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Would be good for them to reward you with extra something without death, rather than loosing all the investment. Loosing exp is something I dislike and feel it's more of an unwanted carry over from old games like after death effects that shouldn't be in a game. This will impact new players that finally get invested to know they are punished soo much. They could add bonus exp with no death rather than removing exp on death for example. However people should also consider the context. This is what they got together in a short time when switching from doing act 4-6. Also this will be the worst state it will be in. They tried to get as much into the game so people could play it during the Christmas break while also letting the Devs actually take some time off. Some feedback is prob too harshly focused on if it was a full release and not an early access. Framed as feedback on improving is constructive, but some people are treating their feedback on expecting it to be polished and full release rather than , this works, this doesn't. I enjoyed your feedback and resonate on most points.
Just a question. This game is still on Beta. Dont you think that the extra grind / extra punishing is voluntary to avoid players to have "fully finished" the beta content way before full release ? I mean they would not be the first to do such, it's quite common actually.
@Morkhard This is what I hope. We are merely expressing our choices and hoping that it will ignite. I recently began playing this game, and all we're asking to hear us out. Enables players to be revived at the final checkpoint in a group play after they die. There is nothing worse than sitting, and waiting for someone to revive you. The worst is returning to town to clear out your inventory and teleporting back only to discover that the map has been rearranged completely.
I've died so many times in the jungle because everything is green, but some of the green is also a wall that I can't move around and i get body blocked to death.
@@D3xt3r33 Nah, there's definitely some weird areas where the jungle drops into this algae covered bog (often obfuscated by tree canopy) you can't traverse but you'd hardly notice if you weren't looking at the mini-map or overlay. There are also tons of Trees next to boulders or bushes that appear as though you could walk between, but on the mini-map it's clearly a nook with no outlet. And don't get me started or freakin' urns. The maps are intentionally created to be more maze like than they should.
I am reminded of the purple plant zone where they emit purple poison patches--my health was going down after a fight was over and I was wondering what was going on, then I realized the ground around me was slightly more purple than elsewhere.
The point about "having the audacity to try hard content" is word for word what I was thinking while mapping. The way the game is currently set up, it disincentivizes you from attempting harder content because of the extreme punishment for failure. Having to put in a low tier Waystone in a node where you just died and still having to spend so much time traversing an entire content wide map with no rewards just adds further insult to the extreme injury.
I don't mind repeating the map, I don't mind the loss of map activities (Breach etc). I absolutely cannot stand the XP loss to the point it makes me want to give up and not play the game any more.
Hard content ? It's totally rediculous the way it's all implemented now. - Trying trials (3rd) : random affictions ...40%less honour, doing 40% less damage, monsters do 30% more damage, lose 5% of everything on hit..ohh, and on a 1HP build : have no energy shield. That's just idiotic to say the least. -doing maps : i need to do regular waystones because the moment i try to put something harder (trying for better) i get crazy things like monsters get 195% more critdamage. or monsters can't be stunned/frozen/whatever combo....there goes my gold. - rarity : try getting a decent rolled weapon that i can use is a pain like no other. Most i get is either crap (over 100 rarity here) or stuff not for my class. The game throws bows at me like it knows nothing else worthwile. So my damage output is "average". And getting something decent from the trade is insane at those crazy prices. - Bosses : don't get me started. 1-hit mechanics forcing you to do it all over again or wait for 5+ levels to be able to take em down////if you're lucky enough to dodge at the right time without lag. - Graphics : my game flickers like crazy when you see several people using their skills at the same time to the point you can't see crap. - Loot : see in part rarity. Also, most (95%) of the loot is either unusable, total crap or has really really bad stats/additions.
For maps it's annoying, but for bosses it's just insulting. You just can't engage with content that you haven't trivialized, that's just dumb. People who play like this play in hardcore, not in softcore. The whole point of softcore is to have fun trying stuff.
The no-rewards thing is insane. Diablo 2 wasn't this punishing. This game is like people wanted Diablo 2 but also occasionally with a CBT torture session.
Yeah even as a veteran of the first game, 1 attempt per map is brutal and disincentivizes trying harder content because it's likely you want to use your better maps on the one's with better and more modifiers. At least in the first game if we died, we can learn what factor it was that killed us and how to prepare accordingly for the next attempt. We don't even get that in this game unfortunately.
"Respect player time" is always the most important thing for me, when the game is about grinding. For some people its "OK" to spend a whole week doing the same thing to get 1 piece of whatever... for me thats fucking dumb.
That'll always be a preference divide, not a real piece of actual criticism. That conversation is essentially a recreation of the whole Guild Wars 2 VS WoW philosophy. It depends on whether or not you prefer moment to moment gameplay, or progressive gearing/stat building of a character. Edit: HOWEVER, the mapping is totally unfair and doesn't respect anyone's time whatsoever. That'll get ironed out in EA without a doubt, though. That criticism itself is 100% valid.
I don't think farming even 6 months for something is dumb as long as it is a progress and depends on what it is based. Personally I will never understand people wanting everything straight away when they consider themselves even semi-developed human beings.
Great Video. I have been playing PoE1 since early alpha and now PoE 2 which I am really enjoying. Your video encapsulates perfectly a lot of the issues with the game in a very clear and fair way. I really hope GGG see this video as it is exactly the kind of well presented feedback they need. Thanks for taking the time to put this together, first class job mate.
Totally agree on the stat sheet being incomplete. Anything you can invest skill points on, or stack percentages on through gear should be shown in your character sheet
anything offensive seems to be totally missing, unless I'm missing. I want to see total summary of my character and it doesn't seem to exist anywhere right now.
I think the critique on the skill sheet being lacking is very true. and is something i see being easily iterated on as its missing some like-for-like simply from PoE 1 ( such as max charges / etc ) .... but the critique comparing this to D2R and D4 when in D4 over 18 months post launch it STILL doesn't explain basic stats like resistances in the menu. Seems a tad nit-picky.
Unistalled the game last night the moment i realized im losing xp and losing progress if i die in maps. Was ready to buy that $500 package just to support the game, that's how much i liked it up to that point.
My main issue with the game is how overly punitive it can be. It’s OK for the game to be hard, but losing things equipment and experience on death is way too harsh. Locking player progression behind two of the least popular and most punishing game systems that require specific builds is also a bad choice. The devs want to grow their audience and be more accessible for newer players. But what we have in EA currently is literally the opposite.
@@suzukisixk7 There are multiple times I have killed bosses or elite packs and then died to an after death effect or dot effect on my character that I wasn’t able to out heal. The equipment and currency that drops when this happens are lost as is any equipment you may have left on the floor from earlier in the run that you might intend to pick up later.
@@spcbrasspick up later is after you win the map you are in, so if you died that means you gave away all the loot up until you failed. You have 5 additional portals for a reason so haul out everything that's valuable and go back in so even if you failed you don't lose everything. Rpg 101 for you bud.
I think when Jonathan said ‘new players’ he meant new HARDCORE players…this game isn’t designed for casuals it’s designed for the top 10% of players. There’s no way anyone on their design team sat down and said “we’ll get a bunch of newbies in with THIS game design paradigm”.
It's wild to me that things that people rightfully criticized D4 for in terms of visual clarity, wasting player's time, lack of information, incorrect tooltips, various hoop-jumping to get from point A to point B, cheap 1-shot mechanics, overly punishing exploding monsters, etc... are being lauded as good design and defended with "git gud" comments for PoE2. I absolutely LOVE the gameplay of PoE2, but it's ok to say "it can be better." What I do respect about PoE2 is that they freely admit this is Early Access and things will be changed in this incomplete game we're playing. I just hope GGG doesn't say "maybe this isn't the game for you, git gud" and takes the feedback seriously, because the game is like 7/10 right now, and could easily be 9/10 with a single big patch that addresses like 7-8 pain points for players.
Well yeah, that's the POE Andy way, double standards. They will talk about D4 $20 cosmetics but will defend the $90 fomo cosmetics each league in Poe, and you can only change your characters looks with paid cosmetics in POE. They talked about blizzard ripping ppl off with a portal pack that contained 5 portals for $20, meanwhile you goto the Poe store and a single portal skin costs $30.
@@phatymcdaddy Blizzard fanboy. You do remember you need to first pay $70 for the base game. Then another $60? for the expansion. Of which multiple will release and you have to keep buying to keep playing. Yes, the MT in PoE are expensive but you do not need to pay a single dollar to play the game.
@@smieltjeh POE2 is actually $30. You can't play without pay. And in a year it will be free and in a year after D4 came out it also got cheaper ($29.99). Also the expansion is $39.99 at release. It's pay to play. Just like POE 2 currently is. For the record.
You nailed it when you pointed out the level of stockholme syndome for the defense of bad design. The game doesn't tell you that you lose XP because half the new players would never ever play it if they knew. Losing the waystone etc is fine. There should be a punishment for dying, but losing all of your time, and being able to go completely backwards is extremely poor design for "softcore." There is no defense for losing XP on death; it is the single biggest thing that has made all of my friends quit. It creates a game where players grind low level waystones to avoid challenge because the punishment isnt worth the potential reward. Then you're not gaining xp because you're in too low level waystones, but if you go higher you'll lose hours of grinding in a second. They are missing out on a massive amount of players because of this simple mistake.
I’m all for grindy games, but about 120 hours into PoE 2 it occurred to me that GGG expects people to play 400-500 hours every league to top out one character. The only people who are going to want to do that league after league multiple times a year have some sort of mental disorder.
I've had that same thought. A league is 3-4 months, so ~100 days. 500 hours is 5 hours per day, every day, without exception. Unless you're unemployed or make a living from playing the game, It basically requires the game to be the only thing you do with 100% of your spare time.
This is experience too. I like making alts a lot, to try different things every season. But this game it will be impossible and with the length of time it takes to get endgame up and running I can't see people playing the game more than once, no chance every 3-4 months.
That’s the main way I die in t15+ maps. Usually when stuff is blowing up on the ground via aftershocks with the Titan, I can’t see what’s there, next thing I know, I’m dead, or my life is draining to zero rapidly.
As someone who doesn't have a lot of time to play games, walking into a map that has 2 or 3 league modifiers on it, randomly exploding to something I didn't see, and permanently losing out on a chance to get pinnacle mats for that node is big feelsbad energy
@Gavinbelson no offense, but that's kind of bs. I think the majority of people who have full time jobs only get a few hours a day to do what they enjoy doing after all of their life obligations are done. Making a game for only the people who can play it for 10 hours a day every day isn't the way to make money, especially if you're doing a f2p model and I think GGG knows that
@@pokeholicmaster Im not saying 10 hours a day im just saying, if you only have 1 hour to game they shouldnt be catering to you. Few hours a day is more than enough imo.
Yeah, they are losing out a TON of cash though if they go with this as everyone with good jobs and lots of money will bail. Losing XP is horrible. That should have died with D2 20 years ago as it really is some ego garbage or for people with less money than time which is a bad business strategy
@pokeholicmaster PoE2 is going to be here for the next 10 years, just like PoE1. You don’t need to feel the need to speedrun the game in 1 month, it’s a game which can be played over several years. You don’t need to play 10 hours a day for that. Just like some people who enjoy playing 2 hours of piano, you could enjoy 2 hours of PoE2 every day. What’s nice, is that PoE2 offers something to look forward over a long time. I don’t need to feel like I need to complete the game to enjoy it, I am enjoying it while playing and that’s what matters. Building my character and seeing him getting stronger, trading and understanding the ingame economy etc. Are 2 things I really enjoy in this game, and I don’t need to beat the pinacle bosses for this.
The ultimate “doesn’t respect the player’s time” mechanic is without a doubt trading. Not only is the expectation that you need to trade in order to progress in any kind of timely manner, but you also have to waste time on an out-of-game trading website and then waste more time waiting on the seller to drop what they are doing to come sell the item to you. Why, why, WHY is there no auction house? And don’t give me that “auction house is what ruined D3” crap when the console versions of PoE1 have auction houses. The current currency exchange mechanic added just last league is built off the auction houses in the console versions of PoE1. If there’s a plan to add it later, great. If not, it’s a huge missed opportunity and even bigger disappointment.
Hopefully no AH ever. Currency exchange is already causing significant inflation. Its overshadowed by MF but its there. And trading is already too convienient to the point where people cry about not wanting to pick loot.
Making something intentionally annoying and unfun as a balancing measure has never sounded like a good idea to me. I'd like to engage with trading, but as long as I have to deal directly with random strangers to do so, I'll just be SSF. I don't hate people, but the more I deal with them, the more likely I am to start to.
I hope GGG can see how lucky they are to have someone like Mac giving them feedback. I usually have no idea specifically why I do or don't like parts of a game but analysis like this actually gives specific problems for them to look at and adjust.
Second comment but actually discussing some of the stuff in your video: It’s wild to me how you describe elites being so painfully invisible where they might go behind a corner and stop emitting light etc. I got into D2 when D2R came out, and was basically a very casual D3 player prior. One of the things I noticed about D2 that I really liked was how you could tell there was an elite monster in the next room over through a wall because they would literally emit a different color of light. You know you’re about to encounter one of those elite ghost things in an Act 1 Countess run because you see a red glow in the next room over before you even entered the room. Or maybe you’re on your way to Andarial and you notice the next room over has a weird blue glow that is kinda walking back and forth. It might not be extremely obvious what that means to a new player, but a new player will be able to identify that SOMETHING is weird.
This is definitely a big sore point with elites in PoE 2. I can never tell which is the Elite enemy and given how death can happen so fast, I don't generally have time to slowly mouse over everything to see which one it is, and what modifiers they have. 9 out of 10 of my deaths come from running into a pack and suddenly dying without being able to react because I didn't know that it was an Elite and couldn't tell quick enough if it had dangerous modifiers.
