My two current main problems