Why does everything require 10 trillion investment? Why is fun not allowed?

Idk if this is more of a rant or true feedback, but I was reading the patch notes and found this:

"The Last Lament unique crossbow now only prevents the final loaded bolt from being consumed if the character actually sacrifices life."

If you know what this means (and for the record this probably was a broken interaction), you also know is yet another instance of build enabling interactions getting nuked from orbit for being too op. But the problem is that they often get either completely removed or replaced with a level of investment that is beyond ridiculous.

This is why I often feel the game is no-fun-allowed, everything required heavy investment, from meta gem energy generation, to stun threshold, to reduction of temp chains effect. It's like you need to spend 70% of your passive skills and a majority of your character power on things that aren't your power and if you dare play anything that isn't just an attack or self-cast build, you better know that the level of investment required to make it work will hamstring your character power. And while I'm at it, why does it feel like every other skill gem is either a builder-spender with few interesting ideas thrown in, or a gem that is explicitly designed to work with one other skill gem? Why are we getting skill and support gems that read that they work with like 2 plant skills in the entire game when we used to get gems that worked with all projectiles, or all slams, or stuff like that?

What happened to taking precise technique with unwavering stance in poe1 to sacrifice potential in exchange for free power when low on gear? What happened to gems and uniques getting released that give unique weird interactions that make no sense till they aneable a whole new archetype? What happened to making weird ascendancy-gem combinations that weren't necesarily intended to create unique builds? Why does every patch feel like it brings with it a mentality of "don't color too far outside the lines!"

This is why people say that poe1 is lego and poe2 is ikea. This is why poe2 never feels quite as exciting. This is why there's a huge divide between player bases. Poe2 is explicitly designed to be a game "under control." But guess what, being the wild west of mechanics and being allowed to invent things is what made poe1 successful, it's what BUILT GGG. Why must all studios become safer in their game design the larger they grow? How long until the game is just better diablo? Maybe you could say "oh, it's just not the game for you" but that's just a dismissive way to ignore all discussion. It's not a way to argue, it's a way to cover your ears and go "lalala."

I don't know if you'll get the referrence, but this game should be the way magic the gathering used to be, not the way yu-gi-oh archetypes are designed. A game is better if the devs just create cool ideas with a "I dare you to make this work" mentality and let the players come up with archetypes from there. This game should be lego, not ikea. And if you think I'm wrong, that's ok, but if you think that means "the game is not for me" then unfortunately you don't understand what the strength and weakness of each are. There's a MILLION ikea games, and only the one lego game. If you want ikea, go play diablo.

they'll never respond to this because they hate fun. I genuinely was redownloading it after seeing the highlights from GGG wanting to play a build since I assumed it wouldn't be gutted.

wild and Ranger exists in the state it does? They genuinely don't care for fun, unique builds, or anything that their other games used to stand for. Its disheartening to see them stray so far from their roots and become the villain.

regardless of how you like your arpgs they don't care about the player having fun. they want to curate your entire experience so they have control? idk it feels like Peter Theil is rubbing off on them. Is Elon in management now or something after he had someone boost his characters?

They had the gall to nerf it after highlighting it on Build of The Week.

GGG took a stance.

PoE1 was a sandboxy crazy complex mechanic game.

PoE2 will be a carefully designed and dev controlled environment. You will play the way dev intended you to play.

I think, you have a good point there. Hopefully one of the GGG Team see this and get it on his mind. Sure, they try to control there game, maybe it is necceserly for some kind of aspects, but you are right in the point of fun.
For me POE2 feels way more like work then playing a game to have some fun.

But on the other hand, the game is in EA, so lets just wait, whats coming next, for me, the game is just way more playable then on version 0.1. or 0.2.

Unfortunately, this is how build crafting in this game is right now, and it won't change until people talk about it enough. It's their way, or the highway, sadly.

This sums up a lot of the other game's core design philosophy. "Don't like Ruthless? Too bad. Oh, you're enjoying this passive? Time to add a new downside to it. You like this unique, huh? Oh, here's another downside since it's too OP."

It's frustrating because PoE1 is the absolute antithesis to this. In PoE1 they give you the tools and tell you to answer the question in any way you deem appropriate given the tools and your knowledge, in PoE2 they give you the tools and force you to answer the question in 1-3 predetermined ways.