Complete personal feedback of PoE 2 0.1.0f

Hi there, I wanted to adress my personal feedback after playing PoE 2 for 20 days since early access released. This feedback was written while playing the game, so its structure is probably not the best, but I'll try to be short.
I have a lot of topics to cover and several suggestions to make, these are just ideas that I could think of.

Disclaimer
Hardware : AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, AMD 7900 XTX, 16 GB DDR5, NVMe SSD. 4k 120 Hz HDR monitor.
Experience : 30k+ hours in PoE 1, most as SSF. 3 SSF characters mapping in PoE 2 (minion/fire Infernalist, 2H mace Titan, crossbow Witchhunter). Not yet tried citadels.
Game version : 0.1.0f

Tutorial
The tutorial is much better than in PoE 1, lots of mechanics are well explained. The tooltip system is a very nice addition and works as some sort of small ingame wiki.
However, some tutorials are missing : socketing support gems, upgrading flasks, recombining items, using weapon sets and their passive points, introducing the endgame Atlas.

Campaign
Act 1 Normal
Difficulty : Most balanced act, can be tough at the beginning depending on the available skill gems for the weapon you want to use.
Bosses : No boss feels too hard or unfair. Act boss is very good, buildup is here and works well for the culmination to be eventful.
Areas : Less diverse act but not a big issue. Environments still feel very good and nicely constructed. The size of each area has a good balance, none feel empty or too dense. Navigating between areas doesn’t feel bad.
Special events/quests : Interesting but could be better. Some secrets to discover but what they bring suffers a lot after the first playthrough. Quests rewards need more work (maybe rare items, currency items…).

Act 2 Normal
Difficulty : Harder than act 1, and the second part of act 2 is amongst the hardest parts of the game as a personal experience.
Bosses : Some bosses can be very tough depending on the build, even if you know the mechanics (Balbala, Iktab & Ekbab). Zalmarath is very difficult to hit with some skills because the hit box is on the edge of the area (examples : SRS, strike melee skills…).
Act boss is very good, second phase is even better than act 1, but first phase might be too simple and a little bit redundant compared to the first encounter with Jamanra (maybe remove the sandstorm phase here ?).
Areas : Very diverse and very good. Titan grotto is the weakest to navigate through. No area feels too small or too big. Maybe some tuning needs to be done to the dreadnought area to facilitate moving between platforms (larger bridges ?).
Special events/quests : No better than act 1 at most. Clan relics quest is weird, and the reward choices seem insignificant. For good utility choices, we could have cast/attack speed, curse effet, or even stun/ailment threshold.

Act 3 Normal
Difficulty : Fine until entering the flooded city, where monsters can be very dangerous (especially those who deal chaos damage, because this resistance stat is almost impossible to find).
Bosses : Very good bosses again. The quadrilla needs some adjustements to better differentiate small and big hits, and also the construction leftovers around the area work against the character. Viper Napuatzi is quite hard without any chaos mitigation. The metal/lava boss can very hard too without good DPS and stays too much near the lava, making hitting him as close melee very difficult most of the time.
Final boss is too easy (doesn’t hit hard enough as compared to previous bosses in the same act), and the buildup to the final fight is weaker than in the previous acts (suggestion : make Doryani appear at least once, for example when Alva gets captured, or when we first enter the past).
Areas : A lot of areas are way too large and difficult to navigate through, even though the act has the best environmental diversity. Apex of filth isn’t good to look at and the character blends too much withing the environment.
Special events/quests : Better than acts 1 and 2. Special merchants are a nice addition and they should be more present in the campaign (merchants or some other way to select some items from a list). Treasure hunting is another nice idea but it should offer much more to be worth doing more than the very first time in a league.

Cruel
Almost anecdotical because it’s temporary, but could use some quick and easy fine tuning to up the difficulty, especially in act 1.
Special events and optional quests don’t work properly sometimes. They need some better indication too because some of them are wrongly marked as done or not.

