What We're Working On

Some suggestions:
Let Bane trigger curses socket on Vixen Entrapment gloves.

Undo Enfeeble nerf.

Generally let triggerable curses with e. g. vixen entrapment or bane gain doom as well.

fix followers to stop fight guards when u click to open the doors,and just follow us

Feedback for Hexblast:

Main Issues:
- There are several enemies that cannot be cursed even with the occultist ascendency. Such as totems. This is a big deal as most of the damage and the AoE comes from having the target cursed.

- The damage feels lackluster for a two-button skill. I built my Hexblast for straight-up damage scaled through negative cold resist. If I do not use doom to scale my damage(through blasphemy) the damage is often too low to one-shot packs, even of regular mobs sometimes. This makes it mostly a two-button skill. But for a two-button skill the damage is quite low. This is especially noticeable on tanky rares and bosses. It is also worth noting that unlike a combo like ED+Contagion with Hexblast you don't keep doing damage after your two-button combo. So you don't get all that free time to kite around and dodge.

- Hexblast does not prioritize targets with curses. If I'm facing a mixed group of enemies, some cursed some not, Hexblast can target enemies without a curse and thus prevent the AoE damage from occurring. This feels really bad and can be dangerous if you are relying on killing the mobs for safety.


Secondary Issues:
- Destroyable objects cannot be targeted.

- The AoE is arguably too small for a two-button skill. Some large packs of mobs require multiple casts to clear while ED+Contagion would clear everything and them some. This would be an acceptable compromise if the damage was much higher(trade AoE for damage), but that's not the case either.


I hope this helps the team work on some improvements.

GGG GGWP POG

Crackling Lance is pretty underwhelming considering it doesn't scale with intensify or spell echo as it was advertised in the video. It could use some bug fixes and maybe even a buff considering it has to compete with Arc and ball lightning

Steel skills Balance

They need something more. There are a lot of feedbacks posted already so I won't write to much about it

My main issue are :

- It feel clunky to use, with call of steel on CD + animation stop the character, it feel bad to use.

- You have to be pretty much to be at close range (even with fork/chain/GMP...ect) everytime so the clearspeed feel clunky. Except maybe for splitting steel but his single target is lackluster.

They are way to counter that clunky feeling but you have to invest a lot in order to make it work (eg: explody chest, awakener/alternate gems) witch not a good thing IMO.

Keep up the good work GGG,
much love

Feedback for discharge:

I feel like the rework of discharge just didn't help self casting discharge enough.
2 seconds cooldown is much too high, and un-proportional to the triggered discharge with endless misery which gets only 60% less damage for being 8 times faster!
Even if the cooldown was 1-1.25 seconds, it would only help the self casters as CoC and spellslingers would use endless misery anyway.
Right now self casting discharge just feels unreliable and slow, if you get hit and stunned when you try to cast discharge it restarts the cooldown, and sums up to standing near the mob for 4 seconds, which is not only slow and clunky but also dangerous. (and that is if you get stunned once... you could be standing there for very long trying to cast and getting stunned every time since the cast time is so long)

Moreover - the effectiveness of added damage is not high enough IMO.
Even with this change, added lightning\added cold\immolate are still bad links for discharge according to calculations and POB.
And I'm not talking about them being worse than elemental focus or controlled destruction which have very harsh side effects - I'm talking about them being worse even than iron will, PCoc, arcane surge and even efficacy for builds that don't ignite!

To sum up it would be really nice if you could lower the cooldown on self cast discharge, maybe lower the cast time, and somehow make the added damage more exciting.

What about the harvest stash in the hideout? It's still there, can be selected but doesn't have a label. Was it intended? Seems like buggy decoration. Would be cool to have some kind of "interactive furniture" from previous leagues.

Void Sphere

They skill is lacking in terms of usability. It would be great if this skill had no cooldown and be balanced around it. This way it can be used as the main skill of a build. This way the skill (wich looks great) will see more usage by the playerbase. I dont have the knowledge to advise number changes, i just want to be able to use this skill in a build based around it.

At 42+ pages in my feedback is likely a bit late to the party and past the point of feasibility given the speed at which changes are made in PoE, a good thing mind you, but I figured I'd offer it anyway. I'll break it up into sections in the name of readability and hope that it is such.

Introduction

I don't really post at all, I'd rather play the game in all honesty, and I'm loving the heck out of the new leagues content it's frankly right up my ally. I think however even though I didn't much care for the alert bar increasing by killing guards I think I like it less now since the change away from that. It was, let me be clear, absolutely the right decision from a gameplay standpoint it just seems to have borked a few of the surrounding systems.

Issues

The "risk vs reward" aspect has been greatly diminished because by using the correct Rogue(s) it possible to loot every single chest and reach the end just fine and because their so no difference in guard response during escape there is no reason not to do this. This means that with very little variance you will either get 100% of the loot or none of it with nothing in between, and it pushes very specific Rogues into a meta (if not mandatory) position, and the others are left to the wayside, and also just outright makes certain Rogue perks/drawbacks non-functional (as well as some map mods).

