Comprehensive Melee SSF Feedback (Balance, Bugs, Improvements) - LONG

Hey there, long time PoE 1 supporter here.
I love PoE 1, was hugely invested in it monetarily back in the day, and had lots of fun with it. I still regard it as one of my favourite games of all time. I am by no means a pro, nor do I aim to min/max the best strats based on Wikis. I try to do my best to discover everything organically and make builds work.
Although I haven't felt the itch to play ARPGs in a long time, I had to try PoE 2 when it became available as Early Access.
So far I've played one SSF Melee Titan Slam (Boneshatter, Totems, Infernal Cry, Sunder, Leap Slam) char in Standard League completely blind, used no guides, no external information. I brought it to level 75, tried all the mechanics at least little and now have a solid impression of what's good, what's bad and what I think needs to be improved. I kind of feel privileged to have been able to play EA, so I feel like I have to give feedback. This is going to be long, lots of stuff, but this is all I have encountered so far during my playthrough.

The positives
1. Amazing graphics and especially sound design and soundtrack
2. Good and immersive story. The campaign seems the better part of the game for me. It always changes up and has cool ideas like the moving caravan.
3. Lots of mechanics to discover that keep you interested in figuring them out, yet somewhat easy to get going with the game
4. Generally mostly crash-free experience and very few serious bugs
5. During the first two thirds of my way to level 75, crafting better gear and finding gear did feel motivating, there was a sense of progression and achievement
6. Just in general the game feels much more Triple-AAA than PoE1. For better and for worse, which we'll come to later.

So far I enjoyed most of the game, but on the other hand there's a lot of constructive criticism I would like to raise. I am now at the verge of stopping playing the game, because I feel too many things are wrong with the game for me to enjoy playing it further. I really like Melee in ARGPs in general, but it feels that melee is an afterthought for PoE 2. There are so many disadvantages over ranged and so many things that simply do not work well as melee.
However, I do not really want to start a ranged char and do the campaign all over again, I'll leave that to a future more mature version of PoE 2.
So, I will start by listing all the issues based on this melee playthrough up until Tier 4 of maps. I will try to categorize these and make sure I'll provide ideas on how to fix/improve.

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Bugs / Improvement Suggestions / Ideas

Trials of Sekhemas
I generally do not like the overall experience of the Trial in its current state. It does give better loot than maps, I'll give it that, but such important character progression (Ascendancy points) should not be gated behind such difficulty and so much RNG. I have only ever attempted the three-floor-trial, can't imagine how the 4-floor-trial would be.
Yeah, it is cool discovering all the mechanics of a trial for the first time, but it's not fun having to do this over and over again. It's just not interesting or varied enough to be replayed as many times as it takes for the difficulty as melee. The very fact that melee is by definition supposed to get in close quarters and be able to absorb hits, but can't in a trial, is not good design.
The honour mechanic needs to be seriously looked at. I've attempted the trial many times, stacked honour (up to 4k) and maxed honour resist as much as possible, but kept failing at the third boss regardless. The third floor seems way harder than the first two, enemies are faster and I can't seem to avoid damage consistently. Also the afflictions from previous floors stack, which contributes to the issues. The third floor often diminishes my honour so I am already too weak for the final boss. Using my backup ranged skills (Sunder) and Totems does not deal enough damage. My main mace strike does not do enough damage in the short timeframe where I don't have to dodge, despite ~11k dps. I've tried facetanking as well, but it eats my honour too quickly.
After losing the Trial Balbala says "be not disheartened", because you devs probably knew that this is exactly how it feels. It is mainly because of the chore of having to do it all again, with a high uncertainty whether you will even get there due to RNG. It feels like a waste of time more than any other mechanic in the game. The trial is even gated behind rare consumables, so losing it all in the end feels all the more bad.
Suggestions
All combined might be too much, but I think most of these would go a long way towards less frustration and a more skill-based design approach rather than just luck.
1. Improve the honour situation:
1.1. Higher restists for melee. I know it has been recently buffed already, but it's not enough imo. Especially tone done floor 3, or simply give us more ways to regen large amounts of honour on this floor.
1.2. Alternative: Make some melee hits (maybe heavy stuns) drop "honour orbs" that restore some honour when walking over them. This would incentivise melee risking for stuns, to hopefully net gain some honour.
2. Make some rooms shorter. Sometimes you get lucky and ritual room takes take 30 seconds, sometimes you spend 3-4 minutes of running around switching levers, avoiding traps, or slowly killing overtuned rares with inadequate slow "ranged melee" skills (Sunder). It's not fun if you have to do it so many times per run.
3. Reduce the disheartenment, allow us to retry a floor from the start when we run out of honour. Maybe allow us to use holy water or another Djinn Barya to retry at the start of the floor.
4. Reduce the potency of afflictions. Much of the frustration comes from having bricked runs based on unmitigatable afflictions. It doesn't have to be "you have no armour", why not "you have 30% less armour" or "you deal 20% less damage" instead of 40%. Since it likely stacks up, every single affliction does not have to be that severe.
5. Allow us to select which afflictions to remove on a shrine. Give us the option to pay for that with holy water, or replace it with another known affliction. Generally give us much more options to chooses how we deal with (removing) afflictions.
6. Some rares are super tedious to kill for "melee". Firebreath totem caster melt the honour bar too fast. I usually have to kill them ranged, it is too risky to get caught up in the fire. I had one with Life regen + ice patches. Could not that thing killed, almost bricking my run.

