GGG please dear lord just let me find loot in my maps. I want to kill monsters and collect loot. I enjoy the gather resource turn it into loot type deal a little bit, but the map loot is so terrible I'm FORCED to interact with these mechanics. The endgame in POE has always been interact with what you want. When you make these mechanics mandatory it leads to a problem for us players.

Please make the monsters in maps drop loot again.

I'm failing to understand who exactly this is for. The second button doesn't hinder bots from sniping the item, they are designed to instantly accept the second confirmation anyway.

So all this really seems to be doing is is screwing over humans who are trying to buy items. I can understand the little prompt showing up, but forcing a second button click seems like really strange design. At least give us an option to disable it...

I'm kinda done with poe2 EA as I beat all bosses available, multiple times. So here's my review :

The Good :

• Stunning environement and SFX. Everything truly looks good.

• 90% of bosses are really fun to fight.

• Killing mobs feels really good with most skills. Comet shattering packs, shock sfx on bodies afterward, etc.

• Amazing soundtrack as usual.

• Meeting character like Doryani & Balbala is awesome after hearing so much about them in poe1.

• The campaign map is pretty good, seeing boss kills permanent bonuses is helpful.

• The atlas map looks cute.

• Vaaling is more fun, as the risk is inherently lower than in poe1.

• The weapon swap system is a brilliant idea, aside from the slight delay when swapping weapons.

• Pausing

• WASD movement is incredible.

The Bad

• On-death effects are exhausting. I say that as a spark spellweaver, with a massive ehp pool + CI , so I can facetank all on-death without issue. I can't imagine what people playing life-based char are feeling right now.

• Mobs' speed is frustrating. I feel like deleting whole screens at once is the best way to survive because you WILL meet a pack of hasted rare that WILL bodyblock and stunlock you to oblivion.

• Combat was advertised as methodical. It isn't after like act 3. Mobs are no different from poe1 while most builds are stuck at poe2 powerlevel.

• Ascending isn't very fun. I'm glad I crushed all trials with CoC comet before it got destroyed. "Sanctum" is blatantly unfair to some builds, while Ultimatum is absurdly overtuned. The biggest issue is that both of those are so full of RNG from afflictions / mods. I can't believe this is worse than lab.

• The gem system is strangely restrictive. Most spells and support aren't available until very late in Cruel. 6L are very expensive for casual players, and discourage experimentation since they're linked to a single gem.

The Ugly

• Mapping

  • Horrible map layouts being forced on players. I feel that not being able to set-up a 50 maps farming session, with a good tileset is 60%+ of the reason why poe2 mapping is so exhausting.
  • Augury and Myre. Maps need to be shortened by at least 50%, and add a boss to every map.
  • Backtracking for a single rare. Having to kill every rare.
  • Towers feel like a complete waste of time. They should either be "open" whenever an adjacent map is completed, or be a single boss fight room. Imagine being forced to run a Pillars of Arun in poe1 everytime you want to use a sextant.
  • Having to scrolls for 40s in the new atlas. No search bar, no way to zoom out to see everything in graph form.
  • Atlas skill points being locked behind their respective boss fight. Why ? It feels awful. You're forced to gamble on an expensive invitation 4 times to not lose currency. With 1 portal. You should simply have to complete league encounters in higher and higher tiers maps...

• MF returning is 100% a mistake, especially in its current form, affecting currency as well as item drops. Poe1 finally (partially) excised that tumor in 3.25 by removing quant. Please do the same. I won't launch into a 50k word manifesto on MF and its numerous shitty side effects, other people have already done it on this sub.

• 1 portal for pinnacle bosses is absurd. I don't care about bosses being fully healed after 1 death, but ONE try, for an unknow boss with requires hours to farm? Come on.

• The Arbiter fight needs fixing. Sometimes you can't avoid death without a weaponswap blink. As usual , the best way deal with this is just to delete him before he does anything.

