Feedback from Ben_ and my comments

I really like PoE2, but I can't disagree on his points.

May I point out that Astramentis-Pillar stackers are with comparable speed to temporalis, because they do not actually "walk".

So we have TWO items, not ONE that increases the speed.
He was wrong on that...

(I will fly away now)

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grubworm#3892 wrote:

why should I care about a streamer's opinion?

+1 not just any streamer but Ben....

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grubworm#3892 wrote:

why should I care about a streamer's opinion?

Because this dude is actually having an objective take on the problems the game has. Plus, he plays and crafts the builds better than you, that's why we know him; that's why people watch him. That's why his opinion matters.
You didn't read the entire post or you just decided to not see the problems that the core game has, which can not be easily be improved or changed, and that might be the reason why they haven't been changed.

If you are okay with the current state of PoE 2, you are part of the problem.

I added "Part 2", see second comment.

just a note, on his quotes...

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Sections got depreciated because they were tedious. And sections are, like, a thousand times better than towers.

He was talking about sextants, not sections. POE 1 Sextants, they went away a league or two ago in favor of the scarab rework.

(And he said 'depreciated', I assume he meant deprecated. they were removed and replaced.)

He has a lot of good takes about the game, but towards the end when he starts complaining about not every map having a boss fight, not being able to block maps you don't enjoy, etc. This is just his opinion. It's not an objective fact that it makes the game bad, just because it's different from POE. It is a deliberate design choice that the developers have made, to deviate from the original POE formula, which I'm okay with.

In a vacuum, players like Ben_ want the game to be as complimentary to them as possible, as they can maximize their farm/hr and ability to blaze through everything at lightning pace. The reality is however, is that games are made for a broad population, ones that want to be successful anyways, and what these 'professionals' of ARPGS don't grasp is that the game isn't made to keep their dopamine drip always dripping at a steady rate.

While I do disagree with many of the design choices of them, for instance never feeling like I'm able to just cast my abilities without having to back track and set up, I do accept that this game hopefully won't just be POE with updated graphics, even though it is looking to turn out that way (did we really need to just port old league mechanics over?).

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kamiknx#1162 wrote:

I like that if you want +skills you must know you'll need mana investment. I think that's a nice trade off, but maybe skills that require more mana than your character have or can realistic have should maybe be looked at.

Numbers are way off. Also, there's no other way to scale spells (except for Archmage) since there's no base spell damage on gear.
For example, curses go from 42 mana -30 resist 6 seconds at level 1 to 251 mana -36 resist 7.4 seconds at level 20. If you add couple of support gems, mana cost easily goes close to 1k per curse. Which is insane considering you need to renew it every 8 seconds.
What's even worse, level 30 curse is -39 resist which is less than 10% increase over lvl 20 gem. And duration only goes up to 8 seconds. But base mana cost goes to 641 which is 2.5 times more. And if you add support gems, you'd be spending well over 2k mana per curse. In what world you want less than 10% increase for 2.5 times the cost?

I don't play all classes/skills, so I don't know, but a lot of people are saying mana cost is really broken, it's probably true then.

I remember when I was playing Stormweaver and whenever I was casting a curse 85% of my mana would be gone, I thought: "oh nice, this is intended, they're capping the power by limiting resources".

But now it makes me wonder if it's intended or just not balanced.

I still like the idea that if you want to + skills you need to invest in mana, I somewhat like this.

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kamiknx#1162 wrote:

But now it makes me wonder if it's intended or just not balanced.

I still like the idea that if you want to + skills you need to invest in mana, I somewhat like this.

It's definitely not balanced. Biggest non-unique mana flask recovers 620 mana over 3 seconds with a perfect roll. That's less than one level 20 curse with 3 support gems.
I've seen screenshots of warrior totems costing 980 mana at skill level 38 which is absurd.

Also, I think that CI builds should have an option of having two mana flasks and Blood Magic builds should have two life flasks instead of being forced into having one useless flask (well, CI can use Eternal Youth for ES recovery from life flasks but that comes with a heavy downside of not being able to recharge ES).