Absolutely! I’m not against slow-paced combat, quite the contrary, I love it a lot even!
I do play souls-likes, I play Monster Hunter, No Rest for the Wicked. I also go along with turn-based games which are actual rogue-likes like the original in design, hence very in-depth meaningful choices that need to be thought out.
But all of that isn’t simply available in PoE 2. There’s a reason why the combat in Monster Hunter feels great, despite battling the same monster for 10… 20… 40 minutes, and it doesn’t feel like ‘a slog’.
There’s also a reason why Souls-likes feel more fun combat wise then PoE 2.
The first thing is a great example with Monster Hunter, long fights need to showcase progression in them and allow proper resource management. The option to recover - even if it’s hard - and deal with the things thrown at you. Flask usage in PoE is immediate, but you use it when you need it, simple as that. So it’s either not used at all (since you avoid everything) or used very swiftly as fights are short.
Also it focuses mostly on a single enemy. Sure, interruptions occur, and those are even good to occur! But the chaos is ‘contained’, your goal in front of your eyes.
In comparison in PoE 2 it’s fast paced mechanic after mechanic, hence barely time to think, only time to react. It causes enormous mental fortitude to play near perfect for a short time in that case, not allowing long-term fights to happen without ‘mental exhaustion’ to set it. ‘I have no energy left, when is it going to stop? I already invested all of that energy into it!’ and the leeway between loss and success is small in comparison.
On the other hand in Souls-likes the enemies are extremely contained. Groups exist but it’s ‘this segment of stuff, then the following… then the next’. Combine em and gather several enemies and it becomes a mess in general, you get easily overwhelmed. Which represents the ‘common gameplay’ of PoE 2 non-stop currently. Pacing and power for the player is set up to not allow as many enemies to exist, hence each needs to be more meaningful. Drop-rates and rewards are similar to PoE 1 though and hence it showcases a heavy disconnect there. Overwhelming and unrewarding. High investment of energy with low return. That doesn’t feel good.
Combat becomes meaningful if you can actually influence it rather then scrambling in the hopes to not get ‘stuck’ in a corner by mistake since you have a hard time to traverse and position… and then as a result rewarding you accordingly. Currently a group of white mobs in the campaign feel like a dangerous essence mob in end-game. But the essence mob provides essences which are valuable and highly sought after… the white mobs give you… nothing? That’s a bad state simply for the effort return.
So if GGG wants to cause a slower-paced game they need to align their mechanics accordingly.
In LE it’s a bit different instead. The individual system are all worthwhile… but the interactions between them are heavily skewed. What’s the focus? Crafting? Item drops? Modification of existing items like the LP system? Targeted farming of specialized rewards? It doesn’t align well, and especially in 1.2 it’ll become extremely grating with the champion drops.
Same as with the white mob example in PoE 2 versus the worthwhile fights always providing fitting returns in Monster Hunter… it needs to align, but doesn’t.
Get a champion drop, ok… it’s on the wrong base → Not worthwhile, empty rewards.
Get a champion drop, it’s on the right base but the crafting didn’t turn out well → not worthwhile.
To alleviate such issues usually games focus on specific aspects which it’s catered around. Either you have a limited drop-system like Grim Dawn which enforces high-powered but fixed affixes (and only 2 as well) onto an item… or you have the drops be ‘all over the place’ like in PoE and instead funnel everything into the crafting mechanics to allow adjusting your result heavily and without many limitations (endless re-crafts basically).
In comparison LE currently has the ‘all over the place’ drops similar to PoE… but the crafting mechanic limits you heavily for outcomes. So neither the drops nor the crafting itself become the intrinsically ‘rewarding’ aspect of itemization. Both leave you ‘empty’ often. Drops aren’t rewarding since they are enforced to be crafted. Crating isn’t because you only have a very limited amounts of adjustments. So people get their most rewards through LP crafting (which is the most talked about area for a reason) to make up for it. That system is not supposed to take this position though, but it’s set up to allow it to a degree.
They all simply ‘clash’ still.
EHG needs to either limit drops severely to properly interweave them with crafting… or empower crafting to alleviate the drop-range instead. As for LP? The most feasable direction would to either enforce a much higher effort investment (rather then a simple drop and then skip to boss mechanics) for it to reduce the perceived rewards and leaving it nonetheless in the powerful state it is… or reduce the variance in results when the bases are kept so incredibly rare as they are currently for good top-tier rolls. Hence for example costly modifiers (from a resource gathered during the dungeon as example) to allow focusing on the specific affixes you want and hence reduce the fail-chance.
Those systems all only work when properly interwoven, otherwise the same issues steadily spoken about creep up. ‘It feels unrewarding’, ‘I can’t progress’, ‘It takes too long’, ‘It’s a bad mechanic’ or whatever else comments creeping in because they’re not fluid and intuitively designed to make you not even think about them, just ‘happening’ and ‘feeling right’ instead, not warranting to think about them in-depth since something ‘feels off about it’ simply… but near nobody able to 100% nail it down as to ‘what’ that actually is.