Why POE2’s Direction Is Worrying for Veterans and Newcomers Alike

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ErdrickDragonsbane#5911 wrote:

I just checked the Steam Charts. PoE2 has dropped 12.3% of its player count from 7 days ago. Monday to Monday.

10.6% drop from Sunday to Sunday.

24.4% drop from Sunday the 8th to Monday the 16th.

Going to be really curious to see how much it drops by NEXT Monday, but without big changes between now and then I won't be shocked to see it reach as far as a 50% drop from Sunday the 8th to Monday the 23rd. I've been seeing the discontent rapidly increasing as more and more players put in 50+ hours into the game.

even if it drops another 50% it still will have more than POE 1 has ever had in the 10+ years its been out.

Thank you for telling me how I should be worried.

I more or less agree with the OP's post.


The incredible variety of opinion on POE2 is simply overwhelming. This is why I've been asking GGG to show signs of life by replying to forums posts more often.

Every once in a while, you'll see one of their reps post some extremely superficial response regarding no violence or abusive language in the forums... why isn't GGG interacting and responding to the player base here, on their own forums?

totally agree with your post.

only the campaign needs to be even longer :) its the best, and more bosses pleasse!

It makes sense that PoE 2 is different from PoE 1. No competition--including competition from PoE 1.

So from the perspective of someone who is new here, I only played and quit PoE1 because it was too sweaty for me.

I agree with anything but the slower pace, I really enjoy that aspect. If anything if it was slower I really wouldn't complain too much.

I will say my complaints mostly stem from the pov of Im playing the game. I don't care to consume stuff about the game outside of the game. So I was caught off guard that the ascendancy class for witch was fire mage and blood mage (with nothing in the skill tree hinting at that even remotely, and character picker didnt hint at this either. It hinted at minion, chaos and bone magic).

Not being able to switch ascendancies is kind of ehhh. I don't see the benefit of this in a testing period, nor in a full release. Feels like not respecting the players time and reducing flexibility. The trial thing to get prestige class points is also just the least fun thing Ive played in a while and might be the only bit of PoE2 gameplay I actually dislike quite heavily.


Honestly the skill tree is also massively uninspired. Yey I get... another +10% damage or something. That's just the majority of the tree. Nothing that really feels like it impacts or changes the way a build works too much. Just more of stats. Which is fine, but the interesting stuff is incredibly rare.

If we didn't have PoE 1 monsters in this slow fluid animation game that is PoE 2 mapping would feel a lot better. But Archnem bullshit is still a thing, we need tens to hundreds of exalts for good upgrades so we need to grind. We can't do that when every class has 2 useable skills.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

POE is about progression, loot, and player creativity

"This game in this genre does this in this way, therefore this other game should also do this thing in this way."

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

Right now, it feels like GGG is prioritizing their “vision” over what actually works.

That is your headcanon. The game isn't losing players. If anything, GGG should completely ignore what PoE 1 players have to say, because they already have their game, it's PoE 1. Making two same live service games competing with each other for the same audience would make no sense.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

I’ve been playing Path of Exile since its beta days. My Steam account alone shows over 6000 hours, and with the standalone client, I’m well above 8500 hours.

Roughly ~2400 hours on Steam myself, with most of it in the game's earlier days. My playtime with PoE the First decreased largely linearly with its growing focus on speed, scaling, and absurdity. Many people in this feedback fforum like to claim that these things - the breakneck pace of play, the absolutely absurd scaling, and the 'freedom' - in actuality an onerous requirement - to create a character that grows so powerful the entire game becomes an easily ignorable trivial chore is what makes PoE1 Great.

They never seem to acknowledge that for every person who adores that style of content, there's people who simply drift away and stop playing because the original game no longer offered anything to people who loved it for different reasons. This one, singular thing is The Thing POE Is Known For, and it's the one and only thing Grinding Gear must 'respect'.

Those of us who drifted away, and were given the unexpected gift of a Path of Exile that brings back a lot of what we loved, are not generally keen to take that sort of thing well.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

I’ve seen every league, every major patch, and every meta shift. I want POE2 to be different. I want it to evolve beyond POE1. But it also needs to respect the core elements that made the original game successful. It feels like some fundamental missteps are being made, and they’re hard to ignore.