Gameplay/Balance (Melee)
1. Gameplay feels rather sluggish. Enemies are super fast compared to the player, it feels the player is lower level. It's probably intentional, but it just doesn't subjectively feel good to be so sluggish with how fast most monsters are. Yes I'm playing slow 2h mace, but stacked a lot of attack speed. It's still barely tolerable.
2. Defenses do not work well enough for melee.
2.1. Not enough life. ~2k life is much too low for endgame content, but I wasn't able to get much more. That's why I tried so hard to get the 15% more life Ascendancy node. The first time I finished floor 2, I made a mistake by picking inventory space because I did not know how hard Ascendancy Points would be to come by. Item progression is so bad and life modifiers basically mandatory on any item. Much of my stuff I put on at level 40-50, never found or crafted anything better.
2.2 I tried not to build a glass cannon and invested into defense, armour and leech, but any passives (%more armor, %more armor against ranged) don't do enough. So the only thing that somewhat helped was kill things before they kill you.
2.3 Elemental Resists are a huge problem, I was never close to capping them. I am currently able to get them to 35-50%, which makes the char so squishy in endgame, not how melee should feel. I have to kite mobs most of the time, the get-into-the-weeds-leech-and-regen-approach doesn't work anymore. I never found anything meaningful to mitigate against chaos resist, so I've always had to be extra careful and avoid chaos mobs.
3. There's so little choice for debuff skills/curses. I basically always used infernal cry and that's it. This is somewhat boring because all you do is cast totems, cast infernal cry and smash foes.
4. Used Seismic Cry for a while, but stopped using it for high mana costs
5. The Trial of Chaos boss casting the tornados needs to be tuned, the damage is insane. The boss wasn't that much of a problem, but this skill needs changing. I tried it multiple times at the appropriate levels where I got the Ultimatums (maybe 40-50?), but each time somehow got slightly touched by it and died instantly. Way too unforgiving. The hitboxes of these tornados are larger than they appear and the damage is way too sudden for the speed they move and how much of the boss arena they cover. Make them move slower, cover a smaller area and make the damage more gradual from the outer edge to the center.
6. Ancestral Warrior totem is kinda pointless at the moment, it needs to allow for more skills. I'm sure this is planned.
7. Puke attack from Filthy Crone (Apex of Filth) has too much dmg. White mob almost oneshot my char for 1700 dmg.
8. Utzaal has weird difficulty scaling, way too difficult for level 62. Aggorrat is MUCH easier at Level 63
9. When I came to Mektul on my first playthrough I had a meager 1800 dps and could barely make it before the end of the arena. I died a few times because I just didn't do enough dps. There's also no way to prepare for such a dps check without dying first (would have been immensely frustrating for HC). Melee is at a huge disadvantage here because we cannot attack him while he's in the lava.
10. Given the slow nature of attacks, I noticed that missing a hit was hugely dangerous, because it wouldn't proc stuns or regen life. I had to stack massive amounts (I think 8-10 passive points) of accuracy rating to make the build work. I'm not sure it should be that difficult to actually hit stuff. Once I had more then 1k accuracy rating somewhere at level 68, things felt better.

Game mechanics
1. I really dislike the fact that you can use support gems only once. Why is that? It's hard to keep track what you've already used and where. Preferred solution: let us use it as often as we want. If it's the best in any case, it probably needs a rebalancing for other reasons, but if that's what the player goes for, allow it.
1.1 At the very least make it so we can use a gem multiple times on different weapon sets.
1.2 If that is not possible, do warn players they already have this support gem in use when gemcutting or picking rewards. I struggle to remember which gems I already have.
2. Make runes on items removable at a price. It should be so that you cannot do this at will, but it should be possible to repurpose an item when you need to shuffle your gear to balance resists or other stats.
3. Charms seem boring to me. I have only ever found one belt in the entire playthrough that had more than one charm slot. One slot doesn't offer much customization and I never really know when they activate. I'd prefer being able to swap charms in combat based on the challenge. I'd have nothing against removing this mechanic entirely.
4. Gemcutting in inventory feels less immersive. We could probably do it at an NPC or at a bench?
5. Chance to hit appears broken in gem stats. Even when it showed 100% chance to hit, that wasn't true and it meant I had to keep leveling my accuracy rating.
6. Rituals should not force the players into super confined spaces. Make the confined circle larger and make sure there are no walls or hallways that make you absolutely get stuck with all the stuff that spawns. The way they are now, it is best not to do them at all.

