POE 2 Doesn't Have the Magic of POE 1, A Casual Player Perspective

I have tried out many chars and leveled them into at least finishing act 2. The current class I have I am in early or mid act 3. I have also played POE 1 for nearly 10y and given a lot of $ to GGG for MTX. I am a liberator of Wraeclast Supporter. I am also a single father of three and a busy professional and so I dont have weeks to devote to the game. I have played POE 1 Ruthless to maps many times and HC at least half a dozen chars.

My current char has 1 day 11 hours played. In 33 hours I would have been done with the campaign in POE 1 and I am less than half way there. Furthermore, most of the campaign play is not instrumental fights but just slogging through mud. Also by this TIME in POE 1 I would have a solid build together with the gems and core skills and be working on my passives and looking for those jewels and other items.

As it is I got killed in a boss fight in Act 3 today. Not because I didnt dodge quick enough or couldnt do the fight (indeed on the retry I rolled him.) I got killed because I fell asleep. POE 2 is like slogging through mud.

1. MASSIVE MAPS ... did I say MASSIVE with enough emphasis. No movement skills and you cant skip almost clearing the whole map. You cant just run to the boss fights past the white mobs. You have to fight and kill every single mob. If you try to run past them you will find a cluster of dozens of mobs that surround you, pin you and kill you.

2. I have finally gotten a little bit of a build that has some power but nowhere near the power in POE 1. White mobs I still have to stop and burn down. I wont tell you my build because I dont want it nerfed. I can sometimes get some speed but mostly the pacts are spaced such that you cant get a rhythm. For example cascading volatile dead. But the map is so huge that you still have to slog through. Its like walking in knee deep snow.

3. No movement skills. I have played Ruthless and not having movement skills sucks. MOST (read 99% of playerbase) do NOT and would not even entertain the idea of playing ruthless. Yet POE 2 is HARDER than ruthless.

4. Crafting system is totally broken. GGG, I love your company but whoever is making some of these decision is out of their mind. I wanted an upgraded volatile wand but I wanted +1 to fire skills roll I have on my current wand. I have 100 transmutes, 60 augments and yet I can use one per item. No alt orbs. I have taken to hitting any Volatile wand with a transmute and augment and then if I dont get the +1 I vendor it. This isnt crafting, its a sadistic RNG generator. POE 1 crafting was BRILLIANT. WHY ON EARTH DID YOU KILL IT?? In pre release interviews you claimed to want to enable crafting early. You didnt. YOu ruined it.

5. Bosses. Ok, these I like. Requiring skill and tactics ... BUT ... a lot of bosses do AOE spells where you have less than a second to react to get to a safe spot and without movement skills its often impossible to get out. Annoying to get killed by a shot that is patently unfair.

I am hoping this all gets fixed. I am so sigk of the campaign slog. I feel like I am carrying firewood one armful at a time up a hill. I just have 17 cords to go. Maybe you dont like players being gods. Maybe they were too much gods. But you need to find a happy medium.

POE 2 makes POE 1 ruthless look easy. I dont even have time for a 120 hour campaign and especially not if you are going to do the league mechanic. I cant even conceive running this again every three months. For that alone this game will fail.

All true. Also the dodge roll is just bad for the game as an RPG. They balanced the combat around having to abuse i-frames, so lame. Even the Souls games that inspired GGG to put a dodge roll in, have far more RPG identity than PoE2 does. You can make your character so tanky in them you have close to 100% mitigation so you never have to roll, you can become so good at blocking that you never have to roll. Thats what an RPG does, it gives the player the freedom and the tools to find their own solutions.

Where is the RPG in PoE2? Why am I absolutely forced to use and abuse the i-frame roll on a constant basis? The dodge roll should be a skill gem along with a variety of many other movement skills, all of which should be viable for avoidance. Blocking and just facetanking damage needs to be viable build options.

I didn't get as far as you, but I wrote a short post about my feelings that if I had come across this game at the beginning instead of PoE I would never have wanted to play it, that's my simple but essential opinion...

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koszmarnica#7777 wrote:

I didn't get as far as you, but I wrote a short post about my feelings that if I had come across this game at the beginning instead of PoE I would never have wanted to play it, that's my simple but essential opinion...

Weird, I have never played PoE1 or any ARPG since Diablo II and I have had a blast during the campaign. At lvl 76 atm. Endgame needs a lot of work still, but nothing they can't fix in 1/2 year to 1 year of early access.

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Prügelprinz#9311 wrote:

Weird, I have never played PoE1 or any ARPG since Diablo II

I’ve never been a fan of hack and slash games because, at some point, I came across Diablo, and I disliked it so much. It felt outdated and primitive, to the point where I avoided this genre entirely until I discovered PoE 1. Diablo was outdated and primitive. It has always been a weak game. The only thing it had going for it was a good name, and people fell for it. PoE 2 currently looks as if it were an earlier version of PoE 1...

+1

Speed is a big pain area. No real movement skills and no Quicksilver flask make this game so boring.

Not gonna talk about the one portal vision or pointlessly slogging through the lengthy circuitous large maps or the ascendancy vision or the ruthless vision--there is enough feedback on this already.

It is very unlike GGG and comes across as so desperate from GGG to try and make everything so slow so that the payers keep slogging for hours in the mindless and boring slosh that POE 2 is currently become instead of being fun and engaging. A real pity that all this forced sluggish, torturous and boring play has taken all the fun/enjoyment of playing new ascendancies, skill tree, acts, boss fights and endgame (even though still work in progress).

LOL @ OP's comment of I fell asleep during the game.

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Prügelprinz#9311 wrote:

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koszmarnica#7777 wrote:

I didn't get as far as you, but I wrote a short post about my feelings that if I had come across this game at the beginning instead of PoE I would never have wanted to play it, that's my simple but essential opinion...

Weird, I have never played PoE1 or any ARPG since Diablo II and I have had a blast during the campaign. At lvl 76 atm. Endgame needs a lot of work still, but nothing they can't fix in 1/2 year to 1 year of early access.

Play it. Try it, its free. Do a league and come back and tell me which game was more fun. This one looks better, no question, but I can see me treating this like "that other game" and playing it once, then never coming back to it. POE 1 keeps bringing me back.

lol cry

Movement is actually okay, i speak as a ranger, we have tailwind, and lot of passives points for movement speed so it feel acceptable.
I believe each player need at least 20-30% speed to feel confortable. (i'm not saying zoom level).

No target farming.
Awful drop rate of currency. You get tons of transmute, tons of Augments.
1 exalt per 2 maps and ... that's all.
2 divines since the beginning of the game.
There is no currency strategies that will constantly make you decent money.
There is no craft and that's the real pain and sadness.
I do understand that poe 1 evolved with various mechanics.
Even settlers was so cool, you could farm maps, do your little town, and get some currencies.

What do you have now ? Garbage altars that actually surround you when you open it, and a tiny zone that any ranged can't even play easily.

Expedition that is somehow easier than poe1 but tujen, rog and the useless girl are all useless now, you can't haggle for currencies.

Delirium that is okay but it's not a huge cash machine.

The game is fully design to slow you down, to make you farm maps and sometimes reward you. I actually believe that this is intentional from devs, they probably rushed a lot to release the game because people started to get impatient and they also wanted to have a base for testing + $$$$$ (Tencent ?).

So yeah, i start to believe that unless the direction drastically change, people won't be as happy as they are in this game.

Thankfully POE 1 is still here. Hope you have lots of fun on that game and let this game be for a different audience. Thank you!