Thoughts from a first time ARPG player
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I love the game so far and I'd like to share some thoughts after finishing the first 3 Acts yesterday. To get where I am coming from it might be useful to know that I played a sorceress and build her as I saw fit. I haven't looked at any guides or information about the game prior to playing so I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes and could have made the game easier if I knew what I was doing. Here's my skill tree for anyone who's interested:
Spoiler
 Difficulty In my opinion, the difficulty is fine as is. Maybe it's even a little too easy. I got most of my gear in Act 1 (my weapon is like level 12) and I had no big issues throughout the game. I assume my equipment is quite bad compared to someone who knows what they are doing, since I never used any orbs or bought items and just used the things I dropped throughout the campaign. So I was quite perplexed about people in the chat saying that the game is hard and complaining that bosses reset their health when you die, which is something I thought would be normal. Rewards The rewards didn't feel particularly rewarding, since I either got yellow items for other classes, or items that I deemed worse than the ones I got before. I received the majority of my gear in act 1 and kept it throughout the game. Yesterday evening was the first time I changed my armor, so I basically used it from act 1 all the way up to act 3. Same for my weapon that I am still running even now as mentioned above. This does not feel like progression, but I am aware that I could have used orbs and other currency to make new / better items. Tutorials As a new player, I was introduced to most of the systems I engaged with, but I had a few gripes with things I realized later on, or systems that weren't explained or even alluded to at all. Here are a few examples: 1. Vendors resetting their inventory on level up. I saw that vendors sometimes had different inventory, but I never realized that it was tied to leveling up until I saw a post about it this morning. It would be nice to have a small pop-up that said something along the lines of "Don't forget to check the vendors on level up, they might have good gear". 2. Support Gems When first using a support gem, it would be great to have an indicator that it is also possible to show all available gems for the skill. I was halfway through act 2 when I realized that there was a checkbox to show more than just the 'recommended' ones, which helped out quite a bit. 3. Ascendancy It would be nice to get a clue where to get more Ascendancy skill points. I found 4 so far (two for each first Trial) and have no idea if the other 4 are possible to even get in early access or if we have to wait. 4. The thingy you can use to turn 3 'similar' items into 1. I forgot the name, but sometime in Act 3 it just showed up without any explanation. A short info would have been nice here as well.(Maybe marking it with a quest marker to show that it is new or something) 5. Corrupted items No explanation on those. I found an altar to corrupt one of my items and the rewards in the trial of chaos are also all corrupted and I have no idea what this means without going out of my way and looking it up outside of the game. An explanation tooltip you can view with alt would be appreciated. Combat and Skills The animations and sound design are amazing. The combat itself is quite repetitive, but I assume that to be normal for an arpg. The skill variety seems quite lacking as well. At least for sorceress there are clearly 'better' and 'worse' skills. Most of the skills I used until the end I unlocked in the first row, which does not feel like a good progression either, since I was doing basically the same things for the entire game. The skills I used were the following: Spark, Flame Wall, Ice Nova, Frost Bomb, Orb of Storms, Frost Wall, Mana Tempest and Frost Armor. With this combination, I breezed through most of the game without issues. In my opinion, spark feels way too strong. It's so overwhelming that it's just not worth using anything else, for example Arc or Lightning Warp. Flame Wall felt like the only useful fire skill, not because of it's damage, but because of the combo potential with Spark. Ember Fussilade is a joke (tried it with level 6 gem) and neither Incinerate nor Solar Orb seem worth using either as none of them top the spark combo in terms of