Just Played 10 hours of PoE 2, It's a Great Game but PoE 2 has an Identity Crisis (LE will benefit)

General
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We also got presented with a very clear-cut vision and also very clear-cut comments related to said vision beforehand.
‘Cooldowns in ARPGs are simply bad’
‘Combination mechanics only lead to muscle memory and should be avoided’

Those were basically citations of an interview a while before release.

So I dunno… kinda sounds like PoE 2 definitely has a identity crisis, a heavy one too.

And yes, I know GGG, that’s why I’m saying that they have. PoE 1 went through the same issues with Archnemesis. ‘Nono, it’s not Archnemesis and the ‘lootgoblins’ made through that which are at fault, absolutely not!’. And well… they were exactly the fault. It’s been dialed in at around 20% or so of the effect they formerly had, basically making it a ‘extra vanity’ compared to a core supporting mechanic as it was planned.
Also the repeated implementations of mechanics which force players into storing tons and tons of items in quad tabs. Be it during Necropolis, Synthesis or even Delve when it came out.
GGG is extremely prone to repeating well known mistakes as well as doubling down on severe issues semi-regularly.
That’s one of their biggest weaknesses, which led to 10 years of ‘no asynchronous trading of any kind’ which likely has hurt them extremely over the course of that time since consumables needed to comfortably run content shouldn’t fall under friction mechanics to such a degree, especially since 90% of it won’t be used by a person but the goal is to focus on a few chosen mechanics in PoE 1. It’s shown that enforcing to branch out is a detriment for player retention (as they get burned out) rather then an upside.

And… surprise surprise, we see the exact same thing happening in PoE 2. Which is why the scrutiny is heavy.

I do. But in EA you need to still mention which things are bad and which good.
Also, GGG isn’t treating their own game as a EA version and it shows. ‘No major changes during a league’… which league? They’re EA! Switch stuff, ruin builds, mess about… experiment! That’s what EA is there for after all. After EA it’s not. A lesson EHG has learned this last year, being reminded about that over and over.
EA is a playground, release is when ‘shit hits the fan’ so to say.

As a player though it’s nonetheless good to say ‘Yes, in the current state xyz is feeling bad or is missing’ and that’s viable. Because we can’t infer if they’ve thought about that specific point yet or even the detail of the specific area being mentioned. Sure, late-game will be improved… but what to change is very hard to infer for developers in detail, that’s why EA is such a very important step for large projects, and when properly used a massive boon for overall quality long-term.

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Good post. I mentioned it in another topic, I think Jonathan is mostly responsible for the disconnect between the game and us. .2 is just an awful patch from a player perspective, damn near everything was nerfed and the campaign is an even bigger slog.

Ziz interviewed Mark and Jon yesterday, and it was overly obvious Jonathan is trying to make something he enjoys when he goes home, whereas Mark is the man responsible for fun. It feels like they have a shared “vision,” but have very different ideas about how to create that vision, and the end result is what we have right now - a game that is devoid of fun.

I do not enjoy the game as it is, but I also know what I signed up for. I will wait for the next big patch and hope the team cooks up something better than .2. Im just glad they nerfed everything to hell now so the only real way is up, imagine if 1.0 played like the current patch., oof. GGG has proved themselves to be competent over the decade of PoE, so I give them the benefit of doubt here. The game is very rough right now, thats for damn sure.

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This is 100% true and someone became famous for doing that in Elden Ring. An infamous player by the name “Let me Tank Him” arrived.

Here is a story of someone who broke all the rules and did what no one else could do in a souls like game becoming an actual legend and unkillable Raid boss.

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Well said, I cant argue against your sentiment at all. It is very weird GGG is naming their big patches and treating them as leagues, when in reality they are just currency and item nukes (I think you can play old characters in the new patch though? Not quite sure). I fell the interview with Ziz yesterday was a step in the right direction of them acknowledging issues the community deem important. Jonathan just seems so damn stubborn.

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I’ve done the campaign 7 times in .10 and loved it. Actually it was my favorite part of the game and thought progression felt good. Then end game felt terrible and builds became broken.

.20 the campaign feels like Classic WoW and I need to farm white mobs for weeks before I can actually play the game. Which isn’t very ARPG like or even souls like. It’s old school MMO grinding.

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Not what was mentioned here. Slower paced ‘yes’. What we got delivered ‘not even remotely’.

It’s not. The things promised and said as clear-cut design philosophies behind it are actively at part switched 180 degrees. It’s the exact opposite of how some points were said to be designed, which is obviously a problem.

