Feedback from someone that gets horribly addicted to games like this

Howdy, as a preface I don't need to add (but will anyway), my lifetime hours in the OG D2LoD was somewhere around 3k, only stopping to do normal human things like "go to high school" and "maintain some modicum of a social standing amongst my peers." I've sunk roughly 200 hours into PoE2 since I got it a month ago, made a guild with all my IRL homies that game, and sunk a bit on actually fleshing out guild stash tabs (and been absolutely roasted for announcing when I dropped divs only to use/slam 90% of the exalts I contributed to the guild stash, sorry not sorry drop more orbs nerds.)

I'm gonna separate this into The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and due to the fact I haven't interacted with a forum with a stylesheet this dated since roughly 2007, I won't bother to format it properly. So without further ado:

The Good:
- Act 1. Probably don't need to say more here, but the pacing, the lore bits, that Act Boss fight, goodness. I must've rammed my head against Geonor enough times for him to get tired of talking about taking it (before clearing Manor a couple times to get to a more suited level and ultimately drop the twat.)

- Early game pacing in general is well-done. Uniques, at this point, feel impactful (when they matter to your class), currency drops (something new to me with only D2 knowledge of ARPGs, closest analog I could think of would be Runes from that system to craft Runewords) are understandably limited, maybe a little too much given the current state of the economy.

- Incorporating ascendancies into the acts plot progression made them feel impactful. First floor Sekhemas is easily attainable to scratch the itch of more power. I am an idiot and forgot second ascendancy is in Act 3, disregard this one tidbit as I edit this in a panic.

The Bad:
- Pacing beyond Act 3 (when builds appear to start "coming online") is fast. Like breakneck speed fast. I freely admit I first rolled a lightning arrow deadeye, but I also hate build guides/meta, so I've been doing my own thing (complete with an absolutely cursed skill tree I've probably sunk 200k gold into tweaking repeatedly.) Despite this, Act Bosses for Acts 4-6 were a relative cakewalk. Whereas 1-3 took multiple attempts and a couple hours, 4-6 were first or second try. Whether or not this was from gameplay knowledge acquisition, or my seemingly cursed "who needs ice when I have Electrocute Buildup and Shock" trash build coming online remains to be seen.

- On-Death effects. This has been seemingly addressed in the coming update, but I want to stress it here: past Act 4, these are pretty much the only thing that kills me besides absolutely stacked mod rare mobs. It has gotten to the point that, after killing a pack of mobs, I will wait 10 to 15 seconds to ensure I'm not about to get nuked from some grenade hidden in the pile of bodies before I can grab whatever terrible stuff I got dropped. These are horribly overtuned and I feel like it's to artificially elongate the endgame progression, since every time you forget one of the 30+ on-death effect mobs, you're eating a 10% XP penalty. Which I wouldn't mind so much, if on-death effects weren't a guaranteed one-shot through maxed resistances and roughly 3k effective HP (between pure life and energy shield.)

- Mobs in general. At a pure macro perspective, mobs can (currently) be broken into three categories: backliners (casters/archers/ranged,) frontliners ("meat grinder" fast mobs,) and tanks (lumbering slow HP pinatas with long-windup, high-damage slams.) This cadence remains consistent throughout the campaign, with occasional pie-breaks (such as the Frost Ghast, which will cast from range or rush you for an AoE; and the Vile Vulture, an absolute pain in the ass that makes me pre-fire corners in tight maps because I get three-shot by the slam if I'm not careful.) While mob AI seems intuitive at a surface level, and given the limitations of the format it's easy to water anything down this much and then call it "bad", it'd be refreshing to see more enemy types that break this three-variant system. (I've been told that there's a *lot* more mobs coming, so I'm holding out hope here.)

The Ugly:
- STABILITY. Yes, I do understand this is an Early Access title. Yes, I understand that Early Access means there's going to be bugs. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, my first rodeo with EA. That said, the fact that there's two threads on this very forum with hundreds to thousands of replies that their system is TOO GOOD to run this game, while I've had maybe ten crashes in a month on my Win10, 1080ti, 5800x3D, 32GB DDR4 3200Mhz system, speaks volumes. Whether that's an engine thing (UE5 is known to be very process hungry when poorly optimized,) or just general "we were trying to get it in the hands of players as soon as possible, stability will happen later" mindset...the game needs to be stable. There shouldn't be operating systems crashes, at all. While I understand that Win11 may also be the culprit behind a lot of these crashes, it needs to be at the forefront of a fix, not backburner'd in favor of Una's lute. (And yea, I am being hyperbolic for comedic intent here. I understand there's wildly different scope between those two things.)

- Endgame. While the coming patch has been announced to address this (with the addition of multiple tower maps, updating the current tower to be less monotonous, and changes to Zealot attack patterns so they can't off-screen nuke you,) I actually agree with another post here that the endgame feels more "something to do" than actually giving any sense of story. Like I admit, I'm a newcomer to the world of Wraeclast, but I want to learn more. Why is this world the way it is? What put these things here? The stuff in the game is well done (and yea I haven't done pinnacle bosses yet, so maybe these questions will get answered,) but some fleshing out is needed in the endgame to enhance the gravitas of *why* we're cleansing the plane of Corruption. These map nodes would be an excellent opportunity, even in their current implementation, to sprinkle in even a smidge of lore stuff, references to the first game, and foreshadowing for pinnacle/endgame bosses, or even for the coming acts bosses or plot devices.

- Lastly, dodge roll. While I will hesitate to call it "rollslop" like some other corners of the internet, I do agree with Asmongold here: dodge roll should break you out of getting "stunlocked" by a massive group of mobs. I'm on the fence about giving it a brief amount of I-frames (and also think that would exacerbate roll-spam if you don't have absolutely cracked movespeed) but maybe enhancing defenses for a brief duration during/following roll execution would be an improvement, alongside a brief "ghosting" window so you don't get pinned to the difficult to parse terrain you didn't know was terrain. There's even indication to this design intent in the ranger part of the skill tree, with +evasion% after rolling. I think something like that should be inherent to the ability if it's intention is to be core to gameplay functionality (as it appears to the layman player, anyway.)

Overall, 7/10, I enjoy it greatly, but holy crap fix the crash issue so my friend on an Intel 14900k, 3090ti, 64GB DDR5 (unknown clockspeed but damn high), 4k ultrawide monitor can actually play the game instead of crashing every other load screen.