About endgame basics

Combat:
As long as there are still hundreds of monsters per screen poe2 is unfortunately going in poe1 direction where you either one shot the whole screen or die in less than a second with no reaction time. Which is the opposite of what was intended with meaningful combat, engaging gameplay and also completely disables combo play, shields, buckles etc.

Imo we need 1/10th the monsters with 10x the health and 20x the value. And half size maps to go with it. Bosses should be way more frequent too as they are in campaign (or more), and have more health and more value.

We also need proper ways to build defenses. So fights are more back and forth and attrition (over a few seconds, not over a long time) instead of instant kill or die.

Atlas:
Also endgame requires too much set up and I'm not talking about eliminating bad maps around towers etc like the no-life hardcore streamers talk about. Just the baseline setup. When I do put all my tablets into an area I will be staying there for a very long time which means I'm not exploring the atlas at all.

Imo tablets buffs should stay on the character and travel with us for the next X maps instead of affecting fixed nodes on the atlas. Same for corruption/cleanse, I'd say somehow they travel with us. For example, you complete a nexus that corrupts your next 5 maps, then the 6th map will have the corrupted boss then your next 5 maps are cleansed. These numbers could be modifiable in the atlas tree with nodes like "2 less corrupted maps, 2 more cleansed maps" etc. With these changes, we can explore the atlas and find the unique maps and citadels. And towers won't be so extremely defining but we will want to get to at least one tower every 10 - 20 maps at least to keep the buffs up.