Feedback for Early Access from lv 97 Mercenary

First of all, I will mention things for the overall game system, which I think it's not working well for the vision of POE2.

1. About defences:
Issues:
- Armor is too weak.
- Energy Shield is too easy to build up compare to Life, especially with Grim Feast can be doubled easily.
- CI gives immune to chaos damage and poison, the damage type that is the hardest to build resist for. And it's now also counted as both full life and low life, which gives too much benefits.
- MoM, which makes mana another layer of defense, is only on the ES side of the passive skill tree. For armor classes there is also block, for evasion there is none.

Suggestions:
- Gives armor physical damage reduction, apply equally to all hits, not worse for bigger hits. So a high-end armor character can have up to 75% physical damage reduction, same as other resist.
- Reduce Energy Shield gained from tree nodes and items.
- Make CI only counts as full life, not low life anymore. Can also remove "immune to chaos damage" but make chaos damage not bypass ES only. Reduce effectiveness of MoM.

2. About damages:
Issues:
- Players damage are too high, boss fights in maps are a joke for good geared/built players, pinnacle boss fights can end within 10s for many many builds, even pretty cheap ones. Players can clear the whole screen of mobs or even larger in 1-2 clicks.
- Monsters damage are too high. Some monsters can deal 2-3k damage or even more with crits in juiced maps to players with 75% res, which can 1 hit many players.
- Melee damage (REAL melee, not melee but ranged) is too low. Like close-range skills should always give higher damage than ranged skills, because players have very little window to use them in boss fights compare to ranged skills, and they often bring higher risks.

Suggestions:
- Increase melee skills damage to be about 20-30% higher than ranged skills. Or even better, make ALL skills deal lower damage the further the targets are from the players. This way, it can also solve the issues of players clearing mobs from the whole screen, or even 2-3 screens from them, while make every players, melee or ranged, to have the opportunity to deal more damage, but in return of having higher risks.
- Nerf overall players damage, i'd say 80% of current damage. I.e. lower the number on everything that gives damage, like gear, skill gems, passive tree nodes. Especially for overperforming builds now, like Archmage, monk bells, lightning skills of bows, crossbows, spells. For gears, increase rarity of highly-seeked gears, or reduce their stats, like Ingenuity, Temporalis, Howa, etc. Of course, also buff the underperformed skills which no one would use right now to be on par with the meta skills.
I agree that meta will always be a thing, but the differences between meta and non-meta builds should not be this huge so all players can enjoy the build they prefer without feeling bad not going with meta.
- Nerf all monsters damage, also about 80% of current damage. One-shot in maps should only happen in extremely juiced maps and to players with low to none investments in defences.
This way, boss fights will truly feel like boss fights, not a dummy with dps check. Also players will only die due to repeatedly errors, reduce frustration in the game. Doing maps will not be "I have to kill them all before they one-hit me".
However, following this, highly geared players will likely become immortal, so it leads us to the below point.

3. About regen/leech
Issues:
- Players currently have too high regen/leech, which also create an issue of being "immortal", except when they're one-shot. And being one-shot is not fun, especially when not in boss fights.
- Regen/leech is too high that players rarely have to use flasks in endgame, even in boss fights for some players.

Suggestions:
- Reduce all regen/leech skill gems/passive nodes/gear stats to something like 10% of current value.
- Reduce Flasks regen to 50-70% of current value, but with more quality possible. This will be discussed more in the section 5 below.
This will make combat more tactical, just like when we started in the campaign with very few regen options, make flasks more important, and combine with the lower monsters damage mentioned above will reduce one-hit situation while keeping the combat challenging enough.

4. About interaction between players
Issues:
- Current trade system is heavily outdated. Website is sometimes down, sometimes working not correctly. It creates more issues than it solves (players don't want to reply to trade, afk players, bots, price-fixers, scammers, kills immersion, hard to use for console, widen the gap of hardcore and casual players because you must be online to do trades, forcing players to have to use 3rd party tools to support trade which can lead to risks of account losing and unfairness, etc.)
- Most of the time, only players with real friends are partying with each other. And they have highly optimal builds for playing together, which gives them too much advantages compare to solo players.
- We have no contents for exclusive party play yet, which discouraging players to find parties to play with.

