My major issues with PoE 2 after playing Monk to act 2 and Mercenary to act 1

I want to mention that I'm only going to be focusing on the negatives, but there are a lot of decent ideas in the game, and things like the atmosphere and music absolutely hit the spot at times.

I think the first act is really solid: it has a slower pace which allows you to learn the skills, and makes movement and ability usage matter much more.
Act 2 continues that trend, however towards the end of act 2 I felt like things were slowly getting worse.
Bosses have been consistently super fun, I believe I had an average of half a death per boss, and it definitely does always feel rewarding to learn the boss throughout.

However (the negatives):
Early gear/crafting:
I was excited for the idea of crafting gear early on, but this simply does not bring you good results - I was constantly bottlenecked by lacking item bases, making it so that I could not obtain good magic items, and there were very little regal & exalted orbs. And this is despite picking up rares and disenchanting them for currency shards. Same for rune sockets - I had a decent number of runes, but 0 sockets to put them in, and 0 currency to make items into socketed items (despite salvaging every socket item that dropped).
I got really lucky with an insane 100% physical damage staff that got me very far, but aside from that all loot besides some charms (and a cool leveling unique) felt very underwhelming.

Walking speed / backtracking
The walking speed feels terrible. While I don't think quicksilver flasks were a good solution, they were better than having nothing. I kept wearing my ilvl 1 boots that had 10% movement speed (and tried+failed to craft higher ms ones in act 2), and despite that, backtracking felt like a huge slog.
Just implementing an automated sprint when out of combat would go a long way to help with this, or anything at all. Teleport-to-checkpoints, maybe? Anything.

Monster packs
While bosses feel amazing, monster packs can feel really unfair or annoying to deal with. If you stay ahead of the curve and can one-shot packs, it feels pretty decent, but if you lack damage or the monsters are too spread out, clearing them feels like a chore. This is not a huge issue in open areas, however in corridor-like maps this is a huge hassle.
Additionally, some monsters (specifically the ones in the finale of act 2, during the caravan raid) jump at you at extreme speeds, so it wasn't uncommon for me to be surrounded by 10 enemies near instantly and die if I dared to play aggressive (as monk melee), instead having to slow down (and play like a ranged build) to the point of being extremely bored.
In general, I felt like the game was extremely stingy with area and attack speed increases (not even suggesting the attack speed support gem), even though those feel amazing.

Skill gems
I am very disappointed at the decision to make skill gems require a specific weapon, as well as having no method to customize a skill.
For example, "falling thunder" converts physical damage to lightning, and while I understand that there are base quarterstaves that have no physical damage, I feel that there is a lost opportunity in not allowing players to transform those ground lightning tendril into fiery, spikey/icey tendrils, or even poisonous or chaos graphics for them (even if it's just a simple particle change).
Same with wave of frost, why not have alternate versions that turn them into a firey area or a poison cloud, perhaps with a support gem (though in this case you would be paying one support slot just for customization) or through another method.

On top of that, skill gems being locked to a specific weapon type also means a lot less creativity, where skills like wild strike in PoE 1 could be used with any melee weapon, or even ice crash which could be used with 5 different weapon types.
This is especially relevant since, for example, quarterstaves only have 1 (large) cluster in the tree.
There are many more interesting options that open up with multiple weapon options, for instance, using a same skill but having faster/weaker attacks with daggers, or having a longer wind up but greater aoe with maces, as examples. This would play even more into the weapon swap mechanic that was added, as well as making it more accessible to newcomers to the series who wish to dabble in the customization.

Support gems
In an interview for PoE 2, I remember the devs mentioning that "flat numbers de-specialize, multipliers specialize" and that "support gems should de-specialize while the skill tree should specialize", yet I do not see this philosophy reflected in the support gems, with very few exceptions.

A lot of support gems are just "25% more cold damage" or "20% more duration" which is specializing, with very few being interesting like "multiple projectiles" or "pierces" which add entirely new (de-specializing) traits. There is no "added cold" or "added fire", or any conversions as mentioned previously.

I can't help but feel like there is a confusion here. Are support gems meant to add customization, or grow you in power?
If customization, why the restriction on no reuse of support gems?
If power, why have this convoluted system instead of small skill gem trees / choices on level up for each skill gem?
And if both, then why do we have to tradeoff power for customization, on top of both of the above? (though obviously I would prefer if support gems were intended for customization as was explained in that interview)

I understand that having "40% more area" via the skill tree may not be very interesting when you only want it on 1 gem, in which case having a system to specifically target 1 gem may be good. But I do not think it should be the same "support gem" system, I believe it should be something else. You've already tried divergent qualities for gems, you've tried skill trees on weapons - why not try skill trees on gems? It would still be very similar to diablo 2, and would make leveling gems infinitely more interesting, simply add some options every time your gem levels up.
In other words, please make support gems customize only (therefore not necessarily requiring the use of all support slots) and add another system for growing the power of skills on a per-skill basis where this system would provide multipliers (dmg. mult., area mult., speed mult. etc...). The idea would be to keep this second system broad, where the wording would affect things that you didn't necessarily initially intend.

Additionally, the game gives out very little support gems, which does not allow you to make more than a few mistakes in choosing them. I do not understand why vendors (the hooded figure would be appropriate) do not sell you these (same for spirit skill gems -and skill gems to a lesser extent).

