Feedback on co-op balance and overall experience

Recently I got the opportunity to play through the campaign with a friend and check how the co-op experience looks like from a league starter perspective.

I don't have much experience in the PoE2, but I'm somewhat a decent PoE1 player, I understand how damage scaling works, defensive layers, etc.

For context, I started with a ranger focusing on cold skills and my friend was rushing hollow palm with a monk.

Last disclaimer, I don't plan to give any solutions here, I will just describe the experience and raise the problems as they appear.

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Cold Skills and underwhelming archetypes early on

The league trailer presented some new cold skills mechanics, and the range was even shown on the trailer using said skills, so I decided to try it out.

Instead of the "go-to" lightning skills that were given, I tried to make my bow build work with cold skills instead.

Problem 1: It isn't until, at least mid act 2, that ranger will get access to the rest of the cold skills archetype. Which means, even when I was trying to focus on cold abilities in the early game, I was basically crippling myself for doing it so. The game clearly wants me to use lightning skills when starting with ranger.

As a side note, this problem also appeared when I tried to use elemental abilities with my Witch, the game clearly wants me to pick Essence Drain/Contagion or a Minion archetype, anything else feels like I'm doing something wrong.

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Problem 2: Monsters have too much life when playing in group

Maybe the balance is taking in consideration that by playing in group, new combos can be taken advantage of. For example the go-to co-op build is 1 player placing lighting rods, and the other consuming it.

That is great and all, but the average player does not create an entire character around their friend being there to finish the combo.

When playing co-op, even if it is exclusively co-op, I usually prefer playing with a complete character, capable of dealing damage on my own, tanking on my own, making combos on my own.

This was proven true, when one day we decided to try our characters alone, and we suddenly started killing every white mob in a single hit.

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Problem 3 The abilities are, underwhelming?

For at least half the campaign the abilities looks waay too underwhelming.

While monsters are drop kicking, burring underground, calling explosions. Bosses are doing all those cool things, calling cold storms, summoning wolfes, body slamming giant axes, calling in another spirit to drop a giant AOE, grabbing a pillar and smashing the ground with it.

The player, myself, is just sitting here, charging my attack for 3s to do 200 damage, or throwing a sequence of tiny lightning tendrils on the ground in the hopes it hit an enemy.

This may be by design, and I understand if that's the case. My point is, this game is a fantasy game, and until very late in the game, the NPC is the only one with access to cool abilities.

For many instances, my friend and I said something in the lines: "Look at this enemy ability, I wish I could use that"

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Problem 4 Reviving doesn't make much sense

If you die in a boss you're basically dead, and if you want your friend to participate in the fight you better just die as well and restart.

Even when we were able to freeze or stun the boss, we still didn't have enough time to revive each other before the boss would unfreeze and hit us, cancelling the revive.


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Conclusion: From a general perspective, but even more prevalent in co-op, the game takes too much time to bring you up to speed.

The early game (act 1, 2 and 3) is a slog, your character doesn't work unless you follow a specific, very clear, path. And even when it's working, it is just plain boring after you used that archetype 5 times in a row.

The cool abilities are gated behind at least 5 or so hours of gameplay (for an experience player), and only then your character will start to feel like a "hero".

In my personal experience playing solo, the game started to feel soooo much better when I hit act 4. A lot more abilities were available to choose, followed by new tiers of support gems and having the second lab done. Only at that point I felt like my character was having a better experience than the average white mob.


The game is great, but the flow isn't it for me. Something is wrong in there.