To mention NRftW instead of Diablo4 - OK OK 
But I’ll stick to 17.04 (or April, 17 if you wish)
Congrats, PoE 2 is having an absolutely horrid launch. Everything that could go bad just did - horrible optimization, endless crashes, whacked balance, hoooo boy
my poe2 .02 experience thus far has been crash, crash, crash, reboot pc x3, restore from back up, get warrior to trials, pick ascension, and guess what? smith of kitava not available, lol. my forge guard friday has been foiled!
As we can see… on par to usual release-day talks.
‘Nothing works!’
‘It’s the worst thing ever!’
‘Horrid launch!’
And all the while 90% of the time this happens, both with new releases and with updates 
Never play on patch-day! That saying is there for a reason.
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Idk about 90% of the time, but 0.1 had even more crashes and it was a blast.
Huntress feels nice, 2 days definitely wouldn’t be enough for having fun with her. At early acts, feels a bit OP though.
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As it turns out you could have launched along side POE2, the new patch is complete and utter shit, they managed to make the game even worse, quit after act 1 because of how bad it it. T_T now to wait for LE launch
I think people who didn’t like campaign will hate Poe 2. Since you are saying “even worse”, I guess campaign was already quite bad for you?
GGG had the worst league launch ever. even their most loyal streamers are pissed. there is no need to delay LE for 2 weeks.
What I hate is how it is generally accepted that launch day performance is gonna be garbage and the game - a buggy mess. How did it come to this?
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For Single-player games it’s generally not accepted.
For live-service games? Basically a given.
Server infrastructure, multiplayer code, extremely tight deadlines which are baseline unrealistic to even manage. Stuff breaks no matter how much you try to handle it in time. I’m more surprised how often GGG managed to not have major massive launch day issues compared to the times GGG has em.
Well, looks like the feedback right now is mostly negative. And this is putting it kindly, I’d say in the official forums it is overwhelmingly negative.
Boy, if only there was an alternative we could play right now until GGG fix their crap
Its heavily depends on what you play, monk and pathfinder flew through it, minions and melee felt horrible. Right now it feels slow and the white mobs feel like bosses some times, Funniest thing is that for huntress the auto attacks do more damage then most actual skills, and i hear for warriors its the same thing. Its just no longer fun.
Auto-attacks are pure damage, while other skills have some additional utility by the cost of damage, so overall it makes sense for me. Though balance among huntress skills is off in early game, some skills feel very weak, some feel OP. Damage of most melee skills feels a bit too low indeed.
All classes including huntress have lower damage than in 0.1, it doesn’t mean they should feel horrible, just different, and maybe for different kind of players I guess. It’s the old problem that GGG are offering to ARPG players, most of which wants to zoom, to enjoy action combat which they are introducing in Poe 2. Targeted on wrong group of players. I’m sure many roguelike enjoyers, who like challenges and more complex combat, will love it. But I guess they had no choice, how could they not target Poe 2 on ARPG players.
To be fair… I utterly love rogue-likes, just the lack of permanent progression is a bit of a bummer for me, the overall playstyle of the genre? Amazing!
But PoE 2? A very underwhelming early experience simply. Their game design and vision simply doesn’t fit together.
Slow and meaningful combat? Then you need to give the player the respective time and means to react according to a situation!
Space to do so, meaning not flooding with enemies.
Far stronger individual mob ability compared to now… ability wise, not stat-wise. Sponges don’t make for good gameplay, mechanical ones do.
If they wanna go there GGG needs to solely look at actual souls-likes and at No Rest for the Wicked. They both do it right in that regard.
If they wanna make a Hack’N’Slash game (as it’s supposed to be, unless they wanna switch genre) then they need to work within the confinements of that. You can’t create meaningful slow-paced combat when your enemies are fast, hitting hard and you’re a wet noodle not doing damage and being unable to avoid damage or have no reliable regeneration abilities. And even if you have those things… you need to provide the player with enough space to execute maneuvers.
All of that just isn’t properly combined there.
LE has a similar issue with their mechanics, lacking the proper combinations to make a grand enjoyable whole out of it rather then dismembered individual great mechanics… just not together in combination to produce a proper ‘whole’
I am feeling absolutely the same. I checked ARPGs, because I basically just want a roguelike with long-term progression. For me, Poe 2 is mostly doing that. Soul-like games have very different gameplay, I don’t like it as much.
It doesn’t necessary need to be slow-paced, just meaningful, interesting. But most likely, it has to be slower in order to nail it. Depends on playstyle, most playstyles don’t work with too fast monsters. But for example for huntress, if some monsters jumping on you and attack too fast, it’s easier to parry and do a lot of damage from it, so those fast monsters are not a problem. But yes, overall they don’t fit well I think.
Mostly i feel salty about all of it because they abandoned poe 1, if I still had a choice between poe 1 and poe 2 i would just play 1, but no the boat league has been going on for what, almost a year.
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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.
About slower pacing — what I meant is it can be not the only option, potentially there are more different solutions, like some instant crowd control in order to counter too fast monsters, or making the fastest monsters very squishy so you could one-shot them, or parry system works too. I think, maybe GGG just want to check, how it currently works and which options do they have. I think fast-paced combat can be very tactical too, for example in Synthetic combat is very tactical, while fast paced. I’m not sure though if Poe 2 can be like that without slowing things down. I don’t know which way GGG will choose, but they probably will fix it one way or another, and make combat good.
Regarding energy exhausting — yeah, it’s very depends on person’s preferences. I like both types of games, can enjoy non-stop action as well, where you constantly need to be concentrated, it can be fun too.
Classic roguelikes like ADOM or Caves of Cud are awesome, love them too. But I usually want action.
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Cant Wait !
Now that weve all seen how awful PoE 2 is can we just launch it
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