This!!
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It is exactly what I wrote in my review on Steam about PoE 2 even before this patch came out.
They just didnât think their concepts to the end.
Soul-Like mechanics only work because there are barely any op builds. Even if you play a very strong build, you still die easily if you do not know the mechanics and play bosses the way theyâre meant to be played.
However, op builds or very strong combinations of skills, perks, talents and attributes and equipment are the core of any ARPG game as LE or PoE or so. The same as much thinking about offense and defense.
So when you kill it, you basically give players no longer a reason to play the game if they expect to be op or at least very strong at one point. This feeling of accomplishment is it, which is making players of those gamestyles feel addicted to those games.
The same can be said about many other things, such as their endgame mappings, the absolute RNG of itemization while lacking any kind of auction house which would be good to access, and all of that just leads to a game which doesnât know where it wants to go.
If LE wants to avoid those mistakes, EHG should just stick to their concept which is in itself great. There is of course a lot of room for improvement, but it is a decent game already.
And about the delay, so what? At least everybody saw now who wasnât a half-blinded PoE fanboy what PoE 2 is supposed to be in the future.
So next season will be great soon (If EHG doesnât screw up completely)!
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Former fan of POE 2 here, until 0.2.0. Had seen LE referenced, but didnât pay much attention to it then. After the patch notes for 0.2 came out, I immediately bought LE and started playing.
So far, itâs fun! LE isnât afraid to let players feel strong and powerful. You can pick your own names with none of that âunique namesâ garbage. You have an offline mode. Big things that GGG just doesnât know how to do.
I tried 0.2 for all of 10 minutes. I could tell immediately that, aside from the evidence of all the nerfs, that their vision was to make battles with trash mobs âepicâ in their attempt to slow down the gameplay.
Players are leaving in droves. Streamers are giving up on the game. GGG didnât learn from the faults of Blizzard when they tried this with D4. They just did what they did and are even deleting forum posts that speak negatively about the update.
My advice to Eleventh Hour: LEARN from this. Sure, you have a vision, but that vision MUST be balanced against what the community wants to play. Donât let yourselves get a false sense of authority. You develop the game, but the players play the game and help pay the bills. You need the players. Always talk with them, and listen to them. You have a chance to take the throne. Do it wisely by filling the gaps that Blizzard and GGG left wide open for you.
Hereâs to your future success!
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Current Poe 2 is something in between their vision and attempt to adapt it to what community wants to play 
So if EGH should learn something from it, itâs probably something different.
Another topic, I donât understand why people often compare Poe 2 to Soul-like games. Itâs a very different genre, with totally different combat. Maybe most people who compare them just never played soul-like games, Idk.
No, sadly itâs not. The majority of players didnât want this âvisionâ. They want fast, powerful gameplay. GGG is trying to turn it into a Souls type game, but theyâre not accounting for the zergs of trash mobs that stun lock you and kill you with ease. This is very much a case of GGG not listening to their users. In fact, most believe they didnât even play test this release, especially evidenced by the easy to find client crashes in even the first maps.
Plus, the forum post deletes, and no response to the backlash whatsoever means that either theyâre afraid to address it and hopes it blows over, or theyâre doubling down no matter if it blows over. Either way, itâs not working with the paying community.
First of all⌠yes, they want more meaningful and a bit slower paced combat.
Yes, many players want to zoom and rush.
No, itâs not inherently a mistake from GGG to do it, thereâs a distinct playerbase available which enjoys that type of gameplay, as weâve seen with how the campaign during 0.1 was perceived. It was taken up as a fantastic one with some small issues after all⌠despite going entirely against the former quick-paced campaign style of PoE 1.
ALso take into consideration that PoE 1 and 2 need to be sufficiently distinct. If not then PoE 1 can simply be thrown overboard since 2 would just be a âbetterâ version of 1 optimally⌠but that wasnât the goal, the goal was to provide 2 inherently different enough games to warrant splitting them up in the first place (unlike planned initially).
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However, it is a mistake to provide a game that people paid money to be a part of, let them zoomzoom and have fun, and then take it all away for a âvisionâ they allegedly had before they put out 0.1.
The steam counts are already dropping, the negative reviews are coming in, and streamers are raging against this update. Sure, that may leave a playerbase, but itâs going to be a lot smaller than they need to sustain it. Remember, GGG is owned by Tencent, and Chinese companies only care about numbers.
However you slice it, this was an ill-conceived vision that wasnât tested out, with no transparency to the community (the notes dropped 10 hours before launch), and no follow-through to the large number of players no longer willing to play along with this new âvisionâ.
This is both incompetence and apathy rolled up into one patch, one that EHG should capitalize onâŚeven if just assuring players that theyâll never do anything this short-sighted.