That’s exactly the time to do that. As well as to upheave underpowered builds.
That’s literally what EA is for. And you need to take the hit of ‘disenchanted players’ because otherwise you won’t use the short timeframe properly to allow dialing in on a decent baseline overall. Much like EHG missed out to do.

Yes, and it feels shit.
From the perspective of a PoE 1 player.
From the perspective of a Souls-like player.
From the perspective of a Standard player.
From the perspective of a darn loot goblin.

All of them feel awful. None is ‘good’.
I can deal easily with hard games that have hefty scarcity… some games thrive on that. But PoE 2 is not designed properly to allow that. The tune would be entirely different if it were. No Rest for the Wicked is designed around hefty scarcity and it works because the design is properly handled according to that. PoE 2 not.

Agreed, so don’t provide them.

Why increase cooldown of explosive grenade from 3 seconds to 8 though? When it was already a underperforming build barely on par with warriors? And warrior builds felt - as mentioned - ‘clunky and slow’. The slow can be fine, but the clunky is not.

Absolutely wasn’t, reasons above mentioned. It’s utterly wrong to even think it was.

Especially since your highlighted combos were initially not a part of the design choice but implemented when Jonathan found out ‘oh… to have meaningful combat you need to have combos… or the depth is missing!’ as well as cooldown because ‘oh… otherwise people will just use the strongest 2 combo method rather then thinking about rotations and higher skill-based combat!’.
Which went as mentioned… counter to initial design.

Yes, and you got absolutely no clue clearly what makes those games great :rofl:
Because it’s plainly spoken insulting to hear that it’s ‘souls like’ direction when PoE 2 is simply a shitty balanced game currently and nothing else. Not even close to anything what ‘souls like’ represents.

And with this I do agree on the other hand.

Not only from the player perspective. There’s clear-cut design errors in there.
The balance between player speed and monster speed… space and time to allow the planned cmbinations to even exist… simply not existing.

How should you set up a 5 skill combination taking 7 seconds when for example a boss gives you a 3 second window every 10 seconds? So theoretically you need 3 of those windows to set it up… and the debuffs and buffs don’t last that long.
That’s a baseline issue of design, it’s not a ‘oh… that couldn’t have been seen’. That’s core planning for enemies in a game.

You also can in PoE 1, just without the ongoing league mechanic, which usually is supposed to go core and the lackluster implementation permanently afterwards has been a big point of contention for Standard players. FOMO and all. But that’s another topic.

But yes, in PoE 2 you can just play on your set up character and have no change at all. Not even early adopter exclusive content.

Yes, a very important one.
And Jonathan lets me worry, heavily.

And now the campaign feels worse then end-game in 0.1 but the end-game actually feels good!

Kinda a mess I would say.

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I had no problems with doing the 3 acts twice in PoE, but I cant make myself go thru the 3 acts in PoE 2 more than twice during a “league,” its exactly as you said. Just give us our damn alts back and let us make something usable, its beyond frustrating. There is not “crafting” early game, we are wholly reliant on drops that dont exist.

Im so glad LE launch is close, I made it through the acts once and had enough for now. I have tons of faith in GGG, but in PoE 2’s current state, this aint it chief.

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Well, at least the gameplay itself felt great in 0.1
In 0.2 though you feel perma stunlocked as you can’t get your combos going… unless you’re ranged, then you’re moving as swiftly backwards as france did during their wars.

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Except…they didn’t launch a separate version of the game. They launched an ARPG game that let players be powerful. Their released videos didn’t show a “slow and methodical” gameplay where positioning and combos were important. People paid for what was represented to them. They got 4 months of that representation. Then, instead of incrementally and surgically bringing it closer to their “vision”, they just smashed every class and build, making all that work meaningless in a single patch.

No, doing a bait and switch is disingenuous. Either you start with your vision or stay the course and refine what you launched.

I don’t know how many betas you’ve done, but aside from planned and scheduled wipes, I’ve never seen a build massacre like this in any beta. Also, your use of the words “broken builds” is subjective, as ARPGs are meant to do mass mayhem. And that’s how POE 2 launched…as an ARPG. Just because they just swing a nerf sledgehammer around willy nilly and call it “beta” because they want to slow gameplay down to a crawl doesn’t change those spots.

Patch notes 10 hours before launching 0.2 , and no mention of any such nerfs to that extent previously is not being transparent.

And why shouldn’t it be? What’s wrong with wholesale destruction if that’s how a player wants to spend their time? Every other ARPG allows for such gameplay. So, logically, POE 2 is no longer an ARPG, which means people were misled. And if you’re not supposed to be powerful and obliterate screens of mobs, why are you playing this game again? It sounds like you prefer that “Dark Souls” gameplay, so this isn’t the game for you.