@@phishmastermike by the time you mouse over it you should already be dodging... or running the fuck away if your a witch and it has that big fucken blue "Drains mana aura"
@@ejliann Yeah see not a fan of that. I know there’s a lot of memes of like… how it seems every claimable cliff face in gaming magically has yellow spray paint all over the parts you can climb, but I never saw anything wrong with how D2 handled elites. Normal skeleton is white, but THIS ONE IS BLUE???! OR RED?!!?? Maybe it’s not a terrible idea to spray paint some of your elite monsters to make them stand out clearly AND have some visual identification that lets you quickly and easily identify their most dangerous modifiers without needing to take a screenshot of their healthbar so you can walk back to safety and read what affixes they have on ‘em xD Plus I feel like D2 had a lot of modifiers you could just see like elite man with a big ass Fanaticism aura. Elite guy who runs at you so fast you can’t even see his animations properly. I don’t need to scroll over their health to know they’re aura enchanted or extra fast in those conditions LOL
Completely agree, I have dropped POE2 for now, will probably come back after EA is done for a league and see where it is at. Unfortunately I expect it to be exactly in the same place. GGG had an opportunity to drop the bad and the bloat from POE1 and come with a new take on POE2, instead we get basically the same game with the same mechanics but with better graphics. As for listening to feedback, apart from maybe a couple of cases in POE1, I had the impression that GGG ever really cared and pressed on with their vision of what the game was, knowing that the next league will be shiny and new and the community will get distracted about a different thing,
I agree with everything, save for the point about the gear/loot/currency interactions being fine. I'd argue that the lack of control over gear, and currency overall is just as egregious as every other point. From a SSF perspective, I never felt like I had the ability to really embrace the crafting currency because it's just gambling currency. If you find a base, and you slam the two magic gambles and see if the piece of gear is bricked or not. If the affixes weren't useful, that's it, base wasted. If you got 1 out of 2, or maybe even both decent affixes, you gamble with a regal again. That's not interactive, that's a going to the casino to play slots; and going back night after night hoping tonight is the night you win. And from a Trade perspective, the economy hit a level of hyper-inflation in record time. The casual player might as well be playing SSF because now that the baseline has shifted to Divines, your options become to reroll a meta clear build and stack Rarity so you can keep up with inflation, or accept that you'll never be able to afford even the higher end of mediocre gear. While you could argue the RNG-nature of gear drops in ARPGs is inherent to the genre, that doesn't speak to the fact that POE literally has a currency system designed around the concept of crafting. Even D2 had runes that players could farm for desired stats, for rng rolls. PoE2's essences in the early game only work on bases, which is a step backwards from PoE1. And the removal of the crafting bench from PoE1 for the sake of PoE2 runes aren't enough to waste the currency to socket on subpar gear for the minor advantage of a single rune (or two). There's no sense of autonomy for the player. PoE2 feels like a disjointed mess of ideas from PoE1, and the vision of spiritual successor to D2; slathered in gacha-style gambling masquerading as progression.
As a new player, i completely agree. I feel I've got no control at all. The experience i have is simply "what do the rng gods have in store for me this season?" And that's all. And furthermore, challenge and difficulty, especially in thematic ways such as we see in games like elden ring, present a challenge to overcome and conquer given that you rise to the occasion. That being said, im not a fan of simple punishment for no reason beyond the punishment itself. You're punishing my xp which you've already made infinitely more grindy to get than need be, youre punishing my loot and waystone which I also spent currency and time to make, youre punishing all the preparation efforts I put into it which wastes more time, and so on and so on.... and this is all because of what? I ask the question "why". There's no benefit to me that I can see. My death was simply because the waystone casino gave me a modifier on my map that makes my build more frustrating but seeing as how I've now spent currency on this map it's a big waste to throw it out but it's also a potential waste to run it if I die,so I feel like I've lost twice now. And for what? 2 exalts maaaabye? Lastly, why on earth am I nearly forced into making myself weaker with as much rarity as I can get when.... A: the map mods do all that for me and then some B: isn't the whole purpose of an arpg to make the most powerful character you can make to get better and better loot? Yet I'm incentivized into being weaker to achieve better results OR becoming stronger, and instead of trading for gear, spending more time in the casino ultimately.
I really hate the fact that I agree with every single line said here. I map for like 10 hours and I still don't know why I am doing it. I will burn out really quick if I don't find an actual meaningful reason to keep doing in it. As you said, I wouldn't mind a light to chase 20 maps away, but I need a sense of meaning for the content I am doing other than possibilities of having ONE chance to do something. Absurd. I am still playing because of the combat, but D4 excels at it and I've got bored of it at some point.
I’m thinking game devs have gotten so sick of “hand-holding” that they forget even the least hand-holdy games of old gave you some kind of hints. Mac’s idea of “a little light that way” sounds like a perfect idea. It’s not holding your hand like a baby, but it’s just kinda saying, “Hey new gamer! I’m glad you’re enjoying our game. There’s something maybe kinda weird over in that general direction. I dunno maybe just kinda go that way and you’ll maybe see something new,” all without ever uttering a single word. BOOM now your end game system has some kind of direction and isn’t just, “WELL, I HOPE I GET LUCKY”
Is it only me that thinks linking the game up to a website for trading is really bad/lazy? For me, i wanna stay inside the bubble i get inside when i play games, no distractions, its just me and my toon. When i have to alt-tab to a website, it immediatly takes me out of this bubble., And when im already on the internet-browser, i check news, i get tempted to check facebook etc. Thats just a me problem though, but i cannot be alone? Also, the trading makes me feel more like a trader than a gamer. I even had to watch some tutorials on how to use all the functions behave on the trade-site. I wanna kill stuff with cool attacks, i dont wanna browse the internet for items, like im browsing ebay hehe.
Depends on what your endgame goals are. If you just wanna blast and stay in the game then go solo self found. If you want to have any level of min maxing then trade league is the way to go. Learn the trade website filters and you will thank yourself with some amazing purchases because the alternative way to gear via crafting is an annoying RNG fest.
it was awesome in Ultima Online. it just added to being able to advance outside of the game by setting up trades later. it was super active tho and it was more of a player economy with way more items/rares/houses/etc people were selling.
Problem is, there's too much RNG in the loot and crafting. So trading becomes the way to go for drastic increase in power. And this in turn leads to the creation of an entire mode where you can't trade... and also can't group. Which means it is still a crappy solution. And, of course, all that focus on trading draws the RMTs. On the plus side, their plan is to make the trading happen in game, no site necessary.
An un-immersive trade system is actually a deliberate design goal for GGG. The idea is that they want to recreate the feeling of playing really old-school online multiplayer games, which includes having players heavily rely upon third-party and community resources for in-game activities. Originally there wasn't even a trade site, you would just make a thread on the forums listing the items you had for sale and have people pm / whisper you if they wanted to buy something. I think they only relented on this because players eventually made a third-party trade site and started taking ads from RMT sites on it.
Diablo 1 was the first game i ever picked and bought, myself, at 8 years old in 1997 (i still remember the excitement of getting my own game and i wont just be playing my brother's games). I'm still playing and seeking that same vibe now at 36 years old.
Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. I totally agree! And i really love how you just mentioned, "Rarity find shouldnt affect currency" i have this discussion every day with my community. I totally agree with you on this subject.
I'm too casual for most of these things to really affect me but I 100% agree. One thing I have felt a lot is the speed differential. Swarms of enemies push me across the map faster than I can run, evasive abilities like Escape Shot have me slowly float through the air before shooting some form of cc behind the enemies because they're already on top of me and pushing me around while I'm still in the air, even with a 40% slowing effect already on the ground. Melee can't land hits without getting hit back and there are trials that punish you for getting hit at all. Enemies need to be slowed down a lot imo.
haha that summary of how escape abilities work is hilariously accurate. I’m expecting to “escape” but the monsters are there waiting for me when I land (and seemingly hitting me while I’m in the air too, but that might be my imagination)
@@halloweentimemachine They're hitting you in air, you get no Iframes from any moving ability that I've seen. (With the notable exception of the basic dodge, which has a few Iframes at the start.)
I've just started a deadeye alt and also decided the escape shot is completely pointless. The mobs don't even pause for split second when you jump, they just continue their run to exactly where you're going to land 😂 It doesn't even let you jump over obstacles on the map, which would make it somewhat useful at least.
Yeah, the difference between player speed and monster speed is mind boggling. Also the fact that large monsters push you around simply by existing... wat?! Giga annoying. There are such few movement skills, such few defensive skills... I feel like it is especially annoying during the campaign stage where you basically have no equipment and skills. If you want to gain new players you need to hook them within the first few hours. If the game is way too hard early on, no one is gonna invest 60 hours to see the endgame.
@@Sorain1 Toxic Growth seems to give s (basically the same move as Escape Shot but you fire poison blobs instead of ice). I haven't done thorough testing or anything though, could have just been a coincidence with evasion.
If the game is supposed to be like Dark Souls by being punishing it's missed the mark because there's basically no punishment for dying at all in Dark Souls. You lose only progress towards your next level, but that's really easy to get back and any boss is basically a guaranteed level, you keep any items you've collected so yolo running to a powerful item and then dying to get back out is a super common strategy. They even stopped doing salty runbacks after 2.
My biggest gripe with the game is that after 12 years of PoE they should have figured out a better way to balance the game for PoE 2. With even the simplest things like ES being many times better than armor + hp, it doesn't bode well for the game ever being properly balanced.
what is this take? PoE 1 is very balanced compared to other arpgs. the game is in early access so they can collect data/feedback and balance it...they have said this
@brianaiken3917 Clearly it's my take based on my experience with both games. Of course I don't expect things to be perfect at the start of EA but I expect them to have learned certain lessons from PoE 1 that they clearly haven't. Case in point, casters who attack safely from distance having the best damage scaling and the best defenses (easy es stacking and CI) with comparatively low investment just like PoE 1, while the classes that rely on armour and have a harder time avoiding damage get all their life nodes ripped out of the tree.
Respecting players time is the biggest crime in this game right now. And on RNG the biggest overlooked RNG in the game is monster generation. Because theres no actual logic and anything blue and up can have random parameters you can often be f'd into a no win scenario. This can also happen with monster density, tight areas in world generation. This is often compounded by the ABSURD speed monsters can have as well as their ability to push you across the map and body block you.
Very interesting feedback! I think the loss on death is the most polarizing bit. Even though most people have lists of feedback, the vitriol with which you describe the final death is familiar to me now! You see people get bent out of shape at this, and I think GGG has to be worried about this reaction. It's not just turning people off, it's making them angry! You can see it in your comment section. Agree with all the feedback about the end game map system, it's essentially the Delve system from POE1. Needs a lot of work.
Yeah, making people so pissed off that they ragequit the game, is not good gameplay. I dont know how many times i logged off from the penalty i get from dying when i get stuck in a pixel, invisbile aoe, oneshots, skillissues etc. It does not motivate me to do better, to get more defenses, learn the map etc. It just makes me wanna quit. And i stopped playing, because it just ruined the gamingexperience for me.
Such a great summary my man. I resonate with every each of these. It helps that you're are not biased to PoE world like some other streamers and can clearly speak about things just how they look.
1 of the best videos you've ever made imo Macro. Number 1 is the big killer with number 3 being slightly less but still a big killer. Number 3 I feel is Isometric ARPG 101. Like bro, I need to be able to see. How was that even missed?
Visual clarity really needs an update. Additionally, this game should develop a "color blind" mode so all people can play it. Implementing this feature would require a fundamental adjustment to how they display enemy attacks (as it would require more than just color changes).
@@DTPandemonium and also go movement blind if you are in a map with tons of water, my pc just start freezing trying to purge all the water and smoke out
Biggest issues: 1. If you die you lose experience. You can game for 6 hours and be worse off than when you started when finishing your session. 2. Forcing players to go out of the game to trade for items. I you don't rng is so bad you will almost never find anything good and usable. 3.Crafting. Just pure Rng for most players. It's like playing a casino with horrible odds. Only here you win some pixels and not money. 4.Not being able to salvage/sell loot on the run, you have go to town....a lot. 5. Uniques are horrible. No exitement when they drop, 'cause you know they will be shitty. Not your level, not your class, not your build. Fix this and the game will be a 10 out of 10😊.
@@harlengreen8981 Well, did you trade it or did you find it yourself? I'd take a gamebraking unique any day over a useless unique. A gamebraking one is atleast fun until it is scaled down if needed......
@@brianaiken3917 Still stupid. If the uniques are bad, why are they even in the game? How hard can it be to make good interesting uniques that are easy to understand and drops according to class and level? I still claim that unless you have a shitload of divines and buy them, most players will never see good uniques. When a unique drops it should be a dopamin rush, now it's just a big meh....Horrible design. The core game of POE 2 is very good, but it could become so much better-
Great video, I think the more opinions we have about the game, the better it will be for GGG to improve. Just adding to your point in 27:30 I think we should be able to mouse over the value and see a break down of the bonus applied over the base value, I don't understand why the game has this information, and GGG chose to not be easily accessible by the player.
This was very well articulated and I think it also kind of explains some of my painpoints with the game that I didn't quite realize until watching this. I would love for the other creators you know in the space to take a look at this and give some of their thoughts
24:41 - Behind the scenes, Item Rarity and Item Quantity are not general player stats. They are modifiers specifically to your skills. The "increased item rarity" modifier on gear would be much more accurate if it was called "Enemies killed by you or your minions have x% increased rarity of items dropped." I believe the stat is managed this way for the sake of party play. If a character with 100% IIR is in a party with a character with 0% IIR, the item rarity modifier of whoever got the "killing blow" is the one applied to the enemy. In PoE 1 there were also ways to get IIR and IIQ for specific skills rather than as a more generic stat. I do not believe this is a particularly good reason for not including the stat in the character sheet and only listing it on the skill information sheet. But I figured I would at least explain the most likely reason why it ended up getting left out.
Man, thank you so much!! 100%....look, I'm a partner at a law firm in a major city. I can blast late at night a few days a week when my kids are asleep and I don't have to work. The fact that I lose XP for dying and it wastes hours and hours is ridiculous. And the game seems to waste my time. I'll spend a ton of money on this game if you make it respect me.
there are omens to reduce 75% of the experience lost... casual people don't know about these tricks and stuff and don't build defense enough to survive and maybe play warrior and not a range character that can offscreen content and die to on-death what can I say the game is not balanced atm just play the meta and have fun till they nerf you by 90%.
You really are the best for putting out your thoughts in a very clear and concise manner. I'd love GGG to tackle all these points, I couldn't agree more and I hope they find this video !! I'm currently hesitating to continue playing. The final build I theorycrafted is gated behind several endgame mechanics and uniques. Not that this is a bad thing because I always have to adapt my build to get to that point but having to play 1000 hours to get there seems very daunting and I don't want to burn out of this excellent game during pre release ahah
I understand that the game is still EA, but if someone get too much into it with the current rng, they might get themselves crazy. Let me give 1 example: In order to get Ingenuity Belt we need to do A LOT of Rituals hoping to see an item called 'An audience with the King'. Now after we get the item we can use it as a key to get into a dungeon to kill King of the Mists, with another rng that the belt might not even drop. So with the mindset of a self built gamer we might think its alright to keep farming the key but the reality comes smacking in our faces that sometimes after more than 100 maps with JUICED Rituals we might not even see the 'An audience with the King' to begin with... Now to add the jerry on top, we might kill the boss 3, 4 times and the freaking Belt is not even dropping... That includes all the Atlas buffs we can get such as : more chance for the key to drop, more rituals per map, bla bla.... the grind is truly mad in this game guys
I sold a ritual waystone to someone for 80ex. It's crazy to me, that someone is willing to invest... in the CHANCE... to get to FARM THE THING, That MIGHT drop the loot. It's what I hate most about PoE- the content to farm the stuff you want to farm, is gated behind the market- and it's rarely cheap. And if you die, you wasted it.
