My long rambling thoughts/feedback from playing in 1.1.

My long rambling feedback from playing in 1.1 patch environment.

General issues:
- Magic Find shouldn't impact currency and base currency drop rates should be improved. Especially that of Greater Jeweler Orbs and the skill quality items.
- The type of gear that drops should be weighted based on your str, dex, and int. So if you have 200 str, 100 dex, 10 int, then you should see drops that are strength based, then strength/dex, then dex then str/int, then dex/int, and the least of all: int based stuff.
- Trial of Sekhama needs some serious tuning. I don't think the word "minor" means what its designer thinks it does.
- Boots without movement speed are instant vendor fodder. Either the game needs to be re-balanced to make movement speed optional (at least halving all the values that give it, plus rebalancing things to take into account the slower, movement speeds) or all boots should have it innate.
- Movement speed penalties for armour should go, unless the heavier the armour is, the more effective all around it is. Because otherwise, it's a downside with no upside. The one for shields can probably stay, as they do provide a big benefit.
- 1h maces feel bad compared to 2h ones. Low damage, the horrible added use times, etc. This is why almost every warrior goes for Giant's Blood, because 1h ones are too far behind the 2h ones.
- The benefits of improving the quality of skills needs a serious balancing pass. Something like Archmage gets a 33-50% power boost, while Rapid Fire gets less than 10%, and others are worse still. Then there's Shard Scavenger, with its 5% reduction in spirit cost at 20% quality? 5% of 30 spirit... Just wow. Another type of issue is the likes of Windcutter, which needs 20 quality to go from 3 to 4 charges. This could probably have been done by making it scale the numbers instead of the quantity of charges, so that you can see benefits with a smaller investment, rather than needing the full 20%, especially given the horrid drop rate of the upgrade item.

Things that frustrate players and will make them quit that need to be changed:
- Trials for ascendancy points, beyond the first pair and picking the class: Why is this still a thing? The entire thing takes too much time, all or nothing, with a ton of RNG. It isn't fun and it doesn't feel rewarding when completed. It just makes you hate the thought that you'll have to go through it again on the next character. I know you guys are hanging onto this idea that it is some great reward for a hard task, but the reality is that ascendancy is the class to most people, and people want access to their class. For the good of the game, drop the bad design into the dumpster, and get us another way to get points 3-8.
- Too much of a death penalty on maps. You lose xp, the node perks, the tower benefits to the node, your waystone, and any loot on the ground.

Josh Strafe Hayes has a good little video where he was talking about PoE2 vs Souls, in terms of death penalties, and went into how PoE2 makes you want to quit, while Souls makes you feel perfectly fine with trying again. I'd recommend looking it up and taking the insight it offers to heart.

- drop rates for certain items, such as Gemcutter's Prisms and Greater Jeweller's Orbs are too low.

Mobs:
- Sun Priests: their beam attack is too long, too good at tracking players. Not the deadliest of mobs, but annoying.
- Azak Stalkers: when you get a bunch of these doing their slam attack, it is death for evasion based characters as well as armour+evasion ones. And since they are speedy as well, and so many maps are a ton of narrow rooms, blind corners, etc... Other slamming mobs come in smaller quantities, but not these guys.

Uniques:
Most are still bad, despite the stat changes. The reasons why are two fold:
- Some just have bad stats compared to the normal alternatives.
- A weapon is quickly outdated if its damage values don't hold up. And that doesn't take long at all for the martial weapons that aren't a certain quarterstaff. Same deal for armour pieces. With every level, the opportunity cost of using these goes up, because normal gear will offer more defense stats, while this "build around" gear just falls behind.
- Several off the maces are actually worse now, because someone put -attack speed on them. Like WTF?

For a lot of uniques, the core item values need to update with us as we level. Martial weapons need their damage values to go up. Armour pieces need their armour, evasions, and energy shields values to go up.

Campaign:
- Many act 3 maps feel too big. They way overstay their welcome.
- Jiquani's Machinarium lacks an exit door to the previous zone, forcing the use of the waypoint to teleport.

Endgame:
Patch improved things, but still lots of work to be done. Overall, it still just feels bad. Once you reach a certain level, xp slows to a crawl, but all the penalties exist, which completely discourage the player from doing anything interesting, and instead, being risk averse or utterly meta. It is, simply, to sum it up in a single word, bad.

- Enough with so many waystones dropping that are way below the level of the map we're running.

- Sustain is still an issue, probably in large part to the above, but also due to when/where tablets drop, as having those tablet infusion effects seem to have a way bigger impact on waystone drop rates than they probably should. We should not be reliant on bosses either.

- Note that if both these issues are addressed (more proper tier map drops, fewer low tier ones) the frequency of waystone drops could and probably should be reduced a bit. Currently, I get 5+ low tier essentially worthless waystones per map...

- PoE1 mechanics that throw swarms of mobs at us in tiny little spaces are bad design. It isn't fun to be running any of the various maps that have narrow corridors or mass obstructions and then being locked into a tiny area while doing a ritual, with a ton of creatures. This all makes most builds non-viable, even though they have little problem with all the rest of the content. Even worse are when you are doing the likes of Augury and the ritual has things like the tornado. Just bad design choice after bad design choice.

- patches on the floor feel horrible. Ignite ones especially. These type of things are okay in the more open open maps, but have no place on maps with narrow corridors.

- Hideouts need fewer mobs in them. Right now, you can get mass swarmed when you go in. The appeal to them should be unlocking the hideout, not other stuff. Actually, it would probably be a good idea to make them not take a waystone at all.

