Absolutely disapointed -- This game is hard, and not in a fun way.

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bdradu96mro#4822 wrote:

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MildlyClever#2548 wrote:

I have been playing MMOs since 1999, ARPGs since D1, POE on and off since open beta.

I find the over-tuned bosses, over powered trash mobs, mindbogglingly sluggish movement, the nonsensical "dodge" mechanic (no, dodge/dodge/dodge/use skill, repeat for 5 minutes is not "skill"), very very odd coming from GGG. Did noone in closed Beta give any feedback? or was closed beta full of people who somehow were all gluttons for punishment?

I am sorry, only level 12 but this feels like an Alpha to me - untuned boss, trash mobs. Meaningless drops (how many flasks does one character need, especially when forced down to one life and one mana flask only?) . I do hope GGG pivots and makes the game play enjoyable and away from this sluggish mess.

I will of course play more - but POE2 seems intent on chasing players AWAY, and not grasping their attention and keeping them like POE1 did - even though it too had challenging bosses in tidal island, trash mobs - voiddogs in docks anyone? - but POE1 was fulfilling. Here, you just move on to the next white mob which will move you around and kill you or a boss who will non-stop telegraph for you to dodge ad-nauseum. Sure this is a challenge which some feel they have overcome, for many this is just tedium.

P.S: For those who have achieved their ultimate bliss now in PoE2 - congrats. Many of us find this gameplay aggravating. The "Action" part of the ARPG seems to be just mashing dodge... And no this is not "getting good" in many of our books either.

I truly don't want to insult anyone, but hard agree on "(no, dodge/dodge/dodge/use skill, repeat for 5 minutes is not "skill")". I don't see how anyone could find this skillful in any way. For how much people want to talk about Souls-like being about skill, its mostly about pattern recognition and perseverance. The difference between those games and PoE 2 is that in a 3rd person Souls-like, you are not swarmed by 20 mobs who surround and end you without having a chance to do anything. You are free to pick your fights 1-on-1, and the progress slow but meaningful. In the time you take one character to maps, lets say around 20-25 hours, you can reasonably finish the entirety of Dark Souls. That's where PoE 2 tedium appears, in the fact that for 20-25 hours you are subjected to the most boring and uninteresting gameplay, just kite and don't hug the wall, so you don't get surround.

Old ones playing PoE 1 remember the early days when the game was difficult, but it was fun, slow as it was, but the game got popular when it became a bit faster, with more options for the players, for how they want to engage with the game. They recently found a good balance for PoE 1 where any archetype build could complete the campaign, and that gave even new players the baseline they needed to be able to understand the fundamentals.

I know that PoE 2 is has only been out for 24h to the public, but I don't see how more time would fix the loot being absent, bosses being a snooze fest and melee still feeling absolutely shit.

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Unfading6156#8266 wrote:

+1 OP

Selected a ranger. Using lightning skills. Currently on a rather large act 2 boss (no spoilers), last one before the final boss in the act.

I enjoyed the challenge of act 1 and kept hopeful that my damage would eventually catch up to start bombing packs of monsters. I’m not expecting full screen wipes or anything, just to run up to a mob and make quick work of them with powerful skills and good positioning with dodge rolls.

Midway through act 2 and I find the best strategy is to run around kiting the white mobs for around 1 minute each until they die. Bosses are taking longer and longer as I progress and it seems my damage is stagnant while enemies health is scaling exponentially. I have on level mostly yellow gear, rune sockets in said gear, and upgraded flasks with a charm on my belt. I’m not a fan of the kiting gameplay mixed with dodge rolls. At some point I want my character to start to feel strong and then scale that up in the endgame.

An issue I find with the lightning rods is they don’t work well for kiting. When in hallways or narrow spaces, you backpedal because you can’t go in circles around the enemies. The lightning rods end up being placed behind the enemies and becoming ineffective with lightning arrow. So you’re stuck not really using that skill at all, unless you can circle the enemies.

Also, the targeting on controller is a little strange. I can’t for the life of me get frozen salvo to work properly. It seems whatever direction I was aiming when I activated the skill, gets overridden by my movement and the frozen arrows end up going the direction my player is currently moving. This, frozen salvo really only works when I’m running towards the mob, as a ranger.

The lightning damage is very lackluster. I initially specked early in the tree to pick up penetration nodes/shock/ele & ailment damage but I found this to be a struggle to get up and running for the same reason as the lightning rod issue.

I respecced with gold to pick up accuracy and projectile nodes hoping this would be better and it’s actually worse off. The marks are difficult to apply for the same reason as controller aiming with frozen salvo.

Boss fight are fun for the first 5 minutes and then you realize they’re only 1/4 of the way through their health and you’ve already used two health potions. Most of the bosses of AOE attacks that are avoided by a single dodge roll. The gameplay loop turns into kiting the boss around the arena and takes a very long time, without getting hit. They can be overcome, but man it’s not really enjoyable to do so. I wouldn’t say a sense of accomplishment is the feeling i get when defeating them. And the drops are horrendous. Regal orbs are what you really need and they’re very scarce in supply. I’ve only got 1 chaos orb and 2 regal orbs so far. The crafting experience leaves me not really wanting to take risks on modifiers because the items in the current state are just okay. They could be better, but after using currency on them, they could be worse or unusable.

I’m all for making the game more difficult, and I don’t have any answers here for GGG, just that I know what I don’t want, for difficulty to be in the form of weak squishy characters and tons of kiting. At some point, for the average player, damage needs to overcome their reflexes. This is just my experience and opinion. I will continue to play but I’m thinking of shelving my level 28 ranger until a balance rework. Hopefully other classes don’t feel the same way.