Most of the players pushing the points you're pushing later do not, in fact, want PoE2 to 'be different' or 'evolve'. What you all want is the same thing you already have in PoE1 - ultrasuperhyperfast gameplay, scaling that reaches past the Kuiper Belt and is absolutely and utterly unobtainable by the overwhelming majority of the playerbase, and a game designed specifically, solely, and exclusively for the tryhardest of tryhards, the neckbeardest of neckbeards, and the no-lifest of no-lifers who can get to the bottom of an invincible, impenetrable, actively hostile minefield of traps, exploits, and "gotcha!" moments designed to prevent anyone from playing at all until they've watched at least a thousand hours of Streamer Memer playing the game for them.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

One of the most frustrating things I see lately is new players, many of them ex-D4 players or people who barely touched POE1, saying GGG shouldn’t listen to veterans who want POE2 to hold onto certain aspects of the original.
These players also argue that POE1 veterans "don’t understand Souls-like games" or "slower, more methodical gameplay." This is just laughable. Many of us have played and loved games like Elden Ring or Dark Souls. We fully understand what makes those games great.
But comparing them to an ARPG like POE2 is like comparing apples to oranges. Souls games are about tight, deliberate combat, exploration, and immersive design, whereas POE is about progression, loot, and player creativity. Slowing down POE2 doesn’t make it feel like Elden Ring—it just makes it feel tedious.

We're asking Grinding Gear to listen to those of us whom they abandoned years ago in PoE1. Players they simply closed the door on, who left because the game was no longer in any shape to deliver the experience we wanted from it. Players like you who love and adore PoE1, to whom a build with less than 1B Pinnacle DPS and less than 1500% movement speed is an abysmal failure, to whom anyone unable to make five hundred divines an hour on TF is a useless pointless scrub who needs to Uninstall Forever, have a very difficult time understanding that this new game isn't the same as PoE1. PoE1 is just for you. The rest of us aren't really welcome to play it anymore, and haven't been for years. This new game was supposed to have a much broader base of appeal and be playable by a much wider audience. The changes you and yours keep asking for would eliminate this and shut all those players out of the second game, too.

It's why we keep telling you - you have yours. Please, let us have ours.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

We’ve been playing this game for years. We’re the players who’ve kept coming back, league after league, supporting GGG with time and money.

Please see my list of Indiscretion badges. You are not the only players on planet Earth with money. The game you love, the one you spent so much money to support, is right next door. This sort of appeal to seniority is incredibly toxic, as it cares about nothing whatsoever save turning the new game into an exact duplicate clone of the old one. Your seniority is not meaningless in Path of Exile 2, but it is also not definitive. New players who've never played PoE before and are trying the new game for the first time have just as much right to want to keep what makes this game good as you have to want it to stop being PoE2 and simply be PoE1 with a fresh coat of paint.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

This isn’t about “clinging to the past.” It’s about wanting POE2 to succeed while still respecting the core of what makes Path of Exile such a beloved ARPG.

Your idea of "the core of what makes PoE a beloved ARPG" is not everyone's idea of that "core". I fucking hate path 1's bonkers, unhealthy, and utterly out of control scaling. It's horrible, and it completely eliminates all but one or two out of every thousand players who try and get into it.

I have four different friends all playing and enjoying Path 2 who - each and every one - tried Path 1 and bounced hard. They like this new game's focus on slower gameplay with more engaging combat. They like the fact that for the most part you can just play and progress without needing to aspire to some Gordian nightmare of statmongering that requires them to have a day-one farming plan capable of producing a thousand divines before the end of league Start Weekend. None of them even know what a divine is right now, and yet they're all playing and enjoying and having fun. Though that does remind me, I should tell them not to spend divines flippantly if they ever get one to drop. Hm.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

Let me break down some key issues:

Sure. Let's see what horrors one wishes to wreak on this splendid, if spotty, new game.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

1. Slow Doesn’t Mean Better
A slower-paced game can be good, but it doesn’t automatically make it better. If you’re tired of POE1’s "zoom-zoom," I get it. But removing movement skills entirely, especially in massive maps that often require multiple trips through the same areas? That’s not challenging—it’s tedious. Even with rolls and movement speed buffs, traversing the world feels like a slog.

This is a recurring issue I see everywhere in the feedback forums - the word 'tedious'. It's indicative to me of how rotten and corrupt - and not in the Lovecraftian way Wraeclast is usually corrupted - PoE1 has gotten. The idea of having to move from place to place using your own two feet is anathema to PoE1 supervets. They cannot tolerate any downtime between packs, nor can they tolerate having to use build resources on things like movement speed. The ask is for Ultrawarpdrive movement skills that replace the act of walking, just like one has in PoE1, so they can absolutely minimize the time spent not exploding packs. Note - this is not minimizing time spent not fighting packs, but time spent not exploding packs. "Fighting" packs, i.e. delivering more than a single skill activation, is also "tedious" to PoE1 supervets, and yet it is the entire point of the second game.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

2. Difficulty Isn’t About Tedium
I keep hearing that POE2 is “more difficult.” But is it? Difficulty isn’t about giving enemies inflated health pools and forcing players into a boring loop of poking, retreating, and poking again. That’s not engaging—it’s frustrating. True difficulty should come from well-designed mechanics and meaningful decision-making, not from artificially drawn-out combat.

