Does anyone else feel like the game is just designed to make you hate it?

It seems like they are trying to make everyone work very hard for quality of life stuff. Example is sprinting. Why not just have a walk/sprint toggle? What's up with having to dodge roll, steer with the mouse, bounce into stuff, etc. Why not just give boots a movement speed implicant? I dunno.

Don't even get me started about ascending or crafting your own gear, lol.

I honestly find it weird there's still some people that defend it. I don't really understand why anyone would want to play an arpg that spells out it's builds for you like you're a child? Somehow we've gone from a complex creative support system, that lets you automate, trigger and drastically change the functionality of any skill. To basically Minecraft dungeons with new skin.

Yeah i really tried to like it but those things are killing it for me:

- Campain is tedious, slow and too repetitive for doing it every league. Create way to skip it for alts.
- Trials are a complete mess. Most people hated these mechanics in poe1, why torture us... Bring back the old lab or better, just let it die.
- This sprint is the worst mechanic I've seen in any recent arpgs. Remove it and make maps smaller or chars way faster.
- You are punished for trying out new builds. Let us buy gems and support gems from vendors and give us the old hideout crafting bench back. Let gems level up with exp. No need for an extra rnd layer...
- Stay real. It should be poe2 and not a wannebe soulslike arpg. Don't forget what fan base made you survive all those years.

Mission Accomplished.

* Skills are not balanced at all, it almost seems like an insult to skill balancing to relate it to PoE 2.0.
* White mobs should be there to kill optionally, not because if you don't you get stunlocked into the ground and have to reset the whole way you just went.
* Why does everything need to reset if you die?
* Run Speed, LOL.
* Trials, LOL.
* Gear Crafting. LOL, what is currency at low levels. BTW, with the nerf to nodes, this is the only way to gain significant power.
* Sprint, implemented in the most ass way possible.
* Tree nodes have downsides, like what? The whole idea is to become more powerful.
* Trading, admittedly better this league, but behind a paywall and doesn't work for some tabs, how was this not tested?
* 1 shot mechanics, why in early game?
* Massive maps, why?
* 12+ hour campaign? Who the hell wants to do that every character and every 4 months to just begin to play the game.
* Too much urgency. I play games to relax, not to feel like I just did 8 hours of work.

The list goes on, but those are glaring.

this is what happens when you try force a zoomer to play a dark souls game.

surprise suprise, they don't like it.

can't make everyone happy, so devs need to pick a side, communicate it, and stick to it, allowing the other side to peace out and find their fun elsewhere.

take 20 min to kill boss
5 min to kill rares
sometimes 5 hits to kill white mobs
bosses one shot you

"fun game"

game is generally fun, but yes, it can be very rage inducing at certain moments

abyss tends to be a chore, the rare monsters are insanely power crept

one of my abyssal depths ended with 3 rares all having the exact same affixes, and they just kept staying in the same area, completely spamming the area out with lightning mirages and flame pillars, it's complete cancer, i had to go back to town 3 times to refill flasks before i was able to kill them. for me, the issue was being able to stay in long enough to deal damage, it's just hard when you have 20 geyers and 10 lightning mirages on top of you, and those aren't even the worst offenders

completely garbage, i absolutely was yelling at my monitor

there's absolutely zero consistency across the power banding of enemies as you progress through the game.

That's because both POE2 and GGG are in an identify crisis. They do not really know what direction to go so they chose to overlap.

During the campaign the game sets the tone and hints at a more slow and methodical combat. Making you also lose loot on the ground when dying also reinforces this idea of "go slow and be careful", but then an abyss spawns and swarms you like in POE 1, just like that, no lube.

Once you hit endgame you must transition fully to POE 1 super speed one shot builds or there will be no fun, just frustration.

I don't know if GGG can't do anything other than POE 1 or they are unwilling to commit to radical change.

PoE2 is a difficult game, it might take time to learn and get comfortable with. Contrary to what a lot of the criticism says, its not actually really tedious or pointlessly slow. Its actually really good for SSF and most things are very balanced. GGG isnt struggling to figure out what they want PoE2 to be. They know exactly what kind of game it is, and its alreadly exceptional.

There are just a lot of PoE1/D4 fans who dont like that PoE2 isnt just like PoE1/D4. Try playing a bit more. Practice combat. Try thinking through your builds and what you need to progress towards. The majority of skills/classes can get through the campaign with reasonable effort. But the game isnt meant to be like PoE1 where you start blasting the campaign with 100 returning projectiles in the first 3 hours. If thats what you want you need to change your expectations.

PoE2 is a game where you need to learn and to farm gear to progress.
If you are struggling with something - it only means you are doing something wrong.
Once you understand how to cook, game becomes a breeze.

P.S.
Haters gonna hate.