POE 2 speed slowed down. Yay or Nay ?

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1453R wrote:

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Phrazz wrote:

snipped for brevity

I will say that over time my stance on "fast" has shifted. I know that historically that's been my gripe, but I've realized as time rolls ever forwards that what I hate isn't necessarily speed itself, but rather how absolutely unintuitive and awful everything is in PoE1 now.

You can build a character with 50+% additional footspeed and still be considered brutally slow by PoE Snobheads because you're not Shield Charging literally everywhere at +700% movement speed instead. Literally just walking is Inefficient and a Gross Suboptimization; you HAVE to use a travel skill for 100% of your movement, whether or not that travel skill makes any bloody sense for what you're doing. It's wild, and it drives me nuts because it's so counterintuitive that a skill used to slam into groups of enemies with a shield is considered a replacement for legs instead of...a skill for slamming into groups of enemies with a shield.

The economy is much the same, and the chief source of my woes with PoE1. You can't make money by playing PoE1 anymore. Not really. You make money by mass-farming some esoteric thing, then selling tabs full of 5k+ of that thing on TFT. Or through some other backwards, utterly counterintuitive "strategy" you can only ever learn by spending hundreds of hours watching Streamer Memers play PoE for you.

"Optimized play" no longer makes any remote sense and cannot be arrived at without deeply unintuitive, out-of-game methods, and the gulf between Optimized Play-ers and regular PoE1 players has grown so wide and unbridgeable that a strong majority of the game's endgame content is simply unreachable by anyone without 500+ hours of watching Zizaran under their belts.

Like, for all that the forum community likes to meme on folks like me for being lolterrible at PoE1? I've still defeated the Eater of Worlds and the Searing Exarch, which fewer than four percent of Steam players have done. I've dropped most of the game's endgame bosses at some point, I've gotten the achievable for 100%-ing the Atlas which includes doing all the corrupted T16 maps and most of the unique ones exempting the Hall of Frickin' Grandmasters. I am not "terrible" at Path of Exile...but the level the game is trying to demand everyone in it operate at is so far beyond what I can manage it may as well be on the Moon. I will never get to 10B+ pinnacle DPS within three days of league start with an easy, casual 500-divine "early game basic" budget, and that is now the level at which one is expected to be in order to be "a real Path of Exile player".

I know Jonathan's thousand-times statement seems like an endorsement of that division. But remember that a thousandfold difference between an actual new, kinda bad player running 50k DPS with a four-link Double Strike using dogshit effectively-random dropped gear and an "elite" player would be fifty million DPS instead. 50M is one thousand times higher than 50k...and 50M is still considered garbo dogshit Rookie Numbers by the PoE1 community. The "thousandfold" difference accounts for actually bad players, not just Non-Elite players like myself who can still crack a million total DPS in a goodly chunk of their for-serious builds.

That sort of scaling makes it incrediblyt discouraging to try and play the game, and often leaves me feeling like there's no point in doing so. I actually very much liked Settlers of Kalguur and consider it one of the strongest leagues I've played, but I didn't play for much more than a month and a half because why bother? I'm not gonna get anywehre, I'm not going to accomplish anything save getting into red maps the way I usually do. Maybe go after Eater and Exarch again, but who cares? That's not clearing thirty Uber fights a day in twenty seconds or less per fight, and that's the only bar that matters anymore.

My hope is that this is pulled back in PoE2 by a large amount, and even if it isn't? Well hell, for a while at the start at least the gap between Ordinary Player asnd Elite Player will not be so wide you can't even see across it. Nobody will have figured out all the blatantly counterinutitive 'optimizations' yet and there will be room for simply playing and experimenting yourself, doing cool stuff just because you want to do it.

There's no room for that in PoE1 anymore. Not unless you can casually farm up a couple hundred divines a day, and I simply cannot do that. So...oh well. Guess the game doesn't have room for me anymore. My only hope is the second one will.