Some QoL and Flask feedback

Great job y'all, just great job. Started as a warrior, not gonna lie, I love melee, but gonna have to wait to see what you have for the other melee skills. Slams just feel awkward and slow, but TBH I didn't progress far enough to really get a good attack speed up. Rolled into an Infernalist and am having a blast in 'yellow tier' maps. Dabbling with monk and some crossbow action as well. So that's where I'm at, and here's a couple things I've noticed:

1. Attributes. In PoE 1, since your skill gems are in your gear, you can reasonably open inventory and character screen and have all your attribute requirements on screen at once. In PoE 2, choosing and balancing attributes is a much more rigorous affair, and the information you need is across the character panel, your inventory panel, and a scrolled skill panel, so while you are on yet another screen (passive tree) you aren't seeing what your change does to the other panels if you respec an attribute, except maybe uh oh, my Spirit just changed. Like the flyout menus on the various panels, a flyout menu on your attributes showing the highest attribute requirement for gear/skills/next level skill would be SO helpful, so one could open the passive skill tree, open the character panel, and see where they are at and what they would need to progress their skills without bricking their gear and gem setup.

2. Click/WASD. In many games, there are WASD controls AND click to move. I'm not the most dexterous guy, and the ability to have the move button in the WASD would really relieve the strain on these ol' metacarpals. It is something I've done in mmos for twenty years and pretty sure I've done it in an arpg, where you can just move with the mouse when not trying to do anything particularly precise and then get the WASD going; it also is great for people who conversely like moving with WASD in general but because of various ol' people stuff find that the ability to continue to control your character when your fingers aren't necessarily .. you get the idea.

3. Flasks and Charms. Right after I complain about not using my fingers because I'm old, I'm going to reverse course and say I'm not so sure about this setup. I get what it's design philosophy is, but a few things glare out to me: Once you've gotten to a mana self sustain point, using the Infernalist mana replacement or if you're say, going CI and not using the 'life flasks apply to ES' for whatever reason, you've got yourself a dead piece of property in your gear. Perhaps making those two slots just available for double life or double mana could do the job, if only there were some concoction to help me block...
Now, charms. I believe they do what they say, but like government agencies, I don't know if I've actually seen them work. Unless I'm missing something, there's no indication of how many charges they have unless you have your inventory screen open and mouse over them, which isn't optimal gameplay. I have no bloody idea if they're helpful or not, I don't see the effect. I think I may have saw a buff pop up once because I put a poison one on when in a zone with poison monsters - and the design idea of having particular charms for particular zones seems like a great idea, especially once all your hard work has been datamined and put on the intraweb tubes for us to min/max which charms are best for which maps. But right now, they seem like a pretty D tier instilling orb on an unrolled utility flask. Could we perhaps get an indicator on the charm as to it's charge level?

Well, all in all, minor gripes. There were a couple times I had a reservation that was later dispelled in the game (Is the campaign too long to do every few months? Why can't we have <xxx> orbs? Where the hell is Einhar?), but for the most part, I've enjoyed the game, the difficulty, the endgame mapping of losing the particular content on a waystone but still allowing to rerun a plain version to keep pathing was a smart move, just great job. My biggest complaint is that I'm too darned old to play for those long marathon sessions. I need naps before maps. And really, where the hell is Einhar?

Happy Holidays,
B.

PS: What everyone else says about Sanctum as a Lab replacement, I don't like it either, but don't look at me, I'd bring back TotA.