Endgame difficulty scaling

After finishing my first character that I feel like I've done most everything on the difficulty curve for endgame right now just seems totally off.

There is practically no difference between T1 and T15 waystones, so much so that whenever I see a build touting it can do T15 waystones it immediately raises a red flag for me.

Things do not seem to get significantly more HP in the higher tiers, damage does seem to ramp up and I was playing an ES character so maybe I'm biased here but that also seemed a big insignificant with general gear curve from T1 to T15 waystones you pickup in the 15-20 or so levels you probably get up to what level 85 or so?

It is not until you take a singular node on the atlas tree that difficulty seems to ramp up at all, and that node is the double corrupt one. There is an absolute massive amount of difference from an alch and go t15 waystone, to a double corrupt one. Pair this with explicit mod multipliers etc. and...

You will go from seeing 100-300% waystone drop modifiers to 500-1000% (895% was the highest I seen I think). You start seeing insane stuff like 98% reduced life/es recovery, which means if you ever get on low ES/Life you have to leave the map to recover it (found a reason to have 6 portals :^) ) you have 80-100% increased cooldown recovery which means some skills you will be able to use 3-4 times at all during a map if you again don't leave and come back. You see ele pen, paired with weakness, paired with 2-3 added damage modifiers, crit on top of that, and just as many debuffs like temp chains enfeeble cold ground etc.



Just one from today.

Bosses also don't seem to scale at all. The only remotely difficult bosses I ever encountered was +4 xesht, +0-3 were all a complete joke by the time you actually see them naturally, or have enough currency to buy stones to run them. Arbiter being as hard as he is to get to by the time you do it again same thing as any +0 boss. And virtually none of the low level boss encounters will drop anything worth the cost of entry besides the king in the mists belt. Floor 4 sekehema is the only boss that I encountered that wasn't completely invalidated by the gear you have by the time you reach him.

I don't think these bosses need their difficulty adjusted, just need to have to low level versions more accessible to players throughout their endgame journey. Right now its extremely backloaded and any difficulty invalidated by the time you get there. I feel like +0 encounters are tuned to a character that is doing t5 waystones, but you aren't going to be seeing hardly any of them by that time unless you are extremely lucky with things like invitation drops or citidels.

And its not like it going to cheapen the experience or loot. You are going to be hardpressed to make back your divine from a breachstone (cost oppurtunity) running a +0 or +1 etc. xesht, same with arbiter and his keys etc. Yet the atlas passives you gain from doing these encounters are crucial to juicing your waystones, and actually getting anything out of them. Difference between a +0 and +8 breach tree is tremendous in terms of loot you are going to get from a map, even just +4. But right now GL getting that many splinters before you invalidate those boss fights and its just a target dummy for +2 pts. The advice going around is just save up 4 div and go get your points because thats going to pay off quickly not even in the long run, just a couple days of mapping with those extra points will make up for the cost. Every league mechanic is like this.

https://www.pathofexile.com/trade2/search/poe2/Standard/3ZRXljkh5
Again this has been 6 div for nearly a week and no sign of dropping, you need 4 of these to get your ritual tree up and running. They are that price because they are that rare, and those atlas passives will generate enough money to make up for it just from the extra reroll, tribute, and omen drops that if you didnt get the belt in any of those 4 runs it would still be worth buying 4 of these if you can.

TLDR: Too much content is backloaded in the endgame, and too much power is invested in a singular atlas node to make maps even remotely challenging in terms of difference between tiers.