salmonbear5433: When I died in poe1, it sucked but I kept playing. When I die in Poe2 and I loose not just the xp but the map bonuses, the boss fight, the way stone, and any loot inside.

This has led me to basically call it for the night anytime I die. It's better than before the patch but there's still random offscreen one shots that cut through my 3k hp and 5k ES like butter.

I Want to play more but the game wants to waste my time too much

harrybalsach7499: The game is not great. Its a good foundation but there so much testing and adjustment to be done. Its not even close to being ready for release. The GGG glazers are just delusional.

sombrego2260: I would argue that not playing anything meta is way too punishing at the moment. I get that they want to wait to balance bla bla bla but come on, they have telemetry they must see that people are playing the same builds to an extreme extent right?

Everybody and their mother is playing Archmage Sparks or some BS attack build with insane gear in trade league.

If you dare playing this game like any other ARPG (i.e without spending half of your day trading and making your own build) the game is absurdly punishing and there's no good reason for it. The game isn't advertised as a trade centric game and there is no good reason for 70% of skill gems to be dog shit compared to the meta builds. Meta builds are fine, as long as they don't do 10-100 times more damage than non meta stuff. At this point they could put a 100% damage buff on most skills they would still not be meta. They have to do something before everybody gets burned out (and I feel it's startng to be the case already).

demos113: Certain areas of the campaign are too damned big and i get bored half way through them, needs a few cuts.

danowat4302: GGG have got a hard-on for ruthless, this has trickled down to the base game of PoE2, they might like self flagellation, most people don't.

sergiopuzatty: Just rage uninstalled after 400 hours of playing. Such a relief. Campaign hours was good, all that are after were most depressing and frustrating time of my gaming life that i spent in vain attempts to find some justification for what is happening. Never saw such amount of absolute dogshit in a potentially good game. Classes design, loot and itemization, combat, mobs and their affixes, defenses, progression and other things, everything is fucked at some degree. Some stuff fucked so hard that It looks like developers has no clue what they are doing, they just put stuff in the game without thoughts in perspective and trying to see overall picture. Never will touch this abomination again. Still better than D4

estellewade5885: XP loss is terrible in my opinion

mikeg8343: Thank god the criticism is getting vocal, can’t stand the “it’s early access, it’s fine” it’s not fine. They had many years to provide a new game, they officially stated they wanted a stand-alone sequel, but they gave us poe 1.5.

Before I rant and provide my 200 cents; let’s highlight the good things ! Mapping is more interesting with the map and the biomes and stuff but it is not interesting enough. It reminds me of hero’s and might and magic but doesn’t actually have any elements to it really it’s just an extra interface to map device which is very cop out.

Combat is moving in a good direction in my opinion, like the combat mechanics and the give and take not just zoom-blasting.

Bossing, I love the bosses the boss designer should design more aspects of the game.

Now that we have the very few positives let’s talk about how they severely dropped the ball, this was supposed to be a new game worthy of the arpg crown, but if d4 released in this state the community would lose their mind!!! But I haven’t seen that from the community yet? Some sort of strange blizzard-like loyalty?

Where is the innovation? How did they spend 6 years and give us only a variation of poe1 that is actually disgustingly REDUCED? There is no crafting really, there is not ONE single new mechanic in the game? How is that justified when releasing a NEW standalone game(oh it’s early access it’s fine) early access what? A worse version of the old game? It’s confusing. They could’ve given us any type of innovation whatsoever any mechanic that isn’t Deli or breach. Especially considering both these mechanics just throw quantity of enemies just rushing you creating a dps check which leads me to my next core issue with the game.

SCALING, doesn’t exist. The gem links/plethora of additive damage you don’t feel it, you can stack it so much and it simply doesn’t matter cus it’s not enough to one shot the screen which is necessary to beat the only content in the game almost, which is get “howa/pillar” or get “archmage” both these “only” options .. oh yeah Herald’s too

whoopassgaming1: I never thought that I would say "I love lab, Bring it back!" lol

Alex-dm3dr: I don't understand what was wrong with 6 portals nobody complained the game was too easy, and those that wanted a challenge always had hardcore. GGG doesn't know the concept of "if it aint broke don't fix it".

InsPoE: Something I've noticed is how quickly exp/h falls off when you are forced to do lower tier maps. I recall hitting 90 running mechanics in white/yellow maps for PoE1. But in PoE2 my exp bar barely moves if I drop two or three tiers below where the game thinks I should be.

Uphold-your-Rights: Story time.

Running the 3rd stage, 4th room of the trial of Sukmyass, i died clicking on the fountain that restores honour.

No, no monsters had followed me into the room. Ive seen that and wait a few seconds to make sure the room is clear.

I clicked on the fountain and died.

These shit trials and/or honour bullshit need to go.

worldreg: I enjoyed POE2 but realized for the time I spent , I didn't really accomplish much. The game at present respects your time a lot less than POE 1. Unless major changes not sure I would do this grind again.

fuzzylumpkins6034: It is too punishing. And "Git gud" is not a response or answer. We have to invest an insane amount of time into a build/character and at a point we can lose an entire days play time in 1 sec by dying. At level 93 if I die to unavoidable damage/crash/glitch, I lose 2 -3 hours worth of experience gain in tier 18 maps. I do not just lose the exp and 3 hours of running them, I lose dozens of hours worth of mats used to level and vaal all those T16 keys plus maps with 2 to mobs.

The loss of 280,000 players in 1 month says half the audience agrees. There will always be sweaty andys that are jobless and follow streamers to copy paste and play trade site so they will say the game is fine and git gud. I am SSF and do not copy paste builds. Getting to 93 and having cleared all bosses gives me a satisfaction of earning what I have however being at a massive disadvantage (not having access to trade with that awful trade site set up) I am penalised as harshly as the players that can buy their way to the real endgame.

