Gave PoE 2 another try for 0.4, it's still just frustratingly uninspired

I played PoE 2 in December last year and honestly hated the changes from PoE 1. Frustratingly railroaded skills, complete absence of usable loot, horrible balance, and the dodge rolls... good lord what a complete disaster of a mechanic. I figured I'd give it another shot this year, and basically nothing useful has changed for the better.

Boss design is still absolute grindy trash. It's just 20 minutes of dodge-rolling against one-shot mechanics. Is that supposed to be fun? If I wanted to play a trashy console game, I'd go play a trashy console game. My build is basically meaningless, since rolling is the only mechanic that makes a difference.

Itemization and class design is still overly narrow and rigid. Support skills do basically nothing, every skill has a laundry list of constraints to prevent any kind of clever combination of mechanics, and passives are just brutally bland. In PoE 1, it's incredibly fun to see which strange combinations other people are putting together. In PoE 2, it's just a vast wasteland of identical clones.

Game performance is still incredibly bad. Load screens are literally minutes, and full crashes are common. The whole "early access" thing is no excuse here---you've had over a year to fix this, and after that long, it's an intentional decision not to prioritize it. The feedback has certainly been consistent and clear on that.


At the end of the day, I'm just sad. Path of Exile 1 was iconic. It was a game that had depth that went way beyond anything else out there. This game? This vision? It's "dodge-roll and don't loot". No choice, no depth, just generic drivel that plays more like a copycat console platformer. And the worst part is that there doesn't seem to be any path forward to improvement. The core principles that the game seems to cling to are just fundamentally not enjoyable. There's been basically no improvement in the last year, and that does not inspire hope for the future.


See you in 2026. Maybe next year will see a change in direction.