Diablo 4 before, now 200+ hrs in POE2: My thoughts and Aspects to improve (for GGG only :D)

A quick context: This is my first real run of POE, started playing with current league, 0.2, with 200+ hrs so far (on PC). I`ve played Diablo 3,4, Elden Ring and some other RPG`s / arpg`s, so not the first of it`s kind for me.

The game is good in general, but it needs a lot of polish to become great. End game has an interesting approach, but kind of becomes pointless after some time. I think it needs some more quests, or some achievements to make it more relevant and add some meaning to the game. Progression is also tedious after lvl 80 (both in XP and Atlas passive points).

I`m actually not very fond of infinite Atlas. It could use a finite number with a counter for how many you`ve done so far. It can also be improved upon (I`ve read a nice post with suggestion that we can start Atlas from zero and build or own along the way).

Game also didn`t offered much choice in terms of playstyle variety. I found myself playing Lighting Bold with Lighting Rod on my Ranger for the entire game! So literally only two skills 99% of the time. This is probably a combination of uninspired Uniques (which also don`t drop in early game) with dull Passive points and maybe unbalanced skills and support gems.

I`ve gathered some notes along the way that I wanted to share (some more important than others). I hope DEVS will look at these points and also take them into consideration. If not, I won`t stick around for long.

To try to categorize:


GAMEPLAY:
-->>> Uniques need rework. Most of them are useless. I`m not excited when I see any unique. I mean, they could be interesting for low lvl characters, but they appear late in the game, so they become usless.
On the other hand, I would have loved to see, for example, Uniques that add/cast a new skill when you cast your current ones (Ex: "Lighting Rod" casts "Conductivity") -- and then you can make Conductivity better with support gems), or Uniques that alter skills alltogether - making them stronger / more interesting.
-->>> Loot feels chaotic now. Too many random stuff (from all classes) and 99% of them are either sold or salvaged (because crafting sucks as well). Most of the items I have are from the Market. I don`t know...
-->>> Passive Tree I think has too many nodes that gives very small upgrade. Also need Bookmarks.
-->>> Trials are not exciting other than making them for passive tree points.
-->>> Too many obstacles in a map. For a ranger is very difficult sometimes to even shoot smth.
-->>> Hate those fkn` projectiles/wisps/deadly volatiles that follow you and explode. They are waaayy to powerful and the things I hate most about the mobs power. At least make them fking stop at some point.
Also some monster leave them on the floor after dying, which is incredibly stupid, including On Death Explosions. You make fun of the players, or you`re just ignorant.. cmonn..
Those Skeletons with shields that throw projectiles are also tooo powerful. I literraly do ZERO damage to them as a ranger, when I almost instantly kill all other mobs. Their projectile damage should be tuned down at least. It`s like a boss to me.
-->>> Some currency is very very scarse: Omens, Catalysts, Jeweler Orbs for 4th and 5th socket, Gemcutter Prisms.
Black schyte artefacts also very rare. I need 15 to recombinate jewelery and I only got 5 of them in 160+ hrs of gameplay...
Fracturing orbs and Greater Essences.. where are those??
-->>> At the Endgame, I`d love to be able to manually add modifiers I want on a waystone. Too much rng (we could have some shards that add specific modifiers / modifier group);
Same for afflictions in Trials, there should be wiggle room or manual setup for the runs.
-->>> Should get bonus rewards if we complete all side activities in Atlas maps.
-->>> TOO MUCH RNG in general.


