I’ve played with friends recently, and while I did not have a problem with the inventory as I was used to PoE before playing the game, they seemed to be extremely frustrated with the menus. The main concerns were the following:
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Tried to put the shards in the stash. For this one, I think the shards should simply not go in your inventory. You see them on the ground, and when you take them. I know of nobody who actually look at their shards inside the inventory and dealing with them there is cumbersome and adds nothing to the game. Maybe you should just add exclamation messages when a user pick a rare shard instead. I’m not suggesting auto-picking here, just not put them in the inventory before they are ultimately sent to the crafting materials anyway.
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Make it clearer / easier to equip weapons in the inventory. Just click / right click on a slot could show you your choices in a list where you can equip them. This is a minor thing, but getting to know how to equip items was annoying to less experimented players.
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Now, it may be the controversial part of my suggestions, but I think inventory management brings nothing to the game. Having items which takes different amounts of “capacity” points and a max capacity would do the same job, without slowing down the game for inventory management, and would enable clearer filters to find items. There is a reason, other than stacking, why I liked the “special” stash tabs in PoE: it made it easier to find items and visualize them. I even bought the unique tab just for this, and the only thing I didn’t like about it was that you could not stack the uniques. The game is about killing things, lootings and crafting; I feel like inventory management is just a chore that removes fun from the game without real value. The idol Tetris looks cool, but becomes tiring after a time too.
Now, I’m saying this not because it bother me a lot, but because playing with 2 friends which are not hardcore into the genre, I’ve had comments like: “The game is super fun, but their inventory and menus almost made me rage quit” and “I deal with the inventory by using my starting items and picking almost nothing until I die too much, so I can avoid going into it as much as possible”. So I think while the menus and inventory are perfectly OK for ARPG fans, I think they are and anti-QoL feature pushing away people who would otherwise appreciate the game greatly while not adding significantly to the game’s main gameplay loop.
So, I think the game could benefit from (optional?) “simplified” versions of the menus which are functionally equivalent (capacity) but remove the manual inventory management part from the game for those who chose so. I also think having an option to not put shards in the inventory would be a small easy step to reduce this problem, or at least the initial frustration it can provoke.
About the rest of the menus, it could be better with only simple UI QoL things, like making the possible nodes clearer on the passive tree, and having a dropdown of choices when clicking to specialize a skill, instead of the unintuitive way of click add + click skill, or go in skill to find (hidden until now) “specialize” button, make it clear which text is hoverable and have extra info, search in character menu, etc. I think aside from the inventory, the main issue of the menus is discoverability of features, especially for first time players.
