Early Access Feedback (~200h)

Firstly I want to say that the game feels good in a lot of ways, I won't cover the obviously great stuff like (most) boss design, graphics, wasd, ...

Leveling/Acts:
For leveling, I mostly miss the crafting bench. While runes somehow work well for resistances, crafting felt much more impactful in making for example a phys weapon with 2 good prefixes good. Some more deterministic crafting would really help leveling, else if you are unlucky with your exalts you can get stuck pretty easily.

Endgame:
Endgame feels okay, but not as good as PoE 1 endgame.
- First of all the progression feels much worse compared to PoE 1. Completing every map type feels just more like a quest compared to completing 5 t15 maps. Also, the boss encounters like eater/exarch are kinda missing. It might be good to make some more of a questline with fixed points you see on the map to progress towards (spreading corruption, time anomalies, ...).
- Towers feel too strong, so maps with just 1 or 2 in range feel useless compared to maps with 5+ in range (especially with the +3% mod effect per tower and so on).
- Pathing to good juiced points and doing all the towers in range feels kinda mandatory but bad imo. I don't want to do like 15 maps just to do 4 really juiced ones.
- Some unique maps are underwhelming.
- Expedition Logbook rewards feel bad (without a boss), I hope there will be some expedition only crafting options or something like that and maybe more of the needed currency in logbooks
- While I do somehow like the idea of having a mechanic tied to an atlas skill tree, the “normal” atlas skill tree feels bad. It feels like I don't have any choices and there is just a best way to skill it. I hope it will grow a bit and give more choices.
- It's kinda unclear to me if % increased rare monsters modifier on waystones increases the rare monsters in breach/expedition or just the monster packs of the map itself (since there is also the increased rare expedition monsters mod on tablets, unclear if they just stack additively or how it works). Would be nice to change it to increased rare monsters in area and tell the player when hovering over in area if it's for breaches/expedition as well.

I hope there will be a big change to the endgame quest system, it's early access anyway, and I'm sure a big balance patch with a reset would do good like 3 months in.

Improvement idea:
- The concept of the map seems really cool to me, but I think making maps “skippable” would be great. Maybe adding some kind of “Kingsmarch” would be a great addition. It would make sense to me if you can pay “adventurers”/workers to clear maps for you from corruption. It would also be possible to add some kind of villages you can find and trade with (similar to the shipping) and corruption spilling onto the trade route (cleared maps). Or just adding currency that links some maps in a certain radius to skip some pathing. (still hoping for kingsmarch-like mechanic tho, best league so far)

Character Progression:
- +Gem-level feels bad imo. It's like a perfect staff only missing 2 gem level is worse than a staff with okay mods and max spell level, I think there is too much damage coming from spell level. Also, the mana curve feels a bit too aggressive, especially mid-game when you find a nice item with a few spell levels, it just takes all your mana.
- Some item modifiers feel like they are missing. Especially on ring prefixes, for some characters the only really needed one is life and or mana. There is nothing like inc. AoE, maybe it's just since there are less systems compared to PoE 1. Items just feel like this is theses are the best mods and every build requires pretty much these.
- A lot of uniques seem useless, especially martial weapons.
- The skilltree feels worse compared to PoE1 imo. It's more like I start somewhere, go to every node that has +damage that I require, take all defenses on the way, finished. I also don't understand why life can't be on the tree, but a 60% ES node is just fine. With life on the tree there were at least options of making the character tankier or taking more damage. Perhaps bringing back life on the tree, also balancing the increased ES nodes and splitting them more evenly over the tree would help. So it is a small investment to get some life/ES, but a big investment to scale it to stupid amounts.
- Minion build skilltree is especially bad, it's just take all minion damage nodes + max res ⇾ defenses. For every minion build. There is nothing for only caster/ranged/melee minions, nothing that only invests in physical/chaos/elemental damage.

I hope there will be some big changes to some systems and balance changes, since it's early access and the best time to try stuff out. I'm sure you'll make a great game out of this!

I really like your points on the character's passive tree. I too find the tree's pathing too redundant. There aren't enough paths to get to "said cluster" and as a result, all of my trees end up looking very similar.