My feedback (as elaborated as I could)

Hi everyone, this is my feedback after about 300 hours of playing. I'd like to give it because I feel like most player feedback focuses on certain points and forgets others, so here goes.
Of course, this is my own opinion and my view on the game does not represent other players.
Before I start, I'll give a little bit of my background on POE. As I said, I've played about 300 hours. I've gone into the endgame making maps up to T18, killing bosses in 2 citadels and doing some pinnacle bosses. As for POE1, I played a few years ago and beat the campaign, which I loved (I love its lore) but I didn't get too deep into the endgame due to its complexity.
That said, I'll give my feedback on POE2:
First of all, I would like to give my general opinion on what the early access has been like. For me, what has been presented to us as early access is a very good skeleton of a future game, a structure with a lot of potential, but nothing like or even close to a good game. There is a lot to change, a lot to improve, a lot to balance and a lot to fix. It seems impossible to me that this game will be released in less than a year and a half, and if it does, I think it will not be a game that can be considered finished.

The strong points of this game, in my opinion, are:

- WASD movement. I think it's simply the biggest improvement that could have been made to POE1. Unbeatable, a pleasure to play like this.
- The graphics. This game is beautiful, without a doubt. There are maps that are visually a pleasure. Mesa, Crisom Shores... there are some maps that I prayed would appear in my atlas just to be able to see them.
- The atlas. I'm aware that there is controversy and there are things that I don't like either, but the atlas has several strengths. These are:
o Its aesthetics. Visually it is very attractive. I love it. It makes you want to explore it.
o Its addictiveness. Let's not kid ourselves, this feeling of progress and the drops you get at the beginning of mapping generates a strong addiction.
o Its lore. My biggest congratulations for having integrated the atlas so well with the lore of the game.
- The campaign. I like the lore of the campaign so far, as well as how easy it is to follow compared to POE1. On the other hand, the campaign is very well balanced, so you constantly play using dodgeroll, which makes it very fun to play.
- Dodgeroll: definitely a totally necessary mechanic. It makes the campaign a lot more fun than POE1. After returning to POE1 after playing 2, it is sorely missed, as without it the game becomes a potion smasher.

And now I'm afraid it's time to present the game's weak points:

- First of all, is the state in which it was released. It can't be that a game is being released where the map is so poorly optimized. The first few weeks the experience of opening the map was horrible. It also couldn't be that it comes out with drops as low as it did or with constant crashes. It gives the impression that early access isn't an early version but rather an alpha version from which they want to gather information.
- The crashes. There's nothing worse in the POE2 experience than the multiple and constant crashes. It's been frustrating and one of the main reasons why I've stopped playing.
- The bugs. Both the campaign and the game itself have a multitude of bugs, to a level that shows that this early access has come out half cooked.
- The crafting or either the currency drop levels. The randomness of crafting makes crafting a waste of resources at any level, but especially during the campaign. Crafting is only an option for the mega rich, so it is a mechanic that most of us will never use. If more currencies dropped or the manufacturing process was less random, we would definitely craft.
- The gem system. I am aware that there are many complaints about the gem and socket system in POE1, but I find it to be something innovative and interesting. In POE2, however, I think it is oversimplified. I don't like it. I don't find it stimulating at all and I also find it quite confusing (even though it is oversimplified).
- Runes and sockets. I think there are few options. Too few. I wish items had more than one slot so I could make rune recipes like in Diablo 2. Currently the game consists of putting the same rune in all the sockets of your equipment.
- An important aspect of the endgame or the game at high levels is that the game starts to be played in a radically different way from the campaign. After a certain level the game becomes a kill on one-hit or be killed on one-hit, meaning you never have to use dodgeroll again. There is hardly any mechanical difficulty anymore and the game starts to become a blasting simulator like POE1 where the only thing that matters is optimizing your build. We go from a game where skill matters to playing POE1 again. This needs to be fixed and I don't know how. Maybe by reducing the damage at higher levels for both players and enemies, I don't know, but if the game wants to be an ARPG where the new mechanics they've introduced make sense, this needs to be fixed.
- Bosses in the endgame. Related to the above, from a certain level onwards the bosses practically kill you in one hit, so encounters with bosses become a game of RL1 in Elden Ring. It's not stimulating, and if you make a single mistake you die, so again, the only thing that matters is optimizing your build enough to crush them in less than 20 seconds.
- The atlas. Yes, I like things about the atlas, but there are other things I don't, such as the fact that it's infinite. The fact that it's infinite removes the feeling of progression and makes exploring it something bland and pointless. I don't know how this can be fixed, but I think it should be fixed. What will happen when someone has explored 1000 nodes of the atlas? Will their computer explode when they load it? Will they have trouble finding the towers to put slats on?
- Losing maps when dying. Honestly, I don't mind not being able to retry the map when dying (although I would prefer to have 6 attempts), but losing bosses, corruption or breaches that were there... this makes the endgame tedious beyond belief.
- The Atlas bosses. Finding bosses or obtaining the material to face them is a pain in the ass. The gridding becomes excessive for something so unrewarding. I made 2 citadels and stopped because the game didn't give me any incentive to continue. After reaching level 91 and seeing that I was able to kill the citadel bosses, what incentive did I have to keep playing?
- The amount of content in the game. Comparison is theft of joy, but if we compare this game to POE1, it feels incredibly empty. I really miss something like Delve or something that is more than a mini-event on a map.
- Trials of Shekemas. Immensely long and not fun at all. There's no point in being penalized for getting hit and it takes the fun out of all the trials. I think it's the content in the game that I like the least.