damage. Haven't used any of the level 11 or 13 skills yet since I concluded that upgrading my existing skills would be worth more than any of the newly unlocked ones, which is generally not what you want to see happen. Especially with late game unlocks. Also, dying to dot's or on ground effects after the bosses are dead and losing all loot is fucked up. At least for bosses, let the loot persist after death. The mechanic is fine for elites (or whatever these random yellow mobs are called), but it sucks way too hard on 'real' bosses. I barely needed mana potions. I'm not sure if that is intended, but I only ever needed to pop a potion when I used Mana Tempest and burned through my mana and I didn't really put much into recovery. Maps Apparently there are things called 'maps' later on after finishing NG+ but I'm not there yet, so I'm talking about the campaign maps. I'm somewhat of a completionist, so I always run everywhere to unlock the entire map. This was fine in the first Act, but starting from Act 2 the maps got so big that it was annoying to backtrack for like 5 minutes, just to notice that the path you didn't take ended after 3 steps, which means you can run back to where you wanted to go another 5 minutes. I saw in the patch notes that it will be possible to port to checkpoints soon, which is a welcome change. But that brings me to a gripe with checkpoint placements. I'm not sure how they are programmed, but some of them are placed horribly. If I die somewhere to get sent to the checkpoint to get swarmed by like 30 mobs that push me into a wall, block and kill me again is not a fun experience. (Talking about you mines in act 2) Checkpoints should be placed at least a little outside of the mobs aggro range. Trial of Sekhemas Honor is a horrible mechanic. Don't have anything else to say about it. Trial of Chaos I'd like to illustrate my point on the first trial I attempted: The penalties I took were the circle that gets larger and eventually explodes (2x) and the lightning circle that damages you if you step into it. I chose them because I thought it'd be easy enough to just dodge around them or leave the area of effect before I get damaged. This worked as expected until I had to escort the statue, which was actually impossible to do with these penalties combined because I could not stand near enough for the statue to move without getting blasted with damage. In my opinion, this just screams bad design. If a certain combination of penalties spells instant doom it's just not fun to do. Inventory The inventory is insanely small. I picked up basically any item I found, even if it was white and sold it to vendors from Act 1 to Act 3. Sometimes I didn't make it even 5 steps before I had to port back into town again. Am I supposed to leave stuff lying on the ground or is there a way to increase the inventory size? Because that kind of gameplay is not fun. Just annoying. Polish Aside from the hiccups at the beginning (which were to be expected), I had not a single crash or lag spike when I played afterwards. It was a smooth experience from beginning to the end which is a rare occurence nowadays, so big W here. Overall I'm glad I bought the early access and I'm really in love with most of what is offered here. This post might seem negative, but this is just because I've listed all the negative / questionable things I noticed. If I haven't mentioned it, it's either in a good place, I haven't done it yet or I have forgotten about it, which means it wasn't as bad. Also, please remember that this is my first ARPG, so maybe some of my points are expected in this genre. Question for players who know what they are doing What do I do with my hundreds of orbs and 200k gold? I actually have no idea what to spend it on since I haven't had any issues so far, so I'm just hoarding resources. Last bumped on Dec 12, 2024, 3:26:11 AM
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Good review overall but I gotta point out that you talk about not having enough rewards and also about having hundreds of orbs hoarded and not using them. Orbs are to be used for crafting new gear especially during campaign where you find more powerfull bases as you progress.
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Yes, you dont need to sell everything. You can mostly only sell or disenchant rare. You should have enough orb of transmutation and augmentation by now and blue items dont sell well unless it's a ring or an amulet.
