Blind playthrough impressions.

[Balm]

I play on GGG client, so zero hours on steam. I didn't spoil anything for myself going into the game and wanted to experience it fresh with no external influence. Act 3 and havent beat the 'final' boss (need to get some better resists).

Graphics: 8/10 - probably the best looking arpg to date, however they removed the laser effect from arc so I am taking away 2 points here, because it was cool and didn't need to go. Bosses look amazing, most spells look very good, enemies look great. Good visual feedback.

Mechanics/systems: 6/10 - gem links / socket colors / importance of sockets were really the essence of path of exile as a franchise and probably one of the first things players interacted with in a big way while leveling. Having it reduced to a menu feels bad, is boring, and feels foreign. Crafting is boring now, not being able to easily reroll magic items to craft them feels like garbage. I am aware of the reasons behind it to make drops valuable instead of just perma crafting one good item, but while leveling it feels like garbage. Gear 'sockets' are boring. Overall not fun to interact with or use. Not enough support / aura gem drops, no source of uncut gems to experiment with. Horrible for a blind playthrough where you want to experiment. Boring/10, not-addictive/10.

Gameplay: 7/10 - I adopted WASD immediately and I like that control scheme despite it hurting my fingers, however the game is clearly fully designed around the roll spam. Roll spam looks weird. It should be a unique movement type for each character, or its own skill gem that gets its own socket. IE: a flame dash/roll/charge/leap/teleport. This was a no brainer, having everyone rolling around and flipping their cosmetics around in a whilwind is really silly. However the real problem here is 'gamefeel'. Most skills lack impact or a sense that you are doing much of anything, while some skills are simply objectively and totally superior (forever), such as the shotgunning mage staff skill which does functionally 10x as much damage as anything else you could be using (will probably be fixed). tl;dr is that it's just rarely fun to play, and feels more like a chore.

Campaign: 5/10 - The setting is amazing, looks great, and the lore is sweet. However that doesn't matter because every map is this sprawling mess of 1 or 2 mob types in small packs, spread out just enough so you never accidentally pull too much. It's just spread out monsters waiting to die or monsters in the walls waiting to pop out. This would be fun if there were lots of them, but there aren't, and unless you are exactly the right level for the zone they are worthless, and they don't drop anything. It's just a barrier to slow you down. Monsters as speedbumps is boring. The real problem is probably the bosses. I don't know if they designed these health pools around maximized and optimized builds with the best gear or what, but these are nothing like merveil or vaal construct. Every boss is this massive slog where you are probably going to be avoiding numerous 1 shot mechanics (unless you are deliberately building full defense, in which case enjoy an even longer boss fight). You'll spend 4 minutes whittling down a boss healthbar with your anemic skills, and then out of nowhere it will do a new move that kills you from full health and es, leaving you wondering what happened (there is no recap), and realizing you will need to fight the boss for another 4 minutes before it does it again so you can see what it was and how to react.

Player time/sanity respect: 5/10 - POE2 does not respect the player's time or sanity. You can make bad decisions early about which support or aura gems to take, which will significantly negatively impact your character for 5+ hours, or longer. For example, if you don't take 'raging spirits' initially as a caster with access to fire spells, you miss out on a huge amount of damage and fun you could have otherwise been having. If you picked the wrong support gem or a support for a skill you thought was good but wasn't, you might not see another uncut support gem for 30 minutes - 1 hour or longer for higher level supports / auras. There is no vendor for gems and no way to get them besides drops. You will exist in a perpetual state of feeling like you don't have resources to experiment with, and knowing you are probably lacking significant power you could have had if you made the right (meta) decision early. With a few exceptions, the maps are also unnecessarily huge and sprawling, with very rare interesting points of interest or anything differentiating them or making them unique, just feeling like a procgen shooting game that mashed assets together to give you a zone to grind in.

Hub world usability: being in a hub zone in this game means having to listen to and look at all the same annoying and stupid cosmetics everyone is using. It's pure garbage, and its unavoidable due to how often you go back to town to talk to people or sell/de. I really hate this. The cosmetics look good in a vacuum, but when everybody has the same ♥♥♥♥, or is annoyancemaxxing their sound effects and forcing you to listen to them, it's a big fail. Need option to turn other player pets / floating things off. 100%.

Overall 6/10 - not POE anymore, not fun, boring and don't even care if I finish the game anymore. It's kind of crazy to me they spent so long getting the campaign in poe1 into a state where people wouldn't mind blasting through it to get to the primary game activity (as most see it), and then went the totally opposite direction with the sequel and giving us this ungodly and horrible slog to contend with.

Special shout out - to the psychopath torturer who designed the 'honor' system for sanctum ascension, ♥♥♥♥ you truly. Nobody ever asked for this ♥♥♥♥. Vomit inducing stupidity that is mandatory. Worse in every way than trials and lab, and that's saying a lot (a lot).