My feedback

D2, PoE1, Dark Souls and Elden Ring veteran here. You are proably getting overwhelmed by negative feedback right now. I hope I can balance positive and negative aspects on this account of my experience with the game so far.

I like a lot of things about PoE2. But there are also many things in PoE2 that are very very bad. Like why do we need to click the well in town to refill our flasks/charms?

Tried getting used to WASD controls, but that felt bad for my left hand after a while. Tried using my Xbox controller, but I was disappointed that there's no targeting cursor for the right stick. Broadly directional auto-aim doesn't feel good for me. So I reverted back to the classic point and click gameplay

Decided on playing sorc first. Tried out a lot of skills, most feel very underwhelming. Fireball/Flame Wall, a leveling staple of mine in PoE1, was not good. Tried Frost and that was a lot better. Settled on Unleash Ice Nova and Frost Bomb as main skills for DPS and CC. Pre-casting Frost Bomb on a pack, then freezing them with Ice Nova works. But rare enemies with Temporal Bubble are super duper unfun for this build

Act 1 was very good. But loot on the ground feels very underwhelming, especially drops from bosses and rares are a joke. The best weapon I could find was one +48% cold damage/+2 cold skills staff I bought from Una, having to sell some mediocre gear I was wearing at the time to barely being able to afford this crucial upgrade. Oh, and there are far too many potions drops in the game. Managed to clear the act 1 boss on my first try, his drops were atrocious and the game crashed soon after. Luckily my progress didn't vanish

Act 2 felt a lot worse than Act 1. The first few zones were very barren and boring. Started to get better after a few zones. Liked the Old City a lot, good density there. Reminded me of tombs in D2 Act2

Bad UI: The nodes one the map for starting a new zone by moving the caravan to it were hard to notice at first

Halani Gates Bug: Portaling out while being assisted by Asala makes her inactive. Had to start a new zone instance to progress

Ascension: Tried Trial of Sekhemas at 22, failed 6 times in a row, managed to reach the boss two times (one of them being the first try). Got him to 50% before running out of honor. Leveled to 30 and tried again, cakewalk this time.

Tried Tempest Caller but Elemental Storm feels bad. Many procs are wasted and the damage is low, so it has almost no impact. Respecced to Arcane Surge

Bug: Hypothermia is still labeled as Frostbite on the skills display in the bottom right corner

The hardest fights I had so far were actually the very first rare witch by the cauldron in Act1 and Rattlecage (because of honor damage from volcanoes)

Dreadnought was not fun, way too bursty incoming damage so I had to play very defensive here. After dying to a fuckton of spears to my face and having to restart from scratch, I let Asala tank the rest of the zone and stayed back as far as I could, which also cut my dps in half

The invulnerability bubble in the Jamanra boss fight is very hard to see, took me multiple deaths to figure that one out

After witnessing the final stages of the Jamanra fight, I am a bit sad. Boss fights where so many things are going on at once are my kryptonite. Hated the Maven fight because of this. I thought you would dial down on this kind of design, but instead you amplified it. Guess I'll be another 2-Voidstone casual in PoE2 as well.

I managed to beat Jamanra after a few tries. Key was realizing it is not a dps race and I can just focus on dodging his attacks in the final phase. What a pleasant surprise to meet Deckard Sin afterwards :)

I really like Act 3 although I am somewhat amused how closely PoE2 copies the structure of Diablo 2 act theming. Act 1 going through dark woods and cemetery leading up to a big structure, where the boss awaits at the very bottom. Act2 desert and tombs. Act3 swamps, jungle and even an almost literal copy of Flayer Jungle, leading up to "This ain't Travincal" xD

Really liked the twist at the end of Temple of Kopec.

Drops were getting better in act 3 as well. Found my second unique item, alas it was for another class, like the first one which I found back in act 1. So zero useful unique drops as of now

Achieved my second ascension through the Temple of Chaos after some tries. Like the previous trial it really depends on getting good RNG. RNG gonna rng, huh? :D

Utzaal was very long and kinda repetitive. Will propably be better once league mechanics get added there. Boy those drowning orbs sure are scary. It's meant to one-shot anyone staying in there for too long, right?

as a sorceress this encounter is not reliable unless you respec to cold, which is dumb design. Each act you have to respec or gear check a specific resist, and each time it's different. Feels like a dumb hoop to jump through for no reason.

I have a high dps spark/flame wall sorceress, i melt the screen on any regular zone before the mobs reach me. in this boss fight I have to survive for roughly 10 minutes and i barely scratch him, even with amplified curse for lowering his resistances. it's just b***shit and no amount of git gud morons can change my mind.

I've also soloed all the other bosses up to this one, and took this one down to 15% at least 3 times in the past hour, it's just too much crap you have to deal with over an extremely long encounter.

He ups his damage considerably in the last phase, while you have dwindling pots (even with having charges/sec pots btw). I also run 50% lightning resist, and he doesn't 1 shot me with any of the abilities in phase 2, so it's not that, it's just stupid amount of health ( more likely stupid amount of resistance ).

My options are to respec to cold, and play something I don't want to, or log off and wait for a patch. Not exactly ideal.

Also, where are the adds in phase 2 ( where you spend most of the time btw 66-0 ). No adds, no regen in the tree, almost no regen on gear, almost no regen on flasks ( and I had that!)

EDIT: just so people don't think i'm some dumbass that likes to whine - i respecced to cold and did the boss, but I don't feel happy about it, it's exactly what i wrote above: https://imgur.com/a/hsCNft7

There are some weird things going on with the world map in act 2 on cruel difficulty:

a. the whole map is mirrored

b. sometimes when clicking the quest symbol the normal act 2 map is shown

Edit: Actually this bug affects all quests on cruel difficulty. So everytime I click on a quest symbol in the bottom left I get taken to the normal version of that act.