Honestly they built like this is an mmorpg in some cases. What you describe would br finr in an mmo, wich is a game you play for life. Now, we are supposed to want to play leagues. I can barely see myself playing the campaign every league, imagine farming this rng crazy endgame
@@setcamper Yeah and how the market in game is done is so bad. Have to use external site, to whisper a guy who could not respond to you at all or scams you in some way. Just horrible to rely on that. SSF sounds cool to me also but like i do enjoy playing with my brother or friend from time to time and that would lock me out of playing with them. Then you have balance being made for people who play trade league which impacts SSF, unless they change rarity only for trade league and keep it how it is in SSF... I just don't think they would do that though.
There's also the argument of: "If i can't even find the content i want to do/ try out, why am i even playing the game anymore?" That is how most players will reason. But if we are allowed to at least try and it's just hard to do, most players will complain about it being too hard. But bottom line, they are still playing the game, unlike if they never even get to try the content.
The reason: a character who goes all-out offensive and slams their head against the wall over and over until they hit 100 is a character that is not deserving of hitting 100. Not having xp penalties trivializes the race to 100 each league to just the players who can no-life the game with bad builds and win. Players need to readjust their expectations that POE 1 and 2 have never been games that are balanced around a character hitting max level. I think it would be a reasonable middle ground for the game to kick in its penalties in the uber endgame, like 90 or 95+, so most casual players don't experience it though.
Ffs it’s a game “not deserving of hitting 100” I cringed so hard reading that line. But I do agree, if x-p loss on death were to remain move it to 90 or 95. As a new PoE2 player at lvl 70-90 I still had a lot of power to gain through skill points. Now having reach lvl 93 I don’t really care to look forward to my next lvl/skill point. I mostly get my power to small or big gear upgrades.
@@3ASY355 Ladder resets and the race to 100 has always been a major part of POE so yes, you shouldn't be able to win a race by nolifing a bad build that zooms all content and brute forces the game with no defense. Hence, xp penalties. It's a perspective shift. Like you said, a character should be mostly considered "done" in their early 90's. The extra points beyond that are stretch goals but the game isn't balanced to hit 100.
@@3ASY355gotta say I cringed just as hard in the opposite direction when you Implied....yes you do deserve to reach max level. I can't even imagine the game where everybody reaches the end, that should stay in the special Olympics and on Mobile games.
@@suzukisixk7 yes it is the special Olympic, and you are part of it. Part of the crew called "people that tied their identity to been good a video game" or "elitist".
I totally agree with all of your points. In addition to your first point, i want to add, that not only are the maps incredibly large. they are also cluttered with obstacles. even in maps like savannah or steppe, you constantly run into walls, that holds you in place: It´s even worse in maps like blooming fields or any fungus dungeon or crypts where you cant run 2 m in a straight line without getting stuck... not to mention the doors being so small that you minions constantly get stuck and/or have no line of sight to the mobs, and do not engage them. But the mobs running straight through your army, hitting you directly, while the skellys are doing nothing. Getting one-shotted from mobs across the screen is frustrating. being killed by bossmchanics long after the boss has died. Homing missles like the lightning apparitions that follow you or the violet bubbles that explodes on you. Not to mention the on death explosion stuff, many seconds after killing the mob. Really evil are the granade throwing mobs, that throw tiny pixelgrenades that can easily go unnoticed in all that visual clutter and you die, because you dared to stay still for a second. Regarding the endgame acessability, i can say, that i have difficulties to maintain my waystones. i just reached the T14 maps quest, but i had to buy several waystones to even attempt to progress this questline. as i got further into the atlas tree, it is getting a little bit better, but they are way to rare and when you see the streamers, they litterally drown in t15 waystones. I have the feeling, that poe2 has a reverse take on difficulty overall. it´s brutal in the beginning, but once you have a strong build everything is handed to you freely. Not like diablo, where the begining is easy and it gets more difficult, the further you progress. This game is fun, bit it kicks you in the nuts constantly. I absolutely agree with your point of respect of the players time investment. The unforgivingness on mistakes and the nessessary learning curve is brutal. Also on the build/gear side. You will loose map after map, if you don´t have good gear. and where do you get better gear, if you cannot farm for it.... buy it via trade... but how, if you dont have the currency ? I know it´s early access and alot of the problems will be fixed at some point. But taking this little steps-grinding towards endgame every new season... thats a lot to ask from a casual player. Raxx has asked the right question on his video. GGG needs to decide, what playerbase it wants to adress. i think, we dont need a new POE 1 nerdfest and we dont need another D4 handholding kindergarden. something inbetween would be nice 😄
I like that this phrase, "Disrepects your time" is gaining traction. It's 100% spot on, and it encompasses everything from map layouts to the way two different players are rewarded for investing the same amount of time into PoE.
I can't agree more about how painful it is to die on high teir maps. It's also incredibly frustrating that the game doesn't tell you when you start to lose xp and how much. Something that important should be in big red letters. I've lost so many hours' worth of xp grinding. It's a dark blot on an otherwise amazing game and it needs to be receiving more attention. Whenever I bring it up, I'm told to stop crying and stop playing the game.
Great points you have there. That respecting player time is connected to so many systems from mapping to crafting, RNG, trading, Trials, movement, objectives etc. It is the main point that keeps me away from most f2ps, unless the money only buys cosmetics. I rather pay once instead of paying with minutes and hours of my unique life. In this game the early access is paid, during launch money should only buy tabs and cosmetics. Still player time is not valued.
I have played 120+ hours. My main concerns are way to much rng item crafting and all that rng is stacking. I have spent 50 exalted on potentially good items and got all wasted. If the best way in item-based arpg to actually get the item is only to trade - it's really bad. Trade is ok in general, but crafting is bad, cheaper should be to craft items by yourself, not vice versa. Currently I am just farming currency and do not even try to craft, and because of that I don't get that excitement from obtaining an item. I am easily doing 16 maps between 2 towers with tablets and with breach/delirium, but the most time I am doing 10-12 maps because I have no higher maps. I saw no citadels. I don't pass last 2 points of ascendancy, f tornado killed me nearly 10 times on the last boss and I have no ultimatums. I don't really know what I want to do now in game. And I even not talking about technical part if the game, I am playing on ps5 pro.
If you dont have any higher maps after running breach maps... Well then there is a skill issue or an atlas issue with pushing for waystone tiers instead of quant / explicits / affixes... And I feel like you probably dont have your breach / boss atlas points because if you had you would have been swimming in T15. For example, I have seen several trees using the duplicate rare modifier and then not scaling explicits... If you scale explicit and have a waystone with more rare and magic mobs you will gain way more mobs than just one extra rare.
I've got bad news for you, most poe players think the crafting is way too basic and new league endgame mechanics will likely continue to add layers of crafting.
Thank you. I tried several times to elaborate my frustrations in a constructive way on the official forum, and I love how you just simplified the whole concept as “respect player’s time”. That’s all it is 👏🏻
@ 😂 You'd be surprised. Usually I get "well written" and "+1" because the posts are well articulated and rarely a rant (and I'm a long time member of the community). Still amount to nothing tho
I already hated the 10% exp. loss from POE1. The one death allowed in maps of POE2 just makes me want to log out. And the visual clarity of all the various spells on the ground is bad enough but why are there walls and trees and other obstacles hiding things from me? And some of them aren't really clearly obstacles so when I am backtracking and rolling away from a monster I get stuck. The tower maps are rooms full of monsters that if you just run in blindly you might get one shot and walls might block your vision from even seeing what is going on. So annoying. The campaign is great. Super fun. Boss fights are great. Just the right level of difficult so that the really tough ones feel great to beat. Each class feels really distinct from the others which is huge compared to POE1 where everything just felt like a stack stick and individual abilities didn't really feel that different a lot of the time. But weirdly they made all these changes and somehow the gear mostly stayed the same. Like why not revamp the entire stat system? And the crafting used to be bloated and overwhelming but now they oversimplified it and made it just a straight up gamble that is not going to go your way 99% of the time. So much to love about the game but so much to be improved. Hopefully they take a lot of time to really make things better during early access and don't dig in their heels. ETA: also the fast travel between way points is great in theory but often there are no waypoints in places where you would expect them!
Valid criticism. I've tried to get into Poe since beta but only got to the end game with Settlers. I've played all ARPGs D2, D3, D4, LE, TQ, GD, I think poe2 is special but needs some tuning. Unfortunately these days I'm dad gaming hours, but I'm thankful for the people that can deep dive and give this good feedback to ggg who have proven themselves as the true successor of D2
Another problem is a reliance on a third party to do basic functionality of the game. Why do i need to download a loot filter? Why cant i set it up ingame of what i want to see? Or why do i have to use a website to trade my items ingame? Both these are leading to the problem of people being hacked currently and GGG doesn't care cause they are on holiday.
All fantastic points and I appreciate you listed them at the start! For RNG, they need to remove magic find completely and raise drop rate slightly. I know magic find existed in D2 but it’s an outdated mechanic. You should not have to choose between optimal gear for your build or less optimal gear that will help you get optimal gear. It makes it so not only does every player need two sets of gear in optimal circumstances, but also so that you’re running magic find 90% of the time. A player shouldn’t feel like they are hurting themselves for running cool gear that doesn’t include magic find.
PoE worked very well in 2012 after the D3 disaster. PoE2 wont work in 2025 even with the D4 disaster if they dont change the game drastically. I agree with almost everything you mentioned.
@@LittleRadicalThinkerI see the game settling at like 135k players per league and the half of those that are whales that slurp up the $90 fomo cosmetics will keep GGG afloat just like Poe 1. Meanwhile they will goto D4 vids and talk about how d4 is bad with $20 cosmetics
By far the most objective and honest take on this game. Unfortunately, the elitism around this game, will prohibit the devs from taking takes like yours seriously
Also... the meta builds are really braindead for a supposedly 'hard game'. Spark/Arc Mage sorc? Infernalist? What happened to the 'interesting skill combinations' and more thoughtful/deliberate combat system???
Lol. Poe is supposed to be a builders paradise yet everyone copy builds. There is no creativity Skill 3 is s huge over designed mess. Game is totally unbalanced yet they add tons support gems / class. More to come : only gonna worst Tip to ggg less is more
Great feedback, constructive! As an SSF player myself my biggest issue is the early stages of crafting. Too many trans/augs or no rewarding way to use them. Transmutes/Augments could reroll prefix/suffix on magical items only. I'm always out of regals, exalts and chaos which is a GOOD thing, but having hundreds of trans/aug doesn't feel right.
I think they were too scared to add the poe1 crafting complexity because of all the new players coming in, I almost Garantee this will change in the next few months.
Really good analysis, there are some serious issues with PoE 2 right now, feels like they did not learn from PoE 1 or their concept of difficulty is tied to inconvenience, you earned my sub with this video.
As a beta player of PoE1, PoE2 is just soul crushing. Everything that made PoE 1 great, is basically gone. At level 40 I am still wearing mostly gear from level 10-15, cause even though i have picked up thousands of items, 90% of them are not for my character, 90% of the ones that are have just trash for stats, and of the 10% that have at least a good stat they are bricked when trying to add more stats with currency. I was stuck in act 3 on the chimera boss cause my cold resist was completely negative, I had no cold resist at all, and it was so bad that the bosses frost breath insta killed me. And with other effects on the ground like poison and fire, you literally could not see the frost spread. I did more than 30 attempts on a boss REQUIRED to advance in the story because no items thus far in the game gave me enough cold res to not be insta killed. Likewise I am still using boots with 15% move speed because getting any other stats on my boots is meaningless, as that little bit of move speed is literally life or death, I mean if a set of boots dropped with max life, and triple max res, I would still have a hard time giving up my only move speed mods, as that allows me to live far more often that more life would. And not being able to craft a set of boots is infinitely annoying. The game puts DPS checks in place, and then gives you nothing, and expects you to over come by what? farming zones endlessly for the potential of gear upgrades? My buddies have all progressed to maps, and I am still slogging along in the campaign cause of poor RNG. Its actual madness.
The crazy boss difficulty spikes without a logical crafting system has been enough for me to uninstall the game. Yes, you can respec if you have the gold. Do I have to do that every time I meet a new hurdle? No, I want to apply passive points and build the character. Not spend even more time trying to figure out how to allocate points to beat a certain boss. Maybe gambling away gold on buying random gear from an NPC, hoping it will get a lucky roll. Your point of using gear that's 20 levels lower is spot on. Most of the rare or even unique drops are not related to the character I happen to play. I realise I am just a newbie in this type of game, but although I am retired and have plenty of time, I am not going to sink in another 120 hours just to be punished even more as you progress.
@@kuyakano8976 In PoE 1, skills and the skill tree mattered more than gear early on, if you had the right set of skills, and a decent build, you could do the campaign on trash gear. In PoE 2, gear is the determining factor, skills still matter, but no amount of skill gems can overcome the gear barrier. And since gear is 100% RNG now, sometimes you will get an awesome start, and sometimes you will struggle to kill white mobs, and unless you play trade league you are kind SoL.
Add the fact that you're screwed against bosses if you play warrior or any of the other melee classes in the future. For what it's worth, the warrior should output way more damage with his skills than he does know considering the fact that he is super slow and has to stay close to bosses which constantly spam aoe and melee attacks. Fighting Doryiani with my warrior was the worst experience ever. Hopefully the rest of the melee classes they add won't suck as much.
Thanks for this macro. I have approximately 0 hours in poe so hearing someone voice my confusion in well thought out and intricate feedback is validating. Keep up the good work!
hahaha, the near stockholm syndrome meantality of people sayings.. git gud! haha Isn't that the truth. People will defend these companies and stuff like they are their best friends or something. A new level of oligarchy.
@@its.okay.to.be.christian Maybe you've been presented with an incomplete definition of Oligarchy and its counter parts.. I believe what your implying is everything is a Hierarchy. Which would be accurate.
I see that the people and avenues you've trusted your discernment too have led you astray. Good luck finding your way, and may you not drag anyone down with you if you don't.
@Adeus555 Name a system in history that in its function is not under rule by elites. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm saying it's an inevitability. Hierarchy and power are not bad. I only would wish the oligarchy that rules over me to have some vague semblance of shared interest in an outcome as me and my family.
Great video! Agree 100%. My friends and i are trying this for the first time and we like it so far, but seeing all these problems. Lots of great titles coming out this year. Hopefully, GGG will keep us coming back
I refuse to grind on this EA period. Any progress will be wiped clean when the game releases anyway, so there is no point for me personally to go beyond just “trying” what the endgame feels like. I just wanna see what the game is like, have fun, and stop when it becomes a chore because my progress will not carry on
If you're playing league, your progress gets wiped too, but yeah it might be better to wait until more weapons, classes, and skills get added. My first character was a miserable experience bc the class/build I wanted to do wasn't easily accessible/available.
