End game combat feels too fast

Probably an unpopular opinion here considering the POE1 veteran blasters and ARPG fans in general but here is my personal feedback anyway :)

Once I started mapping combat just feels faster and faster as you naturally obtain better and better gear with more stats aswell as still gaining skill points. I'm playing a warrior titan and i'm doing an armour explosion build. With enough mob density in the map its a screen wide clear swinging my mace just once.

When I looked at gameplay footage of people playtesting POE2 it looks so epic! And throughout the majority of the campaign it was. Combat felt tactical and active. I found a pack of mobs, i'd shield rush into them to close the distance, swing my mace to build up some more stun, do a boneshatter once the icon appeared to clear them out, dodge roll out of the attack of a much bigger mob then let out a warcry to load up a perfect strike to finish him off. I needed combos and used so much more of my toolkit.

Now that i'm midway into maps its just 1 shot or get 1 shot.. it feels like POE1 combat again and thats not what I was personally hoping for =/

I agree. The slower encounters with less mob density were the enemies survive a while and are a threat - at best with some interesting abilities - but don't oneshot you, are the most fun.
If the gameplay becomes really quick, it becomes less tactical and most often just a generic monster mass. Boring.

I whole heartedly agree! I don't want to get one shot, nor do I want to one shot!

100% man. Endgame is not very fun because I one shot entire groups of mobs. The campaign I had to fight each enemy. I thought that the whole point of poe2 was that the whole game would be like that.

Agreed. The game started off rather slow and tactical and stayed that way through most of the campaign. I loved it. Now with the Atlas endgame it's just like other ARPGs. You nuke the whole screen with the same 1-2 skills, then maybe use another one to mop up the rare that survived.

I was hoping the game would stay more methodical and move away from the super fast paced one-shot them or they one-shot you, clear the whole screen and spend more time checking the loot than you did fighting the monsters.

It's also kind of confusing to have such a discrepancy between the campaign and the endgame in terms of combat flow. I'd be fine with a maxed out build spending 100s of hours being able to just clear whole screens of enemies, but it just happens in one go.

I guess most people want exactly this from their ARPGs, but I was really hoping PoE2 would take a different direction, it's what really hooked me in.

Agreed, the pacing in endgame is way, way too quick.

Absolutely agree. I feel reminded of the Druid teaser: casting vocano, shape shifting, combining various skill to get a lot of slams and aftershocks – that's not possible in this endgame. Try do that in a Breach. You either one-shot 20 monsters at once or they stunlock and kill you, there is no slow methodic gameplay, just PoE1 zooming.

The opposite is true as well: some monsters deal way too much damage, because they have too. They only live for 0.5 seconds, so if they get one attack off it must hurt (exaggerated to illustrate my point).

I would vastly prefer more meaningful encounters where in order to succeed you can't just span one skill and instead have to set up combos. More quality over quantity.

What's even the point of having these beautiful maps and detailed monsters if you zoom through and explode everything before you get a real chance to see it?
I get that people liked that about PoE1, but I thought that's why that game is still around – to scratch that itch, while PoE2 provides a different (and IMO better) gameplay.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

What gives PoE value for me, is our character's potential for exponential growth. Unlike Diablo2 or D2R, etc, you can go from merely surviving the campaign (Which I LOVED), to dropping the hardest bosses in a second. This can take a year's worth of investment, but it's possible and I love that.

I don't want to get to a point where I'm 35% stronger than someone else doing cow-level no matter what gear I have. I want to be able to clear players-6 cow level in 30 seconds, 1-tapping whole screens.

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hmcg020#6029 wrote:

I wholeheartedly disagree.

What gives PoE value for me, is our character's potential for exponential growth. Unlike Diablo2 or D2R, etc, you can go from merely surviving the campaign (Which I LOVED), to dropping the hardest bosses in a second. This can take a year's worth of investment, but it's possible and I love that.

I don't want to get to a point where I'm 35% stronger than someone else doing cow-level no matter what gear I have. I want to be able to clear players-6 cow level in 30 seconds, 1-tapping whole screens.

I mean, it's ARPG thing to make your character stronger and stronger to the point when you destroy anything. No?

Nope, that's all i can really say to this.