Nearly 300hours played, the state of endgame is tragic [feedback]

[Faust]

I've been playing this game for nearly 300 hours, leveled up nearly 5 characters to 80-90 and I have to say that the endgame's state is absolutely tragic.
The campaign is the strongest aspect of this game right now. The story is interesting, the feeling of progression is very gradual and enjoyable with some bugs like Ascension bug in ACT2 cruel but it is understandable, it's EA.
Even though it's EA I'd like to say few things about the current state of endgame which in my opinion is simply tragic.
Progressing Uber Bosses is the most tedious thing I have seen in a long time.
Breach Uber Boss is super fun to progress, you get splinters out of every breach (you need 300 for a key) and usually you can get 5-20 splinters without having any points in the breach atlas tree, it is slow but the sense of progress is there.
Delirium, Ritual, Expedition and Citadels are tragic.
-300 hours in and I'm yet to see An Invitation from the King, after around +150 rituals best item I got from it was a single Divine Orb, considering the state of economy in this game a single Divine Orb is laughable (not like there are players who haven't seen one after + 100 hours of gameplay lol). I did not progress even an inch forward in that regard.
-Delirium is super slow, you barely get Simalucrum splinters and in order to even get them you need to use distilled emotions on maps. Considering how slow it is I can't say it is designed well. 300 splinters in that case is way too much and you're not getting enough distilled emotions to sustain the grind.
-Expeditions are bugged. It has been noticed even by the top players, sometimes you just.. die? A lot of people are simply skipping expeditions because from time to time you will randomly just die without any indication on the screen and this is not the skill issue but an actual thing. It's not worth to risk juiced map on this.
-Citadels feel like a myth at this point. Hunting for them is super unrewarding and there are too many folks theories about how to hunt them and where they appear.

Considering you get ONE chance to fight the boss after such tedious tasks feels like a slap to the face. I get it, it is designed that way so we "play more and test more" as this is early access but holy moly, it's been a long time since I encountered such anti player frustration based system in the game. It has enormous potential, even in it's current state it beats D4 low diff but it would be nice if the communication between the devs and players was a bit more clear and consistent.
Also one more thing, whoever was level designer for Act 3 please, for the love of god. Sit next to your colleagues whop were designing act 1 or act 2 and take some notes.
And the final thing, please change Jamanra death animation. Asala sawing his head off is absolutely METAL but him impaling himself with his own spell takes away a LOT from him. Keep the Asala thing but don't make him off himself by accident.

[Desync]

Yea they already know all of this, that's why the game is called EA, we just paid to watch them work on an unfinished product. I'm sitting at 400 hours and have every single class to lvl 90. It is what it is, they'll never truly fix a whole lot, just look at POE 1 and all the jank it still has after 17 years.

[eastcow91]

i think you have good specific objective points. very very helpful.

though if can post on poe2 ea feedback section forum. cus there's alot good points similar to yours, and ggg is commenting there.

that's for the writing.

[Vortexdr]

Yeah agree breach the only one that feels good but only after putting 4 points in (prior to that i wasn't getting a whole lot of splinters a breach. Simulacrum i only get like a max of 8 run and i need 300??
I'm lvl 93 now, no clue how many maps i cleared and i haven't seen a single citadel. I also tried just travelling in a direction hitting towers for vision and nothing.
The worst offenders are the rng ones, so logbooks, audience with the king and citadels...I haven't even gotten a attempt at those. The sad part is looking at it you need like 4 points in ritual to make the drop appear more...

[Faust]

Originally posted by Vortexdr:

Yeah agree breach the only one that feels good but only after putting 4 points in (prior to that i wasn't getting a whole lot of splinters a breach. Simulacrum i only get like a max of 8 run and i need 300??
I'm lvl 93 now, no clue how many maps i cleared and i haven't seen a single citadel. I also tried just travelling in a direction hitting towers for vision and nothing.
The worst offenders are the rng ones, so logbooks, audience with the king and citadels...I haven't even gotten a attempt at those. The sad part is looking at it you need like 4 points in ritual to make the drop appear more...

Don't be like me. I spent 25 divines yesterday on 4 audiences with the king. One was bugged, the glowing orbs in second phase baited me into wrong part of the map where there was no portal, second one crashed the game and I could not rejoin the fight, third was smooth and fourth was smooth. Got 4/8 points and got the perk that increases the chances of having an audience with the king in ritual by 50% but even that didn't make a difference and still the only audience I have seen was the one I bought from currency exchange lol

[RodHull]

Originally posted by Desync:

It is what it is, they'll never truly fix a whole lot, just look at POE 1 and all the jank it still has after 17 years.

Curious did you play closed beta for POE1?

Cause the difference between what we have now and then is, well its unrecognisable tbh. They fixed so much its impossible to list it all

[Desync]

Originally posted by RodHull:

Originally posted by Desync:

It is what it is, they'll never truly fix a whole lot, just look at POE 1 and all the jank it still has after 17 years.

Curious did you play closed beta for POE1?

Cause the difference between what we have now and then is, well its unrecognisable tbh. They fixed so much its impossible to list it all

I did, but look at the state of POE 1 17 years later.

YES, that is very true and I admit they did fix a lot, but the game is still so jank POE 1 HC players literally have to use an emergency disconnect macro to keep from dying still til this very day.

I'm not against POE, hell I have 400 hours right now in POE 2 and it was only released 25 days ago, so that means I've spent 15 days in total playing POE 2 out of 25 days. So i'm very active in the game, its just TRUE that POE in general has way more janky messes every single day over any other game, yet they've been around for sooooo long, it seems like they should have some of the TOP devs fixing stuff properly for them.

