Balance is out of Control

I am going to go out on a limb here and say:

Campaign:
The entire campaign is mostly fine, for most characters. At the very least it's viable for all of them and many of the viable builds feel good enough ( yes, even melee, but less of the builds feel good and as in all ARPGS melee is highly item dependent ).

Some are a bit broken, some are a bit weak, but they are all viable and good fun up to about act3 in Cruel where some break-down and some scale up insanely.

All of this is true, imho, ONCE.

Softcore people might not appreciate this but the campaign is a chore and a bore in subsequent playthroughs. Slow and clunky with levels 1-XX feeling like just incremental QoL improvements. Even with optimal twink leveling it's still a complete bore/ snoozefest. And worst of all, most characters feel the same up until XX.

Endgame:
This takes us to the endgame. The endgame was first imagined as being shared with POE1. Aka, fast zoomy-zoom with many builds that invalidate it and random deaths from barely visible BS. This is still the case now. You find a build that scales to invalidate some or most of the content and you grind for XP and wealth. This is similar to almost any other ARPG in existence. Skill ( in the form of spatial/ situational awareness ) matters but that's about it.

The real problem is that the end-game lacks interesting stuff to do, enough interesting builds to experiment with (on a single character) and enough (item) interactions to build said interesting builds. There are clear winners in the build situation and this is not ideal. The map layouts are also dreadfully designed/ generated.

Also, build specialization ( bosser, mapper, breacher, delver, etc ) feels inexistent now. There are clear design indications that they exist but the content/ balancing to support them is not there yet.

TLDR:
- campaign is fun ONCE ( or maybe even a small number of times if you are new to ARPGS )
- what endgame truly lacks is content to generate playstyle variety and fixes
- the fundamental design choices around progression and all the items we have so far point to a conscious decision for the end-game to be POE1 like. Expecting it to feel like campaign is likely folly