Give it one more try

As many people here i was pretty disappointed by gameplay decisions in POE 2.

and my feedback was

"

1. Character feels "stoned". Real slowpoke. You want to push move button harder to make it run faster or cast something.

2. Campaign length is synthetic, achieved with map size and character speed. You spend 80% of time running.

3. Bosses are not hard. No complex pattern attacks or something. You die just because pack of mobs blocking you from roll during boss oneshot attacks. Fight time achieved by boss HP only.

4. Delay after roll is lovely.

5. Roll. Only needed during bossfights to dodge oneshots. Please dont mix different games. In souls every mob is scary and you have to use roll often. Here rolling looks like something added last moment and not balanced.

I removed a game, chilled a bit and started to think - WTF?! What's wrong? GGG has to much experience to make BAD game. They definitely have information about ruthless players count. No way they bet on couple guys who play it.

And i gave it one more try.

Yes, i forced myself to solve act 2. And in the start of act 3 i found that game is not that bad. It's just slow as fuck. After years of rushing poe 1 acts it's SLOW AS FUCK. Progression curve is super low. And yes, as dopamine junkie i was not satisfied. However:

1. Difference between 0% move speed boots and 15% move speed boots is HUGE. 15% complete remove all the "stoned" effect from your character. Boss fights become just ez.

2. Move speed solve it partially, but yes, maps still too big. Reduce map size by ~20% would be awesome. BUT with movement speed it become not super annoying.

3. Swarm could be killed with damage improvements. Yes, it could require to run some maps one more time to get another lvl/gold/items BUT it's solvable. (D2 act 1 runes farming, yeah?) +Move/cast speed upgrade makes it WAY less challenging.

4. No changes :) Please reduce it :)

5. Still useless on white/blue mobs but could be useful on yellow. Also no one force you to use it all the way. Yes, seems like boss-only mechanic but not affect QOL in all other gameplay.

Analyzing all my experience i realized my first impression was mostly formed by speed difference between poe 1 and poe 2. Try to fix speed with gear and you will see new side of this game.

For reference - remember act 1 sorc in D2. It's absolutely the same except of bosses. No stamina / slow running / no damage / no gear. Maybe it's less gear in POE2 but it's compensated with ORBS. Johnathan was correct. In POE 2 you are ABLE to get exalts / regals and stuff in act 1. In POE 1 you are NOT. And yes, there are not too many regals. SO DONT WASTE THEM. Only slam blue items which have 2 mods you want. Another POE 1 thing - dont care about blue items.

So conclusion here is - it's not even different. Just take your time and be bit more thoughtful on items, progression and stuff. Dont apply POE1 frames. It's more oldschool, more slow. Stop doomscrolling builds. Stay while and listen ;]

Regarding #3 - all of the classes have means to deal with trash mobs pretty fast.
You don't necessarily need "damage improvements", you might need to use AoE clear skills more.

I didn't really play the last 1-2 years of PoE, and I didn't get to the "blasting everything in one click" stage either, with any build. I like leveling in PoE1 because its slower, more time to react to stuff, etc. Early maps are also enjoyable, with less good loot, struggling a little.

That being said, I don't enjoy how tedious PoE2 is. Zones are too big, skills are too clunky, you get surrounded too easily, and it takes too long to get to the meaningful skills. Seems like all classes are stuck to 1-2 "good" builds for leveling, which just means that you progress at an ok pace without much dying, killing trash mobs easily, and not staying 15 minutes per boss.

"

bdradu96mro#4822 wrote:

Seems like all classes are stuck to 1-2 "good" builds for leveling

Super possible. I changed my sorc build couple times. But fortunately you only need gold for this, not 50 regret orbs :)

Outside of the fact that you can't dodge through enemies, I think the thing that annoys me most about the dodge roll is the fact that the character takes about as long to get back onto their feet as they did during the entire roll including the dive. It just feels clunky and unnecessarily slow.

Getting cornered by many mobs is for sure annoying.

Don't really mind the walking length of the maps, just the healthpools of the monsters make it tedious.

White mobs start to have thousands of health far too quickly, magic mobs tens of thousands, rare mobs take as long as a boss. The long walks with a lot of pack density is great when you can clear it. It sucks when you spend a minute on every pack and they are never ending.

My friends say it is worse than ruthless because of less loot, and they also can't kill as much. I love the direction, but it is too much to make every single enemy an "encounter" save it for rares and bosses. Turn down magics and white mobs hp and act 2 boss HP. By end of act 3 we can start doing funny stuff, not before.

"

AverBeg7#1689 wrote:

It sucks when you spend a minute on every pack and they are never ending.

Correct. POE 2 just not giving you chance to do something wrong. However it gives you chance to rollback with respec. In original D2 ruined character stay ruined forever. It's seems like GGG intention to force you stay and plan your build MORE carefully. Try, make mistake, rollback, do it again. That could be confusing, yes. And it's slows down whole process. I mean it's not slow because of game design, it's slow because you made something wrong with the character. Feel free to farm gold and respec. That's how i understood it. Maybe they try to move focus from rushing acts / story to character assembling. Idk is it's good or bad for you.

"

morpheus1234#4788 wrote:

"

AverBeg7#1689 wrote:

It sucks when you spend a minute on every pack and they are never ending.

Correct. POE 2 just not giving you chance to do something wrong. However it gives you chance to rollback with respec. In original D2 ruined character stay ruined forever. It's seems like GGG intention to force you stay and plan your build MORE carefully. Try, make mistake, rollback, do it again. That could be confusing, yes. And it's slows down whole process. I mean it's not slow because of game design, it's slow because you made something wrong with the character. Feel free to farm gold and respec. That's how i understood it. Idk is it's good or bad for you.

My build is absolutely fine after I rerolled to witch and picked the right skills, but it's still a slog. Even if you have a very good high damage build it just takes a rare with annoying mods to make you feel useless, unless you are in a party or in twink levelling gear.

Even all the streamers are saying they are not going any defense at all in favor of damage, because everything is too much of a sponge.

"

UppityBard#7638 wrote:

Outside of the fact that you can't dodge through enemies, I think the thing that annoys me most about the dodge roll is the fact that the character takes about as long to get back onto their feet as they did during the entire roll including the dive. It just feels clunky and unnecessarily slow.

Its to stop you spamming it, most games would give it a cooldown / charges instead but GGG have gone for being allowed to spam it but giving it a slow finish to make it a bit less reliable.

I agree with you though and i think its a bit too powerful right now even if you just spam