The game starts really strong but is getting worth with each act

[Rudel]

So I finally made it through the campaign, newcomer to PoE and enjoyer of Soulslike games. I really loved the first act, it was the best ARPG I played by far. The second act as some great additions like the caravan, also I managed to grab better gear and felt really powerful. Bosses were not as great as in act 1, but still fun. They were a bit too easy for my Ranger, blasting through all in 2-3 tries. And no, I'm not a particularly good player. Average at best.

Then act 3 arrived:
- waves of uninteresting Mobs who get oneshotted all the time
- some attacks that oneshot me made by white Mobs combined with...
- ...huuuuge areas with no checkpoints that had nothing interesting in it but mobs, mobs and more mobs. Sure there were some rares but in those cases you had to backpaddle a bit to kill them. The rest was Orb + arrow and run by.
- in the whole of Act 3, I got one (1!) loot upgrade. All the other drops were garbage.
- there are no real upgrades in the passiv tree anymore, only +x% damage (yawn). Why are there no skills that alter your playstyle?
- my own new skills are WORSE than simply using Lightning Arrow / Orb from my tier 1 skills. Sure you throw in a mark or a salvo, but everything else is unnecessary because mobs and bosses die anyway. I have like 15 Orbs in my bank because I don't use them.
- the huge areas are generally uninteresting and without any unique things to happen. That glowing thing that damages you was the only cool addition I remember
-...oh and the trials. Those were great. At least some challenge and something I could remember them an hour later.

So overall, I think the 27 Euro were wisely spend. The game has a great 40+ hours of fun! But unfortunately it gets worse while playing and I don't see any incentive to start a new character and go through all this again. Maybe a new class will have a more unique playstyle, maybe they add more interesting things in acts 4-6, we will see.

But so far, in my opinion it's a good time to take a break after the campaign is done.

Just my 2 cents.

[vukotlak]

i overall enjoy the game and had fun in each act. I am playing a melee warrior and for me Act3 was a lot harder then 1 and 2.

What i definatly agree on is that some of the ares are just unnecessarly big with very thin checkpoints. That combines with enemies with oneshot capabilities and the fact that i played a melee made some of the zones incredible annoying.

I think smaller areas would be more fun. Most locations have 1o2 Points of interest outside of the boss and it is pointless to have such a huge map with nothing going on.

[Rudel]

Originally posted by vukotlak:

i overall enjoy the game and had fun in each act. I am playing a melee warrior and for me Act3 was a lot harder then 1 and 2.

What i definatly agree on is that some of the ares are just unnecessarly big with very thin checkpoints. That combines with enemies with oneshot capabilities and the fact that i played a melee made some of the zones incredible annoying.

I think smaller areas would be more fun. Most locations have 1o2 Points of interest outside of the boss and it is pointless to have such a huge map with nothing going on.

Definitely yes, I assume melee characters are a completely different ballpark than ranged ones. It's just no fun to run a 30 minute map again because you got randomly one-shot.

My main gripe is though that the progression of m character basixally stopped. No loot, no more interesting skills, no more interesting areas.

If I wanted to play Diablo, I could just play Diablo. Poe2 had such an AMAZING act 1, it's a petty it went downhill from that point (slightly).

[Willard]

Act 3 was definitely the hardest out of 3 as a warrior. I wanted to reroll at least 2-3 times. Then things got way easier. Once you get your build going Cruel ACT 1-3 is waaaaay easier than previous stages.

The game difficulty is strange. ACTS 1-3 on normal difficulty are pretty tough, especially for melee. Bosses have loads of HP, you don´t have much gear, talents, you are getting oneshotted and it takes minutes to kill bosses.

Cruel difficulty? Total breeze in comparison to normal acts. Bosses are being killed in 20-30s and they don´t oneshot you anymore.

From this point difficulty starts to scale up on maps.

Strange, the game is very hard at start, then it becomes waaaay easier as you progress throught mid game and then it becomes hard again once u start doing maps.

And yeah, oh, trials suck no matter the stage of the game, they need to fix it.

[VoiD]

Originally posted by Rudel:

Originally posted by vukotlak:

i overall enjoy the game and had fun in each act. I am playing a melee warrior and for me Act3 was a lot harder then 1 and 2.

What i definatly agree on is that some of the ares are just unnecessarly big with very thin checkpoints. That combines with enemies with oneshot capabilities and the fact that i played a melee made some of the zones incredible annoying.

I think smaller areas would be more fun. Most locations have 1o2 Points of interest outside of the boss and it is pointless to have such a huge map with nothing going on.

Definitely yes, I assume melee characters are a completely different ballpark than ranged ones. It's just no fun to run a 30 minute map again because you got randomly one-shot.

My main gripe is though that the progression of m character basixally stopped. No loot, no more interesting skills, no more interesting areas.

If I wanted to play Diablo, I could just play Diablo. Poe2 had such an AMAZING act 1, it's a petty it went downhill from that point (slightly).

That's gone now, you can teleport between checkpoints

[vukotlak]

Originally posted by Rudel:

If I wanted to play Diablo, I could just play Diablo. Poe2 had such an AMAZING act 1, it's a petty it went downhill from that point (slightly).

Which Diablo? Cause they range from incredible good to incredible boring.

Originally posted by Willard:

Cruel difficulty? Total breeze in comparison to normal acts. Bosses are being killed in 20-30s and they don´t oneshot you anymore.

From this point difficulty starts to scale up on maps.

