem to be adjusted neither for the amount of MF you can reasonably stack and, during cruel, for the new "advanced" gear you drop. Because what's more advanced, an ilvl 50 armor with +9% lightning? or an ilvl 20 with +20% lightning? Make those advanced gear pieces feel that way, not just by hiking the requirements, but also by dealing away with T1, T2 affixes. A T3 resist is still bad after all the resistance penalties you've got hurled at you.

Then, maybe consider not putting volatile plants rares in areas where players can't mitigate the damage in any way. Or if you do, don't make the blobs last 150% of the cooldown for the skill. Maybe also don't give every other magic monster cluster auras that can end up covering the entire screen in frost, shocking ground or scorching one.

And while at it, maybe decide if we should have defenses or just hp/mp/energy shield. Cus having half the monsters bypass the other 3 defenses with slam attacks just feels... bad. Armor doesn't mitigate fkall, 85% evasion is useless in Titan Valley, since every monster bigger than a watermelon will have at least 1 attack that ignores your evasion. Block? Ahaha! Putting a bell in front of a monster makes for a better shield than any shield you could carry.

Speaking of which. Fix the traversal mechanics, please. Vaults and leaps shouldn't be impeded by monsters below you. Blood pools on the ground shouldn't damage you while you hurl yourself over them. Vultures leaping at you over various map obstacles feels like cheating whenyou can't do the same.

Lastly, please remove the aim assist. It only serves to ruin your experience, regardless of playstyle. I mean, good luck placing 2 debuffs on the same monster in a pack, for example. I also don't like it when my monk will use killing palm on the nearest enemy instead of the one my mouse is over, primed for the attack. Nor when I break one monster's armor and then my merc decides to use the high damage skill on a random other monster that just got closer to me.

And while at it, maybe tone down the bosses' immunity to special effects. The blind skeleton worm atop the Spires of Deshar was at 99% freeze status the entire fight, because it just HAD to chain all it's special attacks. Maybe rethink Forgemaster's fight too, by either making him less prone to run back in the melting river of gold or slow down the flow of that crap. If you CC the boss, it'll run back and spend half the day bathing. If you pull it too far from his gold, he'll run back and spend half the day bathing. As it is, the entire fight is bad. If you've got lucky with the gear, the mechanics are irrelevant, if you didn't, there's no way you can manage the fight, due to all the time spent waiting for the monster to come back and fight.

The game is more fun than PoE1 for me. But it suffers just as much as PoE1 from the stubborn focus on gambling and trade over being equally able to acquire gear through exploring or crafting. I've spent days grinding areas on cruel difficulty and gambl... I mean crafting my gear with the few exalts and regals I've dropped. Only to - more often than not - get gear of worse stats than what I was getting on normal difficulty, where the affixes pool was smaller.

Reduce map sizes...feels like a running simulator.

For bosses I suggest to let people have 3 trys, and make like an animation on the portal that is more unstable / chaotic for every death representing the following... For each death the boss gain 10% max extra HP (or 10% of the remaining HP when the player died). This way is more like it is now, if you like it "punishing", still punishes the one that dies... Maybe someone dies to a random one-shot but he clearly knows he can do the boss so the +10%hp is a minor add, he can deal with it.
If the player is still learning the boss, having two additional attemps will come in handy, even if he does not deserve to kill it because lack of skill or damage, which again, the +10% won't be a problem.
And for the ones in between, the +10% hp will punish dying, but they can still try again and try to not die where they did the previous attemp, which in my opinion is a fair trade.