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TheGuch#4383 wrote:

I have a couple of thoughts on why its bad.

Its not sustainable, people are enjoying it cause the content is new so the challenge is reasonable to get to the next new thing and discovering what comes next. But be hoenst with yourself, how eager are you to do this challenge for the 20th time? When its not new and you just want to get to the next thing as fast as possible.

Dodge is pointless, in that it only dodges some attacks and it doesnt move any faster than just walking. I have no escape from danger with my dodge and I dont have something like frost blink to help so getting cornered is a death sentence. There is the idea in a game you are allowed to make X number of mistakes befor eyou die, thats why escape mechanics have cooldowns. But Dodge is just movement with another button, if it could phase attacks, or even allowed to interrupt my actions that would be useful. Example I had started an attack, the telegraph and attack of the boss happened during my animation, I just died and had no way out of it. Thats bad design. Dodge could be removed from the game and I think most people would not really notice a difference in the game.

They didnt learn from PoE1 or any other ARPG. Every single time an ARPG comes out with the "WE ARE GOING TO BE HARD TO PLAY!" idea they reverse course. Cause its not fun, people play games for enjoyment, adding a "dark souls" element of challenge to an ARPG is not fun, It works in dark souls cause beating the boss IS the challenge. ARPG is about powering up, feeling strong, finding fun combinations to work with, right now it feels like all ability combinations just suck, it's not fun, I dont want to use a basic attack as a melee, im spending gems on special attacks to just look at them, thats not fun. Sadly GGG knows this, they did this early with PoE1, and they reversed course cause no one wants to play that. I think they are hoping that PoE1 will still run and people will play that, BUT as a fan of PoE2 that should bother you cause where are the resources going to go? PoE1 cause thats were players are and thats where money is. If you want to gatekeep endgame content cause bosses are punishing, thats great, Im for it, gatekeeping early acts as you are still unlocking functionality of the game just feels like getting dick punched while in a queue for a dick punching.

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Blade_Dancer_90#3602 wrote:

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Vvulf#5611 wrote:

+1 OP

Good Lord there are so many sanctimonious priggs in the comment section.

OP already stated he wasn't even at an elite gamer, so those with the "git gud" comments aren't worth paying a jot of attention to.

The bottom line is that if GGG doesn't make the game attractive TO A WIDER AUDIENCE than the Dark Souls Andys, then it's going to go from 1,000,000+ users at EA launch to 100,000 in two weeks.

In it's current state, it's got a lot going for it - the visuals, voice acting, monster variety, boss design, telegraphing of most (not all) abilities etc., but the gameplay is too punishing and the drops too low for anyone but hardcore players.

PoE 1 started out with a similar group of smug elitists (80% of the streamers) who called anyone that didn't play Hardcore "Scrubcore" players.

But guess what? PoE 1 didn't become popular until GGG adjusted the difficulty for people who don't no-life video games.

I was there in closed beta, and GGG will adjust this game too.
Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Any game that is inaccessible to anyone that doesn't "git gud" is a bad game... Dark Souls games are hailed as the "pinnacle of gaming" but in reality they're games for mentally ill gamers that want to waste hours and days and weeks of their lives raging to beat a game only to prove they can even though they didn't have fun beating it... they want to prove they're not "plebs" and that they can flex about being "hardcore gamers"...

I've been gaming since I was 5... I'll be 35 in May and I've even been a semi-pro player in a video game in the past (back in 2013 I was a top 0.1% player in the world at FIFA)... but I never played to flex, I played for fun... at some games I was great at others I was just decent... but any game that tells you that being decent isn't good enough for us is a BAD GAME, period!!!

Any game that doesn't have difficulty settings to be able to attract and keep happy all the kinds of player bases is a BAD GAME!!!

Dark Souls design is a bad design... Dark Souls games are TEDIOUS and not fun... I played Elden Ring and never finished it cause it was dragging on and on and on and the progress was painfully slow... yes, it had beautiful graphics and good design but the game was wasting my time massively and dying to a boss 150 times until I eventually looked up a guide online was just dumb...

Any game you need to follow a guide to even play it and can't play without it is NOT A GOOD GAME!!!

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bdradu96mro#4822 wrote:

I truly don't want to insult anyone, but hard agree on "(no, dodge/dodge/dodge/use skill, repeat for 5 minutes is not "skill")". I don't see how anyone could find this skillful in any way. For how much people want to talk about Souls-like being about skill, its mostly about pattern recognition and perseverance. The difference between those games and PoE 2 is that in a 3rd person Souls-like, you are not swarmed by 20 mobs who surround and end you without having a chance to do anything. You are free to pick your fights 1-on-1, and the progress slow but meaningful. In the time you take one character to maps, lets say around 20-25 hours, you can reasonably finish the entirety of Dark Souls. That's where PoE 2 tedium appears, in the fact that for 20-25 hours you are subjected to the most boring and uninteresting gameplay, just kite and don't hug the wall, so you don't get surround.

Old ones playing PoE 1 remember the early days when the game was difficult, but it was fun, slow as it was, but the game got popular when it became a bit faster, with more options for the players, for how they want to engage with the game. They recently found a good balance for PoE 1 where any archetype build could complete the campaign, and that gave even new players the baseline they needed to be able to understand the fundamentals.

I know that PoE 2 is has only been out for 24h to the public, but I don't see how more time would fix the loot being absent, bosses being a snooze fest and melee still feeling absolutely shit.