UI & Game Design:
-->>> Inventory: while the game does not look very modern in general, some aspects look actually quite old or unpolished, like the inventory and stash tabs.
The inventory is very small, only a few items fit inside. The items look ugly/unpolished - no borders, or anything to distinguish a quality item vs a normal one. (There are a ton of examples in other games).
We could also use multiple inventory tabs like separate one for currency or quest items, auto-arrange, etc. This way we could have a flow of gaming and not have to teleport to town as much.
-- WHY only qty 10 stack limit for socketables and many other items in stash? You artificially create a problem so you can sell the solution via stash tabs? You can make stash tabs attractive in different ways (include a nice search filter, or Icons for tabs, etc), but don`t limit players and make our life hard. Stash management should be the last on player`s focus.
-- Exotic coinage and artifacts from expeditions are actually currency, right? Why aren`t they embedded into Currency stash tab?
-- Some Stash tabs would need some love. Gem tab, for example, looks messy - support gems are altogether with skill gems. It`s hard to scroll down to find them. It`s a bit messy. Uniques stash tab could use more filters (like items for Agi/Intel, etc)
-->>> Trade: Can we at least buy directly from someone in the Market, not having to check him online, invite party, Tp to his location, etc... ???
-->>> Skills: I cannot see all (other) skills unless I right click on a gem??? Seriously?
-->>> Distilling is interesting, but only one passive skill on the amulet though?? We could use some more.., otherwise a bit lame
-- Can we visualize all skill options with existing distilled emotions that we have? I currently have a few of them and don`t know what I can create with what I have so far. Otherwise, searching for viable nodes in Passive Tree is tedious, can`t do this!
-->>> When upgrade a weapon or armor with scraps, we need to take them one by one and click at least 20 times back and forth (that`s 40 clicks)?? ..incredibly stupid..
Edit: I just learned you can use SHIFT to mitigate this, which makes it better. In this case, game does not do a good job to show me this aspect.
-->>> Need advanced filter for support skill gems. There are and will be even more skills and combinations, thus we need an easy filter. D4 uses some "Keywords" you can click, which is rudimentary but still way better than what`s currently in POE2.
-->>> Too many things which are not explained in game - like why I can`t combine 3 rare helms at reforge, what is my shock/freeze chance with skills.. etc (Endgame especially has more issues here)
Reforging and Recombinator also appear out of nowhere. Game should include some Tutorial and force player use it at least once.
-->>> Need Bookmarks for Passive Skill Tree + better highlight. Now I can barely recognize something when search in the tree and definitely would need to bookmark some skills that I want to reach, instead of searching them every time (and most of the time forget the name).
-->>> Refund all button for Passive trees
-->>> Should be able to equip an item that has the attributes necessary to cover the "requested" part. (So I have 100 Intel, want to put a helm on that requires 133 intel, but helm itself has 33 extra intel. Still can`t equip it)
-->>> Magic/rare monsters are not immediately visible/recognizeble (see D4 as good example)
-->>> Why do Portals expire in Campaign when in town???
-->>> Teleport to party member exact location, instead of area start, please!
-->>> Areas should intersect (I want to see what my buddy explored)
-->>> I want to be able to see party member life and energy shield (at least).
-->>> On the chat, we should use TAB key to switch channels (Party, Whisper, etc)> I always need to manually click and select now, which is annoying
-->>> Loading times are HUGE when you portal back to town
-->>> How far is 1m in game??


CRAFTING:
-->>> Too much RNG in general (again). The prefix/suffix augmentation is too random! It`s incredibly difficult to make an item as I want it. Also, too many times I get a lowest (T1) augment rolls on higher level items. This should not happen. A minimum of tier level should be guaranteed with "X" item level. Or give some workaround to get higher tier rolls.
(If there are some orbs already which help with this, I did not get any, which is bad after 200 hrs of play.)
-->>> Reforging bench - pretty useless - please add more features (now I can`t even re-roll 3 similar items. They need to have the exact name, or I don`t know..)
-->>> Recombinator good idea, but has VERY small chances of success, which makes it useless for me. There should be some currency that allows you to increase chances at least.
-->>> Crafting definitely needs more love


NICE TO HAVEs / My Wishlist
- In-Game loot filter (including highlights) and Auction House?
- Floating damage numbers (at least for crits)?
- Graphical visualization for Evasion/Block?
- Weapons DPS visibility (I can only see this in Trade now)
- Test Dummy to see how I improve
- Purchase history for currency exchange (At Alma and the other guy in Act I). It would help to know what rates I sold and bought in the past
- Statistics, like number of total deaths from league start; total damage threshold/total damage taken output for boss fights when in Party, or map total as comparison stats. Just make the game look Modern.
(Even World of Warcraft looks more modern in terms of UI, Stats visuals, etc)
- Currency stash tab current Total estimated value - nice to have (give your a little more purpose to hoard currency :D)
Long shots:
- Bestiary. It can be an active one, where we can get foiled frames + animation when we killed X number of a specific monster. Or at least a simpler Wiki, where we can easy check it and learn all about different creatures, hero skills/spells, etc. All that work put into creatures can also be put on display.
- Origin story movies for each character (like in Overwatch).


These are only a few of the things that I think the game needs. I really hope most of them hit your check lists and will see implementation when the game releases.

I think it has very good potential and I want to play it again in the future.

Thanks a lot and good luck!

Edited: Forgot In-Game Loot Filter and Auction house. Added them in the wishlist.

Actually a really decent list of things i would agree with mostly. Doubtful anyone @ GGG other than a mod will read it though. And even then, only to be sure we ain't causin problems yo!

