3 months in, 12 classes 4 workable builds using 2 skills.

OK having just under 800 hours played I think I have come to the conclusion GGG have imported everything hated about POE 1 and amplified it.

1) Trails but worse
2) XP loss that is even more punishing with exponential XP falloff.
3) One shots, homing on death ONE shots, map is "on fire", on death explosions.
4) diabolical trade system
5) Loads of classes and subclasses with ONLY 4 genuinely workable endgame builds use 2 classes.

6) Scams, bots, price fixing, and streamer RNG on steroids.
7) 3rd party currency trading with sponsored ads on all the major sites.
8) No feedback or updates from GGG other than vague "yeah we are doing stuff". No balance patches, no promised marketplace, no buffs to utter garbage classes. Oh we are getting a few support gems...don't care. Fix the game when?

9) Convoluted af weapon swap garbage with skill tree options. Yay more convolution is just what POE 2 needs because POE 1 isn't a convoluted bloated mess.

10) An ascendency that allows you to have a slightly larger inventory? Ooof
11) Dumb defense mechanics, armour that still doesn't work, no ability to melee.

12) No crafting, rng nightmare with massive weighting on garbage stats. Tier 1-5 guarantee high tier garbage, I know I identified 10's of thousands of tiered and none tiered rares, all crap. Currency is useless without hyper rare omens that cost a days farming to buy one for one stat on one item.

13) 100% sure all the new POE 2 streamers work for GGG. They advertise 3 mirror builds with "for only 8 divines... seen these gross practices in mobile games to attract players with the promise of loot explosions. What happened to the GOAT streamers? They offered critics and got shoved to the bottom of the YT pile even though subscribed.

14) one portal.
15) Worst of all - run the campaign 100 times in the hope your planned build will work....It won't. 30 hours wasted. It was a nightmare to level bloodmage to 85 ish I had to remove the ascendency.

16) One shot the boss or get one shot. Warp or Clear the map from off screen or spend 20 minutes a map. Ooof

17) No life node?

On and on....

Most can be fixed by fiddling a few numbers and equations. Cannot be hard to make all classes viable, the 3 class meta crap was depressing on POE. Adding and altering equations is by far the easiest thing to do and can be done by a minimum wage intern. You don't need veteran programmers from POE to do basic math using matlab.

Stormwaver, Gemling and Invoker make up 80% of builds. Spark and stat stacking represent the entire meta. All builds revolve around earning or lets be honest BUYING mirrors off 3rd parties. 100% sure GGG are getting kickbacks from these
currency sellers at this point as they are literally destroying their game. The thing is the builds that work are no fun or fiddley af, need more keys on my KB.

Dark souls of arpgs my arse, POE 1 2.0 with added scams, currency selling, no crafting with diabolical drop rates without massive currency investments. Currency near impossible to farm without scamming, buying with $$$....

Having dealt with GGG for over a decade, I have lost all confidence anything will change. I hope I am wrong but I am not expecting different results after 12 years of false promises.

The wretched choices made in the production of this game can only be malicious. This level of ineptitude seems highly improbable.

+1 to OP and comment

Totally agree.
Its done on purpose and they keep on doing it.
I wish i coud upvote you sir but GGG didnt implement Upvoting system in theyr site in the past becouse they know whats going to happen. It will show what people think and they wont be able to damage control.

But yes the decisions about both game are horrible.
I guess when they sold out and pieced out, the worst of the team was left behind, with the most incompetend to make the decisions.
It is what it is what can you do.

+1. Let's GO!

I actually think it is the opposite, POE2 is a very diluted form of POE Where they simplified everything to the point where there is no difference and no point, the passive tree basically does nothing, it gives damage or energy shield, very little else.

The characters are soo slow and the "movement" of the game is to "dodge" attacks, not be stationary.

So the meta is obviously destroy everything because, again, the characters are so slow, like you have to use the weapon switch just to use blink for most characters.

Basically it is a punishing game with an illusion of difficulty.

+1 Totally agree.

It is weird that Jonathan reacted to strongly to people complaining about the early nerfs to some skills and not any other complaint. I think he WAAAAAY over corrected and decided only infrequent huge patches to avoid complaints and this has had a negative cascade effect on the development during this EA.

The obvious play to me would have been to simply be more liberal about handing out character resets and just going ham on changes, nerfs and experimental updates to get maximum data and feedback.

This slow large update approach is wasting valuable testing hours which could improve the game and has soured more people to PoE2 than any nerfs could.

It is mismanagement of priorities on an epic scale and I really hope the studio does some internal soul searching and changes tact.

I really like the PoE1 event and I hope that more 'experimental' updates and events come in the future.

Accurate. Was this made before the 0.2.0 tower announcement? Because their "fix" is never to address the problem but rather symptoms of the problem. The tower change is more of the same. I haven't seen any indication of a change in attitude, direction, or thinking that would make me return to this game. It's absolutely crazy how hard they are going in the wrong direction.

Irony on: How Dare you to criticise the Holy Streamers and their Sacred Community? You are Clearly a Troll... Irony off

Something like that you will get as an Answer, i bet.