New player's feedback.

I'll just list a few glaring issues I've encountered while going through the 3 acts and the trials. I haven't reached mapping yet.


1. Mana issues. Every single boss fight ends up in you running around using your normal attack for well over half of the fight. Not only this is ridiculous, it also makes certain bosses (Blackjaw, Mektul, Napuatzi for example) feel way too overtuned since they're a DPS race but you can only chip at them slowly. I haven't even been able to kill Mektul despite clearing the campaign and both trials.
There are no mana leech options on the passive tree, best you can do is get flask nodes but some classes can't even reach those until already being done with the campaign's 2 difficulties. Mana leech on gear is almost non-existent and from what I've seen only applies to physical damage. Mana costs are also too high, with a few skill casts depleting your bar.

2. Enemy's speed quickly ramps up to PoE 1's zoom zoom levels. You're instantly surrounded and pounded by AoEs and other skills, leaving no room to do any kind of kiting. Playing something like a caster past act 1 just devolves into rolling and dropping frost bombs because you can't cast anything at all. Meanwhile the player operates at snail speed both when it comes to movement and attacking.
This just echoes the frustrating experiences from the first game where the best defense was to just blow stuff up from offscreen.

3. Gearing is quite miserable with the heavily gutted crafting. Alchemy orbs are extremely rare, essences only upgrade to magic quality, orbs of scouring don't exist, you can't reroll blues and even getting a good base is a rare thing. I've gone for 15+ levels without any gear upgrades despite trying to craft and checking vendors every level up. You're also forced to waste exalted orbs that are better saved for trading later on.

4. Lack of mobility. I absolutely do not want to see PoE 1's zoom zoom in this game (but apparently it already exists thanks to a certain overpowered unique) but having pretty much zero mobility skills for most weapons is quite ridiculous. I was excited to unlock electrocuting arrow, only to find that it's a super slow motion leap that just gets you killed.
Movement speed mod on boots is also super rare. Frenzy charges do nothing.

5. Clear lack of playtesting during certain parts of the game. Trial of chaos is ridiculously overtuned for the suggested level. Some mod combinations make the run impossible, the platforms and mob spawns are buggy and bosses are not only overtuned but also full of bugs. Homing tornado without any animation windup that just instantly spawns on you, the rotten bird going into epilepsy mode and farting at you 10000 times per second while you're unable to act, the chimera just being absent for most of the fight while the map is filled with different ground effects until you run out of flasks and die.
Trials are also very anti-coop with the elevators constantly separating you and the player who dies on the boss not being eligible for the completion even if the boss dies. It feels like doing coop there just inflates the difficulty while introducing janky elements, and it's better to go alone.