Endgame mapping
Weakest part of the game but some base mechanics need to be kept.
League mechanics
The current choice is fine abut the integration is quite lacking, and they don’t feel as fresh as they should be. Rewards are meh.
Suggestions : Introduce league mechanics with NPC, quests, popups…maybe as soon as the campaign (like PoE 1) or in endgame. Maybe this will happen with acts 4 to 6 ?
Breach
Too many monsters spawning at once. Too many splinters to acquire for the breachlord domain to be accessible.
Suggestions :
- Reduce the number of monsters spawning or the frequency at which they appear. Adjust the breach expansion speed and the number of monsters killed needed to keep the expansion in consequence.
- Drop higher quantity of splinters for the player to interact with the breachlord domain earlier.
Delirium
The mechanic itself isn’t clear for everyone. The fog effect is too dense and prevents me from properly seeing what’s happening on the screen. The anoint system is also bad because it encourages using them only on the best possible amulet.
Suggestions :
- The introduction to the Delirium mechanic should explain how to prevent the fog from dissipating.
- Higher tiers of oils should drop more often.
- Anointments need not to be tied to amulets anymore (example : new character slot like relics in Sanctum league).
Expedition
Encounters seem to be fine. They can be dangerous but it’s up to the player to select the difficulty. However, placing the explosives is somehow harder. The rewards are completely useless.
Suggestions :
- Fix the explosive placement issues (easily blocked by anything, and sometimes invisible objects).
- The rewards should still be based on crafting, but seriously tuned up for better outcomes. If new currency is to be added with deterministic crafting, use those methods. Other example : same crafting mechanic as in PoE 1’s Betrayal (Guff), but with limited amounts of uses and unlimited amount of time.
Ritual
Chaos damage monsters are too hard to manage without a good amount of resistance. Rewards aren’t good enough for this mechanic to be worthwhile. Rituals in crowded space are a nightmare to complete.
Suggestions :
- If the chaos resistance mod remains rare, reduce the damage of chaos damage monsters.
- Improve rewards, allowing for example omens to be more common.
- Monsters should also give more favour because right now it’s extremely hard to defer and take items.
- Only spawn Rituals where they have enough space to allow the character to move and avoid monsters/ritual effects

Atlas mechanics
Maps without bosses feel incomplete, and this is amplified by the layout of most of them : too large and difficult to navigate through (lots of dead ends and branches which makes for a lot of backtracking, creating gameplay when nothing happens). Maps without any special encounter (boss/league) feel very bad. PoE 2 needs a different way of endgame design because of much less access to movement speed/abilities. Walking a little is fine but only between packs at best.
The citadels seem way too rare for a main quest objective.
Suggestions :
- Remove bosses from the pool of potential content that can spawn on maps.
- Split atlas nodes between 2 categories : maps with bosses, maps without bosses (any map can be in any category, no exclusive split). 50%/50% repartition.
- Maps with bosses need layouts that allow the boss to be at the end. These maps can have special encounters in addition, allowing for these encounters to interact with bosses (Delirium and Ritual). These maps are completed once the boss is defeated.
- Maps without bosses need at least 1 special encounter, and require to successfully finish these encounters to be marked as completed (no longer need chasing rare monsters). Also, each special encounter need to be marked on the minimap.
- Make the 3 citadels more common, or remove the 1 portal only rule from those.
- Increase map diversity because it’s currently too easy to encounter the same map over and over again especially if we stay within a biome.
- Add new precursor tablets mods, there are only a few of them and we always roll the same.
The endgame should feel much better with these changes, along with massive improvements to the layouts.

Balancing
Monster density/damage feels off compared to the campaign. It’s good to have an evolution of the campaign formula, and we need to have content matching with the character progression. But league content for example brings too many dangerous monsters at once that make the PoE 2 « supposed-to-be » gameplay not working anymore, encouraging simple builds with a single good clearing skill. Visceral combat happens far less frequently. The game vision is not respected. It’s very difficult to use the combo system and some classes simply don’t have any tools to deal with fast moving monsters.
One death allowed per map encourages methodic gameplay where we have to be careful, but this is difficult because of monster speed/density. Methodic gameplay is better vs more hectic gameplay because PoE 2 is much more focused on methodic gameplay (cf the campaign), so the tuning needs to be adressed towards monster density/speed/damage to allow more space for what devs want the game to be (not PoE 1 ).

Biomes
Biomes feel unecessary as of now, but a good concept to keep and build around.
Suggestion : first have a clear list of what maps can be in each biome (necessary for local knowledge atlas node). Add special loot/encounters to each biome (different from leagues), for exemple map versions of special encounters from the acts.

Towers
Towers maps feel useless and boring, but I feel they only serve as placeholder until the second part of the campaign is integrated ?
Suggestion : if we keep monsters in them, different towers layouts based on their biome. Maybe we could add a boss that needs to be defeated in order to activate the tower ? Or else just remove monsters and making the tower activate when completing an adjacent map. In short, remove what’s currently boring and useless.

Monster variety
Monster variety isn’t what was advertised. It’s way less than expected. Most maps always have the same ones.
Suggestion : each map has a core pool of monsters that always appear, and additional packs of monsters from the global pool (which should include every monster from every area of the campaign).

