2nd impressions

So it's been 20 days, and I have barely been playing. Writing this text is more fun that actually login in for me.
I see that people enjoy the game, and if you enjoy it that is great. I don't want to take that away from anyone. Personally I don't like poe2 as it is currently and I don't have high hopes it will ever reach what poe1 was for me.

1. The illusion of a hard arpg
Frankly I think in a heavily itemized game like arpgs you can never achieve the sort of difficulty a dark souls is. Also there is way more information you need to communicate to a server constantly - so the game can never be online and super complex in its mechanics while still being hard and punishing.

2. Balance
In the end arpgs are always a balance between player power and monster power. You always withhold just enough so the player wants the carrot but never reaches it just yet. Poe2 balance is off in so many ways. and the following points are what I personally felt being off

3. Maps too big, monsters too boring, no rewards, endless backpaddeling. I never made it out of the campaign though... Just couldn't be bothered to do the final act 6 boss

4. You only have a tolerable time when you play cookie cut builds that outperform every other skill or ascendancy. There is just too little build variance atm.

5. The skill tree is uninspired and boring. It gives me as a player less freedom than ever and it's overly complex and does not give the player enough power.
This is a huge topic I think. So in poe1 immunity to freeze is a big thing. Because when you are frozen you can do nothing. So that is just a thing every build has to get covered. Same goes for resistances. stunlock avoidance, having a form of life and mana regen.
The game weakens the player and the player has to fix it. all fine. Problem in Poe1 and 2 especially I think is that you have too many of these bases uncovered way too early. And this makes the game "hard" or unenjoyable for me.
And the skill tree, the gear you find or that vendors sell you do very very little to help you fix these problems. freezing players is unfair if they are not given a counter for it. Constantly taking 10% resistances off isn't great when you play through 4 acts and you never find a gear improvement.
I don't want to get into every mechanic that does this - there are just way too many.
The skill tree has too many clusters that are just the same thing in different places. On my build I was struggling to get enough strength dexterity and intelligence - and I felt like I didn't get enough damage nodes. Defensive nodes were pretty bad as well- mostly they just added more life pool but not enough or meaningful mitigation.
And again - picking a class locks you into defensive styles that are on that area of the tree. Which I would have wished we could have done away with by now. Casters have energy shield, rangers evade and melee does armor. That is some uninspired stuff right there.
If I could wish for anything then it would be to completely rework the tree or even the concept of skill trees.
The tree has been incredibly disappointing for me. maybe it's better in endgame when you buy the items you want and you can reach all the nodes you want. but guess what, there is 30 hours of gameplay that are absolutely frustrating before you reach that point. And I thoroughly did not enjoy those. I never had enough points, I was constantly weighing bad options against even worse options.

6. Groupplay is too easy
When you play in a group the leveling is just mad easy. I am sorry, playing solo versus in a group is just galaxies apart in difficulty. And I fear that by saying this they will make multiplayer harder, and I wish single player was easier.

7. Itemization
why do weapons need skills on them. I feel that is a huge step backwards.
Also skills are more forced onto specific weapon typed - which is also a step backwards. I liked the poe1 approach that implicits give you a reason why certain weapons are better - but they don't make or break your build the way poe2 weapons do.
Movement speed on boots is bad. I think it's outdated to have essential modifiers on one type of item only. It feels so bad that every shoe you find that doesn't have movement speed is trash. Again - in endgame this might be different, for classes that can solve this on the tree it can be different. But why can't all classes solve that on the tree?
Itemization is - and I realize that - still under development.

8. NPC placement, quests, qol experience.
There are some quests where you have to travel through a couple load screens and you essentially did nothing except getting npcs up to speed. The loadscreen of the map is a problem too.
Workbenches and NPCs are poe1 style unsorted. and they switch places in act1.
You need to rethink what NPCs do, what you can group up into one npc, or one crafting bench. You need to implement NPC services way sooner into the game. End of Act 1 players should have access to everything. I am talking currency exchange, hideout, combination bench, dismantling bench. just everything a character can do endgame. On one hand you throw the skilltree and crit damage at the player in act 1 and all the skills you can imagine, on the other hand you think it's too much to handle when a player can enter a hideout. or have a currency exchange in every act.

9. Mapdesign
Elevators don't work out.
thin corridor maps are horrible and should be removed. A lot of game mechanics do not work in corridors. monsters won't do some skills or the game won't display them correctly. the narrative gain isn't there to justify the gameplay mess that they produce.

10. Monster design
Rare monster mods are unfun. Often times they aren't a challenge when you counter them, but they are straight up unbeatable if you don't counter them. I think you need to rethink monster mods almost from scratch if you want a different gameplay speed than you had in poe1. The poe1 mods just don't work that great with poe2 mechanics.
And you should remove all effects and adds when a monster dies. Be that a boss or a rare. It's just not fun to kill something, see the loot and then because you took a sigh of relief that the 10 minute fight is over get oneshot from beyond the grave. Also the revive minions mod should have a cost for the monster. You can kill the minions endlessly and never make any progress. very unfun.

11. Trade isn't fun. Think outside the box
what else is new. We got so used to a lot of things that we don't even realize are a problem any more. trading is just not a good experience. Diablo 3 managed to have an auction house - which I hated for a lot of reasons, but it was functional. Poe is the economy for a lot of players. So put as much effort into a good economy experience as you put into graphics or skill gems.
For too long you outsourced lootfilter adjustments, trade lookups of items, trading itself, the madness that is finding a timeless jewel. Part of the fun is that some things are outsorced by the community. But also - the stuff that neversink does could be in the game.
Just dreaming here,
but in an ingame auction house you could list the items by real market value. The game would know how many exalts a divine is, or how many alterations a regal is. You could even have a fiat currency. Right now we are trading goats for oranges. Which is fine, but "gold" would be better because it can have decimals.

12. Graphics are great, voice acting is great - very shiny, many gothic, such gaming.
The only good thing I can really say is that the game looks nice. There is way too much jank under the hood, but it does look nice.
Which isn't that important to be apparently, because like I said at the start of this post, writing this is more fun than logging into the game. You need some real under the hood fixing to get me intrigued again.

Let's imagine I have 2 hours of spare time.
I could log into the game and try and trade for an item that improves my build so I can beat the final boss.
I could try the third ascendancy trial and fail because I don't have enough damage for the boss, but do have enough to clear everything up to the boss
I could level a new character to level 4, find no gear, have no meaningful fun skill points, use skills that are bland and don't change the gameplay a lot.
I could grind a act 6 area in hopes of getting gear or currency or experience and nothing would really tip the scales on my build here. At least not 2 hours worth of tipping.
Or I could just write this text and then still have plenty of time to watch a video on youtube with fun animals in it. Which is exactly what I will do.

I hope the next poe 1 season is coming soon. or that some meaningful BIG changes are coming to poe 2. But that is my personal wish. I think, the way the game is right now it probably will not attract as many people as poe 1 did, but I could be wrong. Maybe I am just the dinosaur of poe and the new species were just hoping for this type of game. And that is great too.