GGG went overboard with the "souls like" hype train and went full sadistic at times with their choice. Elden Ring or DS3 are games you play more occasionally, do a char or two as some content gets released (unless you pvp but then it's a totally different story). Most players won't like getting mistreated league over league. Folks won't be coming back, only the most die hard will. Campaign is too long (they should do a campaign skip, it's a must), maps are too big, end game has too much RNG and the 1 portal mechanism is nuts for an arpg where you can't see much with all the terrain details and spells.
@tvlyt456 I'm worried because they went deep into the sadistic, gambling/rng and time consuming mechanics. It's the DNA of this game and I think it is fundamental, their "vision". There's no reasons for them not to make fast, easy and large changes to at least the end game but I'm afraid it will take a year for them to give up their "vision". I consider myself a pretty average gamer and I'm not going to stick around and play an unbalanced game for that long. They should have learnt more from Poe1, there's no reasons for GGG to have some already corrected mistakes from Poe1 in Poe2.
I think you're making solid points overall, especially concerning the backtracking, visual clarity, death effects, the identity crisis of the game, 1 attempts pinnacle bosses and RNG gatekeeping of late-game encounters. You're also overreaching at times on concepts you don't seem to fully understand and it's hurting a bit the credibility of your critiques of the game (waystone sustain, gem links, breach endgame accessibility come to mind). My main point of disagreement with your video would be your opinion about death in maps, I was originally not biggest fan of map loss penalty on death and it personally grew on me the more I played the game, I had to pivot my build to adapt to those penalties. I like that juicier maps have meaning, I like that a good build has to have a proper layer of defenses, it enhances the whole experience. People will view the death penalties in a more positive light when the on death effects are toned down and visual clarity is improved.
What about them? Or are you one of these wierdos who think a free to play game isn't allowed to make any money what so ever, I have a full collection of stash tabs from poe and I still spent vastly less money than I did to play diablo 4 and it's expansion
I really vibrated with this video =D Also, thanks for calling out the absolutely absurd Stockholm syndrome takes from the PoE 1 crowd. I have seen plenty of over-protective core games audiences in my years of gaming, but nothing comes close to the rationalizations I've seen this last month interacting with this community.
You've echoed my issues with the game almost perfectly. I keep thinking I'm done playing it until the next update, because I'm not having very much fun anymore, since it's such a slog in the endgame, but I keep playing, because I'm a creature of habit with nothing better to do, and I'm actually starting to dislike my time playing. It's such a good game with such huge problems that I have to make myself quit playing until they're fixed, or else I will start to resent the game. Maybe it's time to run through the first 2 acts of Baldur's Gate 3 again until D4 Season 7 comes out...
lol bro don’t get me started with elites that have the evade modifier. Went from 2k honor to 300 in my last floor of the trial just dancing with this enemy. not sure what the though process was with that one. I truly appreciate who you put a lot of things, that I as a new player am also feeling. It is difficult to be a keyboard warrior to express some of these concerns, so dope job with your take!
Funny, the POE community is very elitist and loves jumping on the 'D4 bad' bandwagon at every opportunity (literally commenting every D4 video). This early access is riddled with issues but and the core game really needs a lot of work. D4 is genuinely much more fun to play vs this version of POE... A shame because the boss fights and early campaign were actually incredible and showed the potential. 2 major problems (ignoring the Cruel campaign repeat which is quite lazy and boring): • Items are terrible. Uniques are boring, rarity is a redundant and lazy stat that shouldn't be in game, and you are literally reduced to looking for resistances and ES on every piece of gear. • End game is very limited and incredibly inefficient. I actually enjoy difficulty... I don't enjoy not being able to get waystones for the difficulty I want, and requiring 6 pieces of + rarity % on my gear in order to even play higher maps. The maps are just repeated over and over and the game modes and rewards are pointless. I'm so bored with the game already... which is funny when the elitist community hate on D4 end game and GGG literally announced their end game focus and superiority to other ARPGs (yes, even in the early-access version which we paid for). The end game in current form is straight trash.
It's pretty funny seeing the same people shit on D4 (deservedly so), yet hand wave PoE2 which has a lot of the same problems, sometimes magnitudes worse and previously solved in PoE1. I think a lot of people are going to be in for a rude shock in how long these systems take to change to stop wasting peoples time and actually be fun. Most of these problems are GGG's core vision, and won't be changing till their Chinese owners make them.
You have total item rarity on the map modifiers, which makes sense since the item rarity of each map is different as long as you don't run non-crafted maps, so it's no big deal if you dont have it in your character sheet. But some infos doesn't show anywhere, like the elemental threshold of your character, or the energy shield recovery rate - which is not the recharge rate.
Pretty interesting how intensely focused people are on the problem of 'backtracking' in ARPG's which usually takes 2 minutes max, yet happily walk for hours in games like DayZ, Tarkov or Death Stranding.
Played POE1 for a couple hundred hours back at its launch over a two years time. Decided then that POE is not respecting my time. Looked at POE2 and decided not to play it. I have nothing against the game and ppl who enjoy really do enjoy it. But IMHO and sounding a little harsh when I say this but f GGG and f POE1 and 2. Only thing that the game has going for it are the visuals and sounds.
For now this is a game designed for teenagers, streamers or for people like Elon Musk who can just play it for hundreds of hours. It is a level of absurd which is really hard to comprehend. Because of that I don't have hope for a real improvement. The way they treat players' time is so disrespectful that it is difficult to expect it to change drastically, which is the only solution to all the problems described. There is nothing to balance here, here you simply have to change the basic assumptions.
This isn't blizzard who made this game and it's a three week old half finished product there is still tons of room for improvement but hey to each their own I guess 😅
@@son1cdragon123sWell maybe they shouldn't have released a "half finished product", as you put it. It's a weird level of cope to think that it'll be decent in a year. So you're ok with just playing a bad game in the hope it'll be better in the future? This doesn't count because it's "early access"? 99% of people don't think of it that way. The thought is that we're playing POE2. It may or may not be better in a year, either way... in a year I'll be playing something else. You only get 1 chance to make a first impression. Nothing feels worse than trying to move around some of these maps and getting stuck on a corner that is visually confusing, and getting surrounded by monsters that move twice as fast as you for some reason, not being able to dodge roll or move away because you're cornered... and dying, losing a massive amount of XP and the map. I've been trying to figure out which part of the game I enjoyed as SSF. It's nearly impossible to find gear upgrades. Crafting equipment is entirely luck and RNG. So progression is just tied behind luck and RNG. If you put in enough hours I suppose you can overcome it, or not. When I get to mapping, what's the goal? Is the ultimate adrenaline rush finding a higher tier waystone? Gold seems pointless, orbs are just RNG. Divine orbs are good? Vaal orbs just brick my gear? If I'm lucky enough to find citadels, I get one chance to beat them? If I fail, maybe I find another one in 50 hours? 100 hours? Never? Season ends next week? I'm sure this all appeals to people who can play a game for a living, but I would prefer the game to have an opportunity to thrive by having a large playerbase and not just a niche base. As it stands in its current state, this game will be extremely niche. And that might be fine for the few who end up playing it, but it won't appeal to a larger audience, which I think is what most people wanted.
@@chrisrusnak4103it’s literally at the highest player count in POE history. I wouldn’t call that niche. You can “think” that you are playing the full release of POE 2 but the reality is that you are playing an early release and the devs have been on holiday for half of the time it has been released. These are facts, not opinions. I am sure the few hundred thousand people that are playing won’t miss you bud.
GREAT video, all relevant points. Why do I have to add up my magic find why isn’t it in a menu? Also, trading is a crutch, you shouldn’t HAVE to trade and I never will.
I agree with you as a D2 player my feedback is totally align with yours, and let me end I love the game and I love playing it but nothing is perfect and ones I would play all the characters to the end game might stop till they adress the feedback.
The point you make about the rare monsters is the 'archnemesis' problem. In PoE 1 there was a league called Archnemesis that introduced a ton of new modifiers on rares, and for like a year it was the most hated change that PoE 1 has ever gone through. Almost no players liked it. They toned it down eventually, a few times, and now it's back ! In PoE 2 ! That makes me really disappointed, because that means the devs have not learned anything about the most glaring issue PoE1 has ever had. I'm a PoE 1 veteran with 11k hours and Settlers of Kalguur was/is the pinnacle of PoE1, it's in the best state it has ever been in my 13 years old veteran opinion (mainly SSF), to then see the devs porting these crucial mistakes to PoE2... I just makes me sad.
Great video. I 100% with every single of your points. My biggest pain point is number 1: I'm not a fan of one-shots in general, but when failures, maybe caused by unlucky affix combinations on monsters, visual clarity, obstructed aoe's, or simply not yet knowing the fight, can result in hours, if not dozens of hours in the case of pinnacle bosses, of lost time and regrinding, this is simply disrespectful, prevents most people to even learn fights, and to be honest also stupid by GGG, because most people won't stick around for that which means less money. The fact that the most avid defenders of multiple layers of punishment and wasting people's time in non-hardcore are hardcore players, who only get one shot at anything and obviously have too much time on their hands, is ludicrous. Sometimes I think people like Quin fried their brain by doing the same thing over and over from morning to night for years. At the very least they completely lost the ability to see the perspective of other people. I'm not sure if GGG will actually be able to change any of it. They have been catering to a rather hardcore player base for so long that many of the things that we now see are simply a direct consequence. Which begs the question, why they decoupled it from POE1: Originally, they said they wanted it to be more accessible and slower than POE1 to try to attract a more casual audience and to a degree they achieved it, because the ingame descriptions are better, the skill tree provides less opportunities to brick the character, respec is somewhat better and the campaign is amazing. On the other hand there are so many design issues, quite many mentionend in your video, and most casual players don't want to start a new character with each season and redo the campaing, that I don't expect that it will retain the number of players that would be needed to justify the development cost. At the moment I only see POE2 cannibalizing POE2 and I'm not sure if even this will continue or if the current POE1 players will just ping pong between the different seasons because it's primarily made for the people with the most time, not necessarily the best players, and certainly not casual ones.
Took me 218 map nodes to find 1 citadel. 20ish after that for 2nd citadel. 80ish for 3rd, 2 more for 4th and 5th (found both with 1 tower). It's either RNG or it's just "go as far away from the monolith in 1 direction and keep going further than you think u needed to". All 5 are within 3 screens of each other total (1 2 3 are 1 screen apart from 2's position while 4 and 5 are right below 3 by 1 screen and within 6 map nodes from each other). It took me 80 nodes to find 3 because I was looking around for it near the burning monolith like a buffoon, went back to the original 2 citadels and the actual distance from 2nd to 3rd was about 20ish nodes. In real time, took me 6 days of straight gaming to find 1st citadel, not running a "nuke the whole map with 1-2 buttons build"
![[PoE 2 Lore] The Story of Act 1 - Path of Exile 2 Complete Lore Series](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/DYCb7VRvrqw/mqdefault.jpg)
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Would be good for them to reward you with extra something without death, rather than loosing all the investment.
Loosing exp is something I dislike and feel it's more of an unwanted carry over from old games like after death effects that shouldn't be in a game. This will impact new players that finally get invested to know they are punished soo much. They could add bonus exp with no death rather than removing exp on death for example.
However people should also consider the context. This is what they got together in a short time when switching from doing act 4-6. Also this will be the worst state it will be in. They tried to get as much into the game so people could play it during the Christmas break while also letting the Devs actually take some time off.
Some feedback is prob too harshly focused on if it was a full release and not an early access. Framed as feedback on improving is constructive, but some people are treating their feedback on expecting it to be polished and full release rather than , this works, this doesn't.
I enjoyed your feedback and resonate on most points.
Just a question.
This game is still on Beta. Dont you think that the extra grind / extra punishing is voluntary to avoid players to have "fully finished" the beta content way before full release ?
I mean they would not be the first to do such, it's quite common actually.
Bro, you said everything i have been raging to say every time I play this game.
@@Morkhard I don't see a reason for that to be an undisclosed expectation. I don't tend to add layers to a concept I cannot verify.
@Morkhard This is what I hope. We are merely expressing our choices and hoping that it will ignite. I recently began playing this game, and all we're asking to hear us out. Enables players to be revived at the final checkpoint in a group play after they die. There is nothing worse than sitting, and waiting for someone to revive you. The worst is returning to town to clear out your inventory and teleporting back only to discover that the map has been rearranged completely.
I've died so many times in the jungle because everything is green, but some of the green is also a wall that I can't move around and i get body blocked to death.
Map opacity helps a lot
get your eyes checked man. i know what you mean but dude that sounds more like a YOU problem
@@D3xt3r33 Nah, there's definitely some weird areas where the jungle drops into this algae covered bog (often obfuscated by tree canopy) you can't traverse but you'd hardly notice if you weren't looking at the mini-map or overlay. There are also tons of Trees next to boulders or bushes that appear as though you could walk between, but on the mini-map it's clearly a nook with no outlet. And don't get me started or freakin' urns.
The maps are intentionally created to be more maze like than they should.
I am reminded of the purple plant zone where they emit purple poison patches--my health was going down after a fight was over and I was wondering what was going on, then I realized the ground around me was slightly more purple than elsewhere.
Keep your eyes on minimal map can help
The point about "having the audacity to try hard content" is word for word what I was thinking while mapping. The way the game is currently set up, it disincentivizes you from attempting harder content because of the extreme punishment for failure. Having to put in a low tier Waystone in a node where you just died and still having to spend so much time traversing an entire content wide map with no rewards just adds further insult to the extreme injury.
I don't mind repeating the map, I don't mind the loss of map activities (Breach etc). I absolutely cannot stand the XP loss to the point it makes me want to give up and not play the game any more.
Hard content ? It's totally rediculous the way it's all implemented now.
- Trying trials (3rd) : random affictions ...40%less honour, doing 40% less damage, monsters do 30% more damage, lose 5% of everything on hit..ohh, and on a 1HP build : have no energy shield. That's just idiotic to say the least.
-doing maps : i need to do regular waystones because the moment i try to put something harder (trying for better) i get crazy things like monsters get 195% more critdamage. or monsters can't be stunned/frozen/whatever combo....there goes my gold.
- rarity : try getting a decent rolled weapon that i can use is a pain like no other. Most i get is either crap (over 100 rarity here) or stuff not for my class. The game throws bows at me like it knows nothing else worthwile. So my damage output is "average". And getting something decent from the trade is insane at those crazy prices.