Various ideas for the endgame
Navigating through the Atlas becomes tedious and difficult after a while, when we have discovered many screens of map nodes. It’s particularly hard to find already discovered interesting areas, like towers clusters, citadels, unique maps…
Suggestions :
- Have a search bar that allow us to highlight nodes by typing map names or special encounters
- Have more shortcuts
- Being able to zoom out further (possibly locked because of performance reasons…)
- Probably not feasible, but an Atlas minimap would be great

Passive tree
Very large but somehow lacks in some domains (specific weapons, damage mitigation, ailment mitigation), even though life nodes don’t exist anymore.
Notable drawbacks need to be removed, they only belong to keystones.
Not enough speed increasing passives, especially for the Warrior side.
Life and ES balance is not there. Removing life nodes was a good idea to allow for better specialization in tree, but why do we still have increased ES nodes ?
Suggestions :
- Every class can use any starting point to help experimenting with build. If that feels too complicated for new players, make it so that this chocie can only be unlocked at some point after playing for a while (example : leveling each class to at least lvl 65).
- Remove increased ES nodes. ES recharge/recovery nodes are fine. But the goal is to lessen the current huge gap between life and ES based builds. ES pools have to be larger because of the mechanical differences with life, but not that much.

Atlas tree
Better system than PoE 1, avoiding the respec when we want to switch focus between leagues/special encounters.
But leagues trees need to be unlocked far earlier, because it doesn’t make any sense that better league content can only be allocated once the pinacle boss of each mechanic is defeated.
Suggestion : leagues trees passive points are unlocked by completing maps with the relevant mechanic. Example : +2 points to Breach tree once 10 maps with Breach encounters are completed. Also, the difficulty level system must allow for downscaling if we want to try content with weaker characters, but without losing the notables.

Skills system
Very good improvement from PoE 1, removing unnecessary friction and complexity. But needs tuning to make every choice interesting. Example : mace skills aren’t good enough at some point in the campaign, and useless in the endgame, because of very slow attack speed that I can’t really build around.
Skill gems attribute requirements are too high, and reduce build diversity, mainly when we want to use skills from other « classes ».
A lot of skills are too slow. They seem to need a way to slow down or stop monsters from moving, but access to these ways is almost non-existant.

Suggestions :
- Slightly reduce attribute requirements on skill gems to allow for better build diversity, and reduce attribute stacking on tree. Attribute requirement on support gems seem to be fine for now.
- Increase the drop rate of Jewelers because right now they are far too rare.
- When engraving a new skill gem, it has a chance to be 4L/5L/6L right away (corresponding to the ilvl of the uncut skill gem).
- Add a new currency item or recipe that can decrease a gem level

Items
Loot
Loot situation is better than in PoE 1 because we spend way less time clicking on loot objects on the ground. The amount of white/blue items is fine, but we could do with more rare items (especially during the campaign). After the campaign and entering the endgame, finding item upgrades is extremely difficult unless using trading or doing very weird things (like gambling hundreds of items from vendors).
Quality of items needs to be refined (both found and crafted). The main issue is the mods ranges. The item tier system is a good step in the right direction, but should be used as a base after some point in the character progression.
Suggestions :
- Item tiers are applied to every drop after some area level. Example : items that are ilvl 60+ are at least tier 3. Meaning the bottom 3 tiers of every mod cannot roll anymore. If necessary, reduce the amount of items dropping in maps. This should put a focus back on crafting with Exalts/Chaos orbs.
- The best item tiers can only be found on dropped items, and cannot be added from crafting.
- Add base item names for every Advanced/Expert base. Optionally we also need new 2D/3D art for these items.
- Have some way for players to determine what is the best tier of an affix (examples : how good is a T6 ? Or a T10 ? What is the best tier of a particular affix ?)
- Movement speed and charm slots should be implicits on boots/belt, except maybe on few select uniques that play on them.
- Reduce slightly attribute requirements for items (same as skill gems).

Item names can be misleading, the PoE 1 system was better because we can identify more clearly which bases can be an upgrade for our character.

Crafting
Crafting is barebones but not useless. Sometimes it works and we feel good, but we need more deterministic crafting to help compensate the fact that there isn’t any crafting bench anymore.
Suggestions :
- New crafting tools, components, vendor recipes, uses for the recombinating bench, that allow for filling voids in the character stats. Special encounters and mechanics can be used as content providing these tools (exemple : special crafting bench randomly spawning but guarded by monsters).
- The influenced currencies from PoE 1 could integrate well into PoE 2 and act as more deterministic crafting without breaking the game.
- Runes need to be removable because a common situation is : I found an upgrade but my resistances aren’t balanced anymore, which means I have to get rid of more items in order to be resistance capped again. Being able to remove runes (whether they are destroyed in the process or not) allows to keep using our current stuff.
- More raw currency drops in the campaign (in particular Regals and Exalts). If crafting has to be a major mechanic as soon as the first act, let us experiment and craft a lot of items. We need more regular updates if the game structure stays the same.

