Path of Exile 2 Review (MrVagtastic)
Much of the discourse around this game is all or nothing. I have a more nuanced take than "It needs to be as hard and as punishing as possible" and "It's not PoE1".
My Perspective: Endgame PoE1 player, PoE2 Campaign Enjoyer, PoE2 Endgame Hater
TLDR: Campaign is great after loot fix, endgame will kill the game once the "needs to be harder" crowd actually hits it and spend hours getting literally nothing when playing an ARPG due to overly punishing design. If GGG makes this atlas reward structure opt-in via ruthless mode or the like, I'll return and continue my spending, but until then I've got more than everything I need in PoE1 so I can continue as a F2P from here out anyway.
Challenge and Combat:
The game is not hard, there is a challenge when first learning the fights but it becomes pressing dodge on cue. You can think of this as being "skilled" if you need to feed your ego, but bosses have clear telegraphs and once you get that down you should be fine.
I do enjoy the combat, but I believe there is no "skill" involved when survival is pressing spacebar when the boss says the line/does the animation telling you to press space. I know the telegraphs are needed, but that's just my opinion. Fighting games take skill and I do not play fighting games.
Build Diversity:
Build diversity is extremely poor in comparison to PoE 1. Skills are locked to weapon types and the skill tree is dumbed down to the point of picking the %increased damage nodes for the flavor of your class you picked. Part of it is the stripping of defensive layers, which I am in favor of, but as a hipster build enjoyer I find it slightly above D4 level, but I haven't touched D4 since early access release.
Crafting:
Crafting is a joke. I don't think we need PoE1 crafting, but what we got is essentially just turning white items into ground drops. You have so little in the way of tipping odds in your favor that you're better off trading the materials for chaos/ex and trading for someone else's lucky drop,
Campaign:
So far great. Initially even under geared I was able to beat everything usually after a handful of tries. The main issue is low player damage drawing out the fights, You can, and I did, overcome that by dodging it is just tedious. After the loot increase, upgrades became reasonable and everything really flowed nicely.
Endgame:
This is where the game falls apart and I think will either cause the game to fail or force the devs to rethink their strategy here. This is pure design hubris. So the atlas is like a boardgame and you move to spaces that have different "reward tiles". If you die one time, you lose any chance at getting that reward (or bossfight/etc.) but have to reattempt that node in order to advance to the next "reward tile" space as well as losing all the time spent and 10% of your experience which is much slower to get in this game.
Remember above I mentioned the stripping away of defensive layers, it does solve some complexity/bloat issues which is why I support it, but there are not enough tools in the game to allow any build to avoid one shots after a certain point. Getting off screened still exists as well as on death effect with visual clutter and sometimes there is just zero counter play. Shield charge hit a pebble causing you to be surrounded and can't roll out? Fuck you, back to start and losing hours of progress and you get to do it over with no reward.
Remember, I said once you learn the fight's they're easily doable. Yes, you can do them first try in maps and be fine, but if you catch a stray one shot you haven't seen before, you don't get to run the fight back, remember? This isn't challenge it's a complete disrespect for player time and just needlessly punishing.
Don't get me wrong you can progress, until you can't.
I didn't follow a build guide, but have seen Kripp talk about streamers showcasing their builds in like tier 1 and 2 maps and this is 100% not representative of performance lol. Just be warned if you've bothered to read this far.
Chris and Johnathon, you're not my dads, I'm a grown ass man, get fucked if you think you're gonna punish me. People say they like "punishing gameplay" until they actually experience it and I know most of these people running their mouths haven't finished the campaign yet. You can make a ruthless mode for PoE 2 and have it be as punishing as you'd like, until then I am not boosting your metrics or continuing my financial support.