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

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samdelmolino1#7603 wrote:

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Kaboinglefop#0955 wrote:

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Psi0ptic#5165 wrote:

Sounds like PoE1 is where you belong, no offense.
PoE2 was designed to be different from PoE1, not a NEW PoE1.

I'm enjoying it quite immensely, haven't enjoyed a game like this in over a decade.
It's still early and I think there's a lot of tuning and squashing to be done, but it's early access, game has not officially released yet.

Hats off to GGG - Keep it coming!

agree

+1. I agree. Please keep the game fresh and different. Let these people who don't like it go back to POE. Let us have this beautiful, difficult, wonderful game. Please don't ruin it by catering to people who want to play POE.

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vallor2#1175 wrote:

I have to add my voice to the OP. I am not elite. I am a gamer with some skills but play most games with "Normal" difficulty. I am not good enough to attract a user base as a streamer or participate in any competitions.

My highest character is a level 14 Mercenary who hit a wall with The King in the Mist, but I've ventured through Act 1 with all classes except the Monk.

This is a long read. I'm sure it will spawn a bunch of "git gud" or be totally ignored, like most posts, but I don't care. Wasting my time writing this was still a better use of time than actually playing PoE2.

That's enough for me to see that the designers and Game Director conflate "challenge" with things that aren't typically considered "challenge" in an aRPG. This seems to be to snatch Diablo 2's "Hardest Game Ever" crown thanks to their Hell difficulty, which took forever to beat.

If the designers can't create a gameplay tail that lasts that long, they may feel like they have failed.

Diablo 2's Hell difficulty was not intended to appeal to the masses, and the masses knew it wasn't for them. There was lots of D2 to go around. In PoE 2 the team arguably jumped to hell difficulty immediately and there is no alternative for the normies. I was there, and Hell didn't bother me because I knew it was a bonus for those who cared. It's not the primary way to experience the game.

What do I mean by conflating the wrong things with challenge?
1. The game replaces strategic challenges with a reliance on timing, massive numbers of audio/visual cues, and artificially extending encounters—essentially a reliance on luck over strategy.

1a. For normal mobs, you need to be able to beat the rush.

The mobs will bum-rush the character, get within range, and attack. That's the extent of normal mob AI. That "challenge" can be compounded by the number of mobs attacking. One army ant is worthless, but a swarm tears down almost anything.

So - kiting is king. Death is inevitable if the mobs manage to corner the player where they can't dodge-roll out.

1b. Bosses are exercises in timing, audio/visual acuity, and health pools or phases such that the odds of missing a critical tell are exponentially likely.

So kiting, animation canceling, dodge-rolling, and slowly whittling away an immense health pool, usually over multiple phases, while never missing a tell, is what passes for a "challenge" on bosses.

One missed tell results in death and restarting. And, just for kicks, some mechanics cannot be reliably dodged or defeated.

2. Reducing the capacity of flasks further artificially increases the "challenge."

Flasks have few charges, and there are few ways to recover charges, particularly in a boss fight.

3. To ramp up the "challenge" even further, good drops are miserly, and getting one that is good for your class is extraordinarily rare.

I suspect people having less trouble with the difficulty cliff have benefited from great drops and/or lucky crafts.

4. More "challenge" is added by having anemic skills and cumbersome play mechanics.

This is one of the few I feel mostly OK with. In many ways, this is where the "skill gap" can come into play and where practice can really make perfect. Many of the rest are pure (bad) design or luck-based.

Manual dexterity is a boon when switching full load-outs on the fly and in the heat of battle to maximize your attack or rotation second by second.

People with fast reflexes will be able to mitigate this issue better.

Without the ability to "toggle" something with a single button, skills often rely on executing six or more buttons in very rapid sequences for even standard tasks. Any professional UX researcher will tell you this is too much to expect from a regular player. For example, with the Merc it would be helpful if I could toggle between ice and fire shotgun blasts with ONE key instead of dedicating a key to switching, then pressing to load ammo, then finally being able to shoot then pressing a DIFFERENT key to load the other... and so on.

If I could change that to press key 1 to switch to ammo type 1, then press again to switch back to the original ammo type, it would be helpful managing all the buttons and simplify rotations.

Strategy 1: Outlevel everything by three to five levels - or more for some classes. This is especially true of bosses.

