General feedback based on act 1, from a semi-casual player

I've been playing PoE 1 on-and-off since really early on (not my first account), and I played both D1 and D2 extensively before that. I mostly play SSF semi-casually, fooling around with T16 maps and early bosses before I dip out.

I just finished Act 1 of PoE 2. It's basically exactly what I was hoping for. Sorceress felt amazing. Combat feels far more involved, timing and spacing matter, you have a much wider toolkit, and you have actual reasons to use those tools. It feels like a real step forward for the genre, and I think this game has serious legs.

Balance and loot are also both great. Oh, and bosses have pretty good readability. I believe I died once to some cmidact boss (pure carelessness), then like three times versus Geonor (also a little careless). Never felt like it was due to visual clutter or cheap boss timing, at least so far. I really like the combination of visual and aural cues for attacks. Keep that up.

I've got like one thing I'd like changed, and it's kinda both a small thing and a big thing. I think it should be easier to keep skill gems up to date early on. Why? I just don't think trying to ration your Uncut Skill Gems for your best skills is fun for a new player. PoE2 feels better when you can use lots of tools, and if you're using lots of tools, those skills just feel way better if they're not significantly behind. If anything, new players should be incentivized to experiment with lots of skills to find stuff they like.

It seems like a small thing, but I think this is the kind of quality of life change that can really affect stickiness and retention. I'm guessing this issue vanishes later in the game, but even if it's only an Act 1 thing, I think it should be changed.

You've got a bunch of ways to do this. If you're using Uncut Skill Gems as a brake on player power, to prevent player skills from even slightly overlvl'ing the area they're in, then simply dropping more Uncut Skill Gems is the answer. Alternately, if you want to keep Uncut Skill Gems special, you could actually lower their drop rate slightly, then add a new item (which drops at say 2x the current rate of Uncut Skill Gems) which increases the level of a single skill gem by +1. Players would then be gated primarily by character level and stats.

Kinda on the same note, while it hasn't really affected me yet at all, the XP penalty probably needs to go. The game already has enough death friction via intrinsic responses to keep casual players on their toes, since like dying to a random trash mob is embarrassing and frustrating, and restarting bosses from the beginning on death (a great change) has its own level of frustration.

The XP penalty 100% alienates a certain kind of player, and it's not going to fly like it did with PoE 1. Times have changed, and this is a different game.

Zooming out more broadly, I think you need to be looking at reevaluating everything from the perspective of rewarding experimentation and risk-taking. Players should be encouraged to swing for the fences with the content and bosses they try. If something is too far ahead of them, they'll stop on their own because they keep dying. The death penalty mostly just serves to add insult to injury when players make mistakes or are in the learning phase of a new area or boss.