Feedback after 17 days played

Edit: Almost 20 days now, after the patch, and 1.7 million monsters killed. Still no invitation to the king.

17 days, 3 hours, 32 minutes and 58 seconds seconds played, most of it tier 15 and some tier 16 waystones on my ice invoker monk.

I got invitation to the king pretty early in ritual. Failed it since I didn’t know the mechanics. Haven’t appeared since. This can’t be right, random or not. The other loot in ritual at lvl 0 is terrible.

Loot is exhausting. Using neversink semistrict loot filter requires a lot of inventory management with identification and orbs and potentially multiple trips to hideout to hope to craft something to use or even trade. If the first or second mod is crap just drop the item. I love POE 2 gameplay but miss the more deterministic crafting of POE 1 and even greater affixes in D4 (bad) is less exhausting. Don’t even get me started on tiered items.

Having interact set to a L2 combination on controller always moving stash tabs when opening stash is irritating and should be fixed.

Having XP loss and one portal is too punishing, almost sadistic, and will turn quite a few people off the game.

My mana leech also go a lot worse since last patch, I hate using mana flask every 5 seonds. Watching kripps video https://youtu.be/95hnjc2YHRw?si=0F9pkZCrritJko_Y it makes sense, I do less physical damage. Terrible.

Some maps are horrible like all the Vaal ones, including city, and Mire. I avoid them regardless of activities/quantity/rarity and if I absolutely must do one to progress i put in a low level white waystone. The Vaal ones with monsters that take seconds to activate before you can do damage is especially bad.

The mod tier levels of an item is way to dim when displayed, I actually have to put my face closer to the monitor in order to see them.

Having the same button on controller used to both display item level/level of mods and to search when stash is open is beyond infuriating.

Last update. Juicing maps by doing towers and hoping mechanics gets placed on any bearable map layout has burned me out. I really can’t see myself playing the game again if this system persists. Also very disappointed with the obvious lying about POE 3.26 for quite some time. Trust is lost and I will think twice about spending another dime on this franchise again.