- The Forge map... all narrow paths make this map rather problematic for a variety of random boss attributes and/or league mechanics. It needs a few bigger areas amidst all the narrow pathways.

- Death penalties: excessive. Recommend changing them as follows:
-- Leave the tower bonuses alone.
-- If the player hasn't engaged with the league mechanic, leave it alone. So if you have started 0 of 4 shrines, shrines don't go poof. But if you have triggered even 1 shrine, then they go away on death.
-- Bosses don't go away unless you beat them.
-- Leave player's xp alone.

- The (tier #) item drops you see late game... no explanation what it does, and they still create the usually crappy loot with worthless T1 mod lines. Seems pointless, currently.

- When highlighting a node on the map, it should show us a little screen shot of the terrain. So many different map types, it makes it hard to remember which name goes with which map type. And since so many maps are horrible for various drawbacks/encounter types, we need to know what they actually are.

- Strongboxes are very meh, especially given that you have to pump them up the same way you pump up a map, but only for just them, and then get nothing worthwhile out of it typically. Also, they should probably exist outside of maps, in the campaign as well.


Witchhunter/Crossbow:
- No Advanced/Expert Alloy Crossbows. Add 'em please!

- Crossbow area on the outside of the passive tree could use a little revamping. Right now, pretty unfriendly to Fresh Clip crossbow support jewel, with Reusable Ammunition getting in the way of getting to the reload speed and Full Salvo. Would be nice if Reusable Ammunition could bugger off somewhere out of the way ;)

- Defensively speaking, armour/evasion needs help still. Evasion works great against the things it works against, but certain things, like AoEs, it doesn't work against. And while armour is sort of okay most of the time, it needs effective health backing it up. And that is sorely missing. So, short of it, these type of attacks, whether from a hard hitting unique or a pack of minions like Azak Stalkers can take you from full health to dead before you have a chance to do anything. As is, I don't do boss mobs with my Witchhunter because getting one shot isn't fun.

- With the lack of mana related nodes in this area, mana costs are too high.

- Spirit skills seem lacking. Herald of Ice wants a ton of dex. Herald of Lightning wants shock, so locks out a lot of builds. The banners are short duration, while limiting you to an area. Not a huge fan, though I am using War Banner to burn down elites and uniques. Then I use Wind Dancer, which is dex based, so using a lower level one, because stat requirements, and Time of Need, also a lower level one, because strength based. Need some good str+dex ones really tailored to the needs of a merc, that also aren't the banner mechanic.

- Banners have a short enough duration. Let them stay up even if we leave the area for a sec. Also, longer base duration.

Monk: Acolyte of Chayula
This ascendancy needs a wee bit of work.
- Into the Breach and the Flames of Chayula are... meh. 5s base duration is bad. 10s it is still pretty bad. Plus needing to chase down the stuff... means the purples are near worthless. The reds, with health regen, are mostly worthless, because you'll typically have full health due to ES, and if ES drops, you go straight to the flask, because health pools are so low and mob damage isn't. That leaves the blues, for mana. Which is okay, though not great.

- The top line, with the mana leech stuff, is just bad. Your typical monk has too small of a mana pool to make relying on the blue flames for energy shield regen a good idea. Can't rely on mana drain from phys attacks either, because mana drain on weapons is very lackluster and most attacks convert so much to elemental stuff. Really, this line should be an offshoot from Into the Breach, given how it is likely intended to function. And it needs to offer better value than it currently does.

- Embrace the Darkness is basically some more hp, at the cost of spirit. Short of cheesing no-hit trial, why I would this over overstacking energy shield? Sure, 36% more damage, if you don't get hit and invest 6 points here, but is that worth giving up the Heralds for? The answer to that is no, by the way.

For the flames, the reds need to do more than leech health. Perhaps they should have overflow health, like is found on unique Couture of Crimson (which sadly is not dex/int) or else they should be what "heals" the energy shield, rather than Consuming Questions. The blues are okay. The purples need a longer base duration and/or picking one up needs to reset the duration for the entire stack.

Bugs:
- Selling a stack of items gets you the same amount as money as selling one.
- No Advanced/Expert Alloy Crossbows. Yeah, listing that here as well. I want my Alloy Crossbows.
- Viper boss fight is buggy. Easy for you or her to get stuck in her troops.
- Crossbow bolts at the edge of their range, off screen, are not deleted, leaving them hovering in the air when you walk to that area. This is the case with Rapid Fire, at the very least.
- Clear Space on the passive tree doesn't seem to give the 20% chance to knockback. Or, at the very least, if it does function, it doesn't show on the % chance on the skills' stat sheets.
- Bludgeon says "supports any skill that hits enemies". This is incorrect. It only support melee skills that hit enemies.
- Can't put various attack supports into minions that attack.
- Into the Breach can have various of the "spirit skill" supports put into it. Doing this does not reserve spirit.


QoL issues:
- Allow reforging of unidentified items. A blue is a blue, save me the hassle of having to talk to the guy.
- Reforging results in unidentified items. Why? Save us the hassle, we're probably right nearby an identify guy anyway.
- Why no "area of effect" for Emerald jewels?
- When looking at a corrupted item, there should be a stat line somewhere that says what the corruption did/is doing. At the very least, if I hover over Corrupted to get its popup.
- When alt tabbing while looking at an item, it should show whether it is a suffix or prefix, in addition to the tier. The trade site uses P# and S#, to differentiate the two, but in game, both are T#.
- When I find the location of something like a breach, ritual, or whatever, it should show on my map from that point on, no matter how far away from it I am. Greyed out if completed, of course.
- Can't see item level of items while they are on the ground, even while holding alt. Should be able to.