Making campaign fun

*Long stream of thought incoming
I was thinking about what Jonathan said quite a few times already, including at that podcast recently: "If you want to skip the campaign instead of doing it, it means that it's not fun enough". And I think that it is a proper mindset to tackle this problem.

PoE2 campaign (what we have of it, I really want to see acts 4-6) is very well done (not counting bugs like clipping through floor in the titan fight or progression speed or problem with lack of decent weapons on the first playthrough, etc) - I mean plot and visuals and biomes and monsters and bosses. But a year or two from now everyone will have done it dozens of times. Theoretically there should be some replayability value if you do it on different classes and builds, and level generation should make it a bit more random, but that's not nearly enough - we don't have a roguelike here, we have ARPG. (Actually, the good question is why are roguelikes/lites are much more replayable. Are the runs shorter? Are the drops more random (even getting a random unique in poe is not that interesting - you usually have a build in mind, so 99.9% of them are useless to you))

As many of you, I decided to try LE yet another time. And surprising absolutely noone, getting a bunch of cool loot in acts is fun. Having a nemesis in every zone and a mage/champion in every 2-3 is great. I liked getting random legendaries even if all of them were trash and unusable for my build. Rare mobs dropping bunch of stuff, shards explosion - that's why we play ARPG.

PoE2 is currently kinda scared of buffing loot any (nolifing minmaxers doing 200% quant T17s with scarabs will scare anyone, honestly). Loot will be buffed, ofc, but that won't be enough, as we all can easily predict.

Now the million dollar question about the campaign is - if you are totally fine with doing 800 toxic sewers with exactly the same build, same scarabs, similar map mods and beg for more content like this, why wouldn't you want to do acts which are more varied, have cool bosses and stuff? Well, obviously some people are special and want predictable repetitive tasks, but still.

My vague feeling is - cool loot is in the endgame, currency drops are in the endgame, usable uniques are in the endgame, profitable strats are in the endgame. Campaign is pretty similar to completing another 115 maps atlas, but you have no drops, no speed, no power, all maps are white and atlas passives are disabled. Who would want to do 2 atlases in a row when one of them cannot be juiced in any way - you just need to run to the boss, get that "completed" notification and move forward. This comparison, I think, is good also because people liked endless delve and heist events, where you can level the char from lvl1 doing mid/endgame activity - you run maps anyway, but at least heist drops bubblegum and delve has those currency nodes and fossils behind walls and stuff.

So, to sum it up - campaign can be as pretty as possible, but if you can't get anything interesting from it (and if you can't customize it a bit), constant repetitive playthroughs will sap all the novelty, and all that's left will be 155 white maps done in a row.

Customization is an open problem - some people suggested campaign passive tree where you get 2 points for your account when you finish it with a new char, maybe there could be races or rewarding challenges (get 10 div and a HH if you finish it in 3h or less, or all bosses have uber movesets and drop a guaranteed unique or something).

But the main problem - it feeling an unrewarding chore - can be possibly solved very easily.

First, we buff loot.
Then we buff loot again.
Then we buff it a tiny bit more.

And then...
Each and every zone gets "charges". Charges are spent when you kill/do/open the corresponding thing.
Say, you as a new character enter a zone for the first time. It gets 5 rare charges, 5 chests charges, 1 boss charge (1 for each unique boss in this zone) and a mechanic charge.
Charged rares, chests (which all become rare) and bosses get something stupid like 500% quant, 2000% rarity. When you kill/open them, charge is spent, so if you get DCed or instance crashed before you get to the boss, charges are not spent, but if you want to go back to the zone, it has generic loot again. Mechanic charges spawn essences/rogue exiles/breaches/rituals/whatever, and while charged, they have all positives from the atlas tree and no negatives like toughness, mob life, mob damage and such.
This way, when you go through a campaign zone for the first time, it is mega rewarding - it showers you in exalts, rare gear, uniques, essences, breach rings and stuff. But you can't farm act 1 endlessly - when you killed that Rust King once, all next kills will yield 1 rare and maybe an augment if you are lucky.

Now you may ask - won't some people just make new characters again and again and speedrun the acts using leveling uniques to get all that gigaloot?
And I answer - that's exactly what we want. If balanced properly (which can be done extremely easily by tweaking how much quant and rarity charges give), speedrunning acts will be a viable strat exactly on par with doing like delirium or expe in T15 with the atlas passives (especially if we get campaign passives) or like running trial of sekhemas or smth. If you drop 200 ex and 5 div in the acts, you as a new player will be ready for that endgame, instead of sitting on Jamanra for 8h because you didn't drop a decent weapon. SSF will be fine too with all those rare and unique drops. And you will be able to "craft" (yes, we all hope it gets expanded) in the acts too because you dropped like 30 different essences just going through the zones.

The one big problem I see is that you finish the campaign and get dumped into T1 white map which has common loot - and it feels awful. Dunno how to solve it yet, but there should be ways.

Or we could just get the crafting bench back.