Thoughts and Feedback from a relative noobie

I've been playing ssf hc since DotH release, and played ssf before that. I played a bit of POE 1 maybe 10 yrs ago, but found it a bit too zoomy, and bloated with all the different league mechanics that I wasn't familiar with (not necessarily a bad thing, just too daunting to get up to speed for me at the time).

Overall I would say I'm very happy playing POE 2, and enjoy most of the challenges it presents. I've gotten a handful of characters up to low 90s and died mostly to my own mistakes or unfamiliarity with different content/mechanics. These are just some thoughts I've had in my time playing early access:

- I like trying different builds and leveling a variety of characters, especially since finding gear and uniques in ssf can lead you down different build/character/ascendancy paths. I like the rogue-like aspect where the gear you drop with one character might change how you build your next character and so on. I think leveling through the campaign can get a little tedious (I know many ppl say this) and for me it hits particularly around Cruel 1 - 2. Part of that might be the repeating content. Another factor feels like that is where your leveling progression slows way down and many common leveling uniques begin to fall off in power level. Compared to how quickly you level, and how (relatively) easy it is to upgrade gear in early maps, the second section of the campaign feels quite slow.

- There's a pretty big discrepency in the effectiveness of the different defences, which others have noted, and I honestly think the only issue is how hard it is to scale your life pool without ES. To feel safe in HC my impression is you kind of need a high enough life pool to take a big hit and not die out of nowhere. Armour and evasion do not solve that issue, so I find myself continually returning to ES as an answer. That makes pathing on the passive tree fairly uninteresting, as you are repeatedly forced to make your way to the top third of the tree for the ES nodes. That leaves me wishing for a couple different things (not necessarily all of these):
--- Basic life scaling on the tree, concentrated in the bottom left.
--- Ways to scale or gain extra life based on other stats, i.e. gain flat life based on armor. Gain more life based on str, etc. This is more interesting to me, since it asks you to care about or consider something you might not place as much weight on otherwise.
--- Other ways to effectively increase your life pool, i.e. endurance charges grant guard, convert % phys damage to x, life gain from flasks can overflow x % max life, gain up to x % phys damage reduction based on str, also more interesting to me. I like the idea of effectively increasing your life pool while doing so in a way that is flavourfully distinct from what ES is doing.

Those are my two big takeaways at the moment, a slightly smoother campaign experience (I still like how hard it is!) and a few more ways to scale your effective life pool besides ES.