Endgame feedback and suggestions

Hello! I love PoE 2 and the many changes they made coming from PoE 1, but I think they can further improve it! I want to share some genuine feedback and suggestions. For some context, I'm a long time PoE 1 player and I'm currently at 500+ Steam hours for PoE 2. I'm enjoying the game a lot and I look forward to a future point in time where PoE 2 is vastly more improved through patches!

A. Endgame Feedback:

1. I really like bosses because they are the only enemies that kinda withstand the pace set by the player at least for a moment. Players set the game's pace of mowing down screens of enemies for the vast majority of the time. That is until a boss appears and pushes back on the player and sets up their own pace of the game. The player then has to play the game of the boss and beat them at it. Essentially, I really like a mixed experience where there isn't just 1 thing happening all the time, which would be "I clear the screen with my clearing ability".

2. Raid-like content! I know this is something that was rejected in the original game for many reason like balancing solo vs groups, finding people to play with, designing encounters with the absurd damage and speed PoE 1 characters have, etc.. But PoE 2 currently is so fresh and new that I can see it being a possibility here. Now I don't want strictly group only content, but higher tier content or Unique maps could possibly have stuff more intricate than just "Go here, have this DPS, and kill X to progress". Mechanics like Eater of Worlds purple spheres, Maven memory game, splitting up in a room to touch levers behind traps in Labyrinth, even managing the invincible monster that applies Ruin in Ultimatum are cool gameplay opportunities in multiplayer. I just really like playing with my friends and I wish there was something else exciting to try as a group other than Group Magic Find.

3. Without a doubt, currently PoE 2's pace is slow compared to PoE 1, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Personally, I can appreciate a slower game. The game's pace currently feels more relaxed, readable, and somewhat more enjoyable in multiplayer. PoE 1's speed is somewhat absurd compared to PoE 2. But one thing I do miss from PoE 1's blazingly fast pace gameplay is higher Actions-Per-Minute during mapping. PoE 2's movement is monotonous because I hold down the walk button and occasionally blink or shield charge. Meanwhile in PoE 1, I can generally layer lots of short cooldown fast movement abilities on top of each other, which gives the game a hidden mini-game of tempo that feels fun. My PoE 2 Warrior gameplay is I press Stampede and watch the screen for 2 seconds then walk to the next pack of monsters, rinse and repeat. My Crossbow Chronomancer tends to better in this regard because I can blink but it's not much better.

There are other components to why PoE 1 has faster gameplay in general (ex. Action Speed modifiers, Onslaught, Adrenaline, higher %increased MS values, etc.). I understand they are fighting speedcreep from the very start because they will dole out speed to player over the future years for PoE 2 (as they did in PoE 1 for over a decade). But please, I implore you to meet somewhere in the middle for player speed sooner rather than later.

4. I don't like the norm of Unique boss fights where a character has to burst down a boss before the boss has any chance of doing anything. They are way more memorable when they are hard-fought and when they are mostly dodge-rollable (ex. Xesht). Additionally, Arbiter of Ash being able to be dropped to 1-HP before you can phase him is ridiculous. The moment he comes out of phasing to his 2nd phase is when the player just kills him outright, which is lame. I would rather Arbiter gets a 2nd full HP bar when he phases (just like Count Geonor).

5. Bosses that appear randomly in mapping like k'Tash and the Delirium bosses are really cool and I really would like to see more various mini-bosses. Even though they drop nothing particularly jaw dropping in my experience, they feel like significant fights that add texture to mapping. I would really like to see PoE 2 quality Rogue Exiles or the Sanctum Guards added in.

6. Endgame System being infinitely scrolling is not really good in my opinion. It may be really cool, but I just feel like it's not great dragging around the screen a lot after exploring multiple directions deep. I would rather the atlas to be restricted to only a couple hundred nodes which contain your staple of special nodes, then have nodes at the edges of the "region" that once completed lets you essentially re-randomize everything (ex. map device focusses on 1 randomly generated "region" of the world at a time).

7. Even with the addition of boss tablets, I still think bosses should generally be fought more frequently. Moreover, Pinnacle bosses at the moment are a mix of reasonably farmable and too much RNG, which isn't great. Xesht is perhaps a bit too accessible, while King of the Mist is very inaccessible. Too much RNG is the reason why boss race kill events in PoE 1 don't include Venarius/Cortex kills.

8. Scarabs!



B. Player Character and Itemization Feedback:

1. I genuinely felt really good about playing Warrior because of several factors despite the fact that Warrior in terms of damage, defense and speed is far below other classes. First, the state of monsters really matter and feel rewarding when you take advantage (ex. Seismic Crying a stunned monster quickly before the timer runs out). Another thing is there is a back and forth between the player and Rare monster that lasts a couple of seconds (though Rare Archnemesis modifiers tend to become boring after a while). With that said, I still think Mace skills having a flat unscalable 1.5s use speed no matter what is too harsh. If this was lowered even just to 0.9s instead of 1.5s I'd really appreciate it.

2. Mana is a strange problem on a lot of skills. Sometimes, there are ways to solve it like getting Blood Magic or similar stats on the tree. Other times, I just run out of mana flask charges and I have to portal out. I kinda wish there were more options to replenish mana or mana flasks effectively in the middle of any prolonged fight.

3. Crafting. Item progression is just so tough when it's highly randomized and you need to collect so many individual bases. Currently, even with all the orbs and essences and omens, I just don't have any agency over what happens to the items that I get. There is no skillful decision making when modifying items. I would really appreciate it if we could get some for of resistance swapping on an item (or just element swapping if that's too op).

4. Hand of Wisdom and Action is interesting but is way too strong and way too easily obtained.

i would honestly like faster moving chars or smaller maps for faster map clears