In deph feedback from a poe noob after one week of gameplay

Hi there!

- Bad english, sorry
- 70h in
- Witch minion build lv 73 farming t3 maps confidently and lv 30 Monk in campaign

I´ll start by saying that (considering the marketing and the interviews) I might be the main target audience of this game. Not because I think of myself as a special snowflake but how the game differs from poe1. I wished the gameplay was more activ and reactive and I wished that skilling and building was a LITTE bit easier but still complex. Poe2 delivered exactly that.
I played the first game for 40h, made and bricked a build myself and, after that, played with a guide to maps. What I didn´t like about that game (and most other ARPGs) was the fact that you either get oneshot or you blasting through everything without any thought. For me, everything AROUND the game (building, items) was interesting but super complicated and just not intuitive, and the gameplay was not something I was enjoying.

Here are my (hopefully) useful impressions.

Story

I ignored basically everything from poe1 and have no former knowlegde. I like the story so far and really enjoy the optional character dialogue, I think the presentation is the one that really sells it, even though the story is pretty straight forward for now.

Art Design

First an area whithout anything to whine about: The game looks absolutely stunning. Not only because of the general quality of graphics, but the art design, the DETAILS in everything just exhales atmosphere and the horror/brutality makes it thematicly the diablo 2 successor I was waiting for all this time.
Just when you stand still for a while and zoom in, you notice: The first wolf-boss has a little face over his mouth, the act 3 monsters in the black halls are actually human cyborgs, how the caravan is pulled by undead, but the dreadnought has those giant lizzards (which I haven´t even noticed my first run through).
The bosses, how they attack, move, how every enemy has it´s unique animation for not only being staggered but for being stunned: You jump in as monk and depending on the stagger/health bar of the mob group, some of them get killed, flying away, a few get confused and wiggle around, 4 of them tip over and struggling to get up. It´s just amazing and for a sucker for details, the game is full of great stuff like that. I easily can think of 20+ visual things that stuck in my head, details most people wouldn´t even notice because of the nature of the game.

Even the design of the areas (not perse level design), the overarching strory a map tells you is just so coherent. In the desert spike town, you approach from the bottom to the living quarters, all the way to the top, you explore a whole sunken city and see it a second time in its prime, the black tempel is the most disgusting place I´ve seen since some time. Just plain amazing. The titans in the landscape in act 2, the giant boss apporaching, it goes on and on. So yeah, great one!

Sound design

Basically the same I wrote above can be said for the sound and the music as well as voice acting. So just another bit of praise. (honorable mention goes to the slam attacks and the sound of cubbles rainign down)

Combat

The meat of the game and for me, brilliant (for the most part). I have been very positive so far so I start with problems I´ve had:

- I noticed that many skills I used were not really usefull in boss fights. I am not sure if it is like that because of my build or if the game wants me to have to commit either on boss killing OR areal damage. Expecially as a witch with minions, I fought with basically one course and one damage skill mostly because my minions were disabled pretty much the whole fight (because of the bosses dmg). It didn´t make the fights more diffucult, but rather longer and less engaging.
I had a different experience with the monk, where I felt that I could use my skillset for crowd control as well as bossing effectivly so far. So maybe it was just my build, I can´t tell.

- Some skills have areal movement that comes with them (the staff slam and the ice block of the monk for example) and they don´t quite feel right for me. If I jump into an enemy, I get inconsistent damage. Sometimes, I get attacked by a mob mid jump and nothing happens, sometimes I am almost dead befor I even hit the floor, so I am not sure if the damage I get wile airborne is intended or not.

- Charging enemies: This is a big negative for me so far. My witch build is pretty strong right now, I have good defenses and invested quite a bit into slow aura + spikes to protect myself against those, but it only helps sometimes.
There have been many situations where I walk around the corner, a punch of enemies I couldn´t see just charge me down relentlessly, ignoring my minions and hack away on my heatlh in lightspeed. The slow of my aura is barely noticible on them and my bone spikes (the only skill I can think of right now that seems to be undertuned) mostly gets ignored by them (even if the monsters are small, bone spikes not working on big chargers makes sense). So yeah, I found ways to build around them but they seem out of tune.

- Minion aggro: I played unearth for a while to apply curses on enemies while raising a wall of minions to protect myself. Mostly it worked but there are enemies that randomly ignore my minions. I am aware that I have to be in danger at some point, but most enemies attack ONLY my minions when I build up distance, other enemies will just charge me until they die. So it feels a little bit weird to play minions in that regard.

- Movement on the map: Sometimes there are situations where I die because I can´t really tell where to walk. It´s rare but here and there, because of the detailed graphics, I can´t see where a tree or rock is supposed to "end" exactly, resulting in being cornered by enemies and dying. I like that the enemes have a hit box, I just wanted to mention the enviroment specificly.

- Trial traps: Not much to say there, just that the little fire balls seem to damage me when I think I evaded them and sometimes I don´t take damage while being pretty sure I ran into them.

