Early thoughts on poe2... positivity edition.

Renamed after seeing some of these threads because DAMN!! you guys are harsh.

I'm a relatively casual/new PoE player, having played PoE1 since beta. For some context I got to my first red map ever this league(Settlers). This puts me into the mediocre category i think. I have some criticisms but not the H hate i was seeing in other posts.
The good
I lover PoE2. Love the look, the feel, the systems, and the game-play. WASD movement is was this genre needed and I actually want it in PoE1 now as an option. Dodge rolling feels good and makes fights feel dynamic. The environments and zones are incredibly good looking and, most of them, immersive. The Wildwood from affliction league was one one of my favorite environments and the Grelnwood felt like that. Thought i would miss all my flasks but I don't. I thought that you had fallen into the trap of making the game hard like FromSoft, but unlike FromSoft not making it accessible. And you kinda did but the difficulty isn't as crazy as i thought. Its a perfect "Mid-Core" level of difficulty.
The middling:
Range. Is. King.
Sadly. Melee just doesn't feel as good. Monk was very underwhelming and hard to play. Warrior was better but it was leagues beneath range as far as ease of combat goes. That said: range combat was amazing. Still haven't played ranger yet but the other 3 are insanely fun. Witch and Sorceress are familiar game-play split into two classes. I thought i was gonna be meh on the Mercenary and it replaced the witch as my favorite as soon as i started playing it. Even the basic crossbow shot feels impactful.
The critique:
Is mostly technical stuff, like why does the game keep maxing out my CPU and barely use my graphics cards: I've updated them. But going through Ogrham Village with all its pretty flames is tanking my CPU and freezing up my whole computer.

One critique I will give towards classes: Monks opening skills feel disappointing and not very satisfying. You might want to consider shuffling them around to other levels or redesigning them. One thing that did feel very good is i got a staff with 46% increased attack speed and it suddenly made the game-play much much better. I'd buff the attack speed either in the base stats or in the early passive nodes on the tree.

Some support gems seem boring or not worth taking. The infusion ones come to mind.

Might want to have a way to change a skill gems from one to another. Just got my first LVL5 gem and chose Bonestorm cause it sounded cool. (also wow player) Wasn't what i thought it would be and didn't like it. would much rather have had more minions. But I'm stuck with it for now.


In conclusion:
Keep up the good work but lets put in some extra effort on the technical and backend side of things. I don't want my PC to be the reason i can play.
CPU: AMD Ryzen™ 7 7700X
GPU Nvidia 4060 Ti
Bought the PC in Jan. It should NOT be out of date for PoE already.

ARPGs in general are CPU intensive. POE 1 was especially, I was consistently seeing CPU usage at 100% when monitoring. I'm actually seeing LESS of that with POE 2. And instead it's using more of my graphics card. That's prob cause of the enhanced graphics in this game.

Yes, range is king. Although I have only played 1 class, ranger. I can imagine how hard melee is (and I've seen streamers struggle with it, then switch to ranged class and do much better). You'll enjoy ranger. It's very powerful. Last time I checked, 5 of the top 10 players (by lv) were rangers.

As a Monk player i must say the begining was... quite pain in the ass. Around lvl 30 i really got a grasp of it and the combos started looking good and dealing nice dmg. Some bosses require range-dmg so sometimes you just have to spam wind thrust (or something like that) and abuse stun mechanics (but you CAN DO IT so it's not bad).
Other than that - POE 2 seems great! Difficulty promotes taking things slowly and/or learning the moveset of the boss. You want to progress quickly? Git gud. Struggling with X? Just lvl up and get some better gear!
But... Yeah, gear. Here's my only issue. The drops seems to be so rare and most of it goes straight to trash (merchant). I try to sell pretty much everything i get so i can use the loot-casino (which usually does not dissapoint) but going back to the hub every 2/3 minutes (due to low inventory space) is sometimes annoying.
So far i haven't experienced many performance issues - my game crashed twice since launch.
I'll definetely spend lots of hours playing POE2 as it's simply superior to the first one (which i couldn't really get into).

Yeah finally just fed a bunch of uncut skill gems to my monk and bought every skill in the first two tiers. Palm strikes make thing better. I can at least handle bosses now. Found out how power charges interact in 2 vs in 1 and like the change, made things better when dealing with regular mobs. Something they need to communicate someway in game to player. "hey your lighting skill will consume these and do cool shit and big dam." I actually only found out they did that because of my witch.
Ive seen some builds that I'm interested to try out.

Difficulty for me is never an issue FEEL is the most important thing, I can get good if it feels good doing so.

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But... Yeah, gear. Here's my only issue. The drops seems to be so rare and most of it goes straight to trash (merchant). I try to sell pretty much everything i get so i can use the loot-casino (which usually does not disappoint) but going back to the hub every 2/3 minutes (due to low inventory space) is sometimes annoying.

Yeah that's a huge issue. Vendors have rare gear for sale occasionally, but since gear, gambling and most importantly re-specing costs gold, you cant afford to dis-enchant your gear. You have to sell in order to afford the others. Heck I can't even afford to gamble.

U generally can't afford to gamble early on. And I'd say it's not worth it, either. Better to buy the sure thing off Renly. Look out for move speed boots from him. I sell only the stuff that costs more than average. The rest I disenchant.