rate the endgame from 1 to 10

Walking distances 1/10 (yeah GGG, increase player time for profit)
Loot 1/10
Crafting 1/10
1-death-maps 1/10 (yeah GGG, increase player time for profit)
build diversity 1/10
fun 1/10
repeat/grind 1/10 (yeah GGG, increase player time for profit)
trials -10/10 (yeah GGG, increase player time for profit)

graphics 8/10

1. You cannot select maps, most maps are awful, by design, collisions, layout, and monster density.

2. Out of league mechanics all are unrewarding except for breach, but having breach on a bad map layout is like having no breach at all. Some can argue that you can make money on ritual, yes you can, but very inconsistently and not much fun.

3. Atlas map is awful, navigation is awful, having to run 10 filler nodes to farm 1-2 juiced maps is awful.

4. Lags, freezes, on death effects are terrible.

5. There is crafting in this game, you likely never saw it because the starting price of a single roll goes from 8-10 divines to 40 divines+.

6. Loot is really bad unless you run 500% rarity like we all do right now.

"3.26 when" out of 10

3.26 ?? I predict either it will be delayed again or it will be garbage.

Graphics, skill effects, SFX sounds and voice over - 8/10

That being said i do not enjoy playing the game i prefer playing POE1 by a mile.

The passive tree is underwhelming
Skill slots should be tied to player level (enjoy endgame with 2 slots...)
Rare Loot is non existent, on top of that, still suffers from the same issue that POE1 does 99% of it is garbage.
On Death drops disappear
Ascendencies being gated behind BS mechanics, they eased the access in POE1 but made it harder in poe2 (go figure)
Player movement was restricted but monsters speed was not...
No Crafting, it's all RNG
Endgame is boring and unrewarding
List goes on...

Overall 4/10

Honestly, a 2 would be generous. It feels like a placeholder that needs to be almost entirely scrapped/reworked for release.

I played Path of Exile 1 during the Affliction League, and I absolutely loved it. I had a magic find build and played with a friend who was an aurabot, and it’s probably one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. Even with the occasional crash when I accidentally hit Alt on a map, it was still amazing. I’ve never cared about the campaign (in either the first or second game) – for me, the campaign is the most tedious part of the game. All the fun in Path of Exile was in the endgame: uber bosses, running Maven 300 times to get the unique I wanted, opening reliquaries, juicing maps with scarabs, and so on.

But now?

- Terrible optimization. My computer freezes during loading screens a few times a day. The world map and Atlas take 5-10 seconds to open (seriously, you can’t load a PNG?). Constant CPU spikes because of the global chat. It all feels so poorly done. (FYI: Ryzen 7 7700X, 4070 TI Super).
- Lame endgame. Whose idea was it to make us spend minutes dragging the mouse around trying to figure out what’s happening on the map? Why do I have to think about where to go? I just want to run maps!
- Insane mana costs. I don’t remember ever needing to go back to my hideout to refill a mana flask in endgame. I barely even used mana flasks. Now every skill eats through mana like crazy.
- Annoying mobs like ghosts. It’s ridiculous—a mob that’s 100% invulnerable while invisible? A plain white mob, no less.
- Awful labyrinth-style maps. Where are the jungles? The game feels clunky in these terrible mazes (where large mobs can’t even reach the player because they get stuck in textures).
- Slow movement speed and pacing. Everything feels twice as slow as before.
- Crafting. There’s no crafting anymore.
- All portals disappear on death. This is just stupid.

What’s good?

- Skill gems. No more messing around with sockets and colors. This is genuinely great and convenient.
- Graphics.

2/10.

3 max.

- too much RNG involved in exploring and
juicing the Atlas

- Early Maps drop absolutely nothing, even
with rarity! Waystone and Currency sustain
is awful. Tablets are too rare.

- Map Layouts are mostly bad

- Killing Rares to complete the Map is bad
(backtracking)

- having nodes without content sucks

- loosing content and waypoints on death
isn't fun and sucks even more.

- Juicing with Towers and Tablets is aweful
and tedious. They got rid of Sextants in
PoE 1 to make it simpler and more fun with
Scarabs, just to go back to even a worse
version of Sextants! Let us use tablets
directly in the node and let them affect ALL
surrounding nodes, not RNG picking ones!

