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

I was OK with the campaign being pretty annoying and was hopeful for maps.

Now I'm at maps and farming t4's and it's just not good...

The game reminds me soooooo much of diablo 4 launch. Terrible map layouts that force you to run around doing nothing. Every single map layout is some annoying series of tight hallways, seemingly designed to make us move as slowly as possible. The map layouts alone make me not want to play.

If I could respec for a reasonable cost that would keep me engaged longer, but my spec feels boring now and a respec of 50% of my nodes will cost over 300k. In PoE1 I'd just buy a stack of like 200 respec orbs at the start of the league and never have to worry about it again.

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kuudou#3277 wrote:

Mercenary. I didn't look up any meta builds and have been experimenting with double barrel frag shot, passives mostly focus on maximizing bleed. The setup works fine on most of the content (albeit a bit slow on bosses because of the reload speed), but the Geonor fight is where I hit a wall since the damage output is just not high enough to keep the fight under 15 minutes. Pure attrition, like I said.

Look for comboing abilities together, thats where the high damage comes from. Example with Warrior your damage is going to be very low if you just spam one ability. They're clearly going for a gameplay style where you combo abilities together.

The difficulty of the game is amazing. Perfect balance. Please don't make it easier!

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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kuudou#3277 wrote:

Mercenary. I didn't look up any meta builds and have been experimenting with double barrel frag shot, passives mostly focus on maximizing bleed. The setup works fine on most of the content (albeit a bit slow on bosses because of the reload speed), but the Geonor fight is where I hit a wall since the damage output is just not high enough to keep the fight under 15 minutes. Pure attrition, like I said.

Look for comboing abilities together, thats where the high damage comes from. Example with Warrior your damage is going to be very low if you just spam one ability. They're clearly going for a gameplay style where you combo abilities together.

I hear you. With my build frag shot works best with freezing shot. Except Count Geonor has high cold resist sot he freezingshot/fragshot combo works very poorly on him since he takes wayyy too long to freeze. I've been spamming grenades and even trying flameshot with the incendiary change+ support gem. It's still a slog at level 16. So maybe I just need to farm.

I feel exactly the same i will stick to poe1 this version feels like it is for top players only :(

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diego_garber#0088 wrote:

The "dodge or die" mechanic is boring to me. I do NOT play souls games because they are boring. There are other people that DO like that. It's totally fine, but it's not the gaming i like. PoE2 feels a LOT more like "souls" than PoE1 IMHO.

That's why I rage-quit. Because i'm tired of one-shots and having to re-do the whole thing again. Because of losing progression. I'm barely in act 2 and i'm already tired of this.

I understand your decisions, but they are not fun for me. I don't even want to make another character right now to see if it changes anything. Because I won't be able to dodge the mechanics; and therefore I won't be able to play it.

Just out of curiosity, what do you want from a game? Basicaly just you and the boss exchanging blows and the highest numbers win?

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kuudou#3277 wrote:

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

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kuudou#3277 wrote:

Mercenary. I didn't look up any meta builds and have been experimenting with double barrel frag shot, passives mostly focus on maximizing bleed. The setup works fine on most of the content (albeit a bit slow on bosses because of the reload speed), but the Geonor fight is where I hit a wall since the damage output is just not high enough to keep the fight under 15 minutes. Pure attrition, like I said.

Look for comboing abilities together, thats where the high damage comes from. Example with Warrior your damage is going to be very low if you just spam one ability. They're clearly going for a gameplay style where you combo abilities together.

I hear you. With my build frag shot works best with freezing shot. Except Count Geonor has high cold resist sot he freezingshot/fragshot combo works very poorly on him since he takes wayyy too long to freeze. I've been spamming grenades and even trying flameshot with the incendiary change+ support gem. It's still a slog at level 16. So maybe I just need to farm.

Yeah the builds need some kind of other option if the main idea doesn't work. Lot of really huge bosses are near immune to Stuns, so against those bosses Warrior usually has to resort to fire damage instead. Also don't underestimate the standard attack, its surprisingly decent single target dps if you put some support gems in it.

I see very similar feedback from a lot of PoE 1 players that they simply don't ever want a mechanical skillcheck in the game essentially. I think PoE2 benefits that your mechanical skill is a factor and you have to work on it. I find it very odd they were willing to put in hundreds of hours to learn all the systems in poe1 but are unwilling to put time in to learn an encounter.

They should buff underperforming skills and fixed bugged interactions ofc. But I don't think you should be able to just ignore mechanics and pass the boss fights. Particularly all the complaints for the act one boss. I've gotten past him on two characters now and none of the mechanics one shot you, you die because you eat multiple things in a row.

Dying ten times is really not a lot, it's a few minutes a try. I think too many PoE1 players cannot handle any sort of friction. Which is fine, but I don't want to see PoE2 become that, it is not meant to be that imo. If you want no friction PoE1 is there for you.

And whilst OP did not say it, too many are puffing out their chests that they've played arpg's for years and that they shouldn't have to play differently. PoE2 is not the same as the others, it's time to adapt to something new!

I don't want it to rain useless loot that needs filtered, I don't want the game to become 1 button clears nor do I want the mechanics to be ignorable. If you can ignore mechanics, mobs and never need a combo you're not even playing a game anymore. Might as well play cookie clicker at that point.

I'm not dissapointed, persay, I'm getting what I asked for. But I do have one issue with the current design above all others:

PoE is a game about gear, I wish that weren't the case but it absolutely is. It is a game about locating better +1 stats from the previous hour. You now have a dodge button that can mitigate some of that, but the difference between doing a Maraketh Trial with a level 16 weapon and a level 20 weapon isn't night and day, it's a completely different game.

The issue is that there's extremely limited control over how we obtain items. PoE1 has this endless flood of 'rare trash', but it did mean that you were never behind the curve for long. You would, likely, locate a +1 at around the time you'd need it.

But in PoE2, the most effective way of actually getting +1's appears to be using the gambler and just hoping you roll a rare on a higher base item than you had before. It's possible the Regal Fix may help with this - I haven't had much time .0c, but it's extremely painful, especially for the melee classes who suffer the most from having their gear constantly 'checked' by boss autos, or forcing you to dodge roll between every attack.

Oh, and just a bugbear, you could cut every map in half and they'd still be massive. As they currently are they are *insane*, I was legitimately thinking of Diablo 4's massive nightmare open world way too much, and that's not a positive comparison at the best of times.

Still, the game is sticky and when it works, it works super well. It's rough right now, but a year or two in EA should make something very, very special. Good bones.

POE 1 was getting terribad because there was no equation to solve (e.g. offense vs. defense), you just went full offense and delete everything like a walking simulator.

I've had more fun learning those new boss-fights that I've had in years in POE 1. And it's only Beta testing for now. We'll see lots of changes.