End game speed / area clear (?)
Unlike the other sections, this is more so speculation, but:
I did not see a lot of cast/attack speed on the skill tree, which to me indicates the game does not speed up in the late game. To me, this is disappointing - and while I do agree that it's better not to have the level of PoE 1 speed where everything has to shoot you from off-screen, I do think the pack clearing speed / AoE the player has at their disposal is not satisfying enough (at end of act 2).
Please note that this concern is only addressed at mob packs, I think boss fights are in a really good spot if they continue the same way from act 3 onward.

Melee is still not very mobile
Melee should be able to move while doing attacks (WASD with move penalty like mercenary). Every other class can, and it feels WAY better and adds more skill expression.
Yes, you have skills that make you move in built-in animations, but moving on top would feel better.

You may also want to consider melee having an ability to shove small monsters out of the way, melee being completely surrounded by small enemies and only being able to hit in an arc in front of them does not feel appropriate to the archetype/playstyle.

Combos get repetitive / lack creativity
I think the base amount of skill gem slots is too small. Skills feel like they are meant to be used at a specific time, with very little way for creativity.
For my examples I will use Monk and Mercenary (with recommended skills), since that was what I
played.

Monk gives you falling thunder, which basically requires power charge to use properly to execute mob packs. This is fine, but you only provide 1 skill (killing palm) in the monk skill gems to obtain power charges, and that skill can often put you at great danger the more mob density there is, and restrains your mobility by teleporting you.
Still with Monk, there is only 1 circular AoE around your character (tempest bell) in the early acts, which basically mandates its usage. I wanted to do a cold build, so I used the cold "Ice Strike" attack, and while it felt nice initially it gets really hold just doing 1-2-large hit over and over again, especially given how weirdly it latches on to enemies and ESPECIALLY because I cannot use WASD during this time. I also cannot weave in other skills quickly between that combo to spice up the possible combinations (with, for example, glacial cascade). The skills "Frozen Locus" and "Wave of Frost" basically have the same function, yet it feels terrible to use them after a while as they lock down your movement in a very linear fashion, again, locking your WASD movement. They also serve the same purpose, but frozen locus simply seems worse later on.
(side note, targeting with skills as monk has been a nightmare, many times I attempted to aim exactly over an enemy so that my glacial cascade would hit both them and the bell, and it would just lock on to the enemy instead, completely whiffing the bell. I tried enabling "always attack without moving" and that did not seem to help at all either)

Mercenary felt a lot better initially, however the game really does not incentivize you to constantly switch ammo types, which I feel was a let down. At first I thought switching ammo types made them reload faster when you switched back to a deplete ammo, but if that effect is present it is near unnoticeable.
Throwing explosive grenades while immediately following that with a roll is fun, but I fear it will get old eventually as there is very little freedom in that, especially when being chased by fast enemies. The shotgun skills -can- sometimes feel pretty good when getting real close, but feels really repetitive and tedious.
Also the "repeater" skills have a much greater penalty on your mobility yet don't seem to have very much damage to compensate, making them worthless to use (at least early on).
(side note, throwing grenades directly under your feet makes the grenades go quite far and is incredibly annoying, you instead have to aim slightly around your character - what's up with that?)
(side note, the same issue as with monk happened when attempting to target between enemies with a shotgun - it would simply lock on one of the enemies instead, thus failing to hit both)


The ice shatter sound is better in PoE 1
Just a small detail but, the chunky, LOUD ice shatter sound (and screen shake with crit) is infinitely better in PoE 1, to the point where I would list it very high as one of the reasons that made me come back. The PoE 2 sound is IMO worse, so please improve it (or honestly just use the PoE 1 sound again).


Sorry if I focused a lot on the negatives, I do think there is a lot of potential for the game to be extremely good as well as many improvements from PoE 1! I can only hope that these concerns are addressed going forward.

Automated sprint would be great for out of combat situations.

I feel quite the opposite regarding monster packs. But I'm also on a ranged build. In open areas it was always a hassle to corral monsters into dense packs I could work on with AoE skills while in corridors I found it very easy to funnel them into chokepoints. This is also the strategy I used on the Dreadnought: use the connecting bridges between cars as a funnel that gets plugged by your NPC helper for that mission.

Full agree on skill/gem restrictions, esp. support gems. GGG is probably too concerned with damage getting out of hand but it feels like a straight jacket right now.

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TwoToneDude#9771 wrote:

I feel quite the opposite regarding monster packs. But I'm also on a ranged build. In open areas it was always a hassle to corral monsters into dense packs I could work on with AoE skills while in corridors I found it very easy to funnel them into chokepoints. This is also the strategy I used on the Dreadnought: use the connecting bridges between cars as a funnel that gets plugged by your NPC helper for that mission.

Full agree on skill/gem restrictions, esp. support gems. GGG is probably too concerned with damage getting out of hand but it feels like a straight jacket right now.

Oh yeah regarding the monster packs it's my bad for not explaining properly: I meant more so that at the very least in open areas you can choose to walk past them and have them chase you and group them up that way, or just ignore them completely - but in corridor maps, you are forced to stop due to body blocking, and often in corridors there is one target hiding just behind a wall, exempting them from the AoE and thus wasting a lot of your time.