My feedback and feelings on PoE 2 so far.

Man, I hate writing this. I'm a massive Path of Exile fan. No game does build customization and power escalation like Path of Exile.

Sadly, Path of Exile 2 is a fundamentally different game. It isn't exactly a bad game, but it is a very different one, and I think I don't like this direction nearly as much.

Very little loot drops, and what does drop is almost universally bad. You have to craft decent gear, and that ultimately means getting upgrades very, very rarely. I'm using the same staff I got in Act 1 still in Act 3. Half my gear is still blues. That doesn't feel good, especially since as a caster class many spells are tied to the weapon you have.

Monsters have lots of HP, and players deal relatively little damage. It takes maybe 5 to 10 seconds to kill a white mob 2-3 levels lower than me. I don't think my build is bad; I have a lot of experience with Path of Exile's build systems. Those are intact here and could be good, but just don't feel impactful early on. Rares often take minutes to kill, and then drop no loot. Bosses are long with loads of HP, but can kill you in just a few hits. It is exhausting fighting them, and they almost never drop relevant loot. I've gotten like 1 thing from a boss the whole game. Spending genuinely 10 minutes on a boss, or death cycling and finally beating it after 20 - 30 minutes, only to get no rewards at all feels absolutely awful in a game like this. Loot is the whole point! Getting stronger is the whole point! The first line in the early access description is "Path of Exile 2 is an Action RPG which is all about making powerful characters and getting epic loot." but this isn't true. In PoE 2 you feel weak and powerless, and never get epic loot.

There is a place for games like this. Obviously, the Souls series and the emerging genre around those games has proven to be very popular. I even like them. I don't want that from this game, though. I want loot. I want progression. Souls works because skill can overcome anything, but that isn't true here. You absolutely NEED stats to win, but the game doesn't want to give them to you. That feels bad. In Souls, if you just use your dodge well, if you memorize attack patterns, you can win eventually. But the PoE 2 dodge has no i-frames, is slow and feels bad to use, and no matter how good you are eventually you get hit by poorly telegraphed attacks or you find that you simply cannot do the damage required to deal with adds and the like. And then when you do when you get nothing.

Zones are generally too big. GGG wanted to slow the game down, and that is fine. When my character moves as slow as they do, though, the zones need to match that. I don't want to explore because it takes so damn long to get around. This is made much worse by the death system. If I decide to check a corner of the map I haven't been to, and I die, then everything respawns and I have to slowly trudge my way through them to get back there. It isn't fun.

It still has potential. The game could change and evolve, smooth out the problems and rethink some things and get me back into it. It still has some great progression systems from Path of Exile 1 that could be awesome. The early game is just so slow and frustrating, and none of these systems feel good there. The visuals and fantastic. Production values in general are great. Gameplay can even feel really good when I'm not desperately trying to slowly chip away at a huge HP bar.

I want to like this game but at the moment however, it just isn't the game I want. It's just ok, not something I'd come back to for every league like I have for PoE for the last 6+ years.

I agree with you on this. As a gamer with hand issues the bosses just take to long. I lose from my hand cramping up from spending so much time dodging attacks and not nearly enough attacking.

The King of the MIsts boss was the one that made me quit. Why have a debuff I have to stop for it to drop off or I get Crowd controlled. Either way I have to stop moving and die. It just boggles the mind that someone would create a no win scenario in a boss fight. Either way I get CCed, just one is voluntary and the other isn't. But both lead to almost the same path, death.

Just wanted to update my thoughts now that I'm played an additional 20-ish hours and played some endgame content.

Overall I am still frustrated with the game. Lots of friction in the design that leaves me more frustrated than satisfied with most systems.

That said, there has been some good. Once I got around 20% movespeed I found the game simply felt much better. Moving around felt good, rolling felt more useful, and in general the game simply was more enjoyable at this speed. It seems rather hard to reliably get this movespeed though (it took me ages to find boots with it). I wish the base speed was either increased a bit, or movespeed was more common and easier to add to boots.

Once my build got online (about half way through Act 3) the game also started to feel better. I wasn't tickling enemies anymore, and I could actually survive some hits. That said, enemies still felt like they took ages to die, especially magic and rare enemies. Bosses felt better, but trash mobs felt bad still. It also took so long to actually feel any real increase in power (I was roughly 20 hours in), which feels bad.

Here are some other thoughts on various things:

-Maps are too big and too maze like. It isn't fun back tracking and trying to navigate all these narrow spaces, especially with low movespeed. Act 1 maps felt reasonable, but it gets bad in Act 2 and 3. The narrowness is also infurating, given how important kiting is in this that (as a Sorc, at least). You have so little room to actually move, and getting stuck in corners or on random bits of geometry is a huge issue, and mobs are so fast to get on top of you. Ice Wall helped with this but so many mobs just break through instantly.

-Loot is still far too hard to acquire, even with the recent improvements. It is so, so hard to actually find usable items ESPECIALLY when it comes to trying to get resists and the like. In theory the socket system is supposed to help, but I have found very few artificer orbs, and because I can't actually find item upgrades, I can't switch out runes even though I have tons of them.

-Even beyond resists, I can't get relevant damage upgrades either. I've used the same +3 to skill gem staff since half way through Act 2. Like yeah, that's a great mod, but it has meant that I can't get any other useful stats I would also like. Same goes for most of my other gear, upgrades come rarely and usually require me to use currency to hope for a craft. Getting good items off the ground feels better, imo.

-Also on the subject of loot, having some spells only come as passives on caster weapons feels awful. Again, my staff is very good, but it has a really outdated spell and not one I want to use. I'd love to experiment but nope, I have to take the staff with actual stats, not skills.

-One portal maps feels awful. It means I intentionally don't do any additional map content until full clearing and getting completion. It also makes me not want to take any risks, which is rather boring. It also makes learning bosses miserable. It simply feels too punishing.

-On the subject of death, during the campaign, the full respawning of mobs in the map when you die feels awful. It already takes so long to get around, throwing all these mobs back in my path feels bad.

-Jeweler's Orbs are way too rare. It feels pretty bad having only seen 3 or so Lesser Jeweler's the whole game at 40 hours. I've seen 0 Greater Jeweler's and they are currently extremely expensive. And that isn't even starting on getting a full-link skill, which seems insanely rare, more rare than getting a 6L in PoE 1, which I thought this system was trying to fix.

-Most uniques seem pretty bad from what I've found and seen online. I love build defining uniques but they really don't exist right now.

Build defining uniques exist but yeah, the amount is not comparable to POE1. My build needs an amulet that costs 55+ex right now and ring that costs 1 mirror. Neither is affordable to me. Honestly, this game is pure frustration and not fun at all.