In every arpg, most loot stays on the ground. As for the trials, you are not alone, nobody likes the honor system the way it is right now, so they will change it. Same for chaos trial. Sure if you build character properly, you can actually tank every debuff, but the damage they do might be a little to much at the moment. They wont change the inventory, it's a classic arpg inventory. It's ment to force you to choose what you want to carry. It ads complexity to the game. Try to play Diablo 4 and tell me how much you don't care about what you pick on the ground and items have no values or weight. |
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" That's my problem. I didn't find any more powerful bases that would be worth replacing my old gear with at least as someone who doesn't know much about the game. 90% of the rares I found were worse than the things I got in act 1. Hence my point. I am aware that I am hoarding items that could help get new and better gear, as I mentioned before, but I don't feel it's worth using these orbs for new items I drop because I deem them worse and am able to continue without issues with the gear I currently have. So for me, it makes more sense to keep these items until I find something actually useful or when I run into issues (stuck at a boss, dying to often or whatever). I am certainly playing 'wrong' by doing that, and I understand this, but that would mean there could be other issues. For example, you could say the difficulty is too low if people can clear the campaign without upgrading or changing dropped gear obtained in Act 1 as I am sure that it is not intended to ignore half of the game mechanics. I simply shared my observations for people to draw their own conclusions as I feel inadequate to judge them as a new player who has never touched an arpg before. |
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" I see, thank you for clarifying that. I play mostly single player games, so for me it's just the obvious thing to loot everything to sell, salvage or whatever you can do in the game. But if the basic rule is to just leave all item drops except rares and blue rings or amulets, then why do they even drop? I understand white's with slot(s) or quality rating since you can get useful crafting items from those, but if it's not even worth picking up then why does it exist? As far as I know there is no transmog system or something that trash items could be useful for. __ Making a tankier class would indeed be a solution I didn't think of, but wouldn't that force you down a path in this specific trial room? If you are not tanky enough and have to escort the statue you are basically just fucked. That really doesn't sound like good game design to me. __ Right now, the inventory is not forcing me to choose anything. It's just wasting my time because I have to open a portal, look at a loading screen, identify gear with the hooded man, sell / disenchant / keep gear, walk to the portal and look at a loading screen again and pick up the items I was too full to pick up before. There is no complexity here, it's just padded, repetitive game time. If the portal mechanic wouldn't exist I'd agree with you, but as it stands right now the small inventory is nothing more than an annoying obstruction. I'd understand this design choice if they'd sell more inventory space, but they don't, hence my confusion. |
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The portal mechanic is limited to 6 for mapping. So you will have to make a choice later on. Also, having the items with different size will matter more when you will be out of portals.
As for the loot on the ground, some people might want to sell them or use them for crafting. They could have gone with class bound loot (only see items from your class), but that kind of loot is only for single player games where you can't trade between your playthrough. That's why you will have loot filters when the game will be officially out. You will be able to target the loot you want and remove anything unnecessary. I agree, the trials are not for everyone, that's why they said there will be a total of 3 different options (we only have 2 for now). Not every build will be able to do all of them. GGG will try to make them available for most by the official release, but it wont be perfect and that's fine. The trial of Sekhema is based on the Sanctum league in poe1 and it's mostly only ranged and totem builds that plays it, BUT they allowed melee build by making it so that defense greatly reduce the honor lost. I guess they will do the same thing for poe2. That's really all they need to do, make it easier for melee and make sure blocking actually block honor loss. As for chaos, like i said, they only need to tune down the thing a little. |
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" The inventory space is not an issue if you play the game as intended, which is to choose which items you want, and then leave the rest on the ground. You are doing the opposite of what you are suppose to by picking everything up. However, so far in this game you do spend a bit more time picking up items to disenchant, but only until you have enough blue orbs, then you don't really need to pick up blues anymore. Also in end game you will be emptying your invent after each map so it should be even less of a problem there. I'm not in maps yet though so idk for sure. |