If they wouldnât listen to their users, it would be more challenging game. But they removed body blocking, added few portals and did other things like that to move game closer to what current community could play. While they also go to the direction of original vision, wouldnât make sense not to, because what would they do with all those combo-based skills?
And again, it has nothing to do with Souls-like games, Poe 2 is nothing like them and never will be.
What they did was âovercompensationâ of a mechanic, in this case the health levels of mobs primarily having not been adjusted to the combat otherwise. Itâs still not âgoodâ but better at least.
The major issue is that GGG is trying to get the vision of a slower paced but meaningful HackâNâSlash ARPG out. And thatâs plainly spoken⌠not something being done yet, probably even inherently impossible to do in the first place. At least I think so.
On the other hand itâs also a worthwhile endeavour since those Early Access issues actively provide feedback on what exactly players enjoy and allowing them to dial into that before the game is fully in the market.
Itâs been⌠2 days⌠and GGG is known to make wide sweeps at the first 2 weeks after a release.
Give it time, donât count your chickens before theyâre hatched basically.
To a degree agreed there.
Itâs incompetence actually. The apathy part not so much. Mostly incompetence. Lets see if theyâll see the issues there and hence derive proper competence from it.
GGG is providing systems to alleviate the shortcomings. The end-game experience has become overall better then in 0.1 and that⌠with all the current changes! So itâs mostly the early game experience which is screwed up, and that needs fixing now. Overdid it simply. Nobody sane goes through 10-20 hours of absolutely slog without knowing really really well that afterwards the invested effort would become worth it⌠but since end-game was bad in 0.1 long-term nigh nobody knows. And even then the question is âis that amount of time worthwhile to invest?â still.
They also have very weird difficulty curve, where Act 1 is probably the hardest one and then it goes easier each next Act. I guess it adds frustration, when player is starting game from the hardest act. For me personally, it was fun experience, but not everyone feels it this way.
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Honestly, the took away Grim Feast. They didnât announce that it would face changes in a future patch, they disabled it completely until a future date TBD. So, mage types have NO defense at all. This may not be a problem except that, in the witchâs case, the mobs push right past the minions and bee-line to you. They nerfed minion damage. They nerfed spark. They nerfed hexbloom for crissakes. A lot of the nerfs didnât even need to happen because they were badly performing before the nerf to begin with.
This was using C4 to change a spark plug.
The C4 for changing a spark plug is a fairly apt description there.
What I think happened is that GGG tried to reduce the baseline power overall and hence made those broad sweeps⌠but forgot that it changes the whole perception and experience of the game if the other aligning mechanics arenât adjusted accordingly to make up for the shortcomings then. If power level drops for offensive⌠then defensive levels need to increase after all, enemies hit more often, you get overall more damage.
And if that isnât done then mob density needs to substantially be lowered to allow traversing areas and reposition during the increased fighting times, otherwise you just pull more and get cornered gradually.
And well⌠then stuff tends to feel bad simply 
Which, to me, is a longer way of saying they didnât think it through and test it first. I think most of us learn at some point early in life that if you take something away, you have to replace it with something of equal valueâŚin your example, if you remove offense, then add defense. Itâs a simple concept any developer would know. To take it all away and think that your player base is just going to suck it up and deal with it is grossly underestimating how players value their time.
This is a valuable time and marketing angle for EHG right now. They can peel away POE 2 players by assuring them that they have no plans to pull the rug out from under them like this. This can be a good home for ARPG fans because they WANT you to be fast and powerful.
If it was me, Iâd be all over it right now.
As a PoE Veteran who played for more then 5k hours PoE, i am waiting impatiently for 17th of April. PoE currently unplayable, could beat the campaign (leveled more than 8 characters in the PoE 2, 0.1 patch) but have no desire to do so in this patch. Its totally waste of time. Good Luck for your game. I hope you best. Iâll be here at 17th April.
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Regardless of how bad PoE2 0.2 was, it was still a good idea to delay it.
If they hadnât delayed it, content creators would have played LE for 2 days, then they would spend the weekend, at least, playing PoE2. If nothing else, then because they have a compromise with GGG for the twitch drops.
So LE might have a great launch with lots of players and those numbers would drop a lot. They might have recovered those numbers after people tried PoE2, but they still would have had a huge dip in numbers.
Knowing what we now know, the best would have been to delay just one week. But there was no way to know this beforehand, so their decision is still a good one.
Just wanted to give a shout out to your nick, cause Tas is the best. 
4 Likes
My body is ready for LE S2 LETS GOOOOOOO!
When message about Poe 2 starts like this, you already know what it is about
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Patience friends. PoE 2 does not respect players time in my opinion. I hope that Season 2 will have a smooth launch!
I just love how we have multiple choices of arpg in the market now.
Excited to jump into LE and experience all the changes !
(Especially the sentinel rework)
I struggled to keep playing past act 1. Whites were feeling like elites.
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