0.4 feels pretty bad. overall the game feels off.

There are multiple reasons:

Vaal temple mechanic is unrewarding

- Rewards don't scale to the endgame.
- The temple is buggy (doors glitching, blocking players but not enemies, sometimes the other way round).
- The UX is horrible (which rooms juice which others? Why do only some rooms create connections to others? When are rooms removed, and how many?).
- The fact that you loose modified limbs on death is great for all builds that don't die. With my build I died to the architect less than a minute after i got a limb. Skill issue? Maybe. Still frustrating? 100%.


Extreme affix weighting on mandatory stats

Playing caster? Then you need some form of +Level to skills. If you get lucky and get anything above a +3 on a Wand, then you also need to get lucky with Increased Spell Damage and possibly the elemental damage type you want to run. Getting these 3 stats in higher tiers is already defying the odds. Getting them in better tiers even more. If you then hit cast speed or critical chance instead of Reduced attribute requirements or light radius then you might as play the lottery. I understand this is where the grind is. But the probabilities are astronomically low to get a decent roll:

Getting a +4 to all spells or a +5 to any of the elements on a wand has a weighting of 550/73000 (according to poe2db: https://poe2db.tw/Wands#ModifiersCalc), which is a 0.753% chance if my math isn't failing me, for just the first suffix. That is a SINGLE affix. This leads into:


How much time do you expect players to put into a league?

If you play an off-meta build finishing the campaign already takes a bit longer. Progression slows down because off-meta might not do as much damage, might require better gear, or might simply require more currency/items for experimentation. All of these translate to time played. Again, you could consider this part of the grind, and for some people this will be fun, but there are two aspects here that make this much harder:

- The game is based around a trading economy with a high degree of scarcity for good items. That means these good items will be expensive. And that means they will be more affordable for builds which are faster at making that currency.

- It's a seasonal game. The grind starts entirely from scratch after 4 months. If it takes 30-40 hours on the first character of each league to get to the point that a player can run some juiced maps in endgame, then this is a large time investment for most players just to get to the starting line of endgame (where the fun begins). If i had much more limited time available, and somehow still opted for league instead of standard, then i would definitely play meta every time.


Experimentation is severely punished

High gold costs for respeccing or item gambling during the campaign, and a low drop rate of uncut gems and runes punish the player too much for wanting to experiment. For the average player this problem becomes an even bigger issue in the endgame where some good uniques are so rare that they cost entire savings on the market but are otherwise inaccessible. No way to figure out if an item will be a good upgrade before making that investment.


Abundance of weak Uniques and scarcity of useful ones

I do see Uniques, just hardly any of the useful ones. The more common ones are so weak that they often do not compare to decent rare items (especially when it means missing out on +Level of Spells) and synergies are too weak to make up for the loss in straight power. The less common ones can be so rare that players might not see any during 100 hours of a league.


Illusion of build variety through an unbalanced passive tree

The passive tree is massive, and at first glance this can be either overwhelming or very exciting. On second glance, you quickly realize that most nodes are simply not relevant for your build, so they become immediately uninteresting. For the remaining nodes it's more of a tradeoff between "how far away is this node" and "how good is this node". It's not about crafting your own build fantasy. If it were then we would be seeing a more even spread across all builds (see the passive heatmap: https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaal?heatmap=true).

Then there are the attribute "travel" nodes. These are merely mandatory because the connect nodes to each other or are required by arbitrary item requirements, hardly because they give good bonuses. Stat stackers were nerfed in previous patches so now these nodes are literally just for traveling or micromanaging the item requirements. They add nothing to build variety.


Illusion of build variety through skills

Infusions are at the center of the Sorceress' skills. It's one thing tying Infusions to an ascendancy but tying them to skills shoe-horns players into a specific play style. Gems like Spark are almost completely useless without infusions. Sure there are ways to generate infusions, but what if i find them clunky to generate and use? It should be a choice of do i want to use infusions to do more damage, or do i want to find an alternate way of doing damage. This is not possible when the spark skill includes the fusion mechanic itself, doing 300%+ of damage when infused (through increased flat damage and increased number of projectiles).


Lack of progression

Right now it feels like if I can run T5 maps then i can almost run T10 maps. And if can run T10 maps i can almost run T15 maps (exaggerating). I think the ceiling for the endgame needs to go way up. At the same time there should be much more avenues to increase the player power. Perhaps by:

- introducing more useful affixes. Abyss did this to some degree, just that many of them are not scaling strongly enough compared to the base affixes, leaving most of them undesirable.
- adding more power to the passive tree, and remove "cheap" power sources from items (+ to level scaling)


Wanting the player to solve 1000 little problems

The design philosophy includes dealing with friction. I think to a certain degree this is fine. The way it is implemented at the moment is overtuned:

In my build I need to fix attribute requirements, infusion generation, mana regeneration (mana costs are still too high), item rarity (magic find stat). I need to implement skill combos, consider respecc costs, outshine the odds of badly weighted affix tiers, etc. All of this before even knowing if my build is going to work or not. Depending on your class/skills you have more or less of these problems to solve.

+1

Please GGG buff the league mechanic atleast.. its so unrewarding and theres literally no reason to do it :(

+1