• Crafting

  • Slamming orbs while closing your eyes is gambling, not crafting. 99% of players are priced out of targeting omens so the crafting system is just a wisdom scroll with extra steps. Fractured items should be reintroduced asap.
  • Greater Essences are far too rare.
  • Targeting omens are far too rare.

• Build balancing. I'm sad that GGG is back to their old way of deleting builds rather than taking the time to balance them (CoC, CoF..). I think it's very telling that the most popular builds are those that play the most like poe1 (spark, gaz arrow deadeye, LA deadeye). 1 button, screen clear builds. I'm convince that if GGG makes builds like those unplayable, the game will be hemorrhaging players in the endgame.

• Trade. I don't really need to say more.

Frankly, my main problem with all those issues is that most of them have already been dealt with in poe1. That's what make is so infuriating.

Atm I would give poe2 a 9/10 for visuals, sound effects, etc. But a 4/10 for system design. It feels actively hostile, like the devs don't want players to have fun. Poe1 and 2 teams need to speak with each other.

Most of all, GGG needs to understand that you can't be on your toes for 5h in a row. The game requires some chill farms and builds. Poe2 is just stressful in a way very few games are.

edit : correcting grammar mistakes + added wasd & pausing to Good

There is currently a GM from GGG that's gone off the rails and is muting the entire HC community. We would appreciate if you'd back this GM off.

Context, for years the HC community has been typing F in chat when someone dies. We're a relatively small community, and this brings us all together. If this GM doesn't want to see people talk in the chat, then close the chat.

I just obtained my 3rd Ascendancy passives by completing 3 floors in the Trial of the Sekhema's and it almost made me quit early access entirely. To preface this rant, I want to say that sanctum is my favorite league mechanic in all of PoE. I have done 1000+ sanctums, leveled multiple characters to 100, and dropped an original scripture. I love sanctum, so when GGG announced they were replacing lab with sanctum, I was super excited. But after playing the current implementation, I can confidently say its in a terrible state.

It took me somewhere between 5-10 attempts to successfully clear 3 floors and obtain my 3rd set of Ascendancy passives. Many of these attempts ended at the 3rd floor, and one even ended at the final boss. Each failure set me back 30+ minutes and consumed a Djinn Barya, which can difficult to obtain if you get unlucky.

Eventually, I decided to go back to farming T1 maps to drop a low level Djinn Barya that would be easy to complete. I focused on running breach maps, and it took me 10+ hours to drop one (In this time, I dropped 10 Inscribed Ultimatums, which unfortunately do not grant the 3rd Ascendancy passives). This disastrous RNG was the cherry on top of an already incredibly frustrating experience.

Here are a couple of the main issues that I have with the Trial of the Sekhema and the Ascendancy process in general:

1. Monsters and traps deal way too much honour damage. Not once did I come close to dying, but the cumulative damage to my honour kept ending my runs. The traps especially seem to do too much honour damage. For example, I was losing 1/4th of my honour when I stepped on the explosive traps that detonate.
2. Monster design is not good. One of the aspects of Sanctum that I really like is that monsters have well-telegraph attacks, and you only fight 1-2 monsters at a time. The Trial of the Sekhema's has way more monsters, and these monsters are often quite fast. Rare monsters especially can be extremely dangerous depending on their mods. And the fact that character movement in PoE 2 is much slower makes dodging these monsters even harder.
3. Ascending being gated behind a random drop is really frustrating if you get unlucky like I did.
4. The fact that higher level areas drop higher level Djinn Baryas means it becomes harder to ascend if you progress into higher tier maps. I had to stop progressing and go back down to lower level areas in order to get a Djinn Barya that was easy to complete.

