Poe 2 further away from the ''Broader Audience'' goal
" That redo button is a perfect example of what we mean by unnecessary friction. Even when someone finds the mechanic fun, like you do, the lack of basic quality of life features turns a simple mistake into an hour of wasted progress. In a modern game, accidentally clicking the wrong spot shouldn't brick your entire session. If GGG wants to keep that broad audience, they need to realize that punishing players for UI accidents isn't hardcore, it is just poor design. Adding a redo button wouldn't make the game easier, it would just make it less annoying. |
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" Steam database history shows that only a handful of non-casual, purely hardcore games ever break the 100k mark, let alone 459k. To suggest that nearly half a million people on a single platform are all hardcore grinders is statistically impossible. That number puts PoE 2 in the same territory as massive mainstream hits. The reality is that the casual and mid-core players are the ones who fill the servers and provide the scale. When you lose 90% of that peak, you are not losing hardcore players; you are losing the very broad audience you successfully marketed to but failed to support with your game design. Claiming that half a million people is a small number for Steam only proves how disconnected this elitist gatekeeping has become from the actual industry data. |
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YES!
Please go back to original POE2 vision which supposed to fix melee, making combat feel tactical, meaningful. Then everything can wrap around that concept. Spells, Ranged, Auto-casts, Defense, EHP, Monsters, Mechanics. Everything. Everything should revolve around the vision, which centered around the capability of Melee gameplay. |
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The thing is, this game has basically no middle ground.
Yeah, endgame technically goes T1 to T16, but that doesn't automatically equal a smooth progression curve. That's just "pick a number and grind it", not great pacing or design. The campaign was almost too forgiving. It teaches you "be careful here", "dodge that", "save your cooldowns for spicy moments". Then you step into endgame and it turns into a different game overnight. My first real T15 was like walking from a tutorial into a bar fight where everyone has knives. Those few little "gates" of difficulty disappear fast, and suddenly the lesson is not "play better" but "play safer, off-screen, or get deleted". And I agree with the point people keep dancing around. When a season starts and hundreds of thousands show up again, that's marketing doing its job. When it then nosedives, that's design doing its job... badly. So yeah, that's where the missing quality is. Endgame should allow experimentation instead of punishing it like it's a criminal offense. A few practical fixes would go a long way: - Death penalty should be map-based. If I run a spicy map and fail, I shouldn't come out poorer than when I went in. Losing progress is one thing, losing the whole evening is another. - Temple needs a snapshot system. Let me save a state, try something risky, and revert if I accidentally turn my layout into modern art. Also, the game needs some "I have an hour, let's hop in and have fun" content. Right now it's a lot of "I have 10+ hours, let me start cooking so I can maybe progress". That's not hardcore, that's just timekeeping. So yes, more casual-friendly content for casual players. Not "turn the game into a mobile app", just add content that respects time and supports group play. I like bringing up Guild Wars 2 here, even though it's an MMO, because it shows what good middle ground looks like. You have low-pressure community stuff, and you have structured group progression: - Dungeons as approachable runs (currently lower tier maps?) - Fractals as scalable endgame (higher tier maps?) - Raids as the top tier (special maps, citadels?) PoE 2 could absolutely have an ARPG version of that - easier group maps, scalable challenge content, and true endgame encounters that aren't just "grind-grind-grind until you hate yourself". Because right now it's grind-grind-grind... and not in a fun way. |
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" Exactly. The original vision was about weight, impact, and tactical decision-making. Jonathan Rogers sold us a game where every swing mattered and every dodge was a choice. But right now, the endgame has completely abandoned that foundation. Melee is a nightmare because the numbers are tuned for a game that doesn't exist anymore. You cannot have tactical combat when the screen is a mess of one-shot ground effects and off-screen projectiles. If they actually balanced everything—monsters, defenses, and ranged power—around the core capability of a melee character, the game would naturally become more accessible and balanced for everyone. Instead, they kept the clunky movement of a slow game but gave the monsters the speed and damage of a bullet hell. Fixing melee isn't just about buffing a few numbers; it is about reclaiming the soul of what PoE 2 was supposed to be before it got lost in the spreadsheet-bloat of the first game. |
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" The bar fight analogy is perfect. The Campaign is a 20-hour lie that prepares you for a game that doesn't exist in the endgame. When the lesson changes from play better to play off-screen or get deleted, that is a fundamental failure in game design. Your point about the 90% drop-off being design doing its job badly is the cold hard truth. Marketing opens the door, but the actual gameplay loop is what kicks people out. Comparing it to Guild Wars 2 is actually smart because it highlights the lack of structured mid-core content. Right now, PoE 2 has a floor and a ceiling, but no stairs in between. Adding a snapshot system for the Temple and changing the death penalty to be map-based instead of time-based are the kind of respect your time features that the broad audience is begging for. It is not about making the game easier; it is about making the difficulty feel fair rather than punitive. Until GGG realizes that timekeeping isn't the same thing as hardcore difficulty, the retention numbers will stay in the basement. |
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" Sadly, very true. You summarized it quite well. |
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" "everything is glass cannon" +1 blessed post I had a lot of fun with cold wolf in campaign, so theres that, but endgame is meh. 0.1 warrior was fun, until you get to endgame and get told not to play melee. 0.2 warrior was fun, until you get to endgame and get told not to play melee. 0.3 picked up lich and fell asleep clearing all content possible with casual 20k ES without using a single brain cell. 0.4 cold wolf actually was fun even tho i needed to use 6 active skills, GGG decided its too fun and nerfed wolf for some reason. I guess the lesson is to pick up a bow and glass cannon everything. Great minds discuss ideas, Small minds discuss people. Dernière édition par Henide#3803, le 16 févr. 2026 à 07:56:46
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" "everything is glass cannon" +1 blessed post I had a lot of fun with cold wolf in campaign, so theres that, but endgame is meh. 0.1 warrior was fun, until you get to endgame and get told not to play melee. 0.2 warrior was fun, until you get to endgame and get told not to play melee. 0.3 picked up lich and fell asleep clearing all content possible with casual 20k ES without using a single brain cell. 0.4 cold wolf actually was fun even tho i needed to use 6 active skills, GGG decided its too fun and nerfed wolf for some reason. I guess the lesson is to pick up a bow and glass cannon everything.[/quote] This cycle of nerfing the fun while leaving the broken stuff untouched is exactly why the endgame feels so hollow. You pointed out the perfect irony: GGG promotes PoE 2 as this tactical, multi-skill experience where you use 6 active skills to overcome challenges, but then they nerf the very builds that play the game the way it was intended (like your Cold Wolf). Meanwhile, mindless glass cannon builds that bypass all the tactical depth are left to clear the entire game without using a single brain cell. It is a complete failure of the balance team. They are punishing players for engaging with the new mechanics while rewarding those who revert back to the old one-button screen-clearing meta. If the lesson for every single patch is stop playing melee and just pick up a bow, then the whole 0.1 to 0.4 journey has been a waste of potential. They are effectively killing their own vision by forcing everyone into the same narrow, boring playstyles just to survive the broken numbers in the endgame. |
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My son would be the target demo, but he's sick of everything being bugged when we play.
I guess all that will magically disappear when "early access" ends. |
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