My feedback regarding Boss difficulty after looking at lots of community discussions

From what I have gathered from the community, it looks like there are three categories of feedback from people analyzing boss difficulty. What I'm trying to do with these categories is inform people on the fence about getting early access, as well as inform people that tried it and are negative about their experience. If they can adjust their perspective, maybe they will have a better time.

Group 1: Boss fights are extremely hard and/or very tedious - These are the spawn of Dark Souls

What seems to be going on from feedback is firstly an inefficient build due to passive tree choices that lack synergy. This then is compounded with weak gear due to poor game knowledge and/or insufficient currency for improvement. Also, some people don't like being defeated and making adjustments. They want to push through quickly and painlessly without friction.

An example of a lack of synergy is from my own personal experience with my first character, a mace and shield warrior. My choice was to ignore any build guides or skill explanations and try to make my build work. Unfortunately, I chose the more defensive skills such as health regeneration and shield passives (since you know, I have a shield). Did I make bad choices? No, but I made inefficient choices because, while my defense was solid, my damage was very poor. So the boss attrition really took its toll and got me into a negative loop for a first play-through.

One guy in the YouTube comments stated that he went with a caster-type build on a warrior in his first play-through and it was rough. Like me, he probably had a difficult time getting efficient synergies to balance offense and defense.

Group 2: Boss fights are balanced - GGG please don't make any changes to weaken the bosses

People in this category are typically experienced gamers that chose synergistic skills after looking over information from content creators. They also may have chosen the more powerful classes which need balancing. Or, they may be newer ARPG players but got lots of help from people they know.

This seems to be the sweet spot that a lot of players fall into. I looked at build help for the monk after collecting some good gear for him when slogging through with my warrior. The bosses were on par with POE 1 early bosses as my monk was having minimal issues offensively. My belief is they have a good balance with the bosses, and rather than adjust the boss characteristics, adjust the player's class, skill gems, and item tool-set.

Group 3: Boss fights are trivially easy - There are get good issues here

This is coming from players with lots of information from content creators combined with fairly good skill or average skill but with strong gear. The issue here is some of these people on the forums tend to act like it must be a skill or knowledge issue rather than a balance issue with the classes or class skills. Elitism or inability to see other player's perspective is a problem in some cases from the discussions I saw.

An example of bosses seeming to hit extremes of difficulty is from the two-handed mace warrior that Woolie put together. He went from brutal and difficult game-play to what looked like a cakewalk after he made one main change to his character. I'm not going into what he changed due to a spoiler, but the transformation was immediate and dramatic. In his case, he leveraged the problem with an unorthodox and somewhat unconventional solution. To further clarify, he experimented with what he could adjust, and the solution was not something immediately apparent. It was IMHO brilliant nonetheless, and the definition of
grinding out a solution. The intent of this example is not to show any elitism by Woolie, but to show that there is a serious issue of balance.

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So, the main point of this is to let people on the fence know what they will get into at the current time in early access.

Yes, there are issues with sub-class/skill balance, low loot drop rates, limited crafting options, etc. Trying to go in without a build guide may be tough to brutal. But, GGG is committed to balancing things that need it by listening to
community feedback.

Also, people may not know that GGG has much better tools for editing POE 2 than POE 1, and it was very apparent with their first patch addressing loot, dodge roll issues, and map size frustrations by adding checkpoints. That was very impressive work in a short amount of time, especially compared to other companies. No, not every patch will completely fix things, but they will keep adjusting things in small increments until the balance/fix is in place. Small steps is the best solution, as it will be easier to find the right balance in the long run.

My other point of this information is to hopefully cause people raging over things to take a step back and see things from a community-wide perspective rather than their own view. People's feedback regarding issues should be welcomed by all for this game to efficiently have the weak spots ironed out. But, please don't rage over what's going on; we need your constructive input because a lot of points can be valid, but they will be most likely be ignored by GGG if pushed out with negativity and anger.

My data pool came from POE forum discussions, Steam forum and review discussions, as well as YouTube videos and comments.