This is gonna be a hot take but this is the reason that I think the game is so quiet and dead right now.
Anyway I had high hopes for this game, but ultimately I believe the reason why the game died was exactly what I feared; the dev’s taking the boring approach of constantly nerfing the competitive builds in the endgame to the point they are annoying to play. I have played maybe 20-30 different builds, gotten close to 1k waves in arena, and I would say that almost every time a novel build popped up that was fun and competitive, it was nerfed in some way, and the game lost builds because nobody wants to play that anymore. The most recent victim was runemaster. Some older fun builds that got the nerf hammer and never recovered would be Glacier mage, for example. Now if you want to play glacier mage, you have to play pseudo melee instead of cast on target, and if you take cast at target so it feels good, say goodbye to all your damage because the penalties are so bad (No crit multiplier IIRC or something like that, it was so crippling that you wouldn’t bother trying to play it)
If you look at most of the streamers for PoE2, PoE1, many of them are SSFHC streamers despite most of the audience not playing HC. When I see posts on reddit about a player build that beat 4th ascendency in PoE2 in SSFHC, it gets 1.5k upvotes etc. This is because people like watching the best of the best, top 1% players, struggle to achieve something difficult. Its fun to watch the best compete.
But in last epoch, there is no competition anymore, or no reason to compete. Because the dev’s took the boring approach of prioritizing nerfing top builds, (which only results in less build diversity overall) instead when the approach should have been heavily focused on all the underpowered and underplayed abilities and talent trees, which would result in many new builds popping up that people want to play. That never happened, some skills that were garbage remained garbage for years during the early access until past release.
Now all that remains if you want to compete high on the arena ladder are stupid supertank builds like where you have an abomination to run around and kill/tank for you, and you hide around the corner wearing two shields on your character with 100% block chance (I’m not kidding, this is the rank 1 build rn, go look it up). #2 is some shield throw build with the minion, another build on the same page, hiding with 100% block chance and high armour. Alternatively the only other competitive build was some full glass cannon marksman with zero defenses (negative res) which threw down ballistas that 1shot the entire screen, that was peak dogshit gameplay. Anything else isn’t competitive and not worth playing, so you have to play that crap if you want to compete on the ladder. Its boring as hell and nobody is competing.
Its really unfortunate because I saw this coming ages ago, I saw the dev’s focus on nerfing top builds, and it does nothing for the game. The golden days are gone, where I could play shaman totems build or turbo sentinel (another unjustifiably nerfed build that was high skill cap gated and is now dead) and compete in tournaments hosted by vision. Those were the glory days and I didn’t even realize it. Now tournaments don’t even run because there is nobody interested in competing.
I have hopes that one day the devs get it and decide to focus on buffing weak builds and focusing more on competition so that people have a reason to play and stream the game, but honestly I don’t really see it happening any time soon. I had such high hopes for the game on release, but on release, after preparing probably more than most players would (I played 6+ gear and build variants on runemaster that pushed between 500-800 waves) I found that ward had been nerfed, runemaster unjustifiably nerfed, and I sat looking at the new warlock class that flew around with thousands of ward killing things effortlessly, I tried to reroll and play it but I absolutely hated the DoT playstyle, then I quit because I realized there is and will be no competition. And its ultimately because devs decided that focusing on cultivating competition was not important, some casual players have some bias that competition is elitist (?) or bad for the game, who knows, but everything that I have ever played which was viable has been nerfed to the ground. Think back to EQ werebear, which was gutted so heavily we will never see it as a competitive option, whereas they could have focused on buffing everything else and had 10x the amount of build diversity and options in the game.
Ultimately, if i decided to come back and compete, I would be playing with 2 shields and standing around with an abomination smashing everything for me, it sounds so mind numbingly boring that I probably won’t ever bother. Its a shame.
End of rant, keen to hear your opinions, try to keep it on topic and not personal