Suggestions:
- Create an auction house in each town, where players can list items to sell even when they're offline. Make both the buyer and seller have to spend some gold when they want to retrieve their reward (item for buyer, currency for seller). Make it higher the more valueable the transaction is, e.g. 200 gold for each exalted, 2k gold for each divine, so a transaction that worths 50 exalted will make both seller and buyer have to spend 10k gold to complete, and 100k gold for a 50 divine transaction. In case the buyer/seller don't have the gold, the items/currencies will be kept in the AH, but they can't receive it.
Also, show the seller name for the items listed in AH, and allow one-click whisper so the buyers can pm them and ask to trade directly, so both don't have to lose the gold fee in the AH.
This will keep the interaction between players, get rid of the aforementioned issues using web trade, help the game attract wider range of players, and even can get rid of bot accounts doing trade since they don't have much gold, and gold can't be traded. It will also give more value to gold, which I will talk about more below.
- Higher increase monsters hp/stun and elemental thresholds in party play, to reduce the advantages of party play a bit.
- But to encourage more party play, we can add some party-exclusive contents to the game. Players without friends can still use party finder to find parties for these contents, just less effective than players with friends. Something like boss raids but need to have at least 3/4/6 people, with level requirements, and limit clear time per week. I know this idea sounds a bit cliche, but imo boss raids give MMORPG a lot of fun. And it's a waste not to make boss raids for a game this popular and this complicated.

5. About Currencies:
Issues:
- Orb of Annulment and Glassblower's Bauble has too little use, even though they're really rare.
- Greater Essences and Omens are too rare for deterministics crafting.
- Gold still has little use as of now, especially for players with few needs of respecing.

Suggestions:
- As mentioned above, add auction house for more gold usage.
- Change Orb of Annulment to another orb, or make it remove 1 of the 2/3 lowest tier explicit randomly, to be much better than chaos orb but worse than Omen of Whittling, and give some more "deterministic" but still RNG crafting.
- Keep flasks droppable with 0-20% quality, but make max quality of flasks using Glassblower's Bauble to 50-100%. Since if we reduce players natural regen, flasks will be much more important and the main source to keep players alive.
- Increase spawn rate of Greater Essences and Omens a little. They should only be droppable at high tier maps though, this will be discussed more below in endgame feedback.
- This is just an idea, but since Greater Essence can only be applied to Magic items, maybe create a "Extreme Essence" that can be applied to Rare items, but they're extremely rare and can only be spawned in lv 82 areas, or from bosses?
- Make more use of golds, from auction house, to maybe register in party finder for boss raids, or something else, so gold find stats will be more important.

6. About items explicits:
Issues:
- "Increased item rarity" (IIR) stat is being too important, that it's impossible to ignore, and it has no cap which makes people FOMO not being able to max it. It also favor classes/builds that can maximize IIR because they can ignore other stats or use some specific uniques, e.g. CI builds, or builds that can use the Mahuxotl's Machination shield. It also reduce build diversity, that players will always aim for IIR stat in their gear and ignore many unique gears because they dont have this stat.

Suggestions:
- Cap IIR stat at 100%-200%. Or remove them from equipments entirely.


Next, I'll move on to some points for the endgame, since campaign is at a good spot now in my opinion (at least from act 1-3, since 4-6 is not released yet).


7. About drops:
Issues:
- In endgame, high tier juiced maps (with atlas tree, tablets, waystones and IIR stat) drop too many items that using a filter is absolutely necessary. E.g. one rare mob dropped me 15-20 rare items, and a map with 5+ breaches can easily filled my whole screen with drops even after I use filter to hide all white/blue equips.
- Each juiced map I have to use hundreds of identify scrolls and spent more time looting and identifying than combat, which is not fun. And even with that many drops, decent drops that is an upgrade or is sellable for >= 1 divine is still a bit low.

Suggestions:
- Keep the current drop rate for currency, but adjust the drop rate of equipments: lower the drop amount (quantity), but increase the quality and the rate for tiered drops (T2-T5). Make it so almost every equipments drops in T16 maps are T4-T5, but reduce the drop amount drastically. It's much better than have to loot and identify hundreds of rare equipments each map.

