Creativity Not Encouraged

You can spend 10 hours on POB to get a 'viable' build that feels bad or you can go meta. No other creativity is rewarded. Perfect example: volt support gem is being used by everyone to lightning spear. I am trying to use it on explosive spear - there's no reason it should not chain - and it does absolutely nothing. So back to the meta.

You have two fire skills that look cool and feel fun on Huntress, but you must not use them with bleed because there's no passives, notables, gems, skills, uniques, nothing for blood flame other than a worthless spear (for endgame). Every single gem that grants you extra damage takes something away, which is not a very fun way to design 'powering' a character. I have a creative idea, and no tools I can use, plus the few I've thought of don't work (herald of ash has no way to synergize with bleed, volt gem doesn't work, etc.)

I watched a streamer who did not like the spearfield skill (because it is stationary and just a spam skill that isn't particularly enjoyable) struggle for an entire week to try to make a viable bleed build with Ritualist. It was pretty underwhelming and he eventually gave up despite POB, spending all of his currency, trying extremely creative synergies. All of his creative ideas were NOT rewarded. I'm not a huge POE 1 fan, but my understanding of that games success is that it rewards players for taking quite literally the skills it grants and creating unique power fantasies. This game seems to have one or two meta builds that aren't particularly creative (although the chaining heralds was creative and fun, but now that's gone - I get it was overpowered, but the concept is cool), and everyone else is just punished constantly for trying new stuff that should, in theory, work. My blood bomber is barely mapping and I have used all the skills available in a creative way that is not rewarding me.

+1 for lack of meaningful interactions, lack of options and thus lack of build diversity. This was what made Poe 1 great and is what’s going to kill Poe 2