Lich, Smith and Atlas Summary

Just wanted to leave my personal opinion about the two classes i played and some general feedback before i take a break and come back at a later date.

After playing both these from start to about level 80-85, from a pure ascendancy design, both these are design very well.

Once adjustments are made to individual skills after the initial nerfs to player power in 0.2 both these classes should feel very fun to play.

Lich - has some great potential for a support archetype or damage. It has some generic damage buffs and damage mitigation to open up a variety of setups for solo and group play. I ran it to the low 80's on minions, which made it much harder than it needed to be, due to the now terrible minion damage scaling and even worse minion life, but it was still doable.

Smith - just a smooth setup to level. Right from the first two ascendancy points, you feel like it was worth choosing. I'm not familiar with melee yet, so i ran a simple ballista build, but the ascendancy allowed me to build some solid defenses and recovery, which partially helped some of the major downsides of the totem setup (extremely short placement range basically putting it near a melee build and absurd mana cost).

Atlas - changes were good for the Tower and Nexus (once I took a good look around and was able to properly locate corrupted zones). Progression feels meaningful enough when combined with the occasional Unique map along the way for additional points.

Everything else about the end game was the same or just got worse so i didn't see a reason to bother going any further. I was excited about recombinators, but once i heard about the weighted chance of recombination being based on the weighting of the mods, I considered it a dead mechanic for 99% of the player base and didn't bother given how long it would take to farm up the logbooks to only have a chance at getting the points for Expedition.

Finally, there has been plenty of discussion about loot, but I'll just add my simple perspective. Every single level from 2-80+ I checked the vendors for potential upgrades while levelling the Lich on minions. I was into T5 maps when i finally gave up and just bought a pair of gloves, belt and two rings that i had been using since before level 10. This is in part due to attribute scaling on gems and requiring others stats to use supports applying constant pressure on the player which i just hope was alleviated even the slightest bit by the introduction of new runes and set socket drops.

Even my buddy who was running with me said multiple times "this cant be how they want us to play, there has to be something wrong with drops". During the campaign the running joke after every Unique monster kill was "Oh look, another 3-5min fight for a useless rare Spear/Crossbow" (yes they were all useless).

I'm experienced enough to know that drops will get better the higher you get into maps. Thus, allowing for better returns when you get into investing in the maps. However, the baseline drop rate of items FEELS terrible (no rarity on gear should be the assumption for ending the campaign and into low tier maps).

Spending 10-30hrs doing just the campaign to get to the start of endgame only to find out that you need to go through another potentially 10-30hrs just for drops to start feeling ok. I cant even imagine how bad it feels for inexperienced and new players.

As for the current versions of "crafting", I couldn't even tell someone (with a straight face) that this game even has it, at least not in the first 50-70 hrs of gameplay (for experienced players). A new player would likely have to be willing to invest 100+ hrs before they even got to the point of feeling like they are manipulating the items that they find (excluding the use of blindly hoping to get a modifier they want using the current available orbs), and that's only if they know that they need to be focusing on finding fracturing orbs, or rituals to get the Atlas points so you have the remote chance at getting the only real item in the game that allows you to manipulate the current modifiers on an item.

Sorry i went off topic there, but I don't typically post much, so figured id just get it out now. I tried to keep my 10yr experience from POE 1 out of the feedback as much as possible (hence not mentioning any of the methods there as potential solves).

I know you'll get there. This is a beautifully designed game that will no doubt be the gold standard for ARPGs eventually.

I would like to request one thing. Please create an MTX that makes any skill completely (or near) invisible. I would buy it for everything i run. I don't care about my own skills. I don't need a seizure killing me, I just want to see what monster effect is going to kill me.