Strategy 2: Pray you get lucky with crafting.

Strategy 3: As Joshua said in WarGames "The only winning move is not to play."

I don't know what telemetry GGG is capturing but after nearly 100 pages of mostly regular people proclaiming, "Enough!" they have yet to comment. I hope it also calculates how many people bought and abandoned the game.

I wish I had bought the game on Steam to leave a negative review, but instead, I did it on the GGG site, so they kept every penny (Steam takes 30% of all sales). Hell, I wish I hadn't spent the $100 at all.

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Kashou#2868 wrote:

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MrPedez#4934 wrote:

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ilyatha#5908 wrote:

Why is melee still totally a disaster? Why do bosses at level 4 have 100% more health than necessary?

Melee has aways been bad, not to mention the fact that its much more gear dependent than a caster or minion build. Some melee builds can be pretty decent once u get the right gear but i would NEVER pick a melee build for starting a new league/season its just way too punishing if u dont get any good gear drops

Melee is actually in a fantastic spot right now. The warrior feels really great and it's incredibly strong at both aoe clearing and bossing.

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Hitman_num1#1510 wrote:

I think there is a hidden interaction here somewhere besides the fact that armor doesn't do NOTHING against any elemental, poison, or chaos attacks. Very sad.

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MrPedez#4934 wrote:

Honestly if u havent played a character past lvl 14 u really havent given the game a fair chance at all. It actually does get easier once u get higher lvl and get ur skills and support gems up and running, Im almost lvl 70 now and im doing pretty damn well now with mediocre gear but i can definitely feel my char getting stronger with every lvl and gear upgrade i get

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Arakki#6986 wrote:

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MrPedez#4934 wrote:

Honestly if u havent played a character past lvl 14 u really havent given the game a fair chance at all. It actually does get easier once u get higher lvl and get ur skills and support gems up and running, Im almost lvl 70 now and im doing pretty damn well now with mediocre gear but i can definitely feel my char getting stronger with every lvl and gear upgrade i get

While I don't want to talk down to your experience, telling someone they need to not have fun for 10, 15, 20 hours just so they start having fun sounds like they won't have fun later on.

So many games have this "trust me bro, it gets better later" mentality and my only question is why can't it be good from the start when you have the highest chance of the customer leaving and never coming back?

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aDoreMe#3888 wrote:

I constantly read people are "non-stop rolling around" and bosses taking an eternity... At this point i think thats the issue. People roll around too much instead of doing damage. Dodge roll is for very specific situations, not for panic rolling around like a headless chicken.


My 2 cents in general:
The game is fun from the start for plenty of people... People just try to play it like Diablo 4 or PoE 1 with twink gear because somehow they think, this is how ARPG's are supposed to be played.

PoE2 is targeting a larger player base than PoE1. BUT it is still not targeting casuals, thats D4's niche and they are doing good avoiding that.


Also, people are overly dramatic or probably should have a doctor check out their hand-eye coordination if anything in Act 1 is truely hard blocking them for long.

I just started a Sorc yesterday (I have a Pathfinder in Act 3 cruel).
To be fair I lucked on a blue Vendor-Staff with +2 Gems and 36% Spelldamage on lvl 2 that I could buy thanks to gold from my "main" but that was all the "ousdie" help he got and nearly as good weapons dropped later for me.

I died once in the King of the Mist Area due to being swarmed and being a coward/not spamming Frost Nova. The Act Boss was pretty tough and I nearly didn't make it but in the End he died first try.
It took me about 2 hours to clear the act and i didn't speedrun or anything but skipped the story/dialogue whenever possible.

I had much more problems with my first char, because learning how the game works, listening to the story and Poison-Ranger being plain bad early. I died plenty of times to the Act 1 Boss and had quite a few other deaths.. Act 1 still probably took me at most 4 hours of actual playtime (not counting idling in town)?

If you need 10 hours for Act 1, something is wrong with you. Yes, I get 6 hours on your first try if you listen/read everything but 10 hours is plain ridiculous. Especially when people claim to have done it with several classes.


The game clearly has issues. None of these issues show up in Act 1.

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TheOrigin79#2030 wrote:

I agree - being a warrior on low levels plain sucks. Until you reach mid 20, low 30 levels where you actually get decend gems.