Ascendancy
Themes are very good and a step above PoE 1. Some notables need to be reworked when they feel too much situational, and sometimes contradictory with other systems (skills).
Ascension methods are fine but need tuning :
- Trial of the Sekhemas : Remove honour in the boss rooms (like the final encounter in Sanctum league).
- Trial of Chaos : Big rework of Ultimatum mods (remove those who break characters), faster escort missions, less penalties on characters, no more mods increasing monster speed (almost impossible to manage without game breaking mob control ability or absurd character damage).
- Third ascension method will need to be more deterministic, and less relying on random events/mods.

Monsters in general
Nice evolution from before. But we need :
- Better correlation between visual effect and damage (bigger and more telegraphed skill -> more damage)
- Less difference between the easiest and the hardest monsters in the same monster rarity.
- More highlighting of magic/rare monters, because they are very difficult to identify and play around.
Some monsters are too fast compared to our character. With the removal of quicksilver flasks and movement skills, monster speed needs to be adjusted for combat to feel better, especially for melee characters using skills with low AoE.
Rare monsters mods
Too similar to PoE 1 mods. They need to be adapted to the new monsters philosophy.
Rare monsters mods need to be less spammy and to follow the monsters stats changes (less damage, less speed, frozen in time…).
Bosses in general
They are very good and the best in the genre, period.
However, I found myself in some situations where I knew I played badly and was hit by a skill meant to kill me, but it didn’t. I would like for big telegraphed skills to oneshot every character, whatever its build and defenses are. Because it feels bad to allow players to bypass excellent boss mechanics with good gear/build even if they play poorly. I want good player gameplay to matter even with godly gear, even in the beginning of the campaign. Or else PoE 2 will turn out as its predecessor very quickly, where people only run builds that can ignore every boss mechanic. Which no one sane would like.

Graphics/performance
Graphics are very good and enough for the game genre.
Performance is hit and miss, it can be fine but it can very easily become bad or very bad.
AMD FSR helps maintaining framerate but the visual quality is weird (artefacts, blurry…)
Lots of assets/shaders loading at the beginning of each area, shouldn’t happen with 24 GB GPU memory and NVMe drive. Performance is decreased when assets are loading.
Suggestions :
- I prefer to have longer loading screens than to have framerate drops while combatting.
- Make it so we can better distinguish our character from environment/monsters. Example : very subttle outline or glow effect (enough to be seen).

Music/audio
Extremely good. But the audio balance is not optimal : sound effects are much more present than music/environmental sounds. Ambiance needs more work, especially in towns that feel empty even with other players.

Controls
Only tested WASD but it offers more control over character, especially combined with the fact that most skills can be used while moving.
Issues when targeting with some skills, auto targeting doesn’t work properly and makes the character go into walls and obstacles for some reason.

Unique items
Some of them are interesting but a lot aren’t build enabling.
Leveling uniques aren’t good enough.
Build defining uniques have extremely bad stats, discouraging from wanting to test them.
We need better uniques filling roles/utilities that Ascendancies or skill gems can provide.
High level uniques don't seem to exist for some reason...why ?

Flasks/charms system
Feels better than in PoE 1, and allows to concentrate more on pure gameplay rather that pressing buttons for random buffs and immunities. But don’t feel as impactful as they should, for some reason…

Interface
Old-school but simple and efficient. The new character panel and the character selection menu are a good example of nice progression.

Lore (environmental, dialogue, map)
Again, overall better than PoE 1.
But environmental lore is extremely lacking. Lots of places and areas don’t have more than the map tooltip, we need much more to feel being part of the area/continent.
Nothing negative to say about dialogue.
Cinematics between acts are a nice addition, we don’t need more, it’s better to focus on gameplay and avoid things that get our character out of the screen.

QoL/misc/bugs
- Opening the map (U) : why do we need a loading screeen ? Also we need better icons and a fix for special encounters completion.
- Better quest tracking system, not conflicting with map information.
- Difficulties travelling between past and present in Act 3 (exemple if we want to sell idols to the NPC).
- Weird situations sometimes when monsters push the character away (we can be pushed away over dozens of meters).
- Refund points for some optional quests, as an alternative to gold and a more obvious mechanic to change the allocated passives ?
- Better rewards when gambling items, all of them are blue items that are worse than those we can buy for a lesser price at the vendors. Rare items need to be at least 25% probability of outcome.
- A lot of area layouts don’t feel particularly unique, especially in act 3. They are too bland, and some of them are extremely similar in terms of branching/navigation. We also need a lot of visual clues to help identifying where to go (example in PoE 1 : soldiers corpses in the warehouses area).
- Some areas of the game involve too much unecessary walking : Trials of Chaos/Sekhema, Atlas Towers
- SSF feels fine during the campaign, but tough in the endgame (this situation is related to the loot issues)