Is it just me or are stat requirements a bit too high maybe???

The only way they arent an issue if you take all of the stats hidden in notable passives in your characters specific area of the tree.

For example no less than 4 major intelligence sources are behind energy shield nodes

3+ 10 int ones
and a + 6% int.

This is the real reason why people are complaining about attributes. it is very clear that GGG has tied attribute investment directly to specific defensive and offensive nodes on the tree

if you are int. you better be going for mana or energy shield nodes
if you are dex you better be going evasion nodes
if you are strength you better be going armor nodes.

And not just ANY of those nodes.. the ones that end in a notable that rewards those stats

any deviation can screw your build up because that is like 40 - 50 of your primary stat hidden in those nodes.

It is weirdly restrictive as it essentially railroads you into pathing towards those clusters or wasting gear affixes on stats

From what I can see. They have established a system where you can go down any path with most classes but you can only roll to one side or the other when it comes to mixing. If you go DEX you can go either DEX + STR or DEX + INT for instance.

Because of the +5 instead of +10 and also because large passives which give stats are always the stat of that location it becomes difficult to mix something in direct opposition of the path you chose with reasonable efficiency. Least before late maps.

Personally I like this over making Ascendancy classes that are strictly attack or cast based. Like you can make a Bow Chronomancer no problem but you have to path that direction.

I'll take the Attribute req over pigeon hole Ascendancy options any day.

Far too high. I have + intelligence here and there, even took passive with +25 and yet fail to meet requirements for level 15 gem.

I found it particularly difficult as an INT based caster (sorceress). In the campaign I tried to use ES as my main defense but found it to be an awful experience even with passive skill investment because enemies hit too hard and my gear was not giving me good enough ES values for it to be effective.

So I decided that I wanted to try adding in some block. Sadly, the INT-only focus, which used to have block chance in POE1, now has no block at all in POE2. So if I want block I need a hybrid STR-INT or DEX-INT shield. I found it nearly impossible to get enough of the secondary attribute needed to equip a shield while still having enough INT to be able to keep my main skills at their highest level available to me. The same was true for other equipment slots as well.

So as an INT caster, I felt pigeon-holed into playing only ES, which was insufficient defensively for me while in the campaign. Only when I attained higher levels was I able to finally get some STR on gear enough that I could finally equip a STR-INT shield and get some block. But it really wasn't an option during the campaign based on my experience and that felt awful.

I am still early in the game, but i am starting to run into this issue as well. I am trying to build physical caster witch, so all my primary skills need super high int. I wanted to go health and armor for my defense, because Blood Mage seems to benefit from it the most.

But it seems it wont be possible. I looked up the int requirements for lvl 20 skills (205 intel) and it is not possible to get while having any reasonable amount of strenght without big investment into +attributes on gear. I hope I will be able to get it somewhere in late game, but for leveling it is very annoying.

Currently i am not finding huge amount of loot and any gear with +attributes is very rare. So i can either spend most of my passives only for the attributes, which is bad and boring, or i cant play the character i wanted, which is also sad.

I would love to see lower attribute requirements for the skill gems at least in the earlier stages or higer variety in skills for hybrid attributes, which might come later, as we are currently in EA.

yep this is me. Currently having swap in and out pieces of gear or taking passive points out and changing them. It's a terrible system. It makes me not be able to wear new gear because my current gear has a stat that the new gear doesn't.

Its only really feelable when you go off-route. I was doing a melee ranger (which failed relatively quickly like 99% of the character builds thanks to unbalanced and outright useless skills) and noticed that.

The same when u run a witch and need strength or dex gems. You literally notice how your main attribute is 6x the others due to scaling into it, and then you realize - gear with +dex or +str doesnt drop.

There's also a lot of meta gears, aka: you find or craft it, and never replace it. I'll never replace my +4 minion scepter, since i havent even found any +gem scepters in like, forever. And over multiple chars, too, not a single "+gem" scepter besides the one i crafted-found.

Amulets drop nearly nothing, and the vendor having 1 ring and 1 amulet, early on not even rings OR amulets too, 99% the vendors are useless, and amulets plus rings drop 1 out of 2,000 items.

The majority of the time, as soon as your requirements are off-character, like STR gems for your minions, or duration gem for a skill, you will respec point over point to try and balance the absurd requirements against each other.

"missing 1str" and as soon as you refund an int node, "missing 8 int", you can't win with this balancing lmao.

And the Warrior node for dualwielding 2h weapons even triples the requirements, sheeeeesh.

As I said, for the main attribute its ok but anything remotely out of the ordinary is punished by a steep need to completely change your equipment.

Which wouldn't be so bad, if you could actually CRAFT things, but you can't, cant even craft since its even more luck dependant than ever, its not crafting, its the lottery.

Crafting means you put something definite on, and CRAFT it.

With GGG's logic of crafting, a carpenter in POE2 would randomly create a window, randomly create a door. Imagine the customer comes to ask you for a window, and you give them a door, since you can't craft a window due to RNG deciding what you get.

POE crafting is lottery, not crafting. And thats where people run out of currency, because they brick item after item after item due to RNG instead of a working crafting system.

I had zero trouble with attributes on either ranger or monk. (currently 84 Monk main)

somewhere around Act 3/4, I found I needed to focus more on the gear that matched my weapon requirements. (aka dex-evasion gear on the ranger, and dex/int evasion/es gear on the monk), and I had to very occasionally respec an attribute node becasue I dropped a piece of gear that had attributes needed for a gem, but otherwise, no issues.