POE2 near unplayable

I have spent around 2-3 hours following various guides to stop the freezing and crashing to login. Nothing works. I did the shaders, chat log, lowered video settings, updated drivers, disabled other programs, updated Windows 11. I did not have any of these issues in the release of POE2, and these have plagued me since 0.3.

The game freezes. I curse. I hit escape to hopefully pause the game. Video goes black. Map is wiped. And sometimes the pause doesnt work. It loads in enemies before I can even move, then they proceed to kill me and give me a death penalty. And sometimes to add insult to injury, I can not zone back in to the instance from my hideout, losing all of my map.

This is very frustrating and kills end game play. I have been playing this game a while and every single person I know I tell to stay away until this game stabilizes.

If you are going to freeze me, make me immune until I actively activate movement. If you are going to kill my map with a failure to join instance, then refund me that map. But mostly just stop these issues entirely.

SSF

Happens to me too- I think something reverted. It had been pausing when this would happen.

Now it does the gears, I alt+tab twice, its always the same, gears again, black/red background with fire trails... takes like, forever and restores.

Usually a fair amount before the visuals restore, the game is active again. I can heal and move and attack- can't see anything. Then the visuals snap in.

You can open the passive tree during this time too, I'm not sure if that pauses, but I think it might.

Same for me,
Game is almost unplayable now. Locks up 10-15x per map, sometimes less, depending on the map. Seepage has locked up 25x in the last hour. Cant get through it. I reset all my graphic settings to default. Have tried unchecking multithreading, and several other things you find in various forums, no luck.
Please fix this.

Yep, I have been killed and lost map, including Kulemak, more times than I can count since the .3 and other versions update. Game freeze, gears, laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggggggggggggggg, and ultimately death.

It seems to do with the multi-threading. If uncheck it, most maps seem to work but graphics suffer.
I have a minion build, powered zealots that cast spark, so fills up screen with sparks, usually thats when it seems to lock up then close, or like the others said, pause, then come back with only fire sparks on screen and map is now hidden.
Hope this helps figure out what is going on.

i was crashing too almost every map, sometimes 2-3 times in same map.
i switched from direct12 to vulkan and no more crashes but lag is still very horrible

Curious! Vulkan Render crashes PoE2 after latest patch 0.3.1, so had to switch from Vulkan to DirectX12 Render - can run game now but it lags as hell.

Lost awesome map and corruption node due to lag, I feel frustration.

besides the crashes, every time i enter a new intance, my skills are removed from the set buttons and i have to set them again!