Are fighting games like Street Fighter nothing but "boring loops of punch, block, then punch again"? What you are describing are situations in which the enemies are allowed to execute actions and attempt to pose a threat to the player. This is necessary for a game to offer engaging combat. Engaging combat requires you to engage the enemy; this in turn requires the enemy to live long enough to be engaged.

This is not 'tedium'. This is actually fighting the demon hordes of Wraeclast. It is an art long since lost to POE1, where the only "correct" way to 'engage' a pack is to kill it before it renders with a billion-damage blast from five screens away. Boss fights taking multiple minutes while the boss executes its various abilities many times in succession is not a bug or a design flaw - it is a feature. It gives you time and opportunity to make decisions in the middle of combat, rather than the only decisions you ever make being the ones you do a week before playing the character, in path of Building.

Many of the rank-and-file enemies in the game are simple, yes. Not every enemy is going to be a puzzle box - if there are thirty enemies onscreen and each of them is a puzzle box, then your game might become tedious as you try and isolate each one so you can 'solve' it. But a pack of skeletal warriors charging you while a phantom in the back fires ailment-causing elemental projectiles and a River Hag denies you ground by covering it in drowning bubbles? Those enemies, each with simple mechanics, can produce situations you need to respond to. That is what we who want the game to stay true to its current vision want to keep.

You have your game where everything dies to a billion-damage nuke from five screens away before you even finish loading the instance. Why can we not have this one where you actually fight monsters?

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

3. Flasks and the “Vision”
Yes, flasks now refill on kills, which is better than the original POE2 reveal. But the addition of refill wells still feels unnecessary and redundant. The whole system feels like a solution to a problem that didn’t exist in POE1. Instead of adding depth, it just slows down the pacing. It’s another example of the “vision” overriding what’s actually fun.

This is a nonfactor and you know it. I can count the number of times, in my ~60 hours of playtime since the EA released, that I've left town with empty flasks because I forgot to click a well on the fingers of one hand.

You want to talk about Charms being underwhelming and feeling half-baked? That's fair. I would posit that the system is new enough it hasn't gone through the same level of iteration and refinement the rest of the game has, but that does not mean Charms don't need addressing. But wells in town are a total nothingburger, and frankly I find myself enjoying the touch of each town having a different style of well and a neat little animation to go with it.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

4. Crafting Is a Mess
No deterministic crafting is a joke. The devs say they want us to craft more, but how? Without reliable tools like crafting benches or alt rolls, crafting feels like throwing currency into the void and praying for a miracle. If the idea is to encourage players to build items from scratch, it’s not working. The lack of control isn’t engaging—it’s exhausting.

And crafting in POE1 is an unholy demon nightmare sent by the Beast itself to torment humanity. The thousand and one bizarrely interdependent crafting systems of PoE1 were one of the worst offenders in modern gaming history of a counterintuitive, up-its-own-butt ultra migraine of stress, anxiety, and broken dreams. A player simply using their currency by right-clicking to apply it to an item the way the currency states it's supposed to be used in POE1 is one of the worst mistakes that player can make in that game. "Simple crafting guides" for POE1 read like IKEA manuals in the original Swedish that have been eaten by the Necronomicon, digested, and turned into indexes in the back of the book that scream in endless torment every time someone turns to their page.

Is crafting in PoE2 where it needs to be right now? No, I wouldn't say so. But people can use their currency without feeling like they've just screwed themselves forever, and that is a definitive improvement over PoE1.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

5. Drops and Vendors
If you like the current loot drops, more power to you. But even if you do, they’re still poorly designed. Vendors have been given more power, but drops feel so sparse that crafting currency barely exists. The balance isn’t there. You can’t expect players to engage deeply with crafting when you’re starving them of the resources to do so.

Perhaps some players do, in fact, appreciate not having to filter out ninety-nine out of a hundred drops in every moment of their gameplay. Again - is the balance precisely where it needs to be? Likely not, though I have also noticed little real loot-related struggle with the two characters I have started post Loot Patch. But the answer is definitively not "go back to PoE1 where every white monster drops twenty rares, fifty blues, and four hundred and seventeen whites, of which maybe one of the rares is actually shown." Note that after a PoE1 loot filter is done, ye see what happens? The actual, visible loot in PoE1 is roughly on par with post Loot Patch PoE2.

