My 0.4 Feedback

Game feels better to play, than 0.1 and 0.2 (I skipped 0.3, couldn't even motivate myself to log in).
Mainly I believe this is due to the addition of the interlude and removal of the awful repetition that you started with as filler content. At least there is an end in sight, rather than the dread of repetition. This is purely psychological, as I was expecting the repeat of acts 1-3, so this positive is just in retrospect, and may not actually be reflective of my feelings.

What feels bad!

LOOT
- Seldom have I completed a map and had a full inventory. When I have had a full inventory, all of it is just broken down for half a generic crafting orb. I haven't picked up and equipped a piece of gear since about level 30. (Currently lvl 80ish something). Several times I wasted the meager amounts currency I had acquired to try and craft something. Just giving up and buying some mid tier filler gear from trade. Access to crafting currency - Awful

- I would love to have tried different skills with the druid. Still hampered with way too few Skill/Support/Jeweler gem drops - These should be plentiful - At least in PoE 1 I can swap around skills freely and level them without being hampered by random bad luck - Awful

I far prefer finding gear, than crafting it. I prefer crafting gear to buying it. The trouble is that finding ones own gear is nearly impossible, and crafting the gear is much the same, with the current dearth of currency. I would love some way to weight gear drops similar to mechanics from the tree in keepers league. nothing to guarantee drops of course - just weight toward armor over evasion, or mana over life. a simple tree, maybe tied to act progression in the campaign, so by the time you are hitting maps you have a far better chance of finding usable gear with combinations of stats and gear bases.

TRIALS
- I hate these, the implementation, the even existence of them is an insult. You want me to take an hour of my time, to farm up this garbage resistance to a mechanic not used anywhere else in the game, to get access to what should be base class features. I just don't get it.
I remember reading an interview with one of the developers, where they said the game was so hard to balance because the huge range of player power at any given stage - Why not just give ascendancies at act 2, act 5 (eventual), Map tier 1 map tier 10 bosses.. Rather than tie it to these weird side games that a vast majority of people (from what I read and players I talk to), despise. It's not PoE 1, where several years after launch ascendancies are being added and you have designed the labyrinth as a 'league' thing. Smooth out the power gain across all classes. Adding that progression to the main game would help give goals to achieve and provide motivation for campaign progression, something I feel is sorely lacking as the campaign just feel tedious and unrewarding. - Awful

CAMPAIGN
- Map areas feel way too large and there is way too much backtracking in these large maps. Many times in the campaign it seems you have to from 'Area A' to 'Area B' to 'Area C' back to 'Area B' then back to 'Area A' all to get to 'Area D'. Acts 2 and 3 both seem really bad for this. Really feels like you aren't getting anywhere and are just running in circles doing pointless busy work. There is very little of that in PoE 1, and while the campaign in that is tedious ass well, at least it feels you are going somewhere with a purpose rather than running in circles, just to 'fill out' the campaign.

- The large areas also have lots of dead ends, with nothing in them, no mobs, no bosses, no loot, nothing. The 'exploration' feels tedious and unrewarding.

MEANINGFUL COMBAT
- You use skills to kill mobs, to gain charges to use better skills. Most of the time the mobs die, you get your charges, the charges expire, then the next pack comes along. Makes the whole generate/spend cycle pretty worthless. Then the boss comes along and has no minions with him, so you can't generate the charges at the time when you need the bigger abilities to kill the boss. Just seems a disjointed system (And a very frequent one in both PoE 1 and 2).

- Too many ground effects, many of which look the same. You would not believe the amount of time I spent as a bear druid standing in fissures I believed were my own, when in fact they were flame attacks from the boss.

- AoE Spam from bosses - Many bosses seem to have nearly screen wide attacks. Cool, I'll dodge them, trouble is the arenas are so small they are usually still full of ground based DoT effects that there really isn't anywhere to dodge to. Rather than actually learning attack patterns, when to strike, when to move, like you do in other games, it really comes down to when to mash the life flask button. Then mash attack buttons. It just doesn't feel like combat where you can dodge, fight at range, fight up close, block... Just a battle of attrition where your flasks hopefully last longer than their degen ground effects, and hopefully their one-shot slams will be telegraphed enough that you can dodge, somewhere...

PERSONAL CAMPAIGN LOW POINT
Viper Napuatzi - I Remember despising this boss from my first campaign play through, and nothing had changed. AoE spam in a tiny arena - One of the games big issues center stage. The fact that it's mostly chaos damage and at that point I had no gear with chaos resistance makes it really annoying. Buying chaos resist gear from trade, made it trivial. There seems to be no middle ground. The tiny arena seems to mean you are always taking damage, and a damage type, that at this point you have little resistance to.

SUMMARY
I would love to play another character but the thought of slogging through the unrewarding campaign, doing the irritating trials, just to get to the unrewarding endgame. I can't justify the time expenditure versus fun I would be having doing anything else.

The game as a whole feels like work, not, like fun.

I'll check out things in a couple of leagues time and see what has changed.

Oh I didn't even mention the league mechanic - I put in some rooms, for some reason some of them disappeared, some rooms seem to upgrade some rooms, but without knowing what's coming, there is no real strategy to that (it seems). Sometimes there is an upgrade thing, sometimes not. Sometimes a boss, sometimes not, always pretty unrewarding though. Overall mechanic - Dull and convoluted. I would provide more feedback, but I really don't know whats going on with it.

+1 to basically everything. at this point we are not saying anything that hasnt been said before or isnt a known issue. hopefully everything gets some attention in due time. try not to get too upset that the cake tastes bad when we are tasting it before its fully baked. i try to focus more on the fact that we are helping guide where the end result will be with our feedback

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Gruffle#5536 wrote:

The game as a whole feels like work, not, like fun.

Yep. And as cynic said, this has been the core of the complaints since the start. Only in 0.3 (before the round of nerfs in 3.26) was it like this feeling like an actual fun game.