- Bosses : don't get me started. 1-hit mechanics forcing you to do it all over again or wait for 5+ levels to be able to take em down////if you're lucky enough to dodge at the right time without lag.
- Graphics : my game flickers like crazy when you see several people using their skills at the same time to the point you can't see crap.
- Loot : see in part rarity. Also, most (95%) of the loot is either unusable, total crap or has really really bad stats/additions.
For maps it's annoying, but for bosses it's just insulting.
You just can't engage with content that you haven't trivialized, that's just dumb. People who play like this play in hardcore, not in softcore. The whole point of softcore is to have fun trying stuff.
The no-rewards thing is insane. Diablo 2 wasn't this punishing. This game is like people wanted Diablo 2 but also occasionally with a CBT torture session.
Yeah even as a veteran of the first game, 1 attempt per map is brutal and disincentivizes trying harder content because it's likely you want to use your better maps on the one's with better and more modifiers. At least in the first game if we died, we can learn what factor it was that killed us and how to prepare accordingly for the next attempt. We don't even get that in this game unfortunately.
"Respect player time" is always the most important thing for me, when the game is about grinding. For some people its "OK" to spend a whole week doing the same thing to get 1 piece of whatever... for me thats fucking dumb.
That'll always be a preference divide, not a real piece of actual criticism. That conversation is essentially a recreation of the whole Guild Wars 2 VS WoW philosophy. It depends on whether or not you prefer moment to moment gameplay, or progressive gearing/stat building of a character.
Edit: HOWEVER, the mapping is totally unfair and doesn't respect anyone's time whatsoever. That'll get ironed out in EA without a doubt, though. That criticism itself is 100% valid.
I don't think farming even 6 months for something is dumb as long as it is a progress and depends on what it is based. Personally I will never understand people wanting everything straight away when they consider themselves even semi-developed human beings.
Great Video. I have been playing PoE1 since early alpha and now PoE 2 which I am really enjoying. Your video encapsulates perfectly a lot of the issues with the game in a very clear and fair way. I really hope GGG see this video as it is exactly the kind of well presented feedback they need. Thanks for taking the time to put this together, first class job mate.
Thx fam, I'm glad you resonated with it, and thanks for the kind words.
I have 8k hours in POE1 and I couldn't agree more
Totally agree on the stat sheet being incomplete. Anything you can invest skill points on, or stack percentages on through gear should be shown in your character sheet
anything offensive seems to be totally missing, unless I'm missing. I want to see total summary of my character and it doesn't seem to exist anywhere right now.
I think the critique on the skill sheet being lacking is very true. and is something i see being easily iterated on as its missing some like-for-like simply from PoE 1 ( such as max charges / etc ) .... but the critique comparing this to D2R and D4 when in D4 over 18 months post launch it STILL doesn't explain basic stats like resistances in the menu. Seems a tad nit-picky.
This I agree with. Would love to see my Rarity bonus percentage 😅😅
Thank you for this honest feedback. I love that you don’t mince words and call it what it is: disrespecting the player’s time.
And many streamers hiding the obvious…
Unistalled the game last night the moment i realized im losing xp and losing progress if i die in maps. Was ready to buy that $500 package just to support the game, that's how much i liked it up to that point.
My main issue with the game is how overly punitive it can be. It’s OK for the game to be hard, but losing things equipment and experience on death is way too harsh. Locking player progression behind two of the least popular and most punishing game systems that require specific builds is also a bad choice.
The devs want to grow their audience and be more accessible for newer players. But what we have in EA currently is literally the opposite.
Sorry but, losing equipment?
@@suzukisixk7 There are multiple times I have killed bosses or elite packs and then died to an after death effect or dot effect on my character that I wasn’t able to out heal. The equipment and currency that drops when this happens are lost as is any equipment you may have left on the floor from earlier in the run that you might intend to pick up later.
@@spcbrassso you failed and still expected to be rewarded. Make it make sense lol
@@spcbrasspick up later is after you win the map you are in, so if you died that means you gave away all the loot up until you failed. You have 5 additional portals for a reason so haul out everything that's valuable and go back in so even if you failed you don't lose everything. Rpg 101 for you bud.
I think when Jonathan said ‘new players’ he meant new HARDCORE players…this game isn’t designed for casuals it’s designed for the top 10% of players.
There’s no way anyone on their design team sat down and said “we’ll get a bunch of newbies in with THIS game design paradigm”.
I really resonated with your 'opportunities to learn" section. I, too, feel that GGG doesn't give us enough info to base our decisions on. Thanks!
It's wild to me that things that people rightfully criticized D4 for in terms of visual clarity, wasting player's time, lack of information, incorrect tooltips, various hoop-jumping to get from point A to point B, cheap 1-shot mechanics, overly punishing exploding monsters, etc... are being lauded as good design and defended with "git gud" comments for PoE2. I absolutely LOVE the gameplay of PoE2, but it's ok to say "it can be better."
What I do respect about PoE2 is that they freely admit this is Early Access and things will be changed in this incomplete game we're playing. I just hope GGG doesn't say "maybe this isn't the game for you, git gud" and takes the feedback seriously, because the game is like 7/10 right now, and could easily be 9/10 with a single big patch that addresses like 7-8 pain points for players.
Huge agree here
Well yeah, that's the POE Andy way, double standards. They will talk about D4 $20 cosmetics but will defend the $90 fomo cosmetics each league in Poe, and you can only change your characters looks with paid cosmetics in POE. They talked about blizzard ripping ppl off with a portal pack that contained 5 portals for $20, meanwhile you goto the Poe store and a single portal skin costs $30.
@@phatymcdaddy but POE is free to play, how are they going to finance the game? /s
@@phatymcdaddy Blizzard fanboy. You do remember you need to first pay $70 for the base game. Then another $60? for the expansion. Of which multiple will release and you have to keep buying to keep playing. Yes, the MT in PoE are expensive but you do not need to pay a single dollar to play the game.
@@smieltjeh POE2 is actually $30. You can't play without pay. And in a year it will be free and in a year after D4 came out it also got cheaper ($29.99). Also the expansion is $39.99 at release. It's pay to play. Just like POE 2 currently is. For the record.
You nailed it when you pointed out the level of stockholme syndome for the defense of bad design.
The game doesn't tell you that you lose XP because half the new players would never ever play it if they knew. Losing the waystone etc is fine. There should be a punishment for dying, but losing all of your time, and being able to go completely backwards is extremely poor design for "softcore." There is no defense for losing XP on death; it is the single biggest thing that has made all of my friends quit. It creates a game where players grind low level waystones to avoid challenge because the punishment isnt worth the potential reward. Then you're not gaining xp because you're in too low level waystones, but if you go higher you'll lose hours of grinding in a second. They are missing out on a massive amount of players because of this simple mistake.
I’m all for grindy games, but about 120 hours into PoE 2 it occurred to me that GGG expects people to play 400-500 hours every league to top out one character. The only people who are going to want to do that league after league multiple times a year have some sort of mental disorder.
I've had that same thought. A league is 3-4 months, so ~100 days. 500 hours is 5 hours per day, every day, without exception. Unless you're unemployed or make a living from playing the game, It basically requires the game to be the only thing you do with 100% of your spare time.
I already have 350 hours and am stuck on level 13 waystones.
This is experience too. I like making alts a lot, to try different things every season. But this game it will be impossible and with the length of time it takes to get endgame up and running I can't see people playing the game more than once, no chance every 3-4 months.
Welcome to poe
Games are designed to hook you for life. It's a business. Fun is secondary to player retention.
I lost a divine orb yesterday to an after death effect , felt so bad man. Had 8.7k ES too. Stood there just looking at the divine orb 😂
8.7k doesnt mean much if other defences suck though. lol some bosses have raw fire/melee hit of 10k + for instance...
@ I do CI so immune to chaos and have max resistances too but whatever just feels bad. I wish it would tell you what killed you.
That’s the main way I die in t15+ maps. Usually when stuff is blowing up on the ground via aftershocks with the Titan, I can’t see what’s there, next thing I know, I’m dead, or my life is draining to zero rapidly.
I think on death effects exist mainly because they are one of the only ways to kill players running the most powerful builds.
skill issue. next time walk around the effect
As someone who doesn't have a lot of time to play games, walking into a map that has 2 or 3 league modifiers on it, randomly exploding to something I didn't see, and permanently losing out on a chance to get pinnacle mats for that node is big feelsbad energy
While i do agree with you, POE 2 is probably not the game for you if you dont have much time.
@Gavinbelson no offense, but that's kind of bs. I think the majority of people who have full time jobs only get a few hours a day to do what they enjoy doing after all of their life obligations are done. Making a game for only the people who can play it for 10 hours a day every day isn't the way to make money, especially if you're doing a f2p model and I think GGG knows that
@@pokeholicmaster Im not saying 10 hours a day im just saying, if you only have 1 hour to game they shouldnt be catering to you. Few hours a day is more than enough imo.
Yeah, they are losing out a TON of cash though if they go with this as everyone with good jobs and lots of money will bail.
Losing XP is horrible. That should have died with D2 20 years ago as it really is some ego garbage or for people with less money than time which is a bad business strategy
@pokeholicmaster PoE2 is going to be here for the next 10 years, just like PoE1. You don’t need to feel the need to speedrun the game in 1 month, it’s a game which can be played over several years. You don’t need to play 10 hours a day for that. Just like some people who enjoy playing 2 hours of piano, you could enjoy 2 hours of PoE2 every day. What’s nice, is that PoE2 offers something to look forward over a long time. I don’t need to feel like I need to complete the game to enjoy it, I am enjoying it while playing and that’s what matters. Building my character and seeing him getting stronger, trading and understanding the ingame economy etc. Are 2 things I really enjoy in this game, and I don’t need to beat the pinacle bosses for this.
The ultimate “doesn’t respect the player’s time” mechanic is without a doubt trading. Not only is the expectation that you need to trade in order to progress in any kind of timely manner, but you also have to waste time on an out-of-game trading website and then waste more time waiting on the seller to drop what they are doing to come sell the item to you. Why, why, WHY is there no auction house? And don’t give me that “auction house is what ruined D3” crap when the console versions of PoE1 have auction houses. The current currency exchange mechanic added just last league is built off the auction houses in the console versions of PoE1. If there’s a plan to add it later, great. If not, it’s a huge missed opportunity and even bigger disappointment.
when I first saw the honor system before they "tweaked" it, I raged so fkn hard
Hopefully no AH ever. Currency exchange is already causing significant inflation. Its overshadowed by MF but its there. And trading is already too convienient to the point where people cry about not wanting to pick loot.
Making something intentionally annoying and unfun as a balancing measure has never sounded like a good idea to me. I'd like to engage with trading, but as long as I have to deal directly with random strangers to do so, I'll just be SSF.
I don't hate people, but the more I deal with them, the more likely I am to start to.
So just quit the game.
@@joeyjoey5136 I would prefer it if they would fix the problems instead...
Hit the nail right on the head in this one MacroBioBoi !!! Great video, very good points, eloquently made !!! Keep up the great content !
I hope GGG can see how lucky they are to have someone like Mac giving them feedback. I usually have no idea specifically why I do or don't like parts of a game but analysis like this actually gives specific problems for them to look at and adjust.
Second comment but actually discussing some of the stuff in your video:
It’s wild to me how you describe elites being so painfully invisible where they might go behind a corner and stop emitting light etc.
I got into D2 when D2R came out, and was basically a very casual D3 player prior. One of the things I noticed about D2 that I really liked was how you could tell there was an elite monster in the next room over through a wall because they would literally emit a different color of light. You know you’re about to encounter one of those elite ghost things in an Act 1 Countess run because you see a red glow in the next room over before you even entered the room.
Or maybe you’re on your way to Andarial and you notice the next room over has a weird blue glow that is kinda walking back and forth. It might not be extremely obvious what that means to a new player, but a new player will be able to identify that SOMETHING is weird.
This is definitely a big sore point with elites in PoE 2. I can never tell which is the Elite enemy and given how death can happen so fast, I don't generally have time to slowly mouse over everything to see which one it is, and what modifiers they have. 9 out of 10 of my deaths come from running into a pack and suddenly dying without being able to react because I didn't know that it was an Elite and couldn't tell quick enough if it had dangerous modifiers.
@@ejliannby the time
You mouse over you probably dead so I agree with this
@@phishmastermike by the time you mouse over it you should already be dodging... or running the fuck away if your a witch and it has that big fucken blue "Drains mana aura"
@@ejliann
Yeah see not a fan of that.
I know there’s a lot of memes of like… how it seems every claimable cliff face in gaming magically has yellow spray paint all over the parts you can climb, but I never saw anything wrong with how D2 handled elites.
Normal skeleton is white, but THIS ONE IS BLUE???! OR RED?!!?? Maybe it’s not a terrible idea to spray paint some of your elite monsters to make them stand out clearly AND have some visual identification that lets you quickly and easily identify their most dangerous modifiers without needing to take a screenshot of their healthbar so you can walk back to safety and read what affixes they have on ‘em xD
Plus I feel like D2 had a lot of modifiers you could just see like elite man with a big ass Fanaticism aura. Elite guy who runs at you so fast you can’t even see his animations properly. I don’t need to scroll over their health to know they’re aura enchanted or extra fast in those conditions LOL
aura effect, conviction aura😏
Brother, this is a straight up perfect take on POE2. You covered all of the issues we are all experiencing.
Completely agree, I have dropped POE2 for now, will probably come back after EA is done for a league and see where it is at. Unfortunately I expect it to be exactly in the same place. GGG had an opportunity to drop the bad and the bloat from POE1 and come with a new take on POE2, instead we get basically the same game with the same mechanics but with better graphics. As for listening to feedback, apart from maybe a couple of cases in POE1, I had the impression that GGG ever really cared and pressed on with their vision of what the game was, knowing that the next league will be shiny and new and the community will get distracted about a different thing,
GGG is stubborn
I agree with everything, save for the point about the gear/loot/currency interactions being fine.
I'd argue that the lack of control over gear, and currency overall is just as egregious as every other point.
From a SSF perspective, I never felt like I had the ability to really embrace the crafting currency because it's just gambling currency. If you find a base, and you slam the two magic gambles and see if the piece of gear is bricked or not. If the affixes weren't useful, that's it, base wasted. If you got 1 out of 2, or maybe even both decent affixes, you gamble with a regal again. That's not interactive, that's a going to the casino to play slots; and going back night after night hoping tonight is the night you win.
And from a Trade perspective, the economy hit a level of hyper-inflation in record time. The casual player might as well be playing SSF because now that the baseline has shifted to Divines, your options become to reroll a meta clear build and stack Rarity so you can keep up with inflation, or accept that you'll never be able to afford even the higher end of mediocre gear.
