The initial charm of the early game is starting to wear off as I progress deeper towards endgame.

Hey, I'm a player that is entirely new to the ARPG genre. I come from a background of MMORPG's; I've played WoW classic, I've played Elder Scrolls Online. I am also an avid Dark Souls fan. I've completed all of DS1, DS3, and Elden Ring. (I skipped DS2). PoE2 came on my radar because a friend recommended it to me. I have seen gameplay of PoE1. The content that I saw in that game made me go "wtf is going on?? I have no clue" which made me entirely uninterested in ever bothering to pick up the game. After doing a bit of personal research, I decided to buy PoE2 early access. So far, overall, I've had quite a bit of fun playing the game.

Here is what has made me like the game so far: The gameplay loop in the early stages is slow enough and methodical enough that I actually know what is going on, and as a result, can take the time to appreciate how my character(s) interact with the world, and how the world interacts with me. I know, for example, when I die exactly what killed me and why it killed me. I like how my spells and abilities interact with each other to create powerful effects. I can see that happening in real time. Again, I know what is happening on the screen at all times.

I have begun to notice, however, as I progress deeper into the game, and also watching people doing maps on Youtube (I'm still in Act III, I have a super busy job so I don't get tons of playtime) that the gameplay is beginning to look a lot like PoE1, where there is just a bunch of crazy stuff happening all at once. The ability to clear maps in the endgame, as far as I can tell, has more to do with how you build your character, rather than how you play your character. Another way of saying this, perhaps, is the ability to clear endgame maps seems to be more about what you do outside of actual gameplay/in the preparation side of the game, rather than what you do once you're actually playing the game, for a lack of a better term. I see a lot of super optimized builds with really cool gear go do a T15+ map by pressing one button, and teleporting everywhere with everything dying all at once. I personally like that playstyle less than the way that we all played when early access first got released, which was by stacking different active abilities together, pressing the dodge roll button, seeing big attacks come in that we could clearly see and avoid.

Now, there might be people out there saying "well you can just go and play the way you want, you don't have to make a one-button build" to which I would reply this: as far as I can tell, in the endgame, the current gameplay loop incentivizes you to make a one-button build. The way it does that is that there is so much stuff coming at you at once, that it is extremely hard to tell what each individual target is doing to you, and the best path forward is to nuke all of the targets before they have any ability to do anything.

So anyway, I guess to summarize this post in a TL/DR; I'd like to see endgame be adjusted to be more methodical, to accentuate the charm that initially made me like this game.