Core PoE 2 issues

Balance:
I understand the game is under a really tight schedule due to production pipeline and having to deal with PoE 1 content at the same time.
But this is making returning to content and test the early access really frustrating, we are already at 4 major patches where the balance of Life builds and ES still the same. While you can stack 15k+ ES and Life builds with Titan you can maybe reach 4.5k ish HP pool while armor doesn't even compared to the defensive capabilities compared to EV and ES.
And this is starting to be felt, druid in theory is a Life/ES build. But given how weaker is Life, its better just to migrate full ES and this translates to making the upper left part of the tree not satisfying to put points into.
That makes me wonder when Gladiator and Marauder arrive will I have to deal with the same frustration? Both Druid ascendancies are on the really weak side, and its funny wanting to do a shapeshifting class you arrive to the conclusion that its much better to be any other ascendancy except the druid ones.
So should I keep returning to test something where not even the devs care about?




Class restrictions:
I still don't understand this decision of having everything restricted to a identity when the fundamentals of Path of Exile is freedom and customization.I look at the hammer skills and there is nothing there saying that it couldn't be done with an axe for example. And this was a gripe until this patch, now I'm noticing this is becoming a harmful design for the game with the druid. Why the hell the druid skills are attached to forms? The class where it was meant to be attuned with the elements end up with Bear=Fire, Dragon=Lightning and Wolf Ice.
The peak example of this is devour skill, why we have to shapeshift to a dragon when both bear and wolf can in theory do the same?
Why can't we have a Polar Bear build? Ice Dragon? Bleed Wolf? You are undermining your own game identity by capping the customization.
And what made me start this rant was the devour skill, why the hell a bear and a wolf can't use devour? It should be an universal skill.
Review this policy its destructive to the game future.


Combat:
I don't mind doing combos for combat, chaining different attacks to do something. But its very strange when you have auto attack builds just outperforming those builds.So once again I ask myself why I should bother myself to do all these moves when for example an auto attack dragon destroys everything with one click? Its an insult to player choice, when you have this obvious difference in power. We could argue about abstracts of being fun to do something but still don't remove the elephant in the room saying that you are being a sucker for engaging with the combos.So please decide GGG what you wanna do, either we go back to spamming single abilities or we engage with combos but the balance is telling us something else.


Mapping vs Bossing:
I feel I put more effort doing maps instead of bosses, so I feel more threatened by the map environment and the boss is just a silly victory lap where you melt it. Isn't to be the opposite? I shut down my brain during mapping and when the boss arrive I get fully engaged with dodging and doing combos to optimize my damage against this encounter where probably the brunt of work from the animation team is allocated? Isn't this just wasting your boss encounter developer work?

I know just wrote negatives in this post, but given I have like 350 hours in game (not even close to some enthusiasts). I can safely say I had fun in some regards, but these things are becoming harder and harder to ignore.

How do you feel about combat being centered around the Dodge Roll? In PoE, most players had at least one (of a variety of) movement skills which they used for tactical mobility. It appears that PoE Deuce replaces all of that with a one-size-fits-all game mechanic by default. Seems cheesy to me. ='[.]'=

Agreed completely. Too much skills restriction to class and weapon.

As a guy with 1325 hours in PoE2 spread mostly between 0.2 and 0.3 i have to say i feel like the design team is very confused at what they want this game to be. At the end of the day they should make a decision and stick with it. As the OP of the thread very correctly said the most glaring issue is how restrictive skills being attached to weapons that hard makes things but in my opinion the support skills also need some more help as we need a bigger variety of support options for a wider variety of builds. Especially in the chaos damage department i've noticed things are severely lacking. So first things first i think the support gem system in general will benefit from a wider arsenal.

Now another thing i think needs fixing is the tree. I have no clue what kind of hateboner the PoE2 devs have with life nodes, they just clearly like ES way more which is why they shove it down our throats at every single node. Also there is this bizarre decision of hording all the ms nodes bottom right, instead of also giving other pathings the choice to invest in some ms.

As for 0.4. It's disappointing. I actually decided to put the game in the backburner and wait for 0.5 as the temple is a complete joke, there is no changes to look forward to play towards other than talismans i guess being a thing. Also the maps are way too big for the smaller pack sizes so you'd have to shrink em to accomodate this change. Right now it feels like i am traveling a sea of nothing and occasionally fight a mob.

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How do you feel about combat being centered around the Dodge Roll? In PoE, most players had at least one (of a variety of) movement skills which they used for tactical mobility. It appears that PoE Deuce replaces all of that with a one-size-fits-all game mechanic by default. Seems cheesy to me.

Feels like dodge roll is there for bosses but at the cost of a slower mapping experience. At first I admit I was on board with it, but given I started wishing the bosses were the focus of the game and mapping just a chill experience brainpower wise I reconsidered and I'm in favor for them, even if they deactivate during bosses.