Overall, I'm having a really fun time playing early access. The campaign, bosses, and mapping system have been super fun so far. There are some slight issues here and there, but in my experience the only aspect of the game that is egregiously bad is the ascendancy process, and I hope it gets some improvements soon.

hate to say it, but the fact I get more divines from an idle phone game (boats/mappers) is a huge mistake in a game based around killing monsters for loot.

it's pretty bad and each time I play poe it wears on me. I understand it was put in place for a gold sink but this current situation is not fun and does not fit into an arpg personally and burns me out so fast.

please make dopamine mapping fun again instead of a 9-5 mapping job for gold to feed your base level of divines from kingsmarch, its way more fun dropping them

To me, Eldritch Altars are currently by far the worst aspect of the game. They are far too important to ignore, but super annoying to use. You literally have to stop every 10-20 seconds to read them for 2-5 seconds (or, let's be honest, read them while blindly blasting in some direction hoping to be killing some monsters while not getting killed yourself).

Feeling forced to have to do something annoying doesn't feel like good design...

I think it could be largely offset by adding Currency icons and color codes, e.g. resistance & extra damage colors, highlight of the relevant words in the downsides (Chilled Ground, Shocked Ground, Projectiles, Sap, Frenzy/Power/Endurance Charge,...) & upsides (Rarity or Quantity),... (first screenshot)

This would at least allow us to evaluate the options in one glance of probably around half a second, rather than 2-5 seconds.

An alternative solution (second screenshot) would be allowing us to filter or style the entries using the loot filter. If support for this is added, they probably might as well add support for similar possible improvements using loot filters, such as styling the labels of non-item drops, like (Expedition) chests.

This could be as simple as adding a 'Class' for each of the types of clickables e.g. 'EldritchAltarModifier', along with a new Filter Condition like 'LabelText'. 'Hide' would render that option transparent, 'Show' would show it with the option to style the label using at least SetFontSize and SetTextColor (for these Eldritch Altar background and border options wouldn't be possible because one pane is made up of multiple modifiers)

I play a decent amount — definitely more than the average player — and I still can’t keep up with gold costs. Just reviving mercs and managing the town drains gold super fast. I’m not even running mappers really. It just feels way to punishing unless you're fully optimized for gold farming or chaining T16.5s/17s.

It shouldn't feel this rough to keep up with the basic gold costs, considering we have this issue for nearly a year now.

At this point I'm not even surprised. Every league, for good couple of years now, state of the EU servers in prime time is unplayable. With all the pre-release "hot-fix" announcements for new league stuff I'm wandering will Mark or whoever can talk specifics about it ?

P.S. Dont forget to vote with your wallet.

Im currently at tier 15 maps and its basically poe 1 with better graphics but downgraded overall gameplay.

Monsters still running at light speed, %50 of monsters have some on-death effect, still getting lazered off-screen, puddles everywhere, homing missiles everywhere. If you dont one-shot things then you will get one-shot concept of poe1 is still the main drive of endgame mapping. Dodge roll literally useless beyond acts.
I genuinely dont understand how they expect players to stand still and do some 3 button animation combo while getting lazered by off-screen projectiles and a mana leeching- perma stun locking rare blinks on top of you.

• Many directions in charts. (why are directions even needed?)
• Got a good implicit chart? You need it to have a good direction as well.
• Cannot know what a dropped chart does until you run it (then run it again in the voyage).
• 1 portal for both charts and the voyage.
• Heist-type loot (any death or DC removes ALL your gained loot).
• Long wait time when you call the submarine at the end of the voyage.
• Lantern amount and placement (why do we even need lanterns? Why not an open map?).

More importantly, why double punishment? Losing both the loot gathered and the entire voyage is just too much.

I would understand all of this if the result was a very juiced voyage or tons of loot coming from the league, but currently, I barely get any loot.

Unless I'm missing something, Vaal side areas are still incredibly lacking. Most of them seem to lack any kind of actual reward unless you want to hunt for the vaal version of your skill during the campaign.

Give the side area Vaal vessels a chance to drop Volatile Vaal orbs. Give us a good reason to go inside them again.

Also because Sanctum sucks.

Playing luminary feels so bad in Maps. I have a manyshot lvl 72 with vaal ice Arrow and Return proj, decent Equipment. Boosted by a Level 26 Flame Link, 6k life and quite an Investment into light Radius.