While you could argue the RNG-nature of gear drops in ARPGs is inherent to the genre, that doesn't speak to the fact that POE literally has a currency system designed around the concept of crafting. Even D2 had runes that players could farm for desired stats, for rng rolls. PoE2's essences in the early game only work on bases, which is a step backwards from PoE1. And the removal of the crafting bench from PoE1 for the sake of PoE2 runes aren't enough to waste the currency to socket on subpar gear for the minor advantage of a single rune (or two).
There's no sense of autonomy for the player. PoE2 feels like a disjointed mess of ideas from PoE1, and the vision of spiritual successor to D2; slathered in gacha-style gambling masquerading as progression.
Great insight here
As a new player, i completely agree. I feel I've got no control at all. The experience i have is simply "what do the rng gods have in store for me this season?" And that's all.
And furthermore, challenge and difficulty, especially in thematic ways such as we see in games like elden ring, present a challenge to overcome and conquer given that you rise to the occasion. That being said, im not a fan of simple punishment for no reason beyond the punishment itself. You're punishing my xp which you've already made infinitely more grindy to get than need be, youre punishing my loot and waystone which I also spent currency and time to make, youre punishing all the preparation efforts I put into it which wastes more time, and so on and so on.... and this is all because of what? I ask the question "why". There's no benefit to me that I can see. My death was simply because the waystone casino gave me a modifier on my map that makes my build more frustrating but seeing as how I've now spent currency on this map it's a big waste to throw it out but it's also a potential waste to run it if I die,so I feel like I've lost twice now. And for what? 2 exalts maaaabye?
Lastly, why on earth am I nearly forced into making myself weaker with as much rarity as I can get when....
A: the map mods do all that for me and then some
B: isn't the whole purpose of an arpg to make the most powerful character you can make to get better and better loot? Yet I'm incentivized into being weaker to achieve better results OR becoming stronger, and instead of trading for gear, spending more time in the casino ultimately.
I really hate the fact that I agree with every single line said here.
I map for like 10 hours and I still don't know why I am doing it. I will burn out really quick if I don't find an actual meaningful reason to keep doing in it. As you said, I wouldn't mind a light to chase 20 maps away, but I need a sense of meaning for the content I am doing other than possibilities of having ONE chance to do something. Absurd. I am still playing because of the combat, but D4 excels at it and I've got bored of it at some point.
How far we've come xD
I’m thinking game devs have gotten so sick of “hand-holding” that they forget even the least hand-holdy games of old gave you some kind of hints.
Mac’s idea of “a little light that way” sounds like a perfect idea. It’s not holding your hand like a baby, but it’s just kinda saying, “Hey new gamer! I’m glad you’re enjoying our game. There’s something maybe kinda weird over in that general direction. I dunno maybe just kinda go that way and you’ll maybe see something new,” all without ever uttering a single word.
BOOM now your end game system has some kind of direction and isn’t just, “WELL, I HOPE I GET LUCKY”
@@MacroBioBoi I know, I know... XD
@@beingbeyonddat D4 excels? are you for real?
@@jldionido8014You're like a year past the "D4 bad" train.
5:44 is literally the reason my ass said I'm just going to wait till the game is completely finished lol. Literally felt like I was wasting my time.
Is it only me that thinks linking the game up to a website for trading is really bad/lazy? For me, i wanna stay inside the bubble i get inside when i play games, no distractions, its just me and my toon. When i have to alt-tab to a website, it immediatly takes me out of this bubble., And when im already on the internet-browser, i check news, i get tempted to check facebook etc. Thats just a me problem though, but i cannot be alone? Also, the trading makes me feel more like a trader than a gamer. I even had to watch some tutorials on how to use all the functions behave on the trade-site. I wanna kill stuff with cool attacks, i dont wanna browse the internet for items, like im browsing ebay hehe.
100% - Not having a proper, in-game escrow system/auction house is bush-league bullshit.
Depends on what your endgame goals are. If you just wanna blast and stay in the game then go solo self found.
If you want to have any level of min maxing then trade league is the way to go. Learn the trade website filters and you will thank yourself with some amazing purchases because the alternative way to gear via crafting is an annoying RNG fest.
it was awesome in Ultima Online. it just added to being able to advance outside of the game by setting up trades later. it was super active tho and it was more of a player economy with way more items/rares/houses/etc people were selling.
Problem is, there's too much RNG in the loot and crafting. So trading becomes the way to go for drastic increase in power. And this in turn leads to the creation of an entire mode where you can't trade... and also can't group. Which means it is still a crappy solution. And, of course, all that focus on trading draws the RMTs.
On the plus side, their plan is to make the trading happen in game, no site necessary.
An un-immersive trade system is actually a deliberate design goal for GGG. The idea is that they want to recreate the feeling of playing really old-school online multiplayer games, which includes having players heavily rely upon third-party and community resources for in-game activities. Originally there wasn't even a trade site, you would just make a thread on the forums listing the items you had for sale and have people pm / whisper you if they wanted to buy something. I think they only relented on this because players eventually made a third-party trade site and started taking ads from RMT sites on it.
Thanks for voicing out, wish ggg would listen to
Invaluable summary! Yet another PoE2 EA review that has to be forwarded to GGG.
Diablo 1 was the first game i ever picked and bought, myself, at 8 years old in 1997 (i still remember the excitement of getting my own game and i wont just be playing my brother's games). I'm still playing and seeking that same vibe now at 36 years old.
Same here brother, 36... thought poe 2 would scratch that itch, and it does.... but something is missing here currently
Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. I totally agree!
And i really love how you just mentioned, "Rarity find shouldnt affect currency" i have this discussion every day with my community. I totally agree with you on this subject.
I'm too casual for most of these things to really affect me but I 100% agree.
One thing I have felt a lot is the speed differential. Swarms of enemies push me across the map faster than I can run, evasive abilities like Escape Shot have me slowly float through the air before shooting some form of cc behind the enemies because they're already on top of me and pushing me around while I'm still in the air, even with a 40% slowing effect already on the ground. Melee can't land hits without getting hit back and there are trials that punish you for getting hit at all. Enemies need to be slowed down a lot imo.
haha that summary of how escape abilities work is hilariously accurate. I’m expecting to “escape” but the monsters are there waiting for me when I land (and seemingly hitting me while I’m in the air too, but that might be my imagination)
@@halloweentimemachine They're hitting you in air, you get no Iframes from any moving ability that I've seen. (With the notable exception of the basic dodge, which has a few Iframes at the start.)
I've just started a deadeye alt and also decided the escape shot is completely pointless. The mobs don't even pause for split second when you jump, they just continue their run to exactly where you're going to land 😂 It doesn't even let you jump over obstacles on the map, which would make it somewhat useful at least.
Yeah, the difference between player speed and monster speed is mind boggling. Also the fact that large monsters push you around simply by existing... wat?! Giga annoying. There are such few movement skills, such few defensive skills... I feel like it is especially annoying during the campaign stage where you basically have no equipment and skills. If you want to gain new players you need to hook them within the first few hours. If the game is way too hard early on, no one is gonna invest 60 hours to see the endgame.
@@Sorain1 Toxic Growth seems to give s (basically the same move as Escape Shot but you fire poison blobs instead of ice). I haven't done thorough testing or anything though, could have just been a coincidence with evasion.
If the game is supposed to be like Dark Souls by being punishing it's missed the mark because there's basically no punishment for dying at all in Dark Souls. You lose only progress towards your next level, but that's really easy to get back and any boss is basically a guaranteed level, you keep any items you've collected so yolo running to a powerful item and then dying to get back out is a super common strategy.
They even stopped doing salty runbacks after 2.
My biggest gripe with the game is that after 12 years of PoE they should have figured out a better way to balance the game for PoE 2. With even the simplest things like ES being many times better than armor + hp, it doesn't bode well for the game ever being properly balanced.
what is this take? PoE 1 is very balanced compared to other arpgs. the game is in early access so they can collect data/feedback and balance it...they have said this
@brianaiken3917 Clearly it's my take based on my experience with both games. Of course I don't expect things to be perfect at the start of EA but I expect them to have learned certain lessons from PoE 1 that they clearly haven't. Case in point, casters who attack safely from distance having the best damage scaling and the best defenses (easy es stacking and CI) with comparatively low investment just like PoE 1, while the classes that rely on armour and have a harder time avoiding damage get all their life nodes ripped out of the tree.
Respecting players time is the biggest crime in this game right now.
And on RNG the biggest overlooked RNG in the game is monster generation. Because theres no actual logic and anything blue and up can have random parameters you can often be f'd into a no win scenario. This can also happen with monster density, tight areas in world generation. This is often compounded by the ABSURD speed monsters can have as well as their ability to push you across the map and body block you.
Their genious vision is "Just deal so much AOE damage you don't ever have to interact with combat in our game." Magnificent game design.
Very interesting feedback! I think the loss on death is the most polarizing bit. Even though most people have lists of feedback, the vitriol with which you describe the final death is familiar to me now! You see people get bent out of shape at this, and I think GGG has to be worried about this reaction. It's not just turning people off, it's making them angry! You can see it in your comment section.
Agree with all the feedback about the end game map system, it's essentially the Delve system from POE1. Needs a lot of work.
Yeah, making people so pissed off that they ragequit the game, is not good gameplay. I dont know how many times i logged off from the penalty i get from dying when i get stuck in a pixel, invisbile aoe, oneshots, skillissues etc. It does not motivate me to do better, to get more defenses, learn the map etc. It just makes me wanna quit. And i stopped playing, because it just ruined the gamingexperience for me.
100%...it just makes me quit and go play WoW or D4 again. I can't waste hours of my life with all kinds of other responsibilities.
Such a great summary my man. I resonate with every each of these. It helps that you're are not biased to PoE world like some other streamers and can clearly speak about things just how they look.
1 of the best videos you've ever made imo Macro. Number 1 is the big killer with number 3 being slightly less but still a big killer. Number 3 I feel is Isometric ARPG 101. Like bro, I need to be able to see. How was that even missed?
Visual clarity really needs an update. Additionally, this game should develop a "color blind" mode so all people can play it. Implementing this feature would require a fundamental adjustment to how they display enemy attacks (as it would require more than just color changes).
Dont worry, if you delirium a map everyone who plays go colorblind! 😂
@@DTPandemonium and also go movement blind if you are in a map with tons of water, my pc just start freezing trying to purge all the water and smoke out
Biggest issues:
1. If you die you lose experience.
You can game for 6 hours and be worse off than when you started when finishing your session.
2. Forcing players to go out of the game to trade for items.
I you don't rng is so bad you will almost never find anything good and usable.
3.Crafting. Just pure Rng for most players.
It's like playing a casino with horrible odds.
Only here you win some pixels and not money.
4.Not being able to salvage/sell loot on the run, you have go to town....a lot.
5. Uniques are horrible.
No exitement when they drop, 'cause you know they will be shitty.
Not your level, not your class, not your build.
Fix this and the game will be a 10 out of 10😊.
some uniques are gamebreaking ive got astramentis for one
@@harlengreen8981 Well, did you trade it or did you find it yourself? I'd take a gamebraking unique any day over a useless unique. A gamebraking one is atleast fun until it is scaled down if needed......
@@SimenFulland the good uniques are from the endgame bosses/mechanics.
Actaully some uniques are good but a sure most are bad.
@@brianaiken3917 Still stupid. If the uniques are bad, why are they even in the game? How hard can it be to make good interesting uniques that are easy to understand and drops according to class and level? I still claim that unless you have a shitload of divines and buy them, most players will never see good uniques. When a unique drops it should be a dopamin rush, now it's just a big meh....Horrible design. The core game of POE 2 is very good, but it could become so much better-
Great video, I think the more opinions we have about the game, the better it will be for GGG to improve.
Just adding to your point in 27:30 I think we should be able to mouse over the value and see a break down of the bonus applied over the base value, I don't understand why the game has this information, and GGG chose to not be easily accessible by the player.
This was very well articulated and I think it also kind of explains some of my painpoints with the game that I didn't quite realize until watching this. I would love for the other creators you know in the space to take a look at this and give some of their thoughts
24:41 - Behind the scenes, Item Rarity and Item Quantity are not general player stats. They are modifiers specifically to your skills. The "increased item rarity" modifier on gear would be much more accurate if it was called "Enemies killed by you or your minions have x% increased rarity of items dropped." I believe the stat is managed this way for the sake of party play. If a character with 100% IIR is in a party with a character with 0% IIR, the item rarity modifier of whoever got the "killing blow" is the one applied to the enemy. In PoE 1 there were also ways to get IIR and IIQ for specific skills rather than as a more generic stat.
I do not believe this is a particularly good reason for not including the stat in the character sheet and only listing it on the skill information sheet. But I figured I would at least explain the most likely reason why it ended up getting left out.
I appreciate that insight!
Great video explaining a lot of failings that definitely need altering. I get the feeling we like a lot of the same games.
Man, thank you so much!! 100%....look, I'm a partner at a law firm in a major city. I can blast late at night a few days a week when my kids are asleep and I don't have to work. The fact that I lose XP for dying and it wastes hours and hours is ridiculous. And the game seems to waste my time.
I'll spend a ton of money on this game if you make it respect me.
play D4. poe is not for casuals
@@maxschwediauer9808 What a fail response and the result of a shit GGG experience!
@@dnatech4477 the only fail is blizzard as a company. poe is great
there are omens to reduce 75% of the experience lost... casual people don't know about these tricks and stuff and don't build defense enough to survive and maybe play warrior and not a range character that can offscreen content and die to on-death what can I say the game is not balanced atm just play the meta and have fun till they nerf you by 90%.
god forbid lvl 100 isn't free...get better at the game or go play D4
You really are the best for putting out your thoughts in a very clear and concise manner. I'd love GGG to tackle all these points, I couldn't agree more and I hope they find this video !!
I'm currently hesitating to continue playing. The final build I theorycrafted is gated behind several endgame mechanics and uniques. Not that this is a bad thing because I always have to adapt my build to get to that point but having to play 1000 hours to get there seems very daunting and I don't want to burn out of this excellent game during pre release ahah
I understand that the game is still EA, but if someone get too much into it with the current rng, they might get themselves crazy. Let me give 1 example:
In order to get Ingenuity Belt we need to do A LOT of Rituals hoping to see an item called 'An audience with the King'. Now after we get the item we can use it as a key to get into a dungeon to kill King of the Mists, with another rng that the belt might not even drop. So with the mindset of a self built gamer we might think its alright to keep farming the key but the reality comes smacking in our faces that sometimes after more than 100 maps with JUICED Rituals we might not even see the 'An audience with the King' to begin with...
