My two cents on portals and death penalty

This is my personal opinion and my personal experience over couple thousands of hours in poe. You are probably much better player than me anyway, so you should not get fussed over my opinion. :)

Back in POE1 dying was very different. And it was a big part of the softcore mapping. Now the game has changed, and I think its a big upgrade, and let me explain why I think so, and why we should have portals disappearing on the first death.

There is this holy sacred newbie-bait mantra in gaming that "you cannot deal damage if you're dead". Glass cannons are sin. Players will often default into this way of thinking when picking a build for poe, and that's what I did when I started playing POE back in Synthesis. Over many leagues I played the same pathfinder build, its a tanky build that would go between 100 and 200k eHP depending on the league. As I improved at the game, I would start hitting 98-99 somewhat easily, but. I would still sometimes just die, god knows how and why, just boom - you're dead.

And that wasn't a problem really, with the 6 portals.

Then around Delirium league I decided - okay, lets try playing an LA Deadeye that has 15k eHP. Yes you die a lot, but you can portal+cast on death and you're not really losing anything. The clear speed is amazing, so you average more money over hour but you die more over hour, but who cares about dying? Eventually I got so mechanically good at dodging shit that I would hit 99-100 just doing maximum juiced corrupted t16-t17. Apparently if you have enough damage, you can kill stuff before it kills you and that's how you survive. But even if you die, well, you're not losing anything. And at this point I really didn't see any reason to -ever- play a tanky character again. A lot of people tried this during Affliction league, to, hmm, varying degrees of success.

To sum up, dying in POE 1 was much more volatile and less punishing. Past the point where you learned to not step in ground effects, most dying was non-interactive because it happened way too fast. It was usually due to doing bad map mods or wild combinations of rare monster modifiers, but not something related to immediate player actions.

And now poe 2 comes around and suddenly - dying is not okay any more. Technically dying was never okay, but now we losing loot, and oh boy, that's absolutely no-go territory. But not only dying is not okay anymore, but dying is a lot different now. Now every time you're dying it's painfully slow compared to poe1. You have time to process it and understand your mistake. In like 450 hours of poe2 I died lots of times, but only once I did not understand why and how I died.

So we went from "evey now and then you die randomly and thats okay" to much more explicitly visible "you always die to your mistakes". And it is frustrating. It is infuriating sometimes to clearly see your own stupid mistakes and be punished for them. I almost smashed my mouse couple times, but instead of going through with it, I decided to get better at the game.

So I love the on-death disappearing portals and 1 portal for everything as it was when the game was just released. It removed the debate of "survivability vs clearspeed" and forced me to elevate my gameplay.

Weirdly enough all those people typing 'git good' and 'skill issue' for troll value, are actually right, literally and non-sarcastically. And probably without their knowledge too.