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"Your post is actually polite, detailed and highly constructive. Much better than some exhibits elsewhere in this forum. Thank you for the breath of fresh air and welcome to PoE 2. Anyway, let me use your thread to discuss what I feel are shortcomings of the tutorial and general onboarding of new and "new" (inflexible PoE 1 players) players to the game. "Looking around at the feedback (both polite and less polite), I'm seeing the tutorial needing to step up further. It got players to play the game, I salute all the work put in to cover the corner cases like "oh, do they not know how to drink?" But there's wildly different play experiences which I chalk up to some small-yet-crucial details not being explained. And from my teaching experience in my life, I know there are pupils who are reluctant to think for themselves unless gently encouraged. Vendors need to be in the tutorial. Two 'obvious' points need to be raised, so trigger it when the player reaches Lv 3: * Vendors reset their inventory. In my years of PoE 1 experience, I never learnt this as you never had to look at vendors. Loot was everywhere and that's before a new league's mechanics gave even more loot to encourage you to engage. * You can equip "off-class" weapons early on. Later they need stat investment to gradually limit what you can do but at Lv 2 you can try out anything like picking up a crossbow on a "melee" class. Once new players get prodded to buy an "off-class" weapon, they then need a tutorial on looking at "neighbour-class" skills. The player cuts their first skill gem and is shown a narrow set of recommendations. This is fine at that point in the game. There needs to be another tutorial when they cut their 3rd skill gem or maybe their first Lv 3 skill gem. Something relevant to whatever build the player is trying out, e.g. * "You're a warrior, so you want armour break. Did you know there's a crossbow skill to keep that debuff up when you're further away?" * "You're a monk, we see you're going for an ice build. Did you know the sorceress has Frost Bomb to help your damage output?" * "You're a witch, we see you're trying out zombies which want power charges. Did you know there's a monk skill to instantly kill low HP enemies to earn power charges?" "There's some nuance to the term "skill variety". Other games give you entirely different skills to achieve a sense of progress. In PoE, a "starting skill" can be edited with support gems from later on to become something quite different while still having the same name. To give an example, take a PoE 1 skill: burning arrow. One fire arrow that can set one target on fire. Simple earlygame skill. By midgame you could make it do stuff like this: * Fire lots of fire arrows in a fan * The fire arrows bounce off their first target to hit more targets * Targets ignited spread that fire DoT to nearby targets * A turret is shooting the arrows instead of you The UI needs to make this clearer. The current "recommended 3 support gems at Lv 1" for each skill is fine for the starting player. A Lv 6 player needs to have a "show me everything I could slot in as this skill's support". All gems shows everything including the irrelevant (and doesn't show what you've already got equipped). The 3 recommendations don't show enough. There needs to be a middle ground. Supplement to my point earlier on how "off-class" skills need to be "recommended" too and you get a dizzying variety of skills. I'm constantly fighting the finite number of skill gems I can have equipped. That's good, makes me carefully consider what's actually important. "This is a huge datapoint that is going under the radar to a lot of discussions. You have packrats who want to pick up everything. You have PoE 1 endgame grinders who have been conditioned to leave hundreds (yes, 100s) of rares on the ground with loot filters so they don't even look at them. The tutorial should gently encourage players to carefully consider what's a meaningful balance. In addition to prodding them to buy an off-class weapon, there should be a prod to get them to try using an orb of transmute, then augment, then regal. Give the player some inconsequential white base (like a belt) as part of the tutorial, give them the orbs and don't let them walk away with those tutorial orbs. One point that hasn't been covered in this opening post is respec costs. The current gold costs for respec are tuned to PoE 1 when players could just use orb of regret to respec once the gold cost got prohibitive. That currency doesn't exist in PoE 2. We're getting a fresh set of "woah, THIS is the skill tree?!" clips from first-time players streaming. I'm seeing decision paralysis. I'm seeing new players horde their gold instead of upgrading their gear because they're afraid when they'll need to respec. Now, I'm not advocating completely free respecs. That'd unlock degenerate behaviour in the endgame. I'm thinking something like this to supplement the current gold-per-node system: * Offer a full, free respec at certain points of the campaign. Do it like PoE 1 does in Standard whenever a new league starts: a "take it or leave it" deal that can't be postponed indefinitely. * Offer a full, costly respec after doing some grind in the endgame. Something that's less time to grind out than earning the gold manually or starting a new character from scratch. Something that's still a significant decision to do. The skill points get reset entirely on the spot when the grind is done. Telegraph this clearly to players. That or make a "bulk buy" deal when respec'ing: "all your skills for the cost of 30 nodes". |
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"Now there's an interesting data point. There's nothing in the tutorial about how to read the gear. How does a new player interpret the numbers shown on an item? We could all benefit from your experience being elaborated. Hmm, the tutorial shouldn't explain every last detail about items. It does however, need to say something about why gear found in later acts are better. The base stats and the better affixes that can roll on them. This is especially important for attack-based characters who rely on their weapon to deal damage. |
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" Oh, that makes a ton of sense then. I'm not far enough to do the mapping stuff yet, but I'll be looking forward to it. I also didn't know about the three options for trials, so that definitely helps once it's actually in the game. Thanks for the answers! |
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