I know, right? lol RNG in LE is paradise in comparison
Shh, don’t say that. Otherwise Kulze will come and write a book at you on why, acktshually, PoE2’s itemization system is very well designed and far superior to LE’s. 
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In my opinion instead the combat system in poe2 is exactly what I was expecting as the next step of the genre, maybe during the campaign isn’t noticeable, but once you reach the endgame almost all comes in line and feel great, will be really hard to go back to the combat system of LE and D4 at least for me. In this game your ability in playing it actually matter, and then yes, the OP build to feel the power fantasy are definitely here as well, but I would say that this feeling is accomplished a bit to late in the progression and could be tuned better, but we are talking about an EA with less than half of the base content that will have at full release
So far, what I’ve noticed is that early game feels very souls-like, late game feels a lot more like PoE1. It’s a lot faster paced and by that point you’re pretty much killing white trash without even looking their way.
After mapping for a while (grinding into the 80s atm) I definitely prefer it over the campaign. Having a working build makes the boss fights easier. I actually look forward to them now because they drop a lot of waystone keys. Its much less souls like for sure. Not that I dislike souls like, but its not something I can play 24/7, it’s too “intense” if you know what I mean. I enjoy the time-consuming/grind more than having to time dodges 24/7.
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Well, im done with it 
I’m up to lvl 90 gemling in SSF league. Still blastin.
Not a lot left to do until they start patching it again thou
Witchhunter is in a very bad state right now. Will get buffed next major patch probably. Or reworked some time after 1.0 release.
Gemling ascendancy is definitely quite strong. The double support gem gimmick is strong for grenade builds. Double bonuses for attributes shines when playing att stacker with HoWa and Pillar of the Caged God. I’ve played Gemling as my first character. But I’d still argue that yeah, Stormweaver ascendancy choice has a much bigger impact throughout the game while gemling really shines in late endgame when you get serious about min-maxing.
I have a titan and a pathfinder and melee in PoE2 sucks so much compared to range. Everything feels slow as molasses and the game is literally get 1 shot or do 1 shot.
GGG had an opportunity to take the good parts of POE and make POE2. Instead, they took the worst part (constant 1-shots). So sad to see a game fail before it launches.
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There are some things I don’t like about how PoE2 is, but what do you mean “fail”? By all metrics it’s a huge success. It had a peak of 580k players on steam alone (not counting their app and consoles) and it still retains 250k+ daily peaks after a month.
Saying that it failed when everything says that PoE2 is wildly more successful than PoE1 and that it might even be directly competing with D4 numbers is pretty much like all the “game is dead” threads. It’s more indicative of your feelings towards the game, rather than the game’s reality.
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PoE1 was a indie game when it released, and not many had ever heard of GGG. The only reason why PoE2 is so successful now is because of the success PoE1 has become. You can’t really compare these two games with such a different starting point like you do.
My subjective take; I am deeply disappointed in PoE2 and GGG. It’s like PoE2 is made by a completely isolated group of developers within GGG and they never asked the PoE1 crew about one single advice in spite of the 10-12 years of experience in creating and running a live service ARPG they’re having.
If their “vision” was to make PoE2 so different from PoE1, they should never named it Path of Exile in the first place. By doing this and delivering PoE2 in its current state with all its design flaws and niche decisions, GGG is mistreating a large part of their loyal and supporting PoE1 fanbase.
Have fun playing this “souls-like” wannabe with rogue-like end game mechanics, worst combination and design decision ever made for an arpg imo. The numbers will probably be OK until the initial hype wears off and the PoE1 content creators can’t feed off it anymore - a lot of them have started to make content with way more negative feedback already. At some point, I’m also sure GGG will be forced to tremendously change PoE2 away from their initial “vision” to keep the numbers up and their investors happy. I assume it will end up close to a PoE1-like, which I think it should have been in the first place. I’ll might install it again then - if it’s not still chain-crashing my computer, that is 
That’s not true. I hated POE1 but I am enjoying POE2, mostly. I would never have tried POE2 if it was just like POE1, but I tried it because it looked like an action game.
POE2 endgame devolves into the same type of gameplay as POE1, just zooming around maps as fast as possible AOEing everything down … It’s pretty disappointing IMO. The game felt like it was different until endgame maps are unlocked, then it just feels the same again …
This is maybe the least meaningful descriptor in all of video-games … It’s such a vague disingenuous term that it practically describes nothing. That being said, I don’t think the execution of moving, rolling, dodging, avoiding, blocking in POE2 was done well for an ARPG … The isometric perspective is not conducive to this type of action combat IMO, third and first person perspectives are much more conducive to that style of action combat and movement… There’s just too much screen clutter and effects to look at in isometrics to really truly avoid/block/etc. compared to other camera perspectives. I think it’s a mismatch of features in POE2’s case. I don’t mind actively dodging telegraphed abilities, like in LE, but I’m finding POE2 wants to be skill based combat, and yet it doesn’t really feel like that when you are killed, a lot of the time.