Solutions

Gods below I feel cringe just writing "solutions" to a professional game dev studio as a layperson as, while I think it's a good solution, it's just as likely a some is gonna read it and laugh in developer and point out 33 problems. That said if I might be presumptuous:

1.) Make all the Rogue perks/drawbacks that applied to the alert level apply to the alert level when opening chests. This allows them to have their specific toolkit be relevant again.
2.) Tune the alert so that, like now you, can get the majority of the loot if you want to. I agree that the little boxes need to come up a bit and the big ones down.
3.) Now take the Alert bar and segment it into three sperate bars each representing a level of the Escape response (Moderate -> Excessive -> Extreme) with the more you loot the more dangerous the escape. Players should have to make a choice between a safer less rewarding run and a big haul with more risk, and I think it's a more interesting mechanic if they have to make those micro choices.
4.) The amount of alert per chest should ideally scale with the size of the map, with maps with longer run back to the escape having more chest with each one raising the alert less. These maps would be among the most rewarding but also riskier do to the number of rooms one has to pass through.

Additional Thoughts and Feedback

If Heists are an example of the looting system in PoE 2 I think it's a vast improvement. It's fairly early in the leagues obviously but the quality of the drops I have got has made the transition from Harvest crafting far less jarring and painful than I feared it would. I think, so far this is one of the biggest successes of Heist and it's not getting much praise so I'll do so myself. Good Job, I appreciate the work you folks have done.


I like how rewarding it is and I really don't wanna see it nerfed, especially given I want to make it riskier on the top end, and I really wanna see it go core and like....solidly core. I'd be fine with it being an alternative to mapping long term and I think it speaks volumes to the kind of quality PoE 2 has in store.
That said there are a few outlier worries I have. The first being that it kinda supplants, rewards wise, much of the old content. While I'm sure if I took a character to deep Delve I'd end up with more fossils that is not the case for Betrayal as Heist is far and away the best way to get Unveiled items especially double Unveiled due to PoE 2 loot system. Now, this is a great thing in a vacuum as that system has been kinda painfully janky since Betrayal went core but I worry that it's unduly supplanting the actual content the rewards are supposed to come from.
This might not actually be a legitimate worry but the ease with which they can be targeted just a thought I had.


I'd like to see, if they are not already, Beastlures and Temple gear in the drops. They might already, however, I have not seen them.


Something just needs to be done about Talismans. I know it gets said a lot so I'm banging on a drum worn thin, but with the Anointments on Amulets, it's taken a problematic gear drop and made it worse. It's also the only reward in Heist that just feels worthless, and I think it's bad to see a big reward chest and feel disappointment before I even open the box. I'm not sure what the answer is, I'd like them to have a purpose and not just be removed, but they just don't feel right at the moment.

Crackling Lance

Originally my plan was to League start with Crackling Lance because I really enjoyed the visual however I changed my mind. Now keep in mind I have not actually played it my feedback is based merely on conversation with those that have so take it with an overwhelming plate full of salt as it's probably not worth much.
I think the majority of the new skills, with a few other exceptions, are just tunning issues however Crackling Lance just....I don't understand it's core identity. It feels like it's at odds with itself and I think a lot of that is the Intensify being built into it. For example Arc, I get its identity is very obvious it basically does what it says on the tin. Same with Divine Ire, it's a channeled skill that immobilizes you and when it's done it gives a big wallop.
Crackling Lance though....not so much. For example with built-in intensify it builds stacks when you cast which makes your single target go up which is great for bosses however there are two problems. The first being that bosses require you to move fairly often, which means I survive the boss fight by repeatedly and consistently sacrificing my boss damage capabilities. The second problem is that it does this at the cost of my AoE capabilities, I can't imagine either of these feels good and from what I've gleaned so far from conversations it doesn't, it just feels like the skill is fighting its self.
Now at the risk of soundlike like I'm advocating for power creep, I'd like to see its core identity fleshed out and how I, who has zero experience in game development mind you, would be as follows:

Remove Intensify from the skill, instead replace that functionality with one were using a movement skill causes Crackling Lance to gain three(3) charges of Cool-Name-Here (which is the equivalent of what three stacks of Intensify does now for single target, but not killing it's AoE).
Arc's identity is very much the classic chain lightning, Divine Ire's identity is the ol' DBZ charged up super blast, and this change would allow Crackling Lances identity to be an MFin' wizard teleporting about fire frickin' lasers from his/her hands.
This does two things, it creates a playstyle where good targeting on rares, and rewards doing bosses properly and secondly it eliminates a big issue with Crackling Lance in that unlike Divine Ire that can sit still cause it does AoE around the caster Crackling Lance doesn't have that "defense" so standing still to cast is a death sentence.

Though again I haven't played it yet so this is all esoteric and probably has dozens of problems those who have played it know of that I don't. That said that's more, mooooooore, than long enough by this point. Thank you GGG for the great game you have made that has given me hundreds of hours of joy and sorry to whoever had to read this in it' entirety haha.