Now to add the jerry on top, we might kill the boss 3, 4 times and the freaking Belt is not even dropping... That includes all the Atlas buffs we can get such as : more chance for the key to drop, more rituals per map, bla bla.... the grind is truly mad in this game guys
I sold a ritual waystone to someone for 80ex. It's crazy to me, that someone is willing to invest... in the CHANCE... to get to FARM THE THING, That MIGHT drop the loot. It's what I hate most about PoE- the content to farm the stuff you want to farm, is gated behind the market- and it's rarely cheap. And if you die, you wasted it.
ok? yeh..this isn't D4 where is feeds you everything an is shallow as a puddle
@@bobbobb5759feeding you something vs. expecting you to no life for something is a pretty huge difference.
Honestly they built like this is an mmorpg in some cases. What you describe would br finr in an mmo, wich is a game you play for life. Now, we are supposed to want to play leagues. I can barely see myself playing the campaign every league, imagine farming this rng crazy endgame
@@setcamper Yeah and how the market in game is done is so bad. Have to use external site, to whisper a guy who could not respond to you at all or scams you in some way. Just horrible to rely on that. SSF sounds cool to me also but like i do enjoy playing with my brother or friend from time to time and that would lock me out of playing with them. Then you have balance being made for people who play trade league which impacts SSF, unless they change rarity only for trade league and keep it how it is in SSF... I just don't think they would do that though.
There's also the argument of: "If i can't even find the content i want to do/ try out, why am i even playing the game anymore?"
That is how most players will reason.
But if we are allowed to at least try and it's just hard to do, most players will complain about it being too hard.
But bottom line, they are still playing the game, unlike if they never even get to try the content.
I’ve never heard a good reason for xp loss on death.
The reason: a character who goes all-out offensive and slams their head against the wall over and over until they hit 100 is a character that is not deserving of hitting 100. Not having xp penalties trivializes the race to 100 each league to just the players who can no-life the game with bad builds and win.
Players need to readjust their expectations that POE 1 and 2 have never been games that are balanced around a character hitting max level. I think it would be a reasonable middle ground for the game to kick in its penalties in the uber endgame, like 90 or 95+, so most casual players don't experience it though.
Ffs it’s a game “not deserving of hitting 100” I cringed so hard reading that line. But I do agree, if x-p loss on death were to remain move it to 90 or 95. As a new PoE2 player at lvl 70-90 I still had a lot of power to gain through skill points. Now having reach lvl 93 I don’t really care to look forward to my next lvl/skill point. I mostly get my power to small or big gear upgrades.
@@3ASY355 Ladder resets and the race to 100 has always been a major part of POE so yes, you shouldn't be able to win a race by nolifing a bad build that zooms all content and brute forces the game with no defense. Hence, xp penalties.
It's a perspective shift. Like you said, a character should be mostly considered "done" in their early 90's. The extra points beyond that are stretch goals but the game isn't balanced to hit 100.
@@3ASY355gotta say I cringed just as hard in the opposite direction when you Implied....yes you do deserve to reach max level.
I can't even imagine the game where everybody reaches the end, that should stay in the special Olympics and on Mobile games.
@@suzukisixk7 yes it is the special Olympic, and you are part of it. Part of the crew called "people that tied their identity to been good a video game" or "elitist".
I totally agree with all of your points. In addition to your first point, i want to add, that not only are the maps incredibly large. they are also cluttered with obstacles. even in maps like savannah or steppe, you constantly run into walls, that holds you in place: It´s even worse in maps like blooming fields or any fungus dungeon or crypts where you cant run 2 m in a straight line without getting stuck... not to mention the doors being so small that you minions constantly get stuck and/or have no line of sight to the mobs, and do not engage them. But the mobs running straight through your army, hitting you directly, while the skellys are doing nothing. Getting one-shotted from mobs across the screen is frustrating. being killed by bossmchanics long after the boss has died. Homing missles like the lightning apparitions that follow you or the violet bubbles that explodes on you. Not to mention the on death explosion stuff, many seconds after killing the mob. Really evil are the granade throwing mobs, that throw tiny pixelgrenades that can easily go unnoticed in all that visual clutter and you die, because you dared to stay still for a second.
Regarding the endgame acessability, i can say, that i have difficulties to maintain my waystones. i just reached the T14 maps quest, but i had to buy several waystones to even attempt to progress this questline. as i got further into the atlas tree, it is getting a little bit better, but they are way to rare and when you see the streamers, they litterally drown in t15 waystones. I have the feeling, that poe2 has a reverse take on difficulty overall. it´s brutal in the beginning, but once you have a strong build everything is handed to you freely. Not like diablo, where the begining is easy and it gets more difficult, the further you progress. This game is fun, bit it kicks you in the nuts constantly. I absolutely agree with your point of respect of the players time investment. The unforgivingness on mistakes and the nessessary learning curve is brutal. Also on the build/gear side. You will loose map after map, if you don´t have good gear. and where do you get better gear, if you cannot farm for it.... buy it via trade... but how, if you dont have the currency ? I know it´s early access and alot of the problems will be fixed at some point. But taking this little steps-grinding towards endgame every new season... thats a lot to ask from a casual player. Raxx has asked the right question on his video. GGG needs to decide, what playerbase it wants to adress. i think, we dont need a new POE 1 nerdfest and we dont need another D4 handholding kindergarden. something inbetween would be nice 😄
Some great points, I've been on vacation over the end of last year and still felt like poe 2 disrespects your time.
I like that this phrase, "Disrepects your time" is gaining traction. It's 100% spot on, and it encompasses everything from map layouts to the way two different players are rewarded for investing the same amount of time into PoE.
I can't agree more about how painful it is to die on high teir maps. It's also incredibly frustrating that the game doesn't tell you when you start to lose xp and how much. Something that important should be in big red letters. I've lost so many hours' worth of xp grinding. It's a dark blot on an otherwise amazing game and it needs to be receiving more attention. Whenever I bring it up, I'm told to stop crying and stop playing the game.
Great points you have there. That respecting player time is connected to so many systems from mapping to crafting, RNG, trading, Trials, movement, objectives etc. It is the main point that keeps me away from most f2ps, unless the money only buys cosmetics. I rather pay once instead of paying with minutes and hours of my unique life. In this game the early access is paid, during launch money should only buy tabs and cosmetics. Still player time is not valued.
Really good takes 👍🏻👏🏻
I have played 120+ hours. My main concerns are way to much rng item crafting and all that rng is stacking. I have spent 50 exalted on potentially good items and got all wasted. If the best way in item-based arpg to actually get the item is only to trade - it's really bad. Trade is ok in general, but crafting is bad, cheaper should be to craft items by yourself, not vice versa. Currently I am just farming currency and do not even try to craft, and because of that I don't get that excitement from obtaining an item. I am easily doing 16 maps between 2 towers with tablets and with breach/delirium, but the most time I am doing 10-12 maps because I have no higher maps. I saw no citadels. I don't pass last 2 points of ascendancy, f tornado killed me nearly 10 times on the last boss and I have no ultimatums. I don't really know what I want to do now in game. And I even not talking about technical part if the game, I am playing on ps5 pro.
If you dont have any higher maps after running breach maps... Well then there is a skill issue or an atlas issue with pushing for waystone tiers instead of quant / explicits / affixes... And I feel like you probably dont have your breach / boss atlas points because if you had you would have been swimming in T15.
For example, I have seen several trees using the duplicate rare modifier and then not scaling explicits... If you scale explicit and have a waystone with more rare and magic mobs you will gain way more mobs than just one extra rare.
I've got bad news for you, most poe players think the crafting is way too basic and new league endgame mechanics will likely continue to add layers of crafting.
Thank you. I tried several times to elaborate my frustrations in a constructive way on the official forum, and I love how you just simplified the whole concept as “respect player’s time”. That’s all it is 👏🏻
How many 'git gud' 'skill issue' try hards did you get coming at you? 😂
@ 😂
You'd be surprised. Usually I get "well written" and "+1" because the posts are well articulated and rarely a rant (and I'm a long time member of the community). Still amount to nothing tho
I already hated the 10% exp. loss from POE1. The one death allowed in maps of POE2 just makes me want to log out. And the visual clarity of all the various spells on the ground is bad enough but why are there walls and trees and other obstacles hiding things from me? And some of them aren't really clearly obstacles so when I am backtracking and rolling away from a monster I get stuck. The tower maps are rooms full of monsters that if you just run in blindly you might get one shot and walls might block your vision from even seeing what is going on. So annoying. The campaign is great. Super fun. Boss fights are great. Just the right level of difficult so that the really tough ones feel great to beat. Each class feels really distinct from the others which is huge compared to POE1 where everything just felt like a stack stick and individual abilities didn't really feel that different a lot of the time. But weirdly they made all these changes and somehow the gear mostly stayed the same. Like why not revamp the entire stat system? And the crafting used to be bloated and overwhelming but now they oversimplified it and made it just a straight up gamble that is not going to go your way 99% of the time. So much to love about the game but so much to be improved. Hopefully they take a lot of time to really make things better during early access and don't dig in their heels. ETA: also the fast travel between way points is great in theory but often there are no waypoints in places where you would expect them!
Valid criticism. I've tried to get into Poe since beta but only got to the end game with Settlers. I've played all ARPGs D2, D3, D4, LE, TQ, GD, I think poe2 is special but needs some tuning. Unfortunately these days I'm dad gaming hours, but I'm thankful for the people that can deep dive and give this good feedback to ggg who have proven themselves as the true successor of D2
Another problem is a reliance on a third party to do basic functionality of the game. Why do i need to download a loot filter? Why cant i set it up ingame of what i want to see? Or why do i have to use a website to trade my items ingame? Both these are leading to the problem of people being hacked currently and GGG doesn't care cause they are on holiday.
The most stupid thing I’ve ever seen is the game requires you to trade to progress but makes trades as hard as possible.
@@LittleRadicalThinkeryou do not need to trade to progress
@ Right… very good… opinion
All fantastic points and I appreciate you listed them at the start! For RNG, they need to remove magic find completely and raise drop rate slightly. I know magic find existed in D2 but it’s an outdated mechanic. You should not have to choose between optimal gear for your build or less optimal gear that will help you get optimal gear. It makes it so not only does every player need two sets of gear in optimal circumstances, but also so that you’re running magic find 90% of the time. A player shouldn’t feel like they are hurting themselves for running cool gear that doesn’t include magic find.
PoE worked very well in 2012 after the D3 disaster. PoE2 wont work in 2025 even with the D4 disaster if they dont change the game drastically. I agree with almost everything you mentioned.
Don’t worry, there 100k Poe fanboys and fan girls will defend Poe2 for the sake of Poe.
This game is made for streamers and no
life gamers,like POE1…
@@LittleRadicalThinkerI see the game settling at like 135k players per league and the half of those that are whales that slurp up the $90 fomo cosmetics will keep GGG afloat just like Poe 1. Meanwhile they will goto D4 vids and talk about how d4 is bad with $20 cosmetics
@ then? So poe2 doesn’t need new players. Is this your conclusion?
"Ability to shape gear is near perfect"
Uhhh with what? Randomly slamming exalts?
By far the most objective and honest take on this game.
Unfortunately, the elitism around this game, will prohibit the devs from taking takes like yours seriously
Very well structured feedback. Lots of good points.
Also... the meta builds are really braindead for a supposedly 'hard game'. Spark/Arc Mage sorc? Infernalist? What happened to the 'interesting skill combinations' and more thoughtful/deliberate combat system???
Lol. Poe is supposed to be a builders paradise yet everyone copy builds. There is no creativity
Skill 3 is s huge over designed mess.
Game is totally unbalanced yet they add tons support gems / class. More to come : only gonna worst
Tip to ggg less is more
What "skill" does this game have lol... ARPGs r for blasting... There is no skill involved in these games.
Great feedback, constructive!
As an SSF player myself my biggest issue is the early stages of crafting. Too many trans/augs or no rewarding way to use them.
Transmutes/Augments could reroll prefix/suffix on magical items only. I'm always out of regals, exalts and chaos which is a GOOD thing, but having hundreds of trans/aug doesn't feel right.
I really enjoyed the game but it lost me when I found out the crafting was really gambling. I don't have time for that
I think they were too scared to add the poe1 crafting complexity because of all the new players coming in, I almost Garantee this will change in the next few months.
Really good analysis, there are some serious issues with PoE 2 right now, feels like they did not learn from PoE 1 or their concept of difficulty is tied to inconvenience, you earned my sub with this video.
As a beta player of PoE1, PoE2 is just soul crushing. Everything that made PoE 1 great, is basically gone. At level 40 I am still wearing mostly gear from level 10-15, cause even though i have picked up thousands of items, 90% of them are not for my character, 90% of the ones that are have just trash for stats, and of the 10% that have at least a good stat they are bricked when trying to add more stats with currency. I was stuck in act 3 on the chimera boss cause my cold resist was completely negative, I had no cold resist at all, and it was so bad that the bosses frost breath insta killed me. And with other effects on the ground like poison and fire, you literally could not see the frost spread. I did more than 30 attempts on a boss REQUIRED to advance in the story because no items thus far in the game gave me enough cold res to not be insta killed. Likewise I am still using boots with 15% move speed because getting any other stats on my boots is meaningless, as that little bit of move speed is literally life or death, I mean if a set of boots dropped with max life, and triple max res, I would still have a hard time giving up my only move speed mods, as that allows me to live far more often that more life would. And not being able to craft a set of boots is infinitely annoying. The game puts DPS checks in place, and then gives you nothing, and expects you to over come by what? farming zones endlessly for the potential of gear upgrades? My buddies have all progressed to maps, and I am still slogging along in the campaign cause of poor RNG. Its actual madness.
The crazy boss difficulty spikes without a logical crafting system has been enough for me to uninstall the game. Yes, you can respec if you have the gold. Do I have to do that every time I meet a new hurdle? No, I want to apply passive points and build the character. Not spend even more time trying to figure out how to allocate points to beat a certain boss. Maybe gambling away gold on buying random gear from an NPC, hoping it will get a lucky roll. Your point of using gear that's 20 levels lower is spot on. Most of the rare or even unique drops are not related to the character I happen to play. I realise I am just a newbie in this type of game, but although I am retired and have plenty of time, I am not going to sink in another 120 hours just to be punished even more as you progress.
@@kuyakano8976 In PoE 1, skills and the skill tree mattered more than gear early on, if you had the right set of skills, and a decent build, you could do the campaign on trash gear. In PoE 2, gear is the determining factor, skills still matter, but no amount of skill gems can overcome the gear barrier. And since gear is 100% RNG now, sometimes you will get an awesome start, and sometimes you will struggle to kill white mobs, and unless you play trade league you are kind SoL.
Add the fact that you're screwed against bosses if you play warrior or any of the other melee classes in the future. For what it's worth, the warrior should output way more damage with his skills than he does know considering the fact that he is super slow and has to stay close to bosses which constantly spam aoe and melee attacks. Fighting Doryiani with my warrior was the worst experience ever. Hopefully the rest of the melee classes they add won't suck as much.