This is a very good review. Plus everything. From my side, there are a few things I want to add. So, the game is great, but it has some difficulties to get a lot of fun. In general, you need to farm a lot to progress, that's obvious) but farming can also be different. Almost the only way for your character to become stronger is to earn currency and trade in a very unpleasant way. And if you are unlucky or you play for a build with low cleaning ability, you will fight without any hope of fun. Swarms of mobs with high speed and damage, you can survive only if you are strong enough, or you can kill them all from a distance. So this is an obvious thing that says a lot. What will it change? Of course, better crafting, more convenient trading, more depth of the late game. It just creates conditions when in order to get fun you have to go pay on third-party sites for things that should be obtained by you in the game. And by the way, to prevent delirium from heating up our computers so much, you can simply make the effect of this state on the character itself, that is, let it be blurry, for example, this will give us a lot of performance back.

You can press shift while upgrading armor to do multiple by the way.

A decent list of things that i've also heard from other newer players to the POE world. A couple are wishful thinking. Some are commonly asked features, and a couple just exist due to how the game is designed.

It would be helpful, for End game feedback, to mention how far you've progressed with relation to the Atlas passive tree and each of the mini trees. Time is almost always a terrible way to define your experience in this game. Also, are you playing on PC or console, since the UI is different.

POE 2, while trying to create something different than POE 1, still suffers from the same issues for its end game activities. Both need to be heavilly invested into for them to feel good to run. An unspec'd Expedition tree results in a much much lower amount of Artifacts, Reroll Coins, and Logbooks.

Some of the issues you bring up were even mentioned in the recent patch update. Others are a result of design choices to due the game being a Free-to-Play, but Pay-to-Fully-Enjoy, rather than paying for the game up front (ie: currency stack sizes/inventory/stash tabs/cosmetic look of your character).

Coming from D4, where all drops are class based and almost always drop with mods related to the class, this game will be a shock to most players. Loot certainly feels chaotic and its not even as bad as it's going to be, once the rest of the base types get added into the game and the loot pool gets diluted even further. This is a huge concern of mine, as well. I'm interested in seeing what they come up with, for this issue, since typically the only way to mitigate this (without going the D3/4 route) is to increase drops overall. Last epoch did something semi interesting with this, having class-based gear slots and having the drop pool bias towards them, but still allowing other class items to drop occasionally. Though I would argue the sheer number of unfiltered drops you see there eclipses that of a fully juiced POE 1 map.

I'm not sure about the tutorials, but the game needs a Game guide. Currently, the game tells you that you can Inspect, Use, Quick-move and Bulk-move currency, but doesn't tell you what can be done with the currency after that. There should be a similar list of actions that can now be done, once you've at least performed the Use action.

On pc with mouse setup, I Right-Click a currency item, then can applying multiple of those currencies to a single item or multiple items by holding SHIFT when i hit Left-Click. This avoids the 40+ actions to get an armor piece to 20% quality, for example. Or I can use this method to apply Transmutes/Augments/Regals to every map or tablet i have quickly, then use the Search feature at the bottom right of every stash tab to do a manual text search for thing im looking for on said items.

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DankWeebTrash#7386 が発言:

You can press shift while upgrading armor to do multiple by the way.

Thanks. I think I realized this after I posted.

In this case, the issue is with Game not being able to "tell" this to the player.

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Marcel1258#1596 が発言:

On pc with mouse setup, I Right-Click a currency item, then can applying multiple of those currencies to a single item or multiple items by holding SHIFT when i hit Left-Click. This avoids the 40+ actions to get an armor piece to 20% quality, for example. Or I can use this method to apply Transmutes/Augments/Regals to every map or tablet i have quickly, then use the Search feature at the bottom right of every stash tab to do a manual text search for thing im looking for on said items.

Thanks as well :)

I`m playing on PC, yes. So far I`ve done quite a bit of maps, I`m doing T15`s now, but did not manage to do any Pinnacle or any other staff. I found some Dungeon but it requires something to enter.. seems hard to Get.

Nevertheless, I`m actually not very fond of current infinite Atlas. It looks nice visually, but I think implementation can chance. I read an interesting post where you can start with nothing and build your way, however you like.

I`ll updated the initial post a bit :D

OP +1 agree with most of these.

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Marcel1258#1596 が発言:

Coming from D4, where all drops are class based

That used to bother me from an immersion point of view but come to think of it the way loot drops in D4 is like a loot filter. I'd never really thought of it like that until now.

I'm actually thinking about giving D4 another chance.

Drops form other classes are ok, but they should be much more rare. Now, it`s chaos and will be much worse, if it keeps this way, with more classes introduced.

We should mostly get items for the class we play and only from time to time see something else, so we are incentivized to try other classes as well.