Just like the current endgame atlas map in POE 2, they literally said they have no idea how to fix the game breaking bug where ppls atlas can't be progressed anymore. But they are steadily trying to figure it out. They built the system, how do they not know how to fix it?

[GrogGeneral]

Originally posted by Faust:

I've been playing this game for nearly 300 hours, leveled up nearly 5 characters to 80-90 and I have to say that the endgame's state is absolutely tragic.
The campaign is the strongest aspect of this game right now. The story is interesting, the feeling of progression is very gradual and enjoyable with some bugs like Ascension bug in ACT2 cruel but it is understandable, it's EA.
Even though it's EA I'd like to say few things about the current state of endgame which in my opinion is simply tragic.
Progressing Uber Bosses is the most tedious thing I have seen in a long time.
Breach Uber Boss is super fun to progress, you get splinters out of every breach (you need 300 for a key) and usually you can get 5-20 splinters without having any points in the breach atlas tree, it is slow but the sense of progress is there.
Delirium, Ritual, Expedition and Citadels are tragic.
-300 hours in and I'm yet to see An Invitation from the King, after around +150 rituals best item I got from it was a single Divine Orb, considering the state of economy in this game a single Divine Orb is laughable (not like there are players who haven't seen one after + 100 hours of gameplay lol). I did not progress even an inch forward in that regard.
-Delirium is super slow, you barely get Simalucrum splinters and in order to even get them you need to use distilled emotions on maps. Considering how slow it is I can't say it is designed well. 300 splinters in that case is way too much and you're not getting enough distilled emotions to sustain the grind.
-Expeditions are bugged. It has been noticed even by the top players, sometimes you just.. die? A lot of people are simply skipping expeditions because from time to time you will randomly just die without any indication on the screen and this is not the skill issue but an actual thing. It's not worth to risk juiced map on this.
-Citadels feel like a myth at this point. Hunting for them is super unrewarding and there are too many folks theories about how to hunt them and where they appear.

Considering you get ONE chance to fight the boss after such tedious tasks feels like a slap to the face. I get it, it is designed that way so we "play more and test more" as this is early access but holy moly, it's been a long time since I encountered such anti player frustration based system in the game. It has enormous potential, even in it's current state it beats D4 low diff but it would be nice if the communication between the devs and players was a bit more clear and consistent.
Also one more thing, whoever was level designer for Act 3 please, for the love of god. Sit next to your colleagues whop were designing act 1 or act 2 and take some notes.
And the final thing, please change Jamanra death animation. Asala sawing his head off is absolutely METAL but him impaling himself with his own spell takes away a LOT from him. Keep the Asala thing but don't make him off himself by accident.

Many of the things you mention seem more like fine-tune drop rate issues so that's what EA is for. I'd suggest you post it on the official POE forum as well so that it has a better chance to get seen by the devs.

[G-sai]

lol what a drama queen

[Steelblade]

Oh man the state of end game in the unfinished game is unfinished who would've thought?

[Kassie]

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[Faust]

Originally posted by Steelblade ⛧:

Oh man the state of end game in the unfinished game is unfinished who would've thought?

Oh man, giving feedback on state of an unfinished game. It's almost as if it was early access that needs feedback from players who actually play it, strange isn't it?

[clumzylerch3000]

Well I got this game for free and can hardly finish one character. Got a lvl 74 witch and doing maps,trials and what not. Cant do it no more. Too repetitive doing different zones doing the same thing over and over. When doing trials I hated starting from the first stage with witch cause I just walk through it and let my minions kill everything. There was no reason for it just to make it feel longer and drug out when i just wanted the third stage. Well least I got the game for free I guess.

[Faust]

Originally posted by Kassie:

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I almost pity you tbh. Imagine being so disfunctional you can't hold a convo about something but instead act like a degen trying to provoke a reaction lol.

[SharkPlush]

That's a lot of words for "why cant I just have it" - because then it wouldn't mean anything.

But yes the game is too stingy rn. The problem is they need to balance broken builds (stuff like the cold snap comet thing) because people can farm the game faster than they intended probably.

So you do that until metrics show things are more balanced in practice and start a new league, and by the time it's over players have found more ways to make builds broken

It has enough meat on its bones to live a long healthy life lol

[This PC]

Originally posted by Desync:

I did, but look at the state of POE 1 17 years later.

YES, that is very true and I admit they did fix a lot, but the game is still so jank POE 1 HC players literally have to use an emergency disconnect macro to keep from dying still til this very day.

I mean, what's wrong with that ?
PoE1 is one of the most polished and successful games there is. :P
I don't get what the problem is with that statement rofl.

They're playing hardcore, if there wasn't stakes, hardcore would mean nothing.
They're doing this because of the stakes, not because of a design flaw. It's working as intended. :P

Concerning "how do they not know how to fix a bug", clearly, you have never dealt with code rofl. It's hard enough to debug my own projects, debugging other people's work is even worst. They probably have something like 50 coders over there that all coded different functions that interact with each other. :P

They'll figure it out, debugging sometimes takes time, especially when you're dealing with problems that pop out of nowhere and happen sporadically, and no one is giving you feedback beyond "this doesn't work, fix it, you suck".

Debugging works best when your users give you usable input, like reproducible scenarios, diagnostics, etc..

Then, once you resolved the problem, you need to test these patches, so they don't break everyone's game. :P
BG3 released a patch that broke everyone's savegames once rofl.

Not saying they shouldn't fix it, but complaining they aren't fixing ♥♥♥♥ after a month of which 2 weeks was holidays... :P

(am assuming here bug is real and not something that has been misinterpreted, ggg saying they're investigating isn't an acknowledgement)