[400h later] Top 5 W's & Top 5 Improvement opportunities + Why I'm dropping out until next patch.

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DavexGG#0471 wrote:

Hey, will keep this short (as possible): top 5 wins, 5 improvement opportunities & the one reason (IMO) keeping PoE2 from having an even higher retention rate.

Big wins:
1. The fact GGG didn't even care about filling the MTX store to capitalize on launch + new players & made it so every MTX you had in PoE1 carried over. Players are the ones who have to ask for more stuff to be put there. This blows my mind & tells you where these guys are at.
2. Pause button & WASD! When seamless controller-kb/m transition comes, it'll be perfection.
3. Progression pace from start until late game is much smoother than PoE1 & the game overall isn't as unnecessarily convoluted / cluttered.
4. Attention to detail in everything from dungeons to campaign areas and maps is just incredible. Boss design is absolutely on point, all of them are amazing, especially Xesht from breach. The only exception is Arbiter & his laser of death.
5. PoE2 is clearly Johnathan & Mark's magnum opus & the design philosophy behind the game shows it. The world, the classes & the ascendancies are all really well thought out and introduce new ways of playing. Sure they can be balanced better but the base is extremely solid. E.G. Invoker as an ascendancy is as close to perfection as I've ever seen a class across ANY game.


Improvement opportunities:
1. Game performance optimization & how it bottlenecks CPU. This is by a huge margin the #1 priority IMO. I have a RTX4070s, am5 CPU, gigabyte ethernet, 64gb RAM and many maps like Savannah obliterates my setup. Every other game runs everything on ultra.
2. Trade system + economy. We really, really, really, really need an in game trade system. The trading UX is absolutely terrible & PoE2 is trading reliant to such an extreme extent that it creates a huge bottleneck. Not to mention the scammers & price manipulators.
3. Endgame map juicing system + mechanics accessibility:
Enduring bad maps to do good maps. IMO, I don't care about 1portal mechanic. Add bosses to every map, make it so the map mechanics aren't lost on death and balance out map layouts so some of them (Mire, Vaal fac, etc.) aren't such an absolute pain to run. It's terrible having to endure bad maps until you can boost towers to do the good maps so you don't miss out on currency.
I'm 400h in and still haven't had a single audience with the king after doing hundreds of rituals, let alone 4 to access full mechanic. I refuse to buy them. The mechanic-joining threshold must be leaner & running them more fun. Anything that isn't breach is quite meh.
4. Not enough power-fantasy / blasting feeling without top-end builds. Love the methodical campaign + boss combat. However, as you progress and get stronger in the endgame, most people are running blink to have some shred of mobility or running spark/heralds to have some AoE. Melee classes are non-existent, literally. There's a huge disparity of UX across the player-base in which builds they'll be able to run. Most of them will never get to experience just how fun PoE can actually be.
5. Crafting. Full determinism is bad, some is good when compared to full RNG. Miss alteration orbs, Omens come short, something else should be done here instead. Think LE nailed crafting in most ways, would be good to see similar here.


IMO, the Reason keeping PoE2 from being even more of a goated game & having even higher retention:

Point 3.4 of the improvement opportunities is the main reason for me. I have a couple hundred divines and want to experience some of the more OP builds like temporalis blink setup or an actually good stat stacker build and just can't after so much time put into the game.

I'm not sure where I stand vs the average player but after levelling 4 classes to 80+, 1 to 96, the threshold to experience real power (insert-palpatine-meme-here) seems too far away. Sure I can dump 50-60 more hours into the game and get there but isn't that over the top? I don't expect the average player to be able to dump anywhere close to this many hours every league and, consequently, won't be able to experience anything close to the real strong builds.

One can argue those real powerhouses are reserved for 10+hours a day gamers and I agree as there needs to be reward for investment as well. The problematic is that the difference between a real power-house build, a mid power-house build & a normal-high build is insanely huge. The cost of unique jewels like a good megalomaniac, against the darkness, from nothing dia's, etc. is absurd.

All of this to say that IMO adjustments could be made to the accessibility of strong combo items so that not only hideout-traders, merchers, RMTers or efficiency chasing group players have access to them. I see so many players on Discord offering free xp carries so they can grab 5 leechers on their party so their loot-per-map basis goes up. Is this really what's intended to be able to get to those currency levels?

In my case, I've already played a blink/ice strike for too long and would need to endure slowly moving through enough maps, grinding tower positions to juice other maps to get some currency to drop so I can get there. Yeah, could do hideout-trading but the goal is to play, not doing day-trading... Sadly, I'm realizing that the most logical way to go about things would be to trade a couple dozen hours every league to bankroll the rest of the builds I'd like to try out. It just doesn't seem good UX or that it should be needed.
Not sure what the solution(s) would be here but have some hope it'll be better in our future EA 'leagues' with whatever changes come our way.


That's about it, if you made it this far, GG(G?)!
If not, TL;DR; The game's an absolute monster & a blast to play. Hope some stuff gets course corrected & we can enjoy it even more.