My Experience Playing PoE2

Spoiler usability? UI clarity, item interactions—none of it is user-friendly. This game is still built like it wants you to suffer for information. You basically need a third-party app or a spreadsheet just to understand what half your gear or passives are doing.

User-friendliness is not what this game is about.

Ok, so let’s start.

The currency system that just fills up your whole inventory, in 2025 ikt is ridiculous. Two minutes into a map and I already have no space left, because it’s packed with new waystones and some random item. Why don’t we have a search function in our inventory like we do in stash tabs? Sometimes finding a waystone with the right mods is absurdly hard.

And what’s the deal with those useless pets in storage that just follow you around? Why can’t we tune them to auto-loot drops like in every other MMO? Especially when there’s so much junk to pick up—it’s a full-time job just clicking on loot.

Now, let’s talk about deaths.

Sometimes your character just dies for no clear reason—because something exploded under a monster’s texture or some random garbage one-shot you. Some dumb gorilla jumps at me from two screens away, so... why not increase view distance so I can at least see that thing flying toward my head to stun and instantly kill me?

Or take a level 80 map with no attack modifiers on mobs—suddenly, a random Vaal with an RPG shows up and one-shots my level 93 warrior with 9k armour (70% reduction) and 2.7k HP. One shot. And again, the animation started from somewhere off-screen.

Or I get stuck in some random textures and get bounced around while something jumps in and casts who-knows-what—and boom, dead. It's not skill, it's not learning—it’s nonsense.

And what really pisses me off? My 5080 is lagging like crazy. I have 80 FPS in solo maps, but when I party up, it drops to 40 and becomes unplayable. Everything that explodes, jumps, or fires starts to become unavoidable. People don’t want to spend money on high-end hardware just to end up watching useless YouTube guides saying “disable custom Windows themes” to optimize FPS. Come on.

Now let’s get into a very interesting topic—defenses.

Why is armour so completely useless? If you play a warrior, you just get one-shot randomly, no matter how much armour you stack. And trying to build energy shield or evasion on a warrior? Forget it. You have to choose between intelligence, dexterity, or strength, just to be able to use a two-handed weapon in one hand. Yes, one hand. Because if you put anything other than a shield in your off-hand, you’ll get shredded by random hits way more often.

And why can’t I stack HP properly? Why?! There’s a whole circle of nodes in the "Offensive Stance" section of the passive tree—almost every point in there is about shield block and armour, clearly meant for tanky melee builds. But the whole thing starts from a node that gives increased energy shield and increased armour. Energy shield??? I don’t have enough intelligence to even use proper energy shield gear, and I’m not stacking it—I literally have 79 energy shield, just because there’s a bit on my helmet. So why isn’t it something actually useful like “+armour and +maximum HP”? That’s what a defensive, front-line build actually needs. Not random energy shield bonuses that don’t help the class or archetype this circle is obviously aimed at.

And bosses? Oh man. Why are they all about one-shots? Bosses shouldn’t just be deleting you unless it’s part of a clear, learnable mechanic with proper visual warning. But in PoE2, every boss fight feels like one-shot central. You blink and you're dead. Not fun, not engaging—just frustrating.