honest Feedback

Hi GGG, hi community

After 750h of playing EA I try to give honest and based feedback.

First I think you and your team changed the whole ARPG genre with POE2 and set a mile stone for the whole genre. Atmosphere, visuals, character design, voice acting, even story telling is done very well, in short I love how you designed the campaign. I think it is the best in all ARPGs I played so far.

But there are many issues with the gameplay and performance in my opinion. I try to focus on short bullet points to make it easier to interact with my arguments and to create a based ground for solution focused discussion.

1) combo game play/ "meaningfull" combat
you slowed down the pace for POE2 to create a combat that should be based on interaction with mobs. But even in campaign you are swarmed by mobs so many times that playing different skills dont make sense. Just scale damage as high as possible is mostly the best option. Kill them fast so you dont have to interact is the motivation for players

2) Performance
As I said the visuals in the game are great but all these area effects, on death effects, and swarming maps in late game are vary taxing for the engine, especially the CPU and grafic card. So through lags and frame drops most combined wth all the swarming and high paced mobs in maps cause a very frustrating situation for players.

3) sprint mechanic
The idea of sprint is old but gold and the mechanic itself is great even with the drawback. But please, implement a 2 button solution. For example dodge with spacebar and then press another button to sprint.
If you analyze most of the deaths I promise over 80% are due to heavy stun because of sprint locked to dodge button. Not because of "Skill issue" some people say but because of lags or unwanted sprint while trying to navigate through maps or crowded mob areas. For example if you try to dodge several times in a row as a melee player you easily trigger the sprint mechanic as accident. As range player woth much distance, sou dont have this issue.

4) class Balance
GGG, you and your team know to promote yourself. You can sell nerfs as buffs, shortage as benefits... you know how to navigate the emotional crowd of your player base. I know it is not easy to balance this game but what I dont get is... You buff classes which where allready very strong but nerf classes which suffered since release. Some people always know how to break even a weak class with a niche mechanic. They know how to min max this class to break the game but for the average player it is not achivable. But it seems you nerf a class based on the best 0.1 % of playerbase. So it seems many classes are very weak with average gear, but allready good classes can be played even with sloppy gear... I dont get your intention here. Please nerf Meta builds, not niche builds.

I want to start a rational and solution focused discussion here.
Thanks for your time and feedback

I`m watching some feedback on this page..
Afer 750hrs of play, only these 4 points you have to address? :) I have way less and I think there are a lot of points that need a lot of love:
- Uniques (very bad drop and not almost useless) / There are no build enabling uniques either
- lack of "modernness". Not sure how to call it, but UI feels outdated (you need to to a lot of manual work), lack of any type of Highscore or Ladder system, which would otherwise make the game a lot more engaging.
- Loot in general is too chaotic and too abundant
- Passive Tree is too hard to navigate, You need at least a separate spread sheet to remember all your interesting nodes you want to learn further on
- Crafting .. not really much to say here (and this says a lot). There is also same problem with the lack of UI here.
- Lack of a Party finder;
etc.. etc..