A PoE 1 Veteran's perspective and feedback so far

I have about 10k hours in PoE 1 and about 850 hours in PoE 2. I normally don't give feedback on the forums, but I love PoE, and I want this game to be as fun as possible. With that being said, these are the biggest areas that I have felt need addressing due to frustration or just a lack of fun.

-Map Portals: I frankly do not enjoy the limited portal gameplay, especially at higher tier maps. You are basically forced to either run less difficult content so that you have the ability to make a mistake and lose out on extra tablets, or you have to play perfectly while also making your maps incredibly difficult. This feels, as a softcore player, like a pseudo hardcore mechanic being forced on players, and its neither fun nor engaging. It is especially frustrating because I am not even sure why it is here. I have read many times it is to dissuade glass cannon builds, but it actually incentivizes them. It is far safer, given the current defensive options, to have pure a pure screenwide clear build with minimal defenses because you will clear faster, die less often, and lose less maps overall while a build that is balanced with solid damage and good defenses will often die more and lose more maps while also clearing slower. PoE 1 has done a good job of late incentivizing building tanky by making the most rewarding content also being extremely deadly. I think the 6 portal system in PoE 1 works very well, and PoE 2 is trying to fix something that isn't broken, and making the experience much less fun in the process.

-Dying fighting map bosses: I do not understand why if you die in a map and respawn everything is still there, but if you die fighting the boss in that map, the entire zone resets, and all content disappears even with attempts available. This seems needlessly punishing, and not in line with deaths in the same map outside of a boss fight.

-Survivability: The current tools for survivability are just insufficient if you are not a pure energy shield (often CI) build. This is not because energy shield is too strong, in fact i think it is quite balanced/fine at the moment. The issue is that life based characters, and to an extent as well hybrid characters, have way more affix pressure, cannot scale life to a level that feels good enough to prevent either 1 shot or extremely fast (less than a second) deaths. Armour has gotten better, and doesnt feel bad to invest in on its own, but it is still nearly impossible to get a sufficient health pool if going purely life. Even going hybrid life/energy shield feels bad because you just get more value out of going pure energy shield.

-Melee: I want to start off by saying that I am not a big melee enjoyer in PoE 1, but melee in PoE 2, specifically monk and wolf, have been some of the most fun gameplay I have had in an arpg. They feel responsive, engaging, are visually stunning, and just overall a ton of fun. With that being said, playing melee has really emphasized the insufficiencies of defense and the disparity with ranged characters. Melee need to have much more baseline survivability because they cannot just offscreen monsters like ranged builds can.

-Elemental attack leech: This is one of the most painful points of playing many builds, melee especially. Since so many skills inherently convert physical damage to an element, getting any source of mana or life leech as an attack build is either impossible or comes at an insane opportunity cost. While I think all attacks should have access to elemental leech as easy as phsyical leech (or just make it one stat), if the fear is letting ranged attackers have too much recovery, just limit it to melee attack leech. But right now melee takes much more damage, and the tools for recovery just arent good enough.

-Downsides on items/skills/supports/passive skill tree: I understand that kiss/curse decisions have value, and they exist in PoE 1. Sometimes they are worth it, sometimes they aren't, but in PoE 2 they feel omnipresent, and often suck all of the fun out of otherwise fun/cool skills or interactions. Not everything needs to have a downside, and nearly everything having a downside just leads to feeling like you are always sacrificing QoL and/or fun to get mre damage or survivability. It just ends up compounding because if almost everything has a downside, then you are just stacking compounding downsides, and while your character is often doing more damage, it often starts feeling much more clunky

I really agree with you on the portals, I also hate monster respawn on death. I am starting to feel like this is not a game for a parent and business owner like myself with limited skill and play time.

This is good feedback. I will add minion build lack leech too.
During campaign I miss tooltips on each sub-quest icon showing quest rewards.
Also, because maps in campaign are huge some kind of floating, smart arrow directing me to quest object.

game fucking sucks
idk how its been ruined this bad
way to kill something before it even started (not even close to being out of EA)
and its fucking junk speeding toward the trash can

I agree with your feedback. They really need to get rid of the whole more map mods = less portals. It is anti fun. The map losing all content / drops on the ground if you die to a map boss also needs to go especially now that every single map has a boss. There are just too many bosses that can one shot often with little chance to avoid it.

I kinda like the idea of fewer portals. 2 tablets alch and go was very rewarding in 0.4 for me, something between half a div and 1 div per map of value, with minimal tablet optimization, and im really working my build around surviving enough to clear 1 portals consistenly (im a melee bear). I think its a good objective and it trully helps with my build pathing.

I agree with the map loss after dying to a boss tho, it is kinda strange and i dont know their motivations around it. Maybe they want to give a downside to boss rushers, i dont know.

I also agree with melee, they are fun, but i feel like they are the hard mode of poe. They need more defensive options. I believe that your idea for ''melee only leach'' or other things that only melee could have is the way to go. This would give more balance compared to ranged classes.