1500 hour review

To start, i did not play PoE1.

0.1 i had about 1100 hours, found the game to be extremely fun, i ran into very few problems that other people were having. 0.2 made up for that by throwing every problem possible at me.

So ill start off with the good, because, this game does have the potential to be just as great as everybody says PoE1 was.

-Graphics are amazing
-Feels smooth and visceral
-The combo mechanics (Like firewall adding to projectiles, NOT PARRY)
-The skill gem system
-Boss fights
-The stash QoL and all the minor QoL things like being able to hover over keywords, like "Presence" and get a visual representation.


The bad. The bad part is, unfortunately, a fundamental issue with the "Souls-Like" tag and everything that comes with it. The boss fights in this game are amazing and need to be tuned, but there's nothing to obscene. However, the rest of the game, feels extremely imbalanced because of this fundamental design choice.

Zizaran said it directly to Jonathan, about defense and tankyness, and i really could not agree more with that. Lower the player damage, lift up HP and other forms of defensive layering, and give us better and more intuitive routes to stay alive. Being able to react to things happening, instead of dying outright, is more fun. Getting 1 shot, not fun. (But acceptable in the right circumstances ie boss slam).

I do believe this is the biggest fundamental change that needs to be made, to make the game just better in so many ways. You give us this and those on death effects that everybody complains about, they still become a problem if theres to many, however 1 accidental hit isnt going to send players into a fit of rage. Remember, there's a "Hardcore" option for people who want to play a game thats more challenging, there was "Ruthless" and then theres the base game. Make the base game for everybody and if people want a more insane challenge, give it to them in a different form.


-Atlas node, tower spawns and pathing. All just need improvements which im sure will come in time, but i have to mention it because there has been a lot of times this league where the dotted line meant nothing, or moved.

-Atlas tree, Its trash, the whole thing, all the nodes, including the boss and other league mechanic trees, just terrible. Make it one big tree, give us more ways to customize what maps show up and give us a way to make citadels spawn more often.

-Stormweaver 0% representation this league because everything that made a spellcaster good got butchered to a point where its unusable.

-5-10 seconds game freezes every map, enuf that the game thinks i DCd and resets fog of war on my map.

-Crafting... what crafting is in the game, is still inaccessible. 400 hours into this league and ive seen 1 of the higher end omens and still have yet to get it since the deferral cost is so high.

-Respect of time, this is not happening. With the scarcity of crafting items, currency, cost of death, forced to trade instead of play the game... This needs to be addressed. A lot of people dont like to trade, or dont like to trade CONSTANTLY to be able to progress. The schedule is for 3 month cycles and currently, for the average player, the time investment needed for 1 char is insane, making it impossible to enjoy the game with multiple chars (that can actually clear content)




Im hoping with time and feedback, GGG will make all the improvements that need to be made, i had so much fun in season 1, my first PoE game, coming from D2, D3, D4, Last Epoch, it felt great. I played a Spark stormweaver, tried SSF, struggled a lot to figure things out but once everything clicked i was able to build the char. I tried warrior (magma barrier), chronomancer (cold needs a buff), witch (cold fireball demonform), deadeye (lightning arrow), pathfinder (shattering conc), and blood mage (when i got temporalis). I said the whole time that the only balanced class that i played was stormweaver. The gear requirement for the power, felt fair. Everything else felt like it needed an insane amount of gear to even feel viable to play in the endgame. This league, i have another chronomancer (cold still needs a buff), ritualist (bleed), ritualist (rarity bot (worthless)), deadeye (lightning spear).

The game is extremely fun, but at the same time, extremely infuriating with all the bugs and balance issues. So this is my feedback, in hopes that someone at GGG reads this and good changes come. D4 and PoE2 are holding the same player numbers (about 22k average) on steam right now, which the low numbers dont help the economy. I know PoE2 can hold more players, with the proper changes.

GGG just remember, people will only give u money if they WANT to, and they only WANT to if the game is worth playing. If you can only hold onto the playerbase for a week or 2 at launch, people wont want to give you money.