Overall feedback for PoE 2

I played until I attempted 2 citadels, and I had about 40 div. Level 91, can beat a lot of the content, can probably beat the arbiter of ash, beat simulacrum with struggle. Invoker with ES and evasion.

Played with a friend mostly, he played Witch Hunter and dual-wielded maces (switched to a two-handed mace later), he's life-based with armour. Both of us created our own builds - didn't look at build guides, deliberately avoided looking up which items or skills are overpowered or underpowered. I am a PoE 1 veteran, he's a newbie. (I have beaten all ubers in PoE 1 in two separate leagues).

1-2 weeks into the league we did trading, and for 1ex per piece you get gear which makes you overpowered for the entire act and the next one.

For 1ex per piece, buying gear that I could wear at my level at start of act 1 cruel, I got gear that lets me do tier 3-4 maps, at which point I upgraded again. The experience for him was similar, so it's not just that I was OP - his build is weak in the current meta.

Then getting to tier 16 (or even 18) was really easy, the difficulty increased very slightly with tiers. It increased a lot more with some map mods.

So overall, getting to the endgame was a LOT easier than in PoE 1. In PoE 1, getting past yellow maps is hard, and I have to follow a build guide AND drop some divine orbs to get to red maps. In PoE 2 it was kinda trivial.

But after that point the game got very grindy and boring. That's because any of the new content was too difficult to reach - I had instantly gotten all the Atlas passives for killing bosses, but getting them for the "league" content (breach, expedition, etc) required a lot of grinding, so mostly I would just be doing maps. I bought a Breachstone and it was easy to do. Logbooks were also easy to do; I only got 1 boss from them. Simulacrum was too hard for my build, and I had to buy it from the currency exchange. Mostly I was doing maps which were both easy and grindy. In this regard, I would have preferred PoE 1's endgame, because it has a lot of variety and things to do. Especially its guardian fragment system (shaper, elder, sirus) introduced a frequent change of pace.

Bosses were easy most of the time. Getting the boss difficulty nodes suddenly made them a bit too hard, but at the end they weren't hard again. I was careful with bosses every time, but I never died to them except for one time, and I never struggled (except when I ran out of mana potion charges against a boss with a high HP pool, and then I didn't struggle either, it only took me a while). In retrospect it possibly would've been worth unspeccing the last 2 or so boss nodes. Bosses were too easy to be this big event IME. (Or maybe this means that regular mobs are too difficult, compared to bosses).

Something I struggled with was restoration, especially in simulacrum - whenever I lose energy shield, without leech I have no way of increasing it, so normally I will run outside of combat to wait for it to start ticking up, but in simulacrum I can't escape so I just die. This makes the gameplay different from PoE 1 where energy leech instantly healed my ES. I'm not complaining, only pointing out what happened to me, it might be a desirable thing.

Towards the end I attempted to transition to what should be the most OP build - HoWA CI pillar all three stat stacking with tempest flurry. In the end it dealt high damage, but I was much easier to kill, with fewer defensive layers too, and I gave up on optimizing it - I thought that it would break the game, but actually even with about 30-35 div investment it wasn't that good :(. (This suggests that the game is already fairly well balanced! Or that build required a higher budget to be worthwhile)

One peculiar thing with Tempest Flurry is that I died on the boss of the "Molten Forge" area (map) because it walked me into the lava. I didn't realize that the skill requires you to move, which really sucks against this boss. If I fought it again then I would have moved my support gems to a different skills, but I guess most people will instead just complain and say that the game is broken and should change, either way I share just my observations.

I ran out of gold exchanging divine orbs for exalts. Afterwards, doing an entire map and vendoring all rares (!!!) gave me enough gold to just exchange 1 divine (maybe 1.5 divines if I'm lucky?). On the exchange market, divine-exalt was about 10-20% more expensive than on the currency exchange. I don't know whether this is by design.

I love the expanded tooltips and I would love to see even more of them - one of the most notable things is the mechanics of Armour - I had to go to the Wiki to look up how it works in order to determine how worthwhile it is for my character. My friend was confused about why he was dying even though he plenty lot of Armour - it's a problem that we don't see what damage killed us, was it DoT, was it a big physical shot (which will not be much mitigated by armour), was it chaos damage, etc. This way we don't know how to prevent it from happening either, and dying feels bad, like there's something in our build that we must fix. But we don't know what killed us, so we must guess what to fix.

Going through the acts, in Act 3 there were a lot of dead ends, and I get it that the layouts could have been more linear but also much longer so I spend on average the same around of time, just a matter of luck, but it would have felt a lot better - you feel like a fool for having gone in the "wrong" direction even though you had no way of knowing what is a dead end.

Another reason why Act 3 felt bad was because the game has some problems handling large areas: sometimes when I go back to the area, I get to a new instance, even if I've been away for less than a minute!! This means that I have just wasted about 5-10 minutes walking through the area, and I feel like a fool because that IS preventable by me. Also it feels dull to redo the same content immediately. One of the most egregious cases:

If I find an exit to a new area, then it would be good to go there to get the waypoint. However, if I do that, then I immediately return, the area will be reset, losing all of my progress! But if I find a different area instead, then I go to that area, then later I will have to go back to the original area to find again the first area that I found, so whatever I do I will have to explore it multiple times, unless I do some workaround like dropping a portal in the area to keep the instance accessible by me later, or being in a party and having one of us stay in that instance.

Also I had a lot of crashes on DirectX11 and switching to Vulcan fixed it, I would appreciate if something told me that Vulcan fixes the crashes.

Overall I really liked the changes in PoE 2, and for me this is the future of how I want to play Path of Exile.

With the overall level of polish, I am glad that it got delayed by 3 weeks and I wish that it gets more often delayed in the future so that the most amount of bugs can be fixed. PoE 1 is quite buggy (I have lost expensive-to-attempt boss fights - multiple fights! - as recent as Settlers).