And there’s my point laid out. YOU are one of the customers that like that “Dark Souls” gameplay, so you’re happier than a pig in… However, as mentioned, the video gameplay releases and what players had for 4 months was not that style of gameplay. So, with all the years to create their “vision”, why did they release it with ARPG style to begin with? Did they not think the skills through? Did they not playtest it? Given how poorly thought out 0.2 was, my guess is that they were just too lazy to think it through, and getting those supporter packs for launch as an ARPG was just too hard to resist.

Before I start a game, I look at the available info and media first. It’s my time and my dime, and I want to be careful with it. My personal game style is not “Dark Souls”. It’s feeling powerful over packs of mobs on my way to their boss. I don’t have to be fast, but I should be able to kill metric tons of them before they get me. If I wanted that “slow and meaningful combat”, I’d have done it with a single player game, where the story, graphics, animations, and skills are infinitely better.

Some of us just want to get in front of the computer, relax, and take out the frustrations of the day on a horde of weaker critters. It’s our dopamine. Selling us supporter packs for a game that looks like it promises that, then bludgeons that with poorly done nerfs across the board is misdirection in the least.

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They are literally doing that. They launched with a souls like ARPG in .10 and because it’s Beta there were broken builds. It’s still in BETA and .2 reeled in those broken builds and they were transparent about this whole process months ago. It shouldn’t be ANY shock that this continues to happen to get the game where it needs to be for the Official launch.

PoE 2 launched in early access as a Souls Like ARPG. A next gen different ARPG that should be compared to other ARPGs like No Rest for the Wicked in the genre.

PoE 2 never said they are gonna be Diablo like, Last Epoch like or PoE 1 like. The only one confused here is you and players like you that clearly haven’t paid attention or took time to listen.

Again PoE 2 is a souls like ARPG. Stop comparing it too Diablo like games.

Hogwash they said builds were getting gutted months ago it’s just wasn’t the time to do that and it’s best to wait to a major update and Season reset to do it.

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There is nothing ‘souls-like’ about PoE 2. Never was… never will be.

No Rest for the Wicked is a souls-like ARPG… PoE 2 is a Hack’N’slash.
Those 2 are inherently not possible to combine. One has hordes of monsters and hence takes away the methodical fighting… the other needs tactical treatment of every situation and small mistakes can be costly.

It’s nonsense simply and a really bad notion picked up by the community, nothing else.

Hence all ‘souls-like’ follow ups are as nonsensical.

Actually yes, exactly that. It was designed even as a separate campaign for PoE 1 initially. Then detached because the game feel is too different.

That doesn’t make it a different genre instead. Once more, nonsense simply by now.

They said overpowered builds will be and the pace is slightly too fast.
Not that we go from a sports car into a toy car for kids. People expected - reasonably so - a normal business car… or a mini at least.

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I think you missed an important word: Surgically. Nothing about 0.2 was surgical, carefully thought out, and implemented carefully after testing. This is apparent with the number of bugs on day 1 that would have been easily discoverable, such as newbie zone discos. 0.2 didn’t “reel in broken builds”. It nerfed EVERY build, regardless if it was broken or not. Tell me, how many Acolyte of Chayula characters were broken? How many mercs were using explosive grenades? How was Hexblast being abused?

We’re disagreeing again on this. This “Dark Souls” style is NOT an ARPG. It’s an attempt to make an online single player RPG, albeit poorly done. Even given that they said it wasn’t going to be like Diablo, LE, etc, they still launched it as one of those style games. You keep thinking this was trying to fix a few broken builds. They nerfed EVERY build. They even took out Grim Feast, giving mage types no protection whatsoever. They nerfed minions, making witch useless, unless you can tell me how a witch is supposed to do positioning and combos they don’t have while the mobs push past their low damage minions and beeline for the witch? They took away the meat shield aspect of the hellhound. Why? What was broken about that? Now hellhound is just a low damage minion that takes up 2 ascendancy points to get.

I challenge you to link that, especially if it’s after release. They might have said some things BEFORE release, but likely not after release when they were still collecting supporter packs.

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There are many different ARPG genres. That’s what you aren’t understanding.

No Rest for the Wicked
“No Rest for the Wicked” is a Soulslike action RPG

I feel like you don’t understand what type of game PoE 2 is. I question if you understand or even listen to Dev interviews. It’s players like you that are having a hard time because you literally are playing deaf and blind.