I will not just present a complaint, I will offer a solution that I have brought to forums. The first death per level could have no penalty. Giving us 1 free death per level post 70. It would at least acknowledge we have deaths that are sometimes out of our control and also not punish us for learning fights. I have died in fights that I could not repeat for weeks due to mats lost. Really? wtf. It is deprecating.

Losing the experience would not bother me at all if I did not also lose 10 hours worth of mats and a map/boss with it

dimaunwill: I don't think that game is hard. It's tedious. Running around giant maps looking for rare mobs is tedious. Trying to collect shards for deli\breach on nonmeta build is tedious. Running roguelike sanctum\ultimatum for ascendancy points is tedious. Lottery style "crafting" is tedious. Trading is tedious. The whole game is tedious. Add the lack of content on top of that and you get a burnout player.

brain_segfault: The game is hard to LEARN. It really bugs me when the veteran resp is "you'll get good eventually". No Combat Log. Visual clarity goes DOWN (e.g. deli maps). You have ~1s to read 3-6 affix which could be "prox bubble corpses damage on teusday".

They want to emulate Souls games? Fine. Souls games however have a fairly short reset in the loop which allows faster learning.

mikesanders1205: Loss of time is the biggest punishment imo. That's why exp loss is my least favorite. If I die halfway through a map i can still feel i made some progress if i got exp. Chances are whatever loot i get from a single map isn't going to make my character stronger. You can always get another map or pick another node but you can't get back time wasted.

mej684: Really with they'd get rid of charms and go with poe1's flasks. The movement is so slow.

jessehackett6941: In order to progress i literally had to abandon my level 72 merc and switch to monk, now I'm a double herald ice strike meta monk. Deleting everything before they are a problem, and it's getting so boring. Idk what mechanics bosses have or mobs have...i just know pull the trigger, get loot. It's getting really boring 200 hrs in

leiyoh3311: you have the best take on this whole "game too punishing" ive seen so far.

dpolenz79: The map design is the biggest issue with this game. Navigating almost every single zone feels awful no matter what speed you have as a character. Uneven ground and walled off sections requiring you to walk half way across a zone for a tiny blue opening barely visible on the mini map.

DavidWoodMusic: I reinstalled PoE1 this morning.

Only league I played was about 300 hours in TOTA.

Took me 90 minutes to finish Act one as a Templar, and I honestly enjoyed it more than the 200 hours I spent in Maps in PoE2.

GrindinRyan: Overcoming challenge is fun, and the act bosses are where they achieved this beautifully. Players don't enjoy being punished however, and will take every action they can to avoid it. That's why like you said players are all funneling to the same 4 builds, and these punishment mechanics destroy the joy of testing out builds and the variety of skills and playstyles they've created for us

Kenwe: Keep up the great content, love your perspectives on these topics. At the end of the day this is a game, made to have fun. It's hard to have fun if the game is constantly trying to kick you in the nuts rather than giving you a good time. I don't mind the difficulty, but we should be rewarded for finding cool and unique builds. Instead, we are punished for not playing the most optimized meta build possible.

vimzim8576: I haven't played it in a while, I one shot most bosses in my first play through with terrible damage so I didn't find it particularly challenging in the campaign. i did find it very tedious though.

I like games where i have to dodge things but it is kind of ridiculous in PoE2, i am rolling around like a circus chimpanzee. There is a massive difference between builds that either put out some obscene damage or can deal the damage passively whilst you dodge non-stop. The builds that dont work are the ones where your damage isn't meta level and you have to actually hit buttons to do mediocre damage, which you can't do whilst rolling around like an idiot.

PoE2 isn't challenging to play, outside of a handful of abilities you first encounter, it is pretty trivial to avoid most mechanics, I did the campaign with low to negative resistances and the trash was more problematic than the bosses because they come out of nowhere and you often can't see or avoid their effects due to terrain/effects. They did tone down some of these things.

A lot of campaign maps are just too large, they need to either be cut in half or by 33%, they are too tedious to slog through. Especially the large maps with multiple exits, where you zone through and pray there is a waypoint next to the exit so you don't have to reclear this massive map to come back here. Not as big a problem with maps but I still find them to be unnecessarily large by comparison to PoE1 maps.

GGG have always been dogshit at balancing the game and it seems they pull something out of a hat and give it a random "fix" that other does nothing to balance it or bricks it completely. I typically prefer to avoid meta builds but they have taken a chainsaw to some builds and pretty much left others untouched that are way more broken. I wish they had greater diminishing returns for exponential damage stacking which would force them to address the baseline viability of builds rather than this musical chairs approach to just gutting some builds and leaving others completely OP simply because they are incapable of understanding all the layers of multiplicative stacking.

I just think the end-game crafting system is too lacklustre to enjoy the game in terms of PoE1 types of hours. I didn't over-play so far because I think PoE2 needs some radical changes to be a better game than PoE1. ATM I would far prefer they migrate the PoE2 engine into PoE1 than play PoE2. I like WASD, casting/attacking whilst moving, dodge mechanic is okay but movement abilities in PoE1 were superior for gameplay.

The hype was we would be getting great boss fights in exchange for slower/limited gameplay and that hasn't panned out. it is just a more tedious experience and I am waiting for them to address more of these problems, I just dont have the desire to bash my head against a stone wall and be forced to play a broken meta build because everything else is no good.

TheMiojox: I don't think it's too punishing. I think some things are punishing for no reason, like: I've dropped a cool item but I can't make it any better, because crafting sucks. Or: I have to keep watching my back for after death effects.

Jan 23 2025

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