Primus 1st Casual Feedback

Playtime: 50'ish hours
Player type: Casual

Introduction
I've finally hit the 50 hour mark for POE2.
I thought I'd share my thoughts thus far.
It should be said that I'll not take into account, the changes that are being worked on in my feedback.
I don't really have much to say, but I'll leave some feedback, and then I'll share my progress story.

TL;DR
Beautiful game, okay game pace.
Some skills are clunky and/or not functioning.
Ascension is worse than bad using current mechanics.
Crafting, when?

WASD Movement
Originally I was skeptical about this. But it actually turned out to work pretty great for certain classes and skills (mostly ranged skills).
So, good work!

Graphics
Very big thumbs up here to the art department! It's gorgeous! Environments, ambience, skill effects, everything. Spot on!

Sound
You've really upped your game on this one. Soundtrack is amazing, skill effects and voice lines are crisp as heck. Keep it up!

Currency drops
Abysmal for the first week+ or so. Running on magic items from act 1 until hitting level 60+ is.. Not fun.

Item drops/vendors
Same story as the currency, although this has persisted. I've only ever picked up a single piece of gear that was an upgrade. Vendors weren't much help either.

Crafting
There is no crafting in POE2 - would be my feedback here I guess?
Would be nice to see crafting at some point during EA.

Skills
Skills... Feel a little lacking. I know this is EA, so I'm keeping my hopes up. But I found the lack of physical skills that actually dealt damage on the warrior quite lacking. Also the Contagion skill on the Witch is having a life on its own; Clearly target a specific mob by hovering it, cast Contagion, it hits a mob 2 meters away from the targeted mob. Makes the skill almost impossible to use for its purpose - especially since it's now single target instead of AoE. Please fix this.

Ascension
So, this is the thing that keeps me from actually going through another character. I really want to play a new character, but after playing for 10-15 minutes, I'm reminded of what is to come. Ascension.

This single reminder, makes me quit out of the game and do something else for the rest of the day - every - single - time.

I avoided the single worst mechanic - Sanctum - in POE1 for good reason. I've done it once in POE2 now, never again.

I'm sorry, but a mechanic in which your character building means nothing, as in, absolutely nothing? Nah. If I want my character to be a tank, I don't want to play a mechanic where I'm reduced to a lowly glass cannon (without the cannon part).

Ultimatum? Not much better. In my opinion, the third worst mechanic in POE1. Completely unpredictably. You'll end up getting half way through, and then you have 3 options that will all just brick your entire run. It was fun in POE1 if you had a character that was 100% specialized for it, but not if you were just doing it on a random character. The same applies here.

If you're adding the second worst mechanic as the third ascension option later on, it's just dead to me. DO NOT ADD DELVE AS ASCENSION!!

Or if so, give players 8 ascendancy point upon reaching level 80 or something, as compensation :D

My journey begins

My first character
After all the nerfs to minions in POE1, I really wanted to experience minions again, this time in POE2.

It very quickly became evident however, that the minions needed a complete rework - at least in early game.

Speccing full damage, my skeleton warriors were dying in 2-3 hits from trash mobs, while taking 10-12 hits to kill said trash mobs. This resulted in the first act taking about 4 hours of playtime in total. A little too much for my liking.

Bonus: The act 1 boss fight took me 42 minutes, having to wait 4 seconds in between minion respawns (at least that's a thing), them dealing 1-2 hits of damage, only to die in a single hit again.

Act 2, even the first quest seemed impossible, so I decided to reroll.

Enter the tank
After having played a character where I continuously had to run around and wait for minions to respawn, I decided to build a Warrior that was quite tanky.

Lots of regen... Wait.. Regen is mostly from items you say? Shouldn't be a problem right?

Oh my sweet summer child.. And this will become a recurring theme throughout.

It was so insanely hard to get gear upgrades. If it didn't have armor and life regen, it was a direct downgrade, no two ways about it. May I have been too picky? Yes, of course. But considering you can't craft items (I mean, not really?) in POE2, this was tough.

I ended up clearing Act 1 rather easily (had the mechanics down etc.) and was struggling through Act 2. The lack of gear left me with level 4-6 gear throughout most of Act 2, never finding any upgrades despite literally identifying almost every piece of gear that dropped - and also checking vendors every level up.

After attempting the first trial 9 times, I gave up on that aspect.

After finally beating the titan with it's wonky hitbox after 15 or 16 attempts (lost count, didn't care anymore) it was time to try something else.

Enter the beast
Yes, I rolled another Warrior. Why? Because a near complete respec was too expensive even at level 30'ish.

I decided to go for the life regen route as that had worked the first time through Act 1, but this time I wanted to focus on totems.

Luckily, I could - quite hilariously - scalp my level 30 warrior to gear up my new warrior (Yes, still level 4-6 blue gear in most slots).

This made Act 1 quite easy.

Now in Act 2, with totems to both take some hits and deal damage while frantically running for my life - doing so much better than minions - I was able to actually make progress at a decent pace.

Still no item upgrades though. As with POE1, 99.99% of the dropped items were useless. Most of them white items, that required "crafting".

Picking up some of these white bases, throwing a transmute and an augmentation at it, hoping for at least a small upgrade would prove fruitless.

Even if I had actually found a level 10 body armor at some point that was a small upgrade (like +1 life regen I believe it was) - It wasn't much, as it was impossible to upgrade further.

You see, even though I'd full cleared every zone through Act 1 on now 3 characters, and having turned any and all rare gear (all of them useless obviously) into shards, I only had 1 regal orb to my name.

Considering how rare, rare items were, and just how miniscule of an amount of currency that dropped, I sure as heck wasn't going to just throw that on a garbage piece of gear and hope for the best.

Vendors weren't much help either.

Alas, onwards. Thought briefly about tackling the single worst mechanic from POE1 again (Sanctum) to ascend, but I quickly decided against it.

That was until I got hard stuck on the final boss of Act 2.

Not enough potions to save my life - literally.
I guess running with gear that on average required my character to be level 7 at this point was just not cutting it.

What to do?

Go back through zones and get some experience? No can do, as it seemed the experience penalty for zones has been dropped significantly. If I was more than 2 levels above a zone, the experience dropped to almost nothing.

Ascension it is...

It wasn't actually that hard on a "ranged" character, except for the last boss filling the arena with projectiles. - I got it done with about 10 honor to spare though.

With the spirits added to my totems, I was able to clear the final boss in Act 2 albeit no where near as comfortably as I'd hoped.

I'll spare you the details for the next few acts, and sum it up.

In total, throughout acts 3-"6", I managed to find 2 regal orbs, 4 exalts and a chance orb.

My power increased when I got a jeweler orb and used it on my totems, but not insanely.

I had not found a single piece of equipment from vendors or drops until I hit level 63, where a vendor was finally selling me a new piece of armor.

At level 70, in maps, I finally got my very first item drop! It was a helmet, and it was glorious. I'm fairly sure it would be worth an augmentation orb if sold.

Now, to be fair. At some point, a patch dropped that actually made the mobs drop currency - It was wild. And yet, I was still using level 4-8 gear in most slots at this point except for my weapons, which I had to trade for because the power was just too lacking to get anywhere.