- content points should be given by doing the
content and not only for bosses, which are
either extremely rare like Ritual or need
hours of farming for only one attempt.

- Progression over all is tedious and not fun

I loved the campaign but the Endgame frustrates me and made me quit (in addition to Ascending)

Coming from D3/D4 so some of these numbers may feel high.

Content: 7/10
I want to see more ways to target the content --I-- want to play. Precursor tablets alone aren't enough to feel like I can focus on breach or deli, or whatever. We need more influence over what we want to run.

Systems: 6/10
Tying in with the above, the current atlas trees feels more restrictive than POE1 (with my limited time with it), and on top of that SO much of the Atlas Trees are kiss/curse in what feel like unnecessary ways. The +1 difficulty nodes are enough of a "curse". When a node that grants a benefit "breach drops have a 10% chance to be a full stack" that's enough, it doesn't need the extra BS dropped on top of it.

Character Progression: 7/10
The passive tree is cool, and there feels like there's some meaningful progression with each point unlocked. However, the EXP penalty is unnecessarily roadblocking this. When literal hours of progression can be wiped away by a single not-well-telegraphed (or not-telegraphed-at-all) thing, there's a fully armed blockade preventing progress.

Ascension Character Progression: 2/10
This is actually awful. I've done 2/4 on multiple characters now and not enjoyed it. I've successfully completed 3/4 on my main character and just barely got it done with a sense of relief, NOT joy. Relief. to be done with the BS for that character. I've tried 4/4 on the main (in Sekhema - with as much max honor + honor res as I could muster but still only a 2800 honor pool) and died about halfway through. This shit is not fun. Not fun at all, AND it's currently a choice we cannot respec? This is abysmally bad.

Gear progression: 3/10
Flat out this fucking sucks. Trading is AWFUL. Furthermore, it feels like we can do so incredibly little to progress our character with drops. In my ~5+ DAYS of played time since EA started I've been actually excited about 2, maybe 3 items that I was able to equip immediately and not need to solve some other stupidly complex puzzle to fix resistances in ways that necessitate a crafting bench (that you've removed), or the ability to remove/replace runes (which you currently do not allow). Combining this with the way items/crafting was talked about in countless interviews pre-EA... I just... I don't feel like you launched the game you were talking about. Farming day in and day out seeing low double digit exalts each day, and a grand total of 5 divines period... essences that only add a single modifier to an item (I've looted 1 greater essence, period, and not being able to combine them up seems ludicrous). Reforging taking the lowest item level of the 3 used... rather than averaging, or god forbid rounding up in a situation where 2/3 are 80 and the lower is 79? Come on! I've been able to "craft" ONE item that I'm really happy with, and have hundreds of rejects. All of this brings us back to trading for gear, and the trade system is utterly abysmally bad. Jonathan did an interview around Last Epoch and called himself/GGG out about how bad trade is. Fix it. You have some REALLY great examples.

Also - Magic Find is out of control and needs a long hard look at being axed or entirely reworked. This plays into build diversity below as well as some builds can run MF FAR more easily than others.

Build Diversity: 1/10
All of the aforementioned issues combine into a situation where in order for a player to try and find meaningful progression, they have to play such a narrow scope of builds and/or be incredibly bank-rolled with currency to wade through god awful trade to get there. This, combined with either bugs or HORRIBLE design decisions making a lot of defensive build options a joke (looking directly at you, Armor), and having enemies be SO blindingly fast/hard hitting that any build that doesn't kill everything else first is just not viable.

Atlas / Mapping: 6/10
This has some really good bones, but good god does the 1 death/map idea need to die a fiery death RIGHT now. The amount of time and effort put into making a Atlas node good AND using the right map for it, all to be lost in a blink of an eye? Nah man, not good. There's no reason to have a single attempt at a map. There's no reason to lose anywhere near the exp we do per death (ESPECIALLY when its 1 death / map). There's no reason to lose the atlas juice (from towers) AND the waystone too. It's too much negative on negative on negative.

There are good bones here. The feel of the combat is really good in a LOT of cases. GGG have outdone the kings of gameplay feel (blizzard) here in some big big ways, BUT there's still a lot of room to grow, a lot of old/bad ideas that need to be shed, and some growth that needs to happen.

9/10


The game is amazing and it has room for improvement.