Hm. I wonder why.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

6. The Skill Tree Is Disappointing
The new skill tree looks like POE1’s tree but feels hollow in comparison. The nodes are uninspired, and the restrictive layout makes it harder to create unique or unconventional builds. The inability to travel across the tree freely stifles creativity. And the absence of masteries? It’s a huge loss. Masteries gave builds flexibility and depth, allowing players to specialize and fine-tune their characters. Without them, the tree feels rigid and unexciting. Even basics like Life nodes, which helped define different defensive strategies, are missing, limiting creativity in ways that hurt the game.

Reasonably sure this is working as intended. Everybody's brain is calibrated to the PoE1 skill tree where 'road' nodes were the Devil and the thing has undergone fifteen years of power creep. You are not meant to gain the same level of power from this skill tree. And even if you are, we've had it for ten whole-ass days. People aren't going to become experts in it within that time. How many people are even using the Weapon Specialization system right now, rather than just dumping all their points into a single build? The creativity will come.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

7. The Gem System Isn’t Fun
The new gem system isn’t engaging. It’s clunky, and the fact that gems don’t stack just highlights how half-baked it feels. The uncut gem mechanic might seem like an interesting idea, but in practice, it’s just another layer of grind. Gems should feel like an integral part of progression, not a source of frustration.

Facts not in evidence. I'm quite enjoying the new gem system; the Highlander Rule for support gems is pushing me to get creative and figure out new ways to combine and enhance supports on different skills. It's been a ton of fun to solve that puzzle box and find interesting new ways to use my gem options while getting the damage where I need it to be. Again, the PoE1 mindset of "everything MUST be damage, ALL damage, and NOTHING BUT damage" is hurting creativity, not the gem system.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

8. The Campaign Is Too Long
Some players praise the longer campaign, but for leagues, this is a disaster. Every league, we’ll have to slog through this overly long campaign multiple times. POE1’s campaign is already considered a chore by many veterans, and POE2’s is shaping up to be even worse. A longer campaign doesn’t mean better retention—it just means more burnout.

Maybe - just maybe - the campaign isn't meant to be a twenty-minute roadblock to maps, especially only ten days in? I've been enjoying my time with it and eagerly await Acts 4 through 6. Some players like running the campaign, getting some of their narrative fulfillment quota in prior to mindlessly grinding maps for more loot.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

9. Ascendancies and Trials
Why can’t we change ascendancies anymore? Is this supposed to be a challenge? It’s just restrictive for no reason. And Trials… who thought combining Ultimatum and Sanctum mechanics was a good idea? Trials are tedious, clunky, and far from enjoyable. It feels like GGG took the least-loved mechanics and doubled down on them, which is baffling.

Whether or not Ascendancy selection can be changed is a topic of current discussion at GGG. Right now you can't change Ascendancy because that functionality isn't in, but they may very well change it.

I'll admit, as a detester of both Sanctum and Ultimatum, it's taken a lot for me to even halfway warm up to the Ascension trials in this game. I would dearly love to get the Labyrinth back, my good buddy Izaro never let me down. Hopefully some of the coming updates will fix them and make them less obnoxious for certain build archetypes. Or at least will make Trial of the Sekhemas less obnoxious. Literally nothing can save goddamn Ultimatum, bleh.

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Kaukus1#7461 wrote:

I Want to Love POE2, But It’s Hard
As a veteran, I want to see POE2 succeed. I want it to be different, but it also needs to respect the core systems that have kept players invested in POE1 for years. Right now, it feels like GGG is prioritizing their “vision” over what actually works.

To the newer players defending these changes without understanding their long-term impact: you’re not helping. Ignoring valid criticism isn’t supporting the game; it’s enabling bad design. Constructive feedback is what helps games improve. POE2 has the potential to be great, but it needs to address these issues before it alienates the very players who’ve been its foundation for years.

It's not "valid criticism" to say "This game isn't a clone of PoE1, therefore it's shit forever and needs to be blown up and replaced by PoE1 in a pretty PoE2-shaped dress." Many of the things you think are core to the experience of Path of Exile are, in fact, things that people hate about the original game and will abandon this one if they get brought back in.

You tell people to ignore their own experiences, their own desires, and their own wishes and listen wholeheartedly to PoE1 Supervets who despise new players, despise 'poor' players, and basically hate anyone who can't one-tap Uber Maven with Heavy Strike on a Witch for memes. Well, here's me saying that the Supervets may want to listen to the professional game designers who've been working on both games for many years now, and may have a clue where they're going.

'The Vision' is fine. They have yet to fully stick the landing, but frankly POE2 is already a stronger experience than PoE1. I greatly look forward to seeing where it lands in a year or so when it's ready to take the Early Access training wheels off and drop for real.

fully agree here - bumping up