The reason why the game seems hard right now.

I think the underlying cause of the difficulty of the game lies not with the unfair bosses but with the core game play mechanics, such as bad responsiveness to player actions, inputs, length of animations, and network code to minimize lag.

Everything feels so sluggish, and there's a huge input delay even when playing on local servers. What happened to Predictive mode and Lock Step?

I've written before about the delayed action time and lag but I think this is the cause of the game difficulty seeming so high. Bosses should be hard, but once you learn a bosses pattern, You should be able to beat it.

At the moment everything seems so hard and painful to play because the game doesn't give you the opportunity to avoid what is killing you every time. Once GGG improves the responsiveness and tightens the animation delay, everyone here will be complaining that the bosses are too easy.

At the moment nerfing the end use mechanics wont help anything in the long run. So once the underlying base issues are fixed AND THOSE SHOULD BE FIXED FIRST the game wont need nerfing and everything else will fall into place.

I don't necessarily agree with this. Personally, I don't think there's any issue with responsiveness at all. This could just be on your end.

With bosses, quite simply I think the issue relies is moreso that they spam things too frequently. There is very little time in between different attacks to recover from the previous one. This makes it so that there is little breathing room to learn the patterns in the first place. It's not extremely bad, but it is still too little time, in my opinion. This problem REALLY becomes apparent on slower characters (e.g., Titans). They basically get shit on because they can get barely one attack out before the boss gets two or three.

The game seems hard because lots of players simply do not understand how to make a good build.

That's all what's happening here.

Many don't understand they can use shops.
Many don't understand they are supposed to have some defensive stats instead of using dodge roll exclusively.
Many can't put 2 and 2 together and understand how to make most with some combination of skills available to them.
Many don't realize that their build scales with their weapon (for those classes where it does), and so they keep their shiny old lvl1 stick that does puny damage and wonder why it's taking so long to kill anything.

What are you smoking? If you dont dodge roll your dead. And it still takes half a second for the dodge roll to happen and then the roll is too short. Its the only way to avoid damage because armor has very little damage reduction even though mine says 50% I still get one shot by most things. For characters that dont have armor damage resistance e.g. evasion only armor. Those characters are toast.

You must have never played POE2 and just be trolling. Or you'd know this.

Thanks for nicely proving all of my points in the previous post.

I've been doing some tests today after I wrote the original post, connecting to different players in a party accross the world and being an areas with lots of players. Also changing my home server. And watching streamers play by them selves and in parties.

Speed of the game seems to change with a high ping, the higher your ping, the slower the game, if Im playing with a party on the Frankfurt server, my game and animations will be realy REALY slow, and If im playing on the AUS server, the game speed will be fine. If im playing on the NZ server, I get high FPS and animations are crisp and clean.

But it also works the other way, If I'm playing in a EU party, everyone in the party will experience the same slowness and everyone will run at the same speed so that the little fat guy from NZ can keep up. They dont realize it yet but everyone suddenly complains about how slow the game is when I join those EU parties.

The FPS in town seems to be tied to how many players are in an area. It doesnt matter that I have a RTX 4070S and a M.2 SSD. if theres other players in town the fps drops lower and lower with the more players in a single area.

I tested it at the moving caravan town in Act2 where all the players are bundled together in one spot and the game is going realy slow, saying I have 30-40fps, but it still seems smooth. Then moving to the front to see all the slaves pulling the caravan my FPS jumps back up to 120.

My conclusion is the networking mode they use in POE2 slows down everyones game to keep the FPS high and stop glitches. But the game becomes so painful to play because its so slow like slowly pulling off a plaster rather than just ripping it straight off.