- Area effects casting against objects: It never feels right when I want to apply a curse for it to be blocked by a little pillar. It is apparent that the game wants to focus on psitioning and that I have to control my line of sight properly, but I think some objects should not count into this "spell hit box."
Especially when some enemy skills can go though them while mine cannot. It seems to be a problem with smaller objects, walls and trees/rocks block enemie spells pretty reliable.

So far that is all I can think of. I really enjoy the combat and the feeling of it. The active gameplay is what catches me the most, there is a satisfying approach to skill there: What skills do I have to dodge? What attacks can be avoided by just walking to put more dps in? Which monster to attack first in a group of enemies with different attacks? The animation and hitboxes here do a lot of the magic. The skills look, sound and feel just awesome. Yeah, great for me who disliked the one-button-gameplay of the first game.

Building the Character

First of I am aware that this deviedes the community. When I watch YouTube and look into things streamers doing, I notice that many people approach the game like poe1, which is basically "I need to find a way to be as fast as possible while doing as much damage as pissible with as little button inputs as possible."
Being someone who is not so fond of poe1, I approach the game from a "class fantasy" perspective. My Witch for example: I want to feel like a caster who brings death and blight over my enemies. Or as a Monk, I want to be a fast guy with a stick like in the martial arts movies. So my focus is in building a character which is less efficent but more focused on being as strong as possible while steel feeling like an actual charcter, not like a shining, colourful discoball of death.
I feel like poe2 lets me build those characters.

- Skill system:
I was able to build my character all on my own with just the bare minimum of knowledge I could grasp from poe1, that being: Having good damage while focusing on survival first. At the beginning, I would say 20 ish levels, I didn´t feel like I had enough tools to fight against all the enemies and their movesets, but it got better as more synergies grow clearer on me.
I watched no guides or other people playing and I was able to navigate through my spells as well as the passive skill tree quite easily. It is a lot of fun to find a new weapon or skill and then thinking "oh, I want to play expoding corpses", then search the passive tree for usefull skills while keeping attributes in check. It was very intuitive for me.

- Synnergies
The game clearly communicates how I am supposed to use a set of 2-4 skills to really get payoff. Again, the poe1 approach of many people led to a discourse that skill A or skill B are "trash" because it is useless and the dmg sucks. I cannot share this experience as everytime I entcountered something "useless", I would search for ways to test it out and make it work. Almost always, this was the case.
Because many skills have the ability to be either offensive or defensive skills. Essence drain for example can deal good damage when it is dpread between monsters, but with multi projectiles, ricochet and slow it becomes an amazing skill for survivability.
The most fun I have is to test all the skills with different set ups fitting my build, and most of them feel like they work in a cool way, especially if the focus is not "dmg only." So this feedback serves only half as praise; more as how I navigated the game as a somewhat new player.

- Equipment
I like how everything is explained ingame, it helps in such a great regard that I don´t need to google anything which is always great in my book.
the equipment though is where I can´t really gripe the stats. It is hard for me to analyze what gear I should invest on.
First, I understand and like the orbs a lot. Crafting is fun and even for me, understanding the bare minimum, it is exciting when something good pops up. So yeah, deciding what stats I need and whats good and what not (80% minion damage or +1 t all minion skillss? how to tell what is better?), but I think this will come with time.

Difficulty

I like hard games and have my fair share on them. This game can be very easy or very hard, in areas I was not expecting and I think it is mostly in the right place. When I die, I usually think "yeah, I wantet to pull all the mobs and got to greedy" or "yes, should have dodged instead of trying to push this skill in."

A negative for me though is the map size in the campaign and the endgame maps. While the games challanges can be overcome when being approached with patience mostly, the sheer size of the areas makes dying more punishing than it should be in my opinion. A lot of times (especially in maps) I didn´t die because I was not able to solve a problem but more bceuase I kept losing patience because the map is so big. At some point I feel like I know what enemies to fight there, what their attacks are and how the layout moves along, so my brain switches into autopilot. That is where most of my deaths occure.
I Think the map size of poe1 was far better. In poe2, it feels like every area overstays it´s welcome by, lets say 10-15%
Most maps and areas are compelted just about 5 minutes after I think "okay, this could end right now."
Then dying and all the monsters resetting is double as punishing, because now the area I already grew weary on takes another 10-15 minutes (or in the case of maps a whole new stage), which is even more annoying because you can´t run past mobs that easily. So yeah, for me personally smaller maps would be much appreciated.

I want to mention the boss fights here, too, because overall I like every single one of them and fighting them is my highlight of the game. Sometimes the fights feel a little bit too long but that is only by first approaching them with a new character without loot (which now should be better after the loot changes occured so lets see how this goes).

Closing thoughts

So here you have it. I really rarely take my time to give so much feedback on anything really, but this game hits just the right spot for me and I am really happy how the game turned out. The transparancy of the team, the fair pricing model and the quality speaks for itself. Some people might say 30 dollars is a waste of money for this being not fully released because of the EA, many complain and being angry about random stuff, but I cannot agree to that. The quality of this game in every departement, even in its current state, is unmatched by everything I played in the ARPG-genre so far.
Maybe this helps =) gonna continue playing right now and looking forward to all the changes which may occure (big and small)!

Greetings!