POE2 already needs a PhD to be played.

hahahaha! 100% agree :D tried to get 3-4 friends to play saying this is more easy than poe1 but u still need alot of stuff outside the game and noone got motivated to play it... less is more!

I play this game with my 15 year old son. So there is always this unique perspective I get to see while sitting next to him.

There are literal points when I see the fun drain from his face. However you can and want to math that out... it's the effect the game is having on him.

We had such hype moments in season one. I remember randomly chancing into an astramentis (the good one before it was gutted, still have in a case with spaghetti and all). We were both running around the house and annoying mom. It was a legit awesome memory. That then, because he was running the monk at the time got to HAVE A FUCKING BLAST!

Not a single thing like that has happened since, everything slowly has the fun drained from it. Disappointment from slowing development to a crawl. Every season we boot it up it lasts less and less for both of us. Knowing all the issues still plaguing the game are still there (there are seemingly way more bugs in group play and we seem to find them all).

Finding loot and playing the game NEED to be core. And it's not, it's a sad replication of a stock market meant to keep players spinning wheels as LONG as possible. And naturally people (my son in this case) are being repelled by what should otherwise be a great game.

The game is targeted at hardcore players who have little else going on in their lives. Everything is fine, except that the game appeals to a very specific niche of players and has a peculiar business plan.

You can definitely play this game blind just don't expect quick results. That's how I started back in PoE 1. I bricked a few character and even did not finish the campaign with them but with every new char I got a little bit further until I learned what I needed.

For me the greatest joy come from learning from my own mistakes and making progress. Every new build is a little bit stronger as I understad different interactions and crafting methods better. To be clear I never even scratched the surface of whole complexity in PoE 1 but PoE 2 is much easier to understand. It is complex, yes but not overly (for me) and that's its magic.

My progress is slow, like really slow. I'm probably one of the slowest player in terms of progress during every league but it's so much fun. If you don't care about your wealth and focus on the journey instead of the goal then the game have so much to offer.

Agree that they have already jumped the shark on complexity. And the two big offenders are Crafting and Temple of Vaal. Both need significant work. Especially crafting since most mechanics just add to the complexity of crafting which means it needs to be super simple right now. Or maybe instead of always adding new orbs the new mechanics just offer different way to get the same orbs? I dunno, but something needs to happen here.

There are other things mentioned like the myriad of skill gems and supports. Adding more and more builders/spenders, etc.

I know 0.5 is now supposed to be endgame focused so I'm not expecting much in the way of fixing Vaal. They just released their usual "bandaid" fixes to it that don't address core issues. Really tired of seeing this from them. Checkpoints, then sprint, removing towers, etc. Just acknowledge when something is bad(like giant maps) and fix it. Don't add more garbage to clutter up the game.

My friend pretty much threw his hands up and stopped playing when he saw the atlas and endgame skill trees for the first time, it was too overwhelming for him haha.

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And the two big offenders are Crafting and Temple of Vaal. Both need significant work. Especially crafting

Yup....I don't understand why we have so many different currencies spreaded to different tabs.

Normal currencies, Essences, Omens, etc....Just put everything crafting related into 1 Bench so we player have a better overview what crafting options we have.

Idealy with possible recipes how to craft certain BIS gear.

Last Epoch is the best example how a good crafitng mechanic could look like....Crafting in POE is sadly far away from being good atm (at least for those who don't play the game as a job).

Yep, as true newcomers I have two friends as examples. Both of them started this league fresh to the game, it took them almost the entire month of December casually playing to reach maps. Both of them just felt overwhelmed by the bombardment of new systems and an entirely new tree, that they actually dropped the game there.

This is ontop of them both also not interacting at all with crafting really as they both found it to be convoluted, confusing, unsatisfying, and also taking away from their spendable currency as it is understood, as well as not understanding what to do with so much of the random stuff that drops and just never touching them.

They played other similar games in the past and were accustomed to the more traditional idea of farming bosses and areas for specific drops over the crafting focus here with crazy amounts of outright junk/unusable loot.

Fully agree with OP and i have a PhD in physics. This GAME is whacked.

I have to agree . They wanted POE2 to be beginner friendly but just in 2 leagues of content with crafting mechanics etc the game become Phd level.