I played titan up to lvl 89 and I think warrior has many problems but bossing is not one of them imo
Thanks for this macro. I have approximately 0 hours in poe so hearing someone voice my confusion in well thought out and intricate feedback is validating. Keep up the good work!
hahaha, the near stockholm syndrome meantality of people sayings.. git gud!
haha Isn't that the truth. People will defend these companies and stuff like they are their best friends or something. A new level of oligarchy.
All systems are oligarchy; there is no other.
@@its.okay.to.be.christian Maybe you've been presented with an incomplete definition of Oligarchy and its counter parts.. I believe what your implying is everything is a Hierarchy. Which would be accurate.
@Adeus555 both
I see that the people and avenues you've trusted your discernment too have led you astray. Good luck finding your way, and may you not drag anyone down with you if you don't.
@Adeus555 Name a system in history that in its function is not under rule by elites. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm saying it's an inevitability. Hierarchy and power are not bad. I only would wish the oligarchy that rules over me to have some vague semblance of shared interest in an outcome as me and my family.
Great video! Agree 100%. My friends and i are trying this for the first time and we like it so far, but seeing all these problems. Lots of great titles coming out this year. Hopefully, GGG will keep us coming back
I refuse to grind on this EA period. Any progress will be wiped clean when the game releases anyway, so there is no point for me personally to go beyond just “trying” what the endgame feels like. I just wanna see what the game is like, have fun, and stop when it becomes a chore because my progress will not carry on
If you're playing league, your progress gets wiped too, but yeah it might be better to wait until more weapons, classes, and skills get added. My first character was a miserable experience bc the class/build I wanted to do wasn't easily accessible/available.
Standard server progress won't get wiped
@@nicoinformatics I get the impression that yhey will
Your progress ll be wiped anyway whenever you play 😂 that's how the ladder/league works
@@rafaelgoncalvesdias7459 Don't we get something like achievement tho?
Absolutely love all your necro builds!!!!
Wondering if you might do a chaos minion monk build .....
Happy New Year!
GGG went overboard with the "souls like" hype train and went full sadistic at times with their choice.
Elden Ring or DS3 are games you play more occasionally, do a char or two as some content gets released (unless you pvp but then it's a totally different story).
Most players won't like getting mistreated league over league. Folks won't be coming back, only the most die hard will.
Campaign is too long (they should do a campaign skip, it's a must), maps are too big, end game has too much RNG and the 1 portal mechanism is nuts for an arpg where you can't see much with all the terrain details and spells.
@tvlyt456 I'm worried because they went deep into the sadistic, gambling/rng and time consuming mechanics. It's the DNA of this game and I think it is fundamental, their "vision". There's no reasons for them not to make fast, easy and large changes to at least the end game but I'm afraid it will take a year for them to give up their "vision". I consider myself a pretty average gamer and I'm not going to stick around and play an unbalanced game for that long.
They should have learnt more from Poe1, there's no reasons for GGG to have some already corrected mistakes from Poe1 in Poe2.
Best feedback video so far, it touched on issues i've noticed but have not seen anyone talk about.
I think you're making solid points overall, especially concerning the backtracking, visual clarity, death effects, the identity crisis of the game, 1 attempts pinnacle bosses and RNG gatekeeping of late-game encounters. You're also overreaching at times on concepts you don't seem to fully understand and it's hurting a bit the credibility of your critiques of the game (waystone sustain, gem links, breach endgame accessibility come to mind).
My main point of disagreement with your video would be your opinion about death in maps, I was originally not biggest fan of map loss penalty on death and it personally grew on me the more I played the game, I had to pivot my build to adapt to those penalties. I like that juicier maps have meaning, I like that a good build has to have a proper layer of defenses, it enhances the whole experience. People will view the death penalties in a more positive light when the on death effects are toned down and visual clarity is improved.
Always love your content. Extremely eloquent!
Who looks at the current crafting system and goes almost perfect??
In current state it's using currency to identify your item
I have near 7k hours of PoE1 and I agree with all the topic of discussions.
Also; stash tabs.
What about them? Or are you one of these wierdos who think a free to play game isn't allowed to make any money what so ever, I have a full collection of stash tabs from poe and I still spent vastly less money than I did to play diablo 4 and it's expansion
Excellent critique, thanks. /subscribed
I un-installed tonight and bought last epoch on sale. All I can say is I'm glad I did. People that defend this current state are masochist.
I want to uninstall it too but im gonna wait if GGG comes out with a patch note with positive announcements.
I really vibrated with this video =D
Also, thanks for calling out the absolutely absurd Stockholm syndrome takes from the PoE 1 crowd. I have seen plenty of over-protective core games audiences in my years of gaming, but nothing comes close to the rationalizations I've seen this last month interacting with this community.
You've echoed my issues with the game almost perfectly.
I keep thinking I'm done playing it until the next update, because I'm not having very much fun anymore, since it's such a slog in the endgame, but I keep playing, because I'm a creature of habit with nothing better to do, and I'm actually starting to dislike my time playing. It's such a good game with such huge problems that I have to make myself quit playing until they're fixed, or else I will start to resent the game.
Maybe it's time to run through the first 2 acts of Baldur's Gate 3 again until D4 Season 7 comes out...
D4 😂
You dislike the game so much that you can’t stop playing it lol.
@@speardjinn5085 more like I love it so much that I'm starting to hate it
@speardjinn5085 shuit upp
lol bro don’t get me started with elites that have the evade modifier. Went from 2k honor to 300 in my last floor of the trial just dancing with this enemy. not sure what the though process was with that one. I truly appreciate who you put a lot of things, that I as a new player am also feeling. It is difficult to be a keyboard warrior to express some of these concerns, so dope job with your take!
Funny, the POE community is very elitist and loves jumping on the 'D4 bad' bandwagon at every opportunity (literally commenting every D4 video). This early access is riddled with issues but and the core game really needs a lot of work. D4 is genuinely much more fun to play vs this version of POE... A shame because the boss fights and early campaign were actually incredible and showed the potential.
2 major problems (ignoring the Cruel campaign repeat which is quite lazy and boring):
• Items are terrible. Uniques are boring, rarity is a redundant and lazy stat that shouldn't be in game, and you are literally reduced to looking for resistances and ES on every piece of gear.
• End game is very limited and incredibly inefficient. I actually enjoy difficulty... I don't enjoy not being able to get waystones for the difficulty I want, and requiring 6 pieces of + rarity % on my gear in order to even play higher maps. The maps are just repeated over and over and the game modes and rewards are pointless.
I'm so bored with the game already... which is funny when the elitist community hate on D4 end game and GGG literally announced their end game focus and superiority to other ARPGs (yes, even in the early-access version which we paid for). The end game in current form is straight trash.
It's pretty funny seeing the same people shit on D4 (deservedly so), yet hand wave PoE2 which has a lot of the same problems, sometimes magnitudes worse and previously solved in PoE1. I think a lot of people are going to be in for a rude shock in how long these systems take to change to stop wasting peoples time and actually be fun. Most of these problems are GGG's core vision, and won't be changing till their Chinese owners make them.
@@xbluemarinex Yep, D4 definitely no masterpiece. The double standard from the community is ridiculous but...
Great video, keep up the good work and hope GGG sees this!
my first time playing poe , i like the longer lvlinmg up v/s diablo 4 lvl max char out in a week
Lvling is just tedious and boring in poe2
you won't like it the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time season after season.
You have total item rarity on the map modifiers, which makes sense since the item rarity of each map is different as long as you don't run non-crafted maps, so it's no big deal if you dont have it in your character sheet. But some infos doesn't show anywhere, like the elemental threshold of your character, or the energy shield recovery rate - which is not the recharge rate.
As always, a sharpshooter zooming in on the biggest issues for people coming in to Path of Exile for the first time.
The rarity under skill is for party players so everyone’s rarity will not be stacked but only counts towards the spell that kills the monster
Pretty interesting how intensely focused people are on the problem of 'backtracking' in ARPG's which usually takes 2 minutes max, yet happily walk for hours in games like DayZ, Tarkov or Death Stranding.
Will they though? I would say most people wouldn't want to do that either who play ARPGs
2 minutes in a 10 minute map is 20% of your total play time.
You described Different types of games lol. Poe is a mob slaying loot based arpg, not a walking sim
I realy hope GGG watches this ! Good summary of the issues with the game. Especially for new players or casual gamers.
Played POE1 for a couple hundred hours back at its launch over a two years time. Decided then that POE is not respecting my time. Looked at POE2 and decided not to play it. I have nothing against the game and ppl who enjoy really do enjoy it. But IMHO and sounding a little harsh when I say this but f GGG and f POE1 and 2. Only thing that the game has going for it are the visuals and sounds.
As a Poe1 player from 2013, and a d1 and D2 player on a past, I have to agree with you. Some truły great points, would add even more myself
For now this is a game designed for teenagers, streamers or for people like Elon Musk who can just play it for hundreds of hours. It is a level of absurd which is really hard to comprehend. Because of that I don't have hope for a real improvement. The way they treat players' time is so disrespectful that it is difficult to expect it to change drastically, which is the only solution to all the problems described. There is nothing to balance here, here you simply have to change the basic assumptions.
This isn't blizzard who made this game and it's a three week old half finished product there is still tons of room for improvement but hey to each their own I guess 😅
@@son1cdragon123searly access shill
Or 44 year old elevator mechanics. I enjoy the game immensely. Maybe it’s just not for you friend.
@@son1cdragon123sWell maybe they shouldn't have released a "half finished product", as you put it.
It's a weird level of cope to think that it'll be decent in a year. So you're ok with just playing a bad game in the hope it'll be better in the future? This doesn't count because it's "early access"?
99% of people don't think of it that way.
The thought is that we're playing POE2. It may or may not be better in a year, either way... in a year I'll be playing something else.
You only get 1 chance to make a first impression.
Nothing feels worse than trying to move around some of these maps and getting stuck on a corner that is visually confusing, and getting surrounded by monsters that move twice as fast as you for some reason, not being able to dodge roll or move away because you're cornered... and dying, losing a massive amount of XP and the map.
I've been trying to figure out which part of the game I enjoyed as SSF.
It's nearly impossible to find gear upgrades. Crafting equipment is entirely luck and RNG. So progression is just tied behind luck and RNG. If you put in enough hours I suppose you can overcome it, or not. When I get to mapping, what's the goal? Is the ultimate adrenaline rush finding a higher tier waystone?
Gold seems pointless, orbs are just RNG. Divine orbs are good? Vaal orbs just brick my gear?
If I'm lucky enough to find citadels, I get one chance to beat them? If I fail, maybe I find another one in 50 hours? 100 hours? Never?
Season ends next week?
I'm sure this all appeals to people who can play a game for a living, but I would prefer the game to have an opportunity to thrive by having a large playerbase and not just a niche base.
As it stands in its current state, this game will be extremely niche. And that might be fine for the few who end up playing it, but it won't appeal to a larger audience, which I think is what most people wanted.
@@chrisrusnak4103it’s literally at the highest player count in POE history. I wouldn’t call that niche. You can “think” that you are playing the full release of POE 2 but the reality is that you are playing an early release and the devs have been on holiday for half of the time it has been released. These are facts, not opinions. I am sure the few hundred thousand people that are playing won’t miss you bud.
GREAT video, all relevant points. Why do I have to add up my magic find why isn’t it in a menu? Also, trading is a crutch, you shouldn’t HAVE to trade and I never will.
I agree with you as a D2 player my feedback is totally align with yours, and let me end I love the game and I love playing it but nothing is perfect and ones I would play all the characters to the end game might stop till they adress the feedback.
Great job as usual !!! I thank you.
The point you make about the rare monsters is the 'archnemesis' problem. In PoE 1 there was a league called Archnemesis that introduced a ton of new modifiers on rares, and for like a year it was the most hated change that PoE 1 has ever gone through. Almost no players liked it. They toned it down eventually, a few times, and now it's back ! In PoE 2 ! That makes me really disappointed, because that means the devs have not learned anything about the most glaring issue PoE1 has ever had. I'm a PoE 1 veteran with 11k hours and Settlers of Kalguur was/is the pinnacle of PoE1, it's in the best state it has ever been in my 13 years old veteran opinion (mainly SSF), to then see the devs porting these crucial mistakes to PoE2... I just makes me sad.
Great video. I 100% with every single of your points.
My biggest pain point is number 1: I'm not a fan of one-shots in general, but when failures, maybe caused by unlucky affix combinations on monsters, visual clarity, obstructed aoe's, or simply not yet knowing the fight, can result in hours, if not dozens of hours in the case of pinnacle bosses, of lost time and regrinding, this is simply disrespectful, prevents most people to even learn fights, and to be honest also stupid by GGG, because most people won't stick around for that which means less money.
The fact that the most avid defenders of multiple layers of punishment and wasting people's time in non-hardcore are hardcore players, who only get one shot at anything and obviously have too much time on their hands, is ludicrous. Sometimes I think people like Quin fried their brain by doing the same thing over and over from morning to night for years. At the very least they completely lost the ability to see the perspective of other people.
I'm not sure if GGG will actually be able to change any of it. They have been catering to a rather hardcore player base for so long that many of the things that we now see are simply a direct consequence.
Which begs the question, why they decoupled it from POE1: Originally, they said they wanted it to be more accessible and slower than POE1 to try to attract a more casual audience and to a degree they achieved it, because the ingame descriptions are better, the skill tree provides less opportunities to brick the character, respec is somewhat better and the campaign is amazing.
On the other hand there are so many design issues, quite many mentionend in your video, and most casual players don't want to start a new character with each season and redo the campaing, that I don't expect that it will retain the number of players that would be needed to justify the development cost.
At the moment I only see POE2 cannibalizing POE2 and I'm not sure if even this will continue or if the current POE1 players will just ping pong between the different seasons because it's primarily made for the people with the most time, not necessarily the best players, and certainly not casual ones.
Took me 218 map nodes to find 1 citadel. 20ish after that for 2nd citadel. 80ish for 3rd, 2 more for 4th and 5th (found both with 1 tower).
It's either RNG or it's just "go as far away from the monolith in 1 direction and keep going further than you think u needed to". All 5 are within 3 screens of each other total (1 2 3 are 1 screen apart from 2's position while 4 and 5 are right below 3 by 1 screen and within 6 map nodes from each other). It took me 80 nodes to find 3 because I was looking around for it near the burning monolith like a buffoon, went back to the original 2 citadels and the actual distance from 2nd to 3rd was about 20ish nodes.
In real time, took me 6 days of straight gaming to find 1st citadel, not running a "nuke the whole map with 1-2 buttons build"