State of Early Access Update

I am so interested in what is casuing the "freeze crash", I hope someone explains it somewhere when they finally figure it out. Thanks for the workaround, works for me.

All of this sounds great but you're ignoring the elephant in the room

Map layouts.

They are atrocious every single time. Seeing a return to similar design of map layouts from PoE 1 would fix this and literally make everyone happy.

Nice pat on the back post! See you guys they have been so busy! Stop yelling at them, did you fix the singer in act 1 yet, still getting crashes daily, no map tabs xD

This "announcement" is truly disheartening, to say the least.

GGG, I have supported you for quite some time, but this post really makes me lose confidence in you and your ability to deliver on this game — let alone your plans to run two live service games.

This post is a whole lot of nothing. You're congratulating yourselves for doing a Sprint's worth of work spread out over two months, taking stabs at your players for your own inability to communicate balancing changes, while stubbornly clinging to your "design philosophies" by not offering free respecs. You pat yourselves on the back for adjusting a large number of uniques, all of them still as boring as before.


But worst of all:

You seem to ignore thousands of pages of feedback telling you (some more, some less kindly) what the issues with the game are perceived to be. Instead, you present us with changes I wouldn't even put in the top 20 of problems.

Where has your often-touted "transparency" gone? Your promises that "we're listening to feedback"? Right now it really feels like you've bit off more than you could chew, designing yourselves into a corner with systems that don't work as you'd hoped, but are seemingly too stubborn or proud to overhaul or replace them. I'm just baffled by your actions.

Seriously, what's going on? You stay silent, apologize, stay silent again, apologize... but nothing meaningful changes over the course of two months (yes, yes, some things did change, but it doesn't feel like real progress).

Pundits love to say "right now is the worst shape the game will ever be in," but I'm starting to fear that "things will get a lot worse before they get better."

I truly hope to stand corrected and be surprised.

In my opinion regarding balance the game is lacking a conceptual vision of design, we warrior for example with slow actions that take at least 1 second to be executed and sorceress that can wipe the whole screen in less then a second. No matter what you change at warrior he won’t ever be at the same level.
The great question is what does ggg wants

"

WedgeVII#7764 wrote:

All of this sounds great but you're ignoring the elephant in the room

Map layouts.

They are atrocious every single time. Seeing a return to similar design of map layouts from PoE 1 would fix this and literally make everyone happy.

You know what elephant in the room means? Map layout is so bottom priority its non-existent compared to everything else listed.

"

We did attempt to address some of the more overpowered player skills, but backed off somewhat in order to prevent breaking peoples characters. We initially thought that there would be more tolerance for this kind of thing during Early Access, but we were incorrect! We will save changes like this for larger balance updates.

Honestly, if the Skill Gem socket orbs were more common this would be much less of a pain point as one of the worst things about changing builds right now as compared to POE1 is:

In POE1 if you want to reset to a new skill you presumably still have your 6 link item(s), while in POE2 you completely lose that 6 link skill gem that is already an absolutely insane rarity.

One simple solution would be to make the skill slot orbs either upgrade-able or more plentiful; The upgrade path could be the same as waystones (3 lesser = 1 greater, 3 greater = 1 perfect).
Another would be letting us trade in a 20% 6 Slot skill gem for a Perfect orb.
It is currently more efficient to sell a Perfect Orb, make a new skill gem 5 links, and hit it with a vaal than it is to just use the Orb - that is not ok.

In that same vein it would be nice if we could upgrade the uncut gems in a similar manner - at the moment I'm convinced that level 20 gems just simply don't exist.

Do you want to solve the endgame problem? The first step would be to give the choice of layouts back to the players. Grinding on maps you don't like or it just doesn't fit your build (like minions in narrow corridors) is just... Boring

Put into short words on what GGG have said

They have gave themself kudos for doing the bare minimum

& they have notified the community they plan do to ignore they key issues in PoE 2.

The main dude at GGG did a video to let everyone know they've none nothing on POE1, Yet with POE2 we receive a laughable forum post.

You guys are getting fed hard by your share holders.

Do something with POE2 before you send GGG into the void. You guys don't have the BOLAS to admit you F'D up with POE2 and its too much for bee sized dick team.

I'm sure it's been said, but I've played 150 hours in PoE 2, 250 in PoE 1. I've currently stopped playing because I finally got past as far as Act 3 goes. I don't really have any interest in repeating the content, and since I never got to mapping in PoE 1 I don't really see a need to push to get there in the EA state of PoE 2.

For me, the thing that would draw me back is the same thing that probably greatly slowed my progress; There isn't really a weapon or weapon combination, or class (with their paired weapon) that really matches my style.

I prefer melee, and while Boneshatter is super awesome fun, the rest of the skills in hammer seem to be ones I don't like, or which in general become far too slow.

Also, armor, or even armor/evasion, seem super ineffective in keeping you alive. So my melee focused builds seem to die far more frequently than ranged. (Though ranged seems to do much less damage by comparison, so there's a lot of running around, which I don't like.)

So for me I'm probably waiting until Sword or Axe come into play to see what options there are there to mix in with hammer, or possibly seeing how Huntress plays out. Or maybe once other acts are added to the main story. (I love the idea of Mercenary, but as I've posted about before, kind of hate crossbow and grenades.) I really don't care about balance tweaks or changes to end-game, because if I'm having a hard time getting there, I don't see a point in investing the required time to fight against how I naturally play more than I already have.