Campaign difficulty/map length feels tiresome

I've beaten the campaign a few times at launch, I've come back to give it another shot.

I'm not purchasing items from the auction house, trying to craft my own stuff. I'm generally a good player and do most of the end game in PoE1 - just to give an idea this isn't from a newb. I play at minimum 5 characters a league, so that's 5 campaign runs at minimum, and while sometimes it gets boring, I never "dread" it.

I've played two characters so far, a plant Druid and a bleed Huntress, and boy I'm already tired, I'm not excited to play through the campaign - and act 1 is the "good one" so I've heard.

Boss(es)

I got to Geonor on a huntress, and fighting him reminded me how not enjoyable the boss fights are going to be, how scripted they'll feel. Partway through, there's an entire dialogue between Geonor and Oriana, but he's functionally invincible (not that it matters, he heals to full anyways), while he's attacking me.
Why is that allowed?

My character is not that strong, so boss fights are already taking a LONG time. But so many bosses now have invulnerability phases, or you get them to 25% and then they decide to shape shift into their true form and get their whole health bar back. AND THEN they have an unskippable add phase where you have to kill adds and dodge the boss, and the longer it takes the more of these there are. I don't want add phases like an MMO! On a character that blasts, that's like, annoying honestly, I don't find it fun. On a character who isn't strong, it's excruciating. It's painful. I spent (I dont want to be hyperbolic) 5-10 minutes poking at Geonor, and a lag spike puts me in front of his ice breath and kills me in the last phase. At that point I kind of just quit out and I'm unsure if I'll continue playing this league, because I *KNOW* what's coming for me with every other boss fight in acts 1-3 (can't speak on 4).

Another example of "time wasting" is the executioner fight. If you're good, you fight it once. If your character isn't good, you have to fight it a few times. And every time, you have to hear a woman screaming and wailing because her husband's head is cut off in front of her, and the executioner laughing about it. *every*. *time*. I don't mind "darkness" but I also don't like hearing women screaming before every single attempt.

Campaign maps

My guys, they're still far too large. TOO BIG. TOO BIG. TOO LARGE. Please. I beg of you. The answer isn't to have checkpoints to teleport around - the answer is smaller, semi-handcrafted zones like PoE 1. By that I mean, there's a general "gist" of what the map will look like, but theres some randomization so it's no the same every time, and there are "tells" where to go. I don't want to be running around a randomized Freythorn trying to find 3 rituals to fight the boss, when there's no "tells" where you'll find them. I remember Act 2 and 3 had a huuuuuge problem with zones feeling 3x larger than they need to be. Bigger doesn't always mean better.

Last time I played, Act 2 and 3 felt like they were about double the size they needed to be in terms of play time. Act 3 is horrendous for this, I remember feeling like by the time you got to the sunken city, that was it - but there was a whole other half to it that was back in time!

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In conclusion, the more I think about the campaign and how much boss fights and the maps feel like they're designed to waste my time, the less I feel like continuing. Hell, I've just remembered that you have to do Sekhema and Chaos trials, and my interest in playing is PLUMMETTING.
In games like Diablo 2, or PoE 1, if you were struggling gear wise, you could throw yourself at the boss until it died. I've gotten into points where Merveil has bested me, and I'm allowed to keep trying to kill her, even though she probably will kill me again and again. In this game, you're locked into play the same cutscene of a fight every time you attempt it. Unless you have a strong build, and then it's less annoying (but still annoying, because fights feel overly scripted).

Please fellas, there's gotta be something that we can do, I want to like PoE2, but if a super-fan like me is burnt out before finishing Act 1, something has to change right?

I think that's a good point.

A big gamble for GGG in PoE2 was that epic boss fights would make the game more interesting. I remember this is something they proudly showed off, before the game was released.

But, once rubber hit the road, I think we see a lot of fatigue with complex or time consuming bosses.

I hope this feedback encourages GGG to reconsider how often we fight bosses, how long they take, and how complex they are, especially in the campaign. I agree that they are too frequent, too time consuming, too early, and it would be valuable to tone them down.

Same with area sizes.