8. About difficulty and the endgame questline:
Issues:
- I can't clearly feel the progression between map tiers. I think in poe1, where players have to do magic, rare and corrupted maps between normal, yellow and red tiers to proceed with the questline, players can more clearly notice this. But in poe2, since players are allowed to do any maps they want, the increment in difficulty is hardly noticable. I guess maybe because you don't want casual/weaker players to feel gated behind the questline, but this also reduce the challenge/reward and the progression feeling of the game.
- Citadels are hard to find and are unbalanced between players. For me, I reached lv 96 before finding my first one. This can leads to frustration for some.
- Bosses, especially pinnacle bosses where the entry to them is expensive/takes time to get, with 1 attempt only discourages players from attempting it themself, but encourage asking for boss carries/looking for youtube guides for the first time/follow the meta build, which should not be intended imo.

Suggestions:
- Make higher map tiers more rewarding, e.g. make greater essences only droppable from T11 and higher, perfect jeweller only droppable from T6 or higher, etc.
- Increase the gap of difficulty between T1-T5, T6-T10 and T11-T16 maps.
- Make map bosses drop even more/better rewards in higher tier maps.
- Make citadel a "special waystone" which is droppable from T15/T16 map bosses, tradeable, and can be entered via the Realmgate when combining with another waystone. Or, keep the current implementation but show the closest citadels on the atlas so players know where to find them from the beginning.
- Make pinnacle bosses 6 attempts. For map bosses, even failing the map should not remove the boss from the node, so they can try the boss again with another waystone on the same node.

9. About gameplay speed in endgame
Issues:
- Most of the monsters in endgame are too fast that most of the time players can't react and just spam clicks to kill things as fast as possible. Some of them are okay though, like the big one that go self-explodes, the one holding a tomb, and some new monster type in POE2.
- Dodge roll is good in campaign, but it has a little "delay" at the end of the animation before the character can run again, which feels bad imo and I rarely use dodge roll in endgame, except to get un-stuck between monsters sometimes in breaches.

Suggestions:
- Remove the delay at the end of dodge roll animation.
- Reduce move speed, cast speed, attack speed, projectile speed of many fast type of monsters for now, especially ones from POE1, before we can get new monster types from act 4-6.

Other issues that were posted many times on reddit, and I guess on this forum too, but I agree with (and remember):

10. Charms:
Issues:
- Most of the players in endgame use some kind of unique belts, and all unique belts have 1 charm slot, which kills the purpose of having charms.

Suggestions:
- We should make all belts (or Unique belts) to have 1-2-3 charm slots randomly, or create a somewhat rare currency that can add more charm slots into belts.

11. Runes:
Issues:
- We're lacking rune diversity. E.g. most of the time people use 20% physical damage on weapons. And there's no new rare runes that can be found in endgame contents.

Suggestions:
- Add more type of runes:
+ Weapon: increase damage over time, ailment duration/magnitude, chance to cause ailment, attack speed, cast speed, etc.
+ Armor: reduce freeze/bleed/poison duration, increase stun threshold/elemental threshold, reduce physical damage taken, reduce DOT taken, etc.

12. Atlas:
Issues:
- Lack of control, sometimes make players feel lost, take too much time to hover around the atlas.

Suggestions:
- Add more controls to the atlas:
+ World view (something like a mini-atlas for players to see the whole atlas, where they are, and how far they've gone in each direction from the beginning). They can also click on the world view to move the atlas there instantly.
+ Search based on type of nodes: Completed, Failed, Attempted, reachable, breach, boss, etc. when click on will darken the background and highlight the nodes.

I don’t think ES is too strong, there is an ‘exploit’ with Grim Feast where self sacrificed minions can be used to buff it to silly levels (this should be fixed so that ONLY killed mobs can buff Grim Feast).
Evasion is Ok but needs a buff to bring it to ES levels, perhaps our old friend Grace could achieve this like Grim Feast does for ES.