Strange, the game is very hard at start, then it becomes waaaay easier as you progress throught mid game and then it becomes hard again once u start doing maps.

And yeah, oh, trials suck no matter the stage of the game, they need to fix it.

I don'T think we will get a lot of rebalancing on cruel bosses 1-3 nor should we. they are placeholder bosses scaled up. I think the unique bosses for 4-6 will follow the 1-3 scheme and offer a better balanced challenge.

Scaling is a lazy and cheap method to bloat content. This is totaly fine for PoE2 as it is 0.1 beta and they openly communicated the cruel acts are placeholders.

Diablo 4 on the other hand is totaly build around scaling and the game is a horrendous mess cause of it.

[💥FPSRUSSE™]

Originally posted by Rudel:

So I finally made it through the campaign, newcomer to PoE and enjoyer of Soulslike games. I really loved the first act, it was the best ARPG I played by far. The second act as some great additions like the caravan, also I managed to grab better gear and felt really powerful. Bosses were not as great as in act 1, but still fun. They were a bit too easy for my Ranger, blasting through all in 2-3 tries. And no, I'm not a particularly good player. Average at best.

Then act 3 arrived:
- waves of uninteresting Mobs who get oneshotted all the time
- some attacks that oneshot me made by white Mobs combined with...
- ...huuuuge areas with no checkpoints that had nothing interesting in it but mobs, mobs and more mobs. Sure there were some rares but in those cases you had to backpaddle a bit to kill them. The rest was Orb + arrow and run by.
- in the whole of Act 3, I got one (1!) loot upgrade. All the other drops were garbage.
- there are no real upgrades in the passiv tree anymore, only +x% damage (yawn). Why are there no skills that alter your playstyle?
- my own new skills are WORSE than simply using Lightning Arrow / Orb from my tier 1 skills. Sure you throw in a mark or a salvo, but everything else is unnecessary because mobs and bosses die anyway. I have like 15 Orbs in my bank because I don't use them.
- the huge areas are generally uninteresting and without any unique things to happen. That glowing thing that damages you was the only cool addition I remember
-...oh and the trials. Those were great. At least some challenge and something I could remember them an hour later.

So overall, I think the 27 Euro were wisely spend. The game has a great 40+ hours of fun! But unfortunately it gets worse while playing and I don't see any incentive to start a new character and go through all this again. Maybe a new class will have a more unique playstyle, maybe they add more interesting things in acts 4-6, we will see.

But so far, in my opinion it's a good time to take a break after the campaign is done.

Just my 2 cents.

get skill, delete steam, start playing tetris

[Sa_woe]

Cruel difficulty is not meant to be in the release game though, its a temporary difficulty that let them try to put more of endgame together for us to test. So yeah its probably not perfect, and the devs probably are not interested spending a ton of time making it perfect either. Hopefully they are taking the information we give them and applying it to the final 3 acts before release to tune them better. I do share the opinion that act 3 had some unnecessarily long maps zones where i started to get bored looking for an exit. Long maps are okay, but there needs to be way more events or random interactions to keep things interesting.

[Rudel]

Originally posted by Sa_woe:

Cruel difficulty is not meant to be in the release game though, its a temporary difficulty that let them try to put more of endgame together for us to test. So yeah its probably not perfect, and the devs probably are not interested spending a ton of time making it perfect either. Hopefully they are taking the information we give them and applying it to the final 3 acts before release to tune them better. I do share the opinion that act 3 had some unnecessarily long maps zones where i started to get bored looking for an exit. Long maps are okay, but there needs to be way more events or random interactions to keep things interesting.

Yea we need more on the maps than just random Mobs or the occasional. I'd love more special events than sheer quantity. Also the loot is still borked, it would be nice to have at least some fitting drops for major bosses, I disenchanted everything past act 2.

[Philly4eva]

act 3 is a slog to play just like u said. Areas overall in this game need to go down in size.
Maybe we got spolied with campaigns such as the one in Lost ark, but would it really be bad if the objective in a new zone could be something other than "explore for 20 min, then kill boss".

[Garahel]

had more fun with the campaign than with this mapping crap. now it's starting to feel like hamster on wheel.

[Phailpoet]

Originally posted by Garahel:

had more fun with the campaign than with this mapping crap. now it's starting to feel like hamster on wheel.

It's an ARPG, that's all they are.

[Garahel]

Originally posted by Phailpoet:

Originally posted by Garahel:

had more fun with the campaign than with this mapping crap. now it's starting to feel like hamster on wheel.

It's an ARPG, that's all they are.

hopefully with things like no rest for the wicked coming out, these boring ideas are put to rest through some innovative ideas.

[miqz]

Originally posted by Garahel:

had more fun with the campaign than with this mapping crap. now it's starting to feel like hamster on wheel.

"Why is the loot grinder that i bought, a loot grinder"

[Garahel]

Originally posted by miqz:

Originally posted by Garahel:

had more fun with the campaign than with this mapping crap. now it's starting to feel like hamster on wheel.

"Why is the loot grinder that i bought, a loot grinder"

i had hope endgame was more expansive. I was lied to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[miqz]

Originally posted by Garahel:

Originally posted by miqz:

"Why is the loot grinder that i bought, a loot grinder"

i had hope endgame was more expansive. I was lied to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And based on what exactly, the first game being exactly the same? the endgame being exactly as ggg said? you've only got one person to blame for that, and it's yourself.