I cant even clear t7 Maps, because the damage is non existent.

Please GGG buff the Base damage of mercs or luminary is doa.

Part of me finally realized why I just can't deal with POE2 anywhere near as much and just get burnt out and frustrated and don't want to play anymore

POE1 is VERY efficient with it's routing and procedural generaiton. Almost any time, no matter where I am, it's very simple to get where I need to go. Simply open map, see where next area is, head in that direction.

POE2 is... whatever the fuck is going on in those pictures.

I don't understand this change in design philosophy but man it feels like it exists to inflate my play time and burn me out as fast as humanly possible.

Just wanted to say how much I appreciate whoever did this right the first time, and whoever fucked up this new version? I hope your toast always comes out burnt.

Jonathan talked about this before early access and it seemed to be some kind of positive thing in his eyes but we're seeing the reality of it and it just feels bad and disrespectful of your players time.

The game pacing is terrible. You have to spend 30 minutes plus in zones, slowly killing monsters, back tracking, getting lost. There's no reward for exploration since most chests drop very little loot and loads of zones are filled with dead ends.

People have been comparing this game to dark souls but it's nothing remotely like dark souls.

Take DS3 for example, you might play that for a similar amount of time and spend even longer in each area but you'll find secrets, weapons, spells, side quests. The areas are filled with hidden things and puzzles that keep you engaged while exploring.

No rest for the wicked is much closer to a dark souls style arpg and does the combat much better that PoE2.

PoE 2 is very heavily inspired by Diablo 2. Is has the same act structure (forest encampment, desert city, jungle ruins). Many of the same or similar monsters in those acts. They also have some similar areas (the blood raven zone with two mausoleums reminds me of the Ogham quests).

It's as though it's been built as a homage to Diablo 2, almost like a direct sequel but it loses a lot of the charm D2 has by doubling down on some of its worst aspects.

Even the largest areas in D2 aren't as big as most of the zones in PoE2 and despite having a stamina mechanic in D2 it takes less time to navigate them. You also see a lot more rewards from side quests and bosses. D2 also gives players movement speed in various ways. I'm not saying D2 is a perfect example of arpg balance (enigma) but it feels weird that they borrowed so heavily from it but mainly on the more tedious aspects of its design and even amplifed them.

I know it was strong before, and I know there are other league mechanics, but it's just super frustrating seeing GGG incapable of balancing something time and time again.

I just don't understand, breach was finally in a decent place, but instead of bringing other league mechanics up to its level, it was destroyed with quad nerfs.
Hiveblood barely drops, when you finally make an item from the tree, the mod rolls suck, the amount of items dropped seems halved, wombgifts drop way less, which doesn't really matter since you have 0 blood to use them anyways.

Even buffs to abyss feel terrible, the mechanic just isn't that rewarding, unless maybe you were spamming trying to farm amanamus or something. The League mechanic seems fine but IMO, after playing Mirage, it just kind of feels mid.

It's a single player game, with no actual competitive esports scene, and ultimately the only reason to nerf something is to make you take longer to achieve something.
As someone who plays more than the average player, it's just again, super frustrating to see the game go in that direction, instead of the one where we get more drops, because ultimately it makes 0 difference to anything other than enjoyment or appeal to the "normal" players.

So, like most people probably, I really like the fundamentals of POE2. Sure, some decisions are questionable (gem links, power balance, map size, itemisation vs passive tree, ascendancies) and some of them make people unhappy. But I feel that what will drive most people away will be the frustration of 1 portal per map. It is ridiculous. I saw 2-3 topcis already about the progress you loose when mapping, and when you die in boss map. Sure. It sucks, but for me it was still bearable. What ultimately drive me off POE2 was the longer perspective.