Again it’s great that Devs are making new ARPGs like No Rest for the Wicked and PoE 2 where they push the envelope on new next gen ARPGs and gameplay design. If this isn’t your type of game don’t play it and stick to traditional Diablo like ones.

Every buiild and scaling needed nerfed to bring it inline with the vision of the game. It’s early access, large sweeping changes like this is going to happen. It sounds like early access isn’t something you should be playing if you aren’t ready for these types of changes. Where builds and even skills get completely removed and new ones added.

Removing Grim feast was a good call it was really badly designed and best to remove it till a new iteration can be created. This is just smart by the Devs. I give them credit.

I challenge you to have more than zero awareness which you have displayed in your post. They said it. Maybe pay attention.

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But not a ‘Hack’N’Slash’

That’s the difference.

A souls-like game is the playstyle. Hack’N’Slash is the playstyle. The camera perspective is just that… the perspective.

Nah @AbombDaChamp … that’s you sadly.

Also… just for general information. Dark Souls is a ARPG.

Fairly awful take.

Being fed for several years + 4 months into beta the same thing and it changes then? Not acceptable, simple as that.
If intentional it’s fraudulent even.

Maybe don’t have shit takes which don’t uphold scrutiny instead, but well, expected I would argue.

This is a form of argumentation which is based very heavily on simply invalidating the opposition. It has nothing to do with finding solutions are going towards ideas. It’s solely being offensive for the sake of being offensive.

Detailed information has been presented that can easily be looked up, they are facts after all and permanently visible online without much effort. Such a ‘switcheroo’ is plainly spoken not a proper communication basis.

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Ah…, I see what’s going on here. I suspected earlier, but now it’s much clearer. This isn’t a debate with you. That takes at least two parties looking for a middle ground of understanding. That’s not what’s happening here. Your repeated attempts to personalize it to me directly, without answering my points clearly or providing requested evidence for your points, only serves to confirm this.

I could continue to go back and forth…back and forth…on this over and over again, but I’m just not motivated to hear more jabs at me from you. You’re quick to dismiss my thoughts (and the thoughts of others) on gameplay in your zeal to defend GGG. That’s fine. You have the game you want…so again…why are you here?

I’m here because I like the ARPG style of LE. I like how they let you feel powerful. I like how they’re exactly as advertised, and I can’t forsee them doing nerfs on a massive game-changing level because their “vision” is different than their launch.

You’re here…why? Your statements and love for 0.2 suggest you want that slow, methodical gameplay where you’re much weaker than the mobs. You really like their vision, which is a polar opposite to EHG’s vision. So…you play your game, I’ll play mine.

It’s your time, it’s your dime. Enjoy it as you will, and so will I.

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Exactly

I’m here in LE for a typical Diablo blasting OP build.
I’m playing PoE 2 now as we speak for a slower souls like build progression.

It’s great we have different types of games and the ARPG market is looking great in 2025. As gamers we should be thrilled.

Its because you are trying to have a discussion and you are very uninformed on the topic. You can do some research and when you are better versed in the topic and have the knowledge to have a conversation we can have one.

It is not my job to teach you and bring you up to speed on everything you missed because you weren’t paying attention the whole time and missed years of conversations. That’s on you.

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Gaslight much?

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Say the uninformed person which doesn’t even know the difference between a souls-like and a Hack’N’Slash game…
Thinking one is a ARPG and the other isn’t.

Action-Role-Playing-Game.
Action stands for real time. Opposite to round-based.
Role-Playing stood for the immersion into the character… which has been lost over time and now stands mostly for levels, equipment and similar. ‘Adventure’ would fit better since you don’t do character choices… but it is what it is.
Game is self-descriptive.

Yeah, please don’t. For that you would need to know what you’re talking about actually.

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You know, sadly I agree with this, and I think it’s both the player and developer’s faults. Perhaps the genre’s as well. This goes as far back to Everquest or even further. The built in need to play for gear took away most of the immersion. No character customization hurt even more.

I remember my last moments in Everquest beta. I was a halfling, sitting on a beach next to a troll. Total strangers, but we were watching the sun set as the beta was closing. Such a magic moment for me to this day. it’s sad that such things are non-existent in today’s gaming. But…progress, right?

Oh, and this is an example of a fruitful conversation in case anyone was wondering.

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Not the same kind of example. In Elden Ring, for example, you can easily overlevel and make encounters a lot easier. I suck at souls-games, don’t like them, but I was killing bosses with just 2-3 shots because I had overleveled so much.
It meant that I could make a few mistakes and still win the fight.

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