Of all this, what worries me the most and what I want to emphasize without a doubt is how the endgame is played. The fact that the way it is played is different from the campaign. I would like to play the maps as I play the campaign, although I understand that the people who play each league of POE1 want the opposite.
I think that this game needs a severe process of balancing its mechanics and attributes, as well as a reinvention of some of its aspects.
With this I finish my feedback. I hope that it can be useful to the developers or that at least it helps them to diversify the opinions they get from people.

Before I finish, I would like to say that although I don't think it's the case, I am sorry if some of my comments sound aggressive or are offensive to the developers of the game. I am not a native English speaker and writing all this text has been mentally exhausting, so using a more neutral language would have been an excessive effort. At no time did I intend to disrespect or offend anyone.

Thanks for reading and see you soon!

After playing the Settlers of Kaalgur league, going deep into the POE1 endgame and killing some pinnacle bosses, I'm updating the POE2 feedback with the new points of view I've obtained (new points or modifications of those described in the previous post):

- The gem system of POE1 is quite restrictive, and although I still prefer it to that of POE2, I think that the correct thing would be a system of intermediate complexity (I have no proposals on how to implement it).
- The fact that the list of possible support gems is hidden behind a small button at the bottom of a menu is a serious affordance problem.

- The atlas layout. After playing the atlas in the first game, I reiterate once again that the layout of the POE2 atlas is BEAUTIFUL. I really like the map you have implemented. But the POE1 experience has made me reaffirm the fact that the infinity of the map eliminates the feeling of progress and the satisfaction associated with it.

- Content. POE1 is a bloated game. Inaccessible to new players. It's not something POE2 requires, but I do insist again that the endgame feels empty. Having multiple progress towards different bosses in POE1 makes the endgame addictive, especially if there's a quest that pushes it.

- Map attempts. After trying the experience of multiple portals per map/boss I have to say that it's a nice improvement to the game experience, although I think the difficulty of only having one attempt can be fine as long as it doesn't eliminate the boosts in the attempted atlas nodes (or at least the boosts that already came with the node). As for the bosses, given the difficulty of finding a pinnacle boss I think the 6 attempts should be mandatory (or adapted to the difficulty).

I think that's all that's new for now.
Thanks!