Addressing your Early Access Post-launch Feedback

mercenary in comparison to other classes feels very clunky and slow.
lack of room clear and only one real basic skill path forward through grenades.

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misterblort#0681 wrote:

Make it so you can pick your type of potions. After taking Chaos Inoculation the health potion is useless.

Also there is a massive difficulty spike when entering to drowned city from the past.. which seems a bit excessive

First part of this comment is fucking mind blowing. Great point.

Could you clarify who this game is for?

It's hard to be specific because, as Johnathon himself said, the 'difficulty' comes from a lot of little things. I'm a 500 hour PoE1, 0 of Diablo, and about 50 of PoE2. I am willing to invest time, and more importantly, money into this game.

I love theory crafting and trying new builds, but my mechanics are mid-tier due to how my brain works, and it feels like this an exclusive club, and I'm tired of being gaslit. Nearly every point along the campaign is a reminder of why I love this game, and a feeling GGG is saying 'unless you're upper-tier who has unlimited patience, we don't want you in our game'.

I can't get past the Act 2 boss because the reaction times are so unforgiving, I can't get creative with builds because we can't respec the ascendency tree and gem drops are so rare early on, and I'm emotionally exhausted because the maps are so big. And that would be ok, if I weren't playing with the mindset there is a whole endgame to supposedly enjoy.

And then we get gaslit by a vocal, but I believe minority, part of the community that just says 'skill diff' and assumes the pros on YT represent what is achievable for most players, be it mechanics or patience.

We don't want a game that can be sped-run and turn off our brains, but it just feels GGG is doubling down in the opposite direction with the main campaign.

So yeah, if you read this, which I assume is unlikely, I think I am part of a customer base, old and new, that is willing to invest time and money into this thing, but are worried about the direction. And we could use a statement, preferably from an upper person, that answers the question...

Who is this game for? I get it's an ea, but there must be an over arching goal guiding the design decisions. And we just want to know what that is.

Bosses really aren't that hard once you crank up your damage. Get a better weapon and invest in a setup that is good against bosses. You'll kill it no problem.

any news on the issue that regularly causes the game to freeze and crash my pc? its hard to enjoy the game when i get an anxiety attack every time the frames drop by a little.

Ability on Death (?)

In the old PoE 1, this wasn’t too big of a problem, but with the new graphics and terrain, you don’t see it coming...

When we’re playing on such high difficulty and in ruthless mode on maps, this becomes a real issue.

I’ve experienced this so much on my melee Monk that I just stopped playing it altogether.
I switched to a Ranger to try and avoid the problem, only to discover that the ability sometimes spawns under the player in certain cases—even when the mobs die off-screen. That makes no sense.

Combining this with the punishment for losing maps is just heartbreaking, turning it into an unfun experience.

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SkyPrince30#4110 wrote:

Could you clarify who this game is for?

I, Like you are part of the Old, but New brigade.
Whilst they (GGG) have not said who they are targeting, it seems from the posts on the forums, that it is going to be the "Git Gud, it's EEEEEEZEE" Gatekeeping people.

However that being said. it is Early access at the moment, there is plenty of time to see where there game goes, and if it carries on going the same way, I will simply call it a day, I Paid about £30, I have had about 40 hours of game play so far so im not bitter about any money I have spent.

I certainly don't want Speedy full screen clears (I have a fully red D3 Wizard on none season if I want that) I want a game that challenges me, but I also want a game that respects the time I put into it, which at the moment POE2 simply does not.

I would suggest that you do, what I am doing. Keep an eye on it, if it turns into the next game I can sink a couple of thousand hours into over the next couple of years, great. If not I will no doubt find another game that is more to my taste.

I love the game, the campaign and bosses are superb and I find it closer to dark souls than Diablo, I think mainly because of the dodge/roll mechanincs and how the bosses behave.

However there seem to be a lot of bugs that I encountered. One example is how ocassionally my lightning resistance would drop by 10% on some blank random maps (happens on some maps without modifiers, I have 10% lightning res less, then i start a new map without modifiers and the 10% resistance is back). I also noticed that sometimes warcries dont go on cooldown, allowing you to abuse Corrupting cry. A3 and A3 cruel become buggy at the end, not allowing you to port back to the present, unless you do it via some workaround. I'm pretty sure these will be addressed soon, as that's what an early access is for.

There were some mechanics, that I particularly did not enjoy and I believe that many other players share the same feeling:

The gem system needs to be reworked, higher gem levels should not be a drop tied to a difficulty, POE1 had it a bit better with leveling the gems.

The atlas has some new and good ideas, like the towers and the tables inside to boost content around it, but this becomes boring the more you do it. Also in the beginning you barely have any tablets to use on them, these need change.

Even though the crafting is a lot more RNG based, compared to the deterministic PoE1 crafting, I find it more engaging. However I do believe a crafting bench would make crafting substantially more enjoyable, in the sense that it would allow you to block specific modifiers.

In Trial of Chaos some modifiers are too hard, others too easy. Like having no evasion on a warbringer with 85% armor does nothing, but monsters dealing 300% crit chance is huge negative. The whole thing is pure RNG, you can finish the trial without having a single bad modifier or you can fail at the 2nd trial because you got one shot due to one bad modifier. They need to be balanced, and I don't know how you will do it.

Ascendancies are broken, either too strong or too weak.

If you take some specific passives - like when your hp becomes 1 or you have no mana, the life or mana flasks become useless. It would make more sense to have a replacement for them (like if you have no life, to be able to use a second mana flask?)

Things I REALLY liked, beside campaign and bosses:

Breach - it is very well done ! My favorite mechanic right now, it keeps me on my toes during the whole encounter and I find this very entertaining.

WASD controls feel better than any other similar game.


Overall, my initial view of playing POE2, is very positive and I can't wait for new content to be added.

Not really enjoying poe2. Tedious, unrewarding, unenjoyable. Maps are the same size but we traverse at a quarter of the speed even without poe1 meta movement builds so you spend 30 minutes to an hour smacking your face against a map that has no rewards worth noting. Rolling seems to have iframes of some sort but I haven't been able to figure out where they are and how to use them effectively; I get smacked by attacks that I thought I clearly avoided but obviously not if I take damage or die to it.

Targetting enemies on m/kb is janky as hell; my girlfriend is currently playing a pathfinder and she complains that targeting smaller enemy bodies just misses them, she's spoken about having to aim at their feet which doesn't feel good. I noticed the same problem playing sorceress before switching to controller; I'd aim at a target and have my spell fly way off target. I don't know what y'all did to make it work like this but it wasn't an issue in poe1, your attacks would go where your cursor is.

I regret buying the early access, I didn't expect an experience where I need to be laser focused 100% of the time lest I be heavily punished. Wanted to buy stash tabs for someone using my points just to learn that that appears to be impossible? I won't be spending money on path of exile 2 again, and probably won't spend money on path of exile 1 without a really good reason.


Controller support is pretty cool, though.

Yeet!