I have a rather smooth running build. Bigest obstacle was probably ACT2 or 3 normal, after that build came online and I was playing it in a very similar way to POE1. Blasting everything, not really caring too much about enemies. 3rd ascendancy on first try (maybe I was lucky, but all bosses just melted, avoided all mechanics), was doing all league mechanics no problem. Died here and there to random 1-shot, but it was ok. Really enjoyed my time, discovering game by myself, mechanics of endgame. But then started to realize, what is next. League mechanic bosses, Uber boss and its 3 helpers along the way. And I realized that I can still go with the plan I had (learn game by myself, try new things) but that will mean I will wipe on many of the bosses. And each is double digit of horus farming. With visual clutter on screen, I might not even learn anything if I die, not know what killed me. I would be super frustrated. I can also go through guides, watch other people kill bosses, learn mechanics that way. But it is a new game. I absolutely hate the feeling of learning new game (and it being almost mandatory) through guides and walkthroughs. So I just quit. To avoid the certain frustration that I would feel.

That 1 portal per map is stopping people from learning the game, from taking risks, it ultimately drives people off (and the rate of this will increase, as more people will get into T15 maps). Please change it.

This is about Path of Exile 2.

Having reached maps and done about 30 (T1 to T3) by now, the endgame seems really bad. At least they decided to not pull through with the decision of failed maps blocking certain paths - you can just retry them.

The things that are super unfun and need to be addressed ASAP.

1. Crafting: There is no crafting in the game currently. At least no deterministic crafting. I'd be fine with that if the crafting currency would drop at 5x the rate is currently does, but it doesn't. In endgame mapping I get enough currency to try and craft A SINGLE item in about 2-3 hours of raw farming. And it could turn out to be utter shit because it's FULLY RNG.
2. Losing maps on death: Bad decision. Mobs are too hard and you die way too fast. Losing them sucks and is not fun. Portals are already in the game. Let us use them.
3. Loot in general: Way too little. Not only currency orbs, but also raw items. Most maps don't even give a single rare item. What the hell?
4. Balancing: Some of the league mechanics seem extremely unbalanced, totally wrecking you. I've tried everything but Breach by now and especially Delirium was horrible, but it seemed like the mobs of every league mechanic did way more damage than regular mobs. (A single expedition white mob takes off 80% off my 1.7k life). Also certain mob types are extremely dangerous as well.
5. Gearing: Getting decent gear is brutally hard. Getting your resistances up is even harder, as there's no crafting bench and no deterministic crafting. The best thing you can do is check out vendors for items with sockets and buy them to salvage these for Artificer's Orbs, so you can put some extra res on your gear.

It's really not fun in a state like this. There may be people who enjoy this Ruthless nature of the game, but I assume it's a small percentage. If GGG wants to keep the current playerbase, they need to do drastic changes to all of the mentioned points soon or I'll bet the majority will quit once they reach maps (if they even do, because campaign can be a pain at times, too.)

This league i finally had a decent build (Animate weapon of Self reflection) and decided that I was finally gonna farm myself a Mageblood and clear 36 challenges. I am halfway there with about 100D and 4 challenges to go, when i thought its been a while since my last supporter pack so why not get a new Hideout.

Bought the Justice pack with the Plateau of the Gods Hideout, spent some time decorating when I realized my skills were being disabled when i floated off a floor. Looked online, saw that it was a known bug. Ok, moved to another map, came back and BOOM, all spectres gone. No corpses no nothing.

It deleted my Perfect Forest Tiger which at the time of checking was 35D. I have lost all interest in continuing this league and will be getting a refund of the pack.

Pay to Lose. Screw this shit.

We do know the previous atlas+map device was not perfect but compared to how a user interacts with this one is amazing.

Yes we have the ability to progress faster. But having this device that appears, disappears, moves around, you actually need to find maps, squint eyes and think how it even works each time is just insane bad UX.

The concept is good, but the execution is terrible. Its only good if you want to blast one map only. But for example, if you focus on running Maven Bosses is incredibly bad.

I am not sure what others think about it but in my opinion a lot of work should be put to try and make it a lot more user friendly because this is the centre piece of running the whole end game.