For example, most of the time I die in Elden Ring I can point to a skill issue or mistake, but in Remnant 2, which adopted many of those features, I didn’t feel that way… It was very difficult to identify mistakes and skill issues. Elden Ring felt fair, Remnant 2 did not. I am having similar issues with POE2, where sometimes I know my mistake, sometimes it feels impossible to have identified before it (death) happened.
Fail in my opinion.
The single largest issue in POE 1 was instant kills. That remains in POE2. Therefore, complete and utter failure to me.
Edit: the 2nd biggest failure of POE1 that’s in POE2 is the “map grinding”.
Tbh I think the movement in poe2 is one of its best features, the WASD + Dodge even on melee just starts to feel natural. raising your shield to block projectiles felt janky at first, now I do it even in maps, it works fine.
The bigger issue is that they created all these bosses/mechanics that reward using your tools like that, but then also created ground degens, explosions, and on death effects that just… cant be interacted with at all. Even when you are not zooming and playing a slow paced build like molten barrier block build, I still feel like im just waiting around or dodging out of mechanics I cant interact with.
GGG has seemed to have not learned anything in regards to “give players the tools to combat the mechanics so they feel good and solve the puzzle”
They feel like a dungeons and dragons DM whos goal isnt “set up and manage the encounters of players and let them feel good by solving the challenges set before them”
instead they do weird shit like “Yeah this right here? you killed it, here is your reward, unblockable unevadable HUGE DAMAGE EXPLOSION, GOTCHA I WIN”
it feels likes its players vs devs, instead of devs going “hey congrats you raised your shield and blocked the explosion at the right time, good for you”
In monster hunter sometimes your shield cant block something, unless you get guard+ then it can. You will be staggered, you will use up stamina and take some chip damage. the optimal play is dodging out of the way, evade lancing is way stronger then guard lancing, but its an option.
In poe1 the excuse always was “its because players are too fast, we need speed bumps to slow them down” normal not buggy/broken builds in poe2 are not zooming. they are just being cheesed by unfair unfun mechanics that GGG feels they need to “win” the arms race vs players.
or “this is too tanky we have to nerf it” why is becoming tanky something the devs have to stop? solving the puzzle is deemed not a feature. they are supposed to kill you, to win.
Fair,
Just to clarify what you quoted of my post; I agree that walking around with WASD feels good. My criticism is moreso that the combination of walking, dodging, blocking, attacking, etc. all together, while facing punishing mobs who do a lot of damage, wasn’t executed great for the isometric perspective. Because, as you said, there are a lot of effects that cannot be interacted with, and aren’t telegraphed. To be fair, I was just trying to avoid using the term ‘souls-like’ because I think it’s a poor descriptor. But souls-like is generally what people use to describe that combination of gameplay elements; dodging, blocking, and enemies who are punishing towards the player. And then there’s the other ‘souls like’ characteristics like checkpoints (bonfires), large bosses, traps, parrying, deliberate combat, telegraphed attacks, multiplayer, etc. etc. etc. … the more specific we get with all that could fit in the term, the vaguer the term gets which is why I don’t like it, as a huge Souls fan. As a side note, we could retrofit a lot of older games into the ‘souls like’ “genre” despite them coming out long before Demon Souls was released.
A lot of the time that I am killed during POE2 endgame it sort of feels like I wouldn’t have been able to avoid it if I wanted to. Which feels bad. That’s the great part of From Software games; they are built mostly fairly so that you have a chance once you understand the enemy and its’ attacks. Unlike most games people would call “souls like” because they are not made with the deep attention to detail that From Soft has.
This was to be expected.
GGG has long been hinting that they don’t want to make the kind of game that PoE players want. The way GGG was praising Ruthless mode shows that they don’t really like how people play PoE - the “zoom zoom”, “kill whole screens in second” gameplay is what was paying their bills, but it’s not something they were proud of.
Now they have the chance to get a completely different playerbase, one for the game they want to make.
I fully expect that, if PoE 2 is a huge success, GGG will stop working on PoE 1.
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PoE2 would not been peaking 500.000 concurrent players during release without the success of PoE1. In fact, without PoE1 there would be no PoE2 
The fact that you as a single individual do not like PoE1 but enjoy PoE2 is pretty much irrelevant why PoE2 exploded.
Let’s re-examine what I quoted from you
You stated that the ONLY reason POE2 is successful is because of POE1 but that’s obviously false. There are other reasons why POE2 is successful too.
I’d be surprised if that happens unless the PoE 1 playerbase mainly moves over to #2. I agree with the premis, that GGG have painted themselves into a corner with how fast #1 plays.