Option to bypass the main campaign and go straight to maps!

I think this has been requested since...the game came out?

In GGGs mind the solution is a better campaign we wont mind playing 100 times over. What GGG fails to realize in this regard is you cant equip shavs at level 1 or start your CoC character the second you get the gem. Even if the campaign is great people will still want to blast through it so they can do their fun endgame builds that require levels and gear.

I think the biggest problem for me is how unfun they've made the early acts to be honest.

PoE's combat just doesn't lend itself to not having enough damage to kill things reasonably fast, combined with not having a good enough mana pool and not being able to move out of the way.

The gameplay in early acts is just skipping every mob you don't kill in 1 or 2 hits and keeping your quicksilver up so you can ignore the terrible combat gameplay. That's not challenging, nor is it engaging.

In early act 1, you should be eased into the quirks of the combat, but they just give you nothing and bombard you with enemies that can kill you in a couple of hits and stunlock and freeze you so there's nothing you can do if you make the mistake of attacking a pack of mobs. It just feels awful. It does get better in the later acts, but these are still acts they've said they wanted to "improve" as well.

Combine that with the problem of a lot of builds needing levels and gear to come online and actually feel good to play, and you're stuck with unsatisfying gameplay for hours before you can have fun. I dread leaguestarts because of this.

Hopefully the basic combat in PoE 2 is a lot better so it actually feels good to kill and dodge things while leveling so you can start with an actual challenge rather than a quicksilver uptime running simulator with a couple of annoying boss hurdles in the way.

First character of the season should always have to do the acts as it is a part of the race BUT every character after should be allowed shortcut as it will encourage people to try more builds.

And yes, we already have shortcuts in place, like not having to do the mini lab trails. I think it would not be game breaking if secondary characters start with mini lab trails, all gods captured and all skill quests done.

It has been asked for a million times before and they've been extremely stubborn about this.

I don't understand how GGG keeps talking about the strengths of PoE being endgame and a huge library of previous league content - yet they make players suffer through the acts (esp. A1-3) which represent the worst part of PoE.

Look at D4 with its shiny campaign, full voice acting & cinematic cutscenes - even then pretty much everyone playing it during beta admitted that it'd be very annoying to go through it more than once. No matter what they think about PoE2's campaign, it will be the same.

Campaigns in arpgs are great for a one time experience, but no more than that. By design, arpg campaigns are extremely linear & one-dimensional so it feels brain dead to go through this multiple times.

the campaign feels boring cause there is no challenge once you know how to kite mobs.
and even if you like it and you clear an area, you're overlevelled and stuff just falls dead to your feet.

secondary chars are even worse cause you can afford the best levelling gear and just need to run through.

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in reality, players asking for options to skip the campaign are asking for ways to skip it only for them. cause they either don't know the consequences of everybody being able to do so or they don't care.

if you wanna jump on the hype train of the latest overpowered shit midgame, you will have to invest 3 hours of your life to do so. it's not really much.

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vio wrote:

the campaign feels boring cause there is no challenge once you know how to kite mobs.
and even if you like it and you clear an area, you're overlevelled and stuff just falls dead to your feet.

secondary chars are even worse cause you can afford the best levelling gear and just need to run through.

---

in reality, players asking for options to skip the campaign are asking for ways to skip it only for them. cause they either don't know the consequences of everybody being able to do so or they don't care.

if you wanna jump on the hype train of the latest overpowered shit midgame, you will have to invest 3 hours of your life to do so. it's not really much.

I'd rather skip the campaign because I've done it before and each time there is a new POE update, I'm even less tempted to go through all of that again just go enjoy the endgame content.

I mean even with the Crucible update. It looks cool. Friend has said "Wait until you get t maps and get better weapons to use the new mechanic" and I groan because I have to go through this campaign again, just to get to maps.

By the time I get to maps again, I've lost the will to keep playing.


So these days, I just look at the videos of what the new mechanics entails and then move on about my day.

This would be pretty great, it'd be like Diablo III getting its Adventure Mode.

Like the power pass in Lost Ark, what you get in the Campaign and can push another Char to a higher level.

That would be cool. The reason I don't play more Chars/Build is the leveling time and the repeating things all over again.

I am begging GGG for years for this.
The only thing Blizzard did absolutely right with d3 was that if you finished the story once, you where DONE with the story, forever.

This should be the baseline for all ARPGs, because story is fun once, maybe twice. After that it is a pain and not fun at all anymore.

PoE has SOOOOOO many features which would allow for players that did the story more than enough to level other ways.

You could give us a level hub in which we can start random encounters, doors to specific features.
Or if you are lazy, just make the delve up to level 68 free of sulphite cost (of course downlevel recipie doesn't work here!), give us endless ledge, endless blood aqueducts or just give characters on their hideout a "Open Random Levelmap" on the map device that just opens a random map from the existing pool and puts mobs on the level of the player in it.

There are so many ways you could make leveling fun.
This really needs to adressed.

OMg this, I can't stand this damn story, ACT 7 is such a trash it kills fun to the point where one wants to vomit instead of playing POE. Terrible, get rid of this shit, let us play endgame content only.