A proposed compromise on the 1-Portal Policy

So the devs want death to mean something, and not just a trivial afterthought.

Players want to not be so harshly penalized for dying (sometimes to BS overtuned mechanics)

GGG added gold to the game as a way of eliminating orbs of regret.

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Solution 1:

Make a Death Tax: (the XP loss after 70 would still apply)

If someone dies in a map, there should be a gold tax on death in order to keep the portals up and available. If not enough gold, the portals close and the map is inaccessible.

Caveat:
If a person dies in a boss room, the gold tax still applies... but... the boss is reset at full health.

Make the gold cost scale with player level. This way gold is now for more than gambling.... players get the ability to control portals again... and the devs still have the policy that death means something and is something to be avoided.

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Solution 2:

Create a system where when the map is generated on the map device, players get to preemptively buy extra portals. This creates a gold sink, while also making death mean something as players who don't want to buy portals they dont think they will need will then choose not to have any.

Not a bad suggestion. Anything is better than the current state of piling death penalties.
I've seen numerous post supporting that flawed system which baffles me, what baffled me more were the reason for supporting such terrible philosophy, stuff like encouraging build diversity, and making defense matter! Truly insanity, if those those were true then we would see a massive gap in build diversity between softcore and hardcore!

Anyway, great suggestion, I would just love to see it gone as it is now.

Exp loss is another terrible mechanic as well, but if it must stay at least have tell us how much was lost on death! Why must the UI also be part of the game difficulty as well!

A better proposed solution: dump it, because it's terrible. 6 portals was fine, and somewhat iconic to PoE1. There was zero reason to remove it.

Nah, keep it and remove the XP loss instead.

It achieves perfectly what XP loss was always designed to do but never achieved: disincentivizing glass cannon builds and 6 portal defense.
On top of it the penalty doesn't scale the further you get into the game. A lost map is a lost map. XP loss on the other hand amounts to no penalty on lower levels and erases hours of progression on higher levels.

Game design wise a pretty good solution and it makes the xp loss redundant allowing us to finally let go of this anti-player mechanic.

One a side note, how have you guys still not adapted your builds to what the game demands? I have decent build, nothing crazy, 7k ES as spark mage, 75 res each, and nothing oneshots me outside of boss rooms. And if I get one shot in a boss room that's on me 100% of the time.