[Jonathans vision] For what audience is this game designed? [Why is he reinventing the wheel?]

PoE2 problems are not solved the same way as PoE1 problems so approaching them from a PoE1 perspective is not really the right way to do it in most cases.

The investment required to spam totems is necessary to ensure that you can't just slap something in a totem and have it be inherently better than self-casting by default.

The opportunity costs in general are there to make sure you're not just an invincible god with 9 instant screen clearing skills - you need to strategically decide where you place your points, and what supports you use, to design the way you want to play your character. Whether that's a mono-skill character or a multi-skill character.

There is no need for as many PoE2-style opportunity costs on skills/keystones/etc in PoE1 because of this mono-skill aspect. Even players with two six links in PoE1 will usually only have one "main" skill just because the "opportunity cost" of making two skills work "feels bad" or since the whole thing is designed around mono-skill, it just ends up being worse to use a multi-skill setup.

The campaign in PoE1 feels like a simple speedbump on the way to endgame because it's simpler to make characters that can speed through it in an environment centered around mono-skill constraints and design. The PoE2 campaign can also be speed-run not much longer than the PoE1 campaign by skilled players, it just has different requirements for doing so, because it has a different design that requires different solutions - it's not quite as simple because of the multi-skill/opportunity cost aspect, and it also has a larger emphasis on mechanical skill.

When you bring the PoE1 mono-skill mentality into PoE2, you're already conditioned to "feel bad" when making one of your skills better makes another one worse. However, removing these opportunity costs would mean that the rest of the game would need to be re-designed in a way that forced everyone to use multi-skill (re:combo) builds, or it would just turn into everyone using 9 god-like skills - but likely still spamming whichever one felt the best making the entire multi-skill mechanism a wasted design.

Where the "combo" centric multi-skill builds shine in PoE2 compared to mono-skill builds the most is not in the flat damage values of the numbers - even though those numbers can be very good - it's in the level of investment required to get "good" numbers.

The level of investment required to hit "good" numbers with multi-skill builds is less restrictive on gear affixes in general - there will be a broader selection of gear affixes that can benefit a multi-skill character, so it's also less sensitive to bad RNG.

This also leads to the fact that the tree in PoE2 is designed to be more attuned to what you roll on your gear along with your skill choices, as opposed to PoE1 where your tree and singular skill choice more strongly dictate the affix requirements of your gear. The problem-solving perspective is almost flipped around.

This is why some might say the tree design in PoE2 can be considered to be more flexible - it has an ability to be responsive to drops for players who are using a multi-skill build. For those players, their gear and skill choices drive the main functionality of a build, and the tree responds, rather than someone dead-set on min-maxing the damage of one particular skill who would also require specific points, and specific affixes, which is the case with every single PoE1 build, since they are mono-skill builds.

PoE1 players seem to be stuck in that "min-max a mono-skill" perspective and I can tell that it results in a lot of frustration when they try to imagine or plan how to get an idea to work, not only because they can see that doing so has much more explicit and visible opportunity costs compared to PoE1 (which gives the ick, and can make build planning more complex by adding "problems to solve"), but it also places much more restrictive gear requirements on them that can make progress slow, or make their entire build "come online" much later than they would normally be used to, turning everything before that into a "slog".

This is likely also the case for people who just follow a build, and for whatever reasons, can't/don't want to use any of the other easily accessible tools the game has available for them to get them to where they want to be.

They will just bash their heads off of someone else's template without considering that the piece of "trash gear" they dropped in their map has a mod on it that, along with another slotted in skill and 10 points respecced, would lower the damage of their mono-skill by 20% but improve both survivability and single-target by 50% and enable them to farm for their more-restrictive min-maxed gear more effectively than their current min-not-maxed version of their mono-skill build.

If you ever want to understand anyone's "vision" and problem solve within the context of that vision, the first step is to notice which direction you're currently looking to properly adjust your own orientation. Otherwise you're going to be confused, frustrated, and come to conclusions that sound as nonsensical as "it's unfair that we can't grow beans on the moon" when the real problem is that you're under the impression that you need to grow beans on the moon at all, when the reality is that you can just walk around the block and pick some beans from a garden. And you feel even madder because the opportunity costs for going to the garden are that you can't also go to the moon, and it feels bad that we can't be all-capable astronaut bean-farmers. We have to choose between being a farmer or an astronaut! However, we do have the ability to grow 80% the amount of beans while only going to the moon for special occasions - but apparently this option feels bad because it is not min-max-able. B l E g H