POE2 Early access feedback (6 jan)

Some context on me:
Never played POE1 but have played Diablo 3 & 4. (Mostly just the story for the second one)

I learned about the game when some of my friends tried to log into the game on opening day.
Had a blast with them as they failed to log in and eventually played something else with them.
When they could get in the next day I bought the game as well.
For 3 weeks I touched none of my other games and only played POE2.
I'm now on 142 hours, 95%+ of those on my Pathfinder (Ranger).


First experiences:
Why are character names unique? It's such a chore to name a character and most of my characters have some bizarre names so I could finally stop trying.
If all the current names keep being taken there will be no names possible except random gibberish for full release.

The story is interesting, the tutorial actually does a very good job at explaining things.
I want to give special props to the combination of introducing the skill orb, you using the skill and immediately getting a prompt to use the mana potion.
This stills feel like a smooth way to introduce this.

The following maps are huge and have some things to discover in them but not enough for their size. (This is a common issue over the entire game)
Loot is very interesting at the start and there is a clear sense of progression.
The first harder bosses appear at the end of act 1, which I thought was a good place.


Ascendancy:
Oh boy the first ascendancy unlock was a wild ride.
I was happy with the reward, but I did it late.
All in all OK, but for such a core part of the game why do it this way.
If it wasn't for the unlimited barya it could have been a game ender.

Then we get somewhere even worse.
The Trials of Chaos are way overtuned for early game, especially a specific tornado bird.
I was in cruel difficulty before I cleared the Trials of Chaos on normal difficulty and haven't done so since.

I was busy with maps before I completed the 3rd and 4th ascendency through the sekhemas trials.
The pacing of this feels terrible in comparison to the scope of the game as it is now.


Build:
Out of the four skills rangers start with I decided to roll with poison.
I took the earlier ascendancies into poison stacks and spread.
(Not the concoction)
The combo's that arose from this were very fun to play with, poison clouds, vine arrow underneath, pustules.
Tweaking the build with support gems, understanding mechanics betters, switching some around and doing more damage was a very good experience.
The passive tree, skill tree and support gems combined pretty neatly for nice choices.

However, this was fine for the offensive capabilities of my ranger.
The defenses completely came from gear.
And the poison scaling was completely dependent on the physical damage of my bow.
Useful gear became extremely scarce around level 45~.


Rest of the campaign:
The cruel version of the acts were such a breeze in comparison to the normal mode.
Ascendancies excluded of course...
The story & tie in of the current endgame is well done in my opinion and also leaves the option to completely ditch this iteration later.
This is the place where death effects from monsters became increasingly annoying.
I would love for those to be gone.


Trade:
Utterly unacceptable.
No ingame client, no automatic resolve.
Worst trade system I have seen in a game since a long long time.
Sold a few items with a tab that was on sale.
Have since been using that tab as a normal one and just disenchant anything that I or my friends don't use.


Maps, bloody maps:
The campaign is finished and you go to endgame; whohoo.
You give the trials of chaos another shot before you start and spend the next 10 minutes after that figuring out how to get back to the endgame portal.
(Why is this so extremely unclear and convoluted?)

You start your first map and realize that those maps are HUGE.
You are almost done with clearing it, die to some effect.
Cant enter again :S well that's new.
You make some progression, get up to tier 5's.
Get bad RNG on waystone drops.
And have to try and farm back up again.
Because buying a tier 5 from Doryani when he has none in offer is 5.000 * 3 ^4 = 405.000 gold
Soon you will be able to afford that fine, but at that point that hurts the wallet.

At this point you will be high enough in levels that you lose XP and progress of waystones on death.
All this gets scary so you look into ways to survive better.

And then there is only 1 solution -> Should have invested in energy shield.
Gonna make an own header for this one.

Struggling through the maps I eventually clear tier 15s, but every ground effect will kill me if I stand in it for more than half a second.
At this point of the game there is so much loot dropping that monster death effects can be completely obscured by the stack of loot they just spawned.
Burning ground from a map effect is literally the most deadly thing to me, the effect kills me and explodes the poison clouds lowering my damage output.


For the events in the maps:
Bosses in the maps are nice and I would love to see those more often. (And multiple different bosses/locations per area type)
Breaches are great, they give fun unique loot and they are exciting, some real time pressure and tension.
Irradiated and corruption are an I guess moment, what do they actually add?
Delirium is a fun idea, terribly executed, hard to understand and typically unrewarding. The way to make the most of a delirium is to keep rushing for it.
Do all the delirium content without break, clear the map that way and then loot the map effectively traversing that thing twice.
Altars are meh, the gear is never relevant as far as I have seen, the visual clarity terrible and them being wedged in corners and obstacles unfun.
Expeditions are fun, give you some control on what is about to happen, miss a bit of oomph on the monster department and are typically unrewarding.


Crafting, scratch that, the Casino:
Calling influencing the items with the orbs in this game crafting is an insult to the term.
It's a casino and I would not be surprised if it promotes actual gambling.
There NEEDS to be more control over what happens for the player.


Defenses, or why they need some attention:
At this point in the game it's pretty well known that there are only a few ways to make your character more tanky.
Most of them use Energy shield, some of them Mind of matter.
But why does Energy shield baseline work against all damage types except chaos?
And why do Armour and Evasion only work against physical hits and projectiles?
This disparity is a core design flaw which has to be remedied or Energy shield will remain mandatory on most builds.

Evasion is a very tricky defense. If I have 92% evasion and an enemy hits me I can still get hit.
I have no energy shield, not enough HP (because I invested in evasion) and if the attack hits me I die.
Feels terrible.

There are people with more experience on the armour part of the story but it feels like there is an error in the calculation.


Stats:
Strength gives HP.
Intelligence gives mana and mana regen.
Dexterity gives Accuracy rating.

Everyone wants HP.
Most want a lot of mana and regen.
Nobody wants a lot of accuracy rating, and please don't enforce it.

Accuracy is a terrible stat for players that will only result in feel bad moments when you lack in it.
It might feel a lot better if Dexterity gave crit chance increase or crit damage increase and accuracy was retired.


Recent changes to my build:
So I decided to look up what other people did with their poison pathfinders.
They used the poisonous concoction, widowhail and a quiver with levels of projectile skills.
Got the bow I needed in 5 minutes flat, had a suitable quiver and flasks.
My entire combo based playstyle was completely outclassed by me spamming my new button.
I can now clear maps at triple the speed, a tenth of the effort by spamming 1 skill I haven't been able to exhaust.
The odds of me dying increase if I try to combo in more of the old playstyle.
This feels a bit like the sparks spam one of my friends is doing.
Toward the end all the varied gameplay is gone and you just spam one button to win.
My damage upgrade is now dependent on 1 thing: a quiver with high level projectile skills.
Nothing else really matters as the skill level determines way to much.


Crashes:
I'm one of the players who experiences pc crashes on map load.
The best way I found to fix it is to select the PathOfExile2 process in the list of processes and Set affinity, deselect the first 2 cores and OK.
It lowers the amount of crashes and makes only POE2 crash instead of my whole pc.
I heard some folks say this is a windows issue.
Could you make a ticket with Microsoft asking if you guys need to fix this or they will?
I have not had this issue with any other game.


Good notes:
The music and art of the game are great.
The setting and design of the maps are very neat.
Monsters are all nice and varied, telegraph what they are doing well.
Voice acting varies between good and hilarious.
Gameplay loop is very good.
Most things before endgame are well paced and explained.