Quality of life
1. The waypoint map loads so slowly. Sometimes takes 5-6 seconds to load. I often accidentally pressed U instead of I and was punished with a long loading screen. I changed the keybinding of U to M (M is more natural for map anyway)
2. Loading times in general could be better despite using a very fast NVME SSD. I heard it has to do with rebuilding shader caches every time we change zones, so it would be more CPU-bound.
3. Vaal Past: Don't make us go through the portal walk animation and instance loading time every time we go to town. Just bring all, or at least one vendor NPC to that instance

UI
1. The activation of passive skill gems is very awkward and unintuitive. Make passive skill gems stand out, separate them, grey them out to visually show they need to be activated. Add a flashy button that makes sure you can click on it to activate.
2. There's more support gems than the suggested ones that work with a given skill. When we select a skill gem and see the "recommended supports", allow us to optionally see all other compatible skills. Currently, they are only available under the general "All gems" section, but here compatibility with a given skill cannot be seen.
3. Spoken logbooks can be played in the background by clicking outside the dialog window. Clicking continue cancels it. Make the UI clearer, add a button "Play in background"
4. Waypoint map: make eliminated/finished items crossed out or give them a checkmark. Greying them out with an animation took me a while to figure out what it meant
5. Gem Tooltips: Videos are sometimes out of frame (1440p resolution) because of long description texts
6. Make the salvage bank a vendor window like all other similar mechanics. Using a cursor to salvage items from your inventory feels awkward. You also cannot preview the outcome like in a vendor window.
7. Map ritual Rewards cannot be put directly into inventory extension
8. Inventory extension covers map device UI. Map device UI should always be centered and z-indexed to the front
9. Make navigation to waypoint in world map engage on mouse up, not mouse down


General/Other
1. Bring back Orbs of Alteration from PoE 1. Especially for maps, but also for other valuable base items which got bad mods after using transmutation and augmentation. I understand reforging is the replacement to make 3 into 1, but maybe you want to retain that high roll of the base stat and try magic mods again.
2. Some player microtransaction are annoyingly noisy and shake the screen all the time
3. Matlan Waterways (Canal lever level) is at least 25% too big/repetitive
4. Augury map center area is completely overexposed. Hard to see anything in the center. Cannot see effects, stun indicators, fire on the ground, etc.
5. The animation after killing rare monsters in a map causes a huge fps drop (my specs Ryzen 7 5800X, AMD RX 6800 XT, 32 GB DDR4-3600, native 1440p). Usually 90-120 fps, drops to 10 and stutters badly. This animation also feels so violent like you should die when standing close. Not sure it needs to be that extreme.
6. A similar problem happens in some Hourglass rooms of the Trial of Sekhemas, the spawn animation also causes my game to almost hang with very low fps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23BfyPkOfaE
7. Maps: Strongbox shroud is a really bad mechanic, especially as melee. Even more with rotating chaos vortices which cannot be seen. Just remove it, it is not fun or necessary and disadvantages specifically melee which has to move into the shroud to kill stuff.
8. Make the entrance to Jiquanis Machinarium visible once you enter the Xyclucian boss arena. It is not visible if you don't go to that corner.

Bugs
1. Chimairal Inscribed Ultimatum: In the level with switches to raise and lower walls to get to vaal cores, I just couldn't get to an area with a vaal core by foot, so I jumped on a wall using leap slam, toggled a switch on top, which lowered the wall, got on the wall while it was moving down and I then had no more way back up. The run was bricked, had to abandon the trial.
2. On my cruel playthrough the "Jamanra The Risen King" fight got stuck after that beetle siege in second phase. The boss was not dead, but exit was opened. No loot dropped. Also strangely, my sound cut out and did not recover. Not sure if that was related, but it has never happened before. Had to restart the game for the sound to come back.
3. Jiquanis Machinarium on my first playthrough had no exit back to the instance I just entered from. I went in to activate the waypoint and then wanted to go back to clear the rest of the map, but was unable.
4. Moving directly after pulling a canal lever teleports you back to several times, like the server resyncs you and resets your position
5. Identify items from vendors does not work for inventory extension from Ascendancy passive
6. Expanse support gem does not affect Infernal Cry. It is socketable, although it shows an X for compatibility
7. Ritual: Couldn't pickup deferred item which was deferred in first part of the ritual, but did not become buyable as suggested after last ritual part was completed
8. Inspiration support gem does not work on Shockwave totem. It is socketable, and shows a checkmark in the overlay
9. "Always show sockets" option from the interface settings doesn't work on 2h mace (might have to do with my 3 slots mace?)
10. Reactor in Jiquanis Sanctum character says: "I should find a larger soul core for that", but I already had medium soul core and it fit and fired right up
11. The Herald of Ash gem upgrade preview broken: For example, it always says 0 seconds to 1, but actually already at 1. All other values seem to not be correct either