Armour is dead and pointless as it stands and for Str based builds this is terminal error. Your idea to make it all dmg protection might work but I’d suggest adding (inverted to how poe1 did it) some % X element taken as physical mods. It additionally needs to work as a flat percent reduction like resistances, not this ‘based on size of incoming hit’ rubbish that needs a side of paper and a calculator to work out.

The time to kill a boss is irrelevant, the problem with ‘bossing’ is negating the mechanics that were supposed to be a selling point of poe2. I don’t think it matters is a player takes 30 seconds or 5 minutes to kill a boss as long as they have to engage with the mechanics which currently you don’t if you have enough dmg. The solution to this is forced phases, boss X will do attack Y at every 10% for example and can’t be damaged until that attack is completed.

Boss dying too fast maybe a thing for meta builds or at least more or less working ascendancies.

As BM witch on chaos skills I struggle hard with bring enough dps to boss fights.

"

Timbo Zero#8289 wrote:

The time to kill a boss is irrelevant, the problem with ‘bossing’ is negating the mechanics that were supposed to be a selling point of poe2. I don’t think it matters is a player takes 30 seconds or 5 minutes to kill a boss as long as they have to engage with the mechanics which currently you don’t if you have enough dmg. The solution to this is forced phases, boss X will do attack Y at every 10% for example and can’t be damaged until that attack is completed.

We can apply this too, but the final result is the same with my method of reducing players damage and increasing boss HP, prolong the fight, force players to not able to burst bosses but have to take part in the mechanic, just not as seamlessly. Maybe ultimately we can combine both.

"

le_souriceau#5005 wrote:

Boss dying too fast maybe a thing for meta builds or at least more or less working ascendancies.

As BM witch on chaos skills I struggle hard with bring enough dps to boss fights.

I've watched some videos of other builds, they're ridiculously OP and many of them are not exactly expensive/hard to get. You can just go to youtube and literally search "poe2 one shot boss" or "poe2 cheap bossing build" and a lot of them will show.

For now it's okay since it's EA, but if it's still like this after release then people can just follow some certain builds and bosses will be a joke.

"

frazency#2974 wrote:

- Make pinnacle bosses 6 attempts. For map bosses, even failing the map should not remove the boss from the node, so they can try the boss again with another waystone on the same node.

+1 agree, this is absolutely needed

I think you said it better than I could have.
My original post, here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3682384

But you hit on a few more I'd forgotten about.

I would add:
- The rune issue is important to encourage experimentation. A one-time thing just makes players not want to spec and hold-off "just incase".
- the IIR - as I was discussing with other players in a different thread, we didn't notice any difference at around 100%-150% from gear (ignoring map modifiers). I personally noticed more currency (for example) during trials, but maybe we didn't have it stacked enough.

Given you're 97 (I'm currently 88 on main Witchhunter) it sounds like you have a better opinion. But my own question is survivability - I think that's the one thing I notice a lack of compared to anything else, with not much option to improve. Sorcery Ward seems awful endgame. DPS seems otherwise somewhat reasonable, with decent gear/comparing to some of the meta builds currently. How are you faring in that sense?

"

Junki3JJC#5645 wrote:

Given you're 97 (I'm currently 88 on main Witchhunter) it sounds like you have a better opinion. But my own question is survivability - I think that's the one thing I notice a lack of compared to anything else, with not much option to improve. Sorcery Ward seems awful endgame. DPS seems otherwise somewhat reasonable, with decent gear/comparing to some of the meta builds currently. How are you faring in that sense?

There are many other issues in the game rn but I don't list them here because they're posted many times already, I only posted about some general issues about the game.
As I've mentioned in the post, monsters damage is absolutely a problem right now, it's not how it should be if we want more meaningful combat. Hopefully it will get addressed.
I'm having 3.1k hp and 80% evasion with acrobatics. Combine with my dps to kill stuffs quickly, I rarely get hit, and even if I get hit it should not be one-hit except some extreme cases like special skills from bosses or overjuiced maps/Expedition.
You can see me did max diff Breachstone few days ago here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5KOaCyF0wM&t=2s, my gear costed about 200 divs. I just record for the memory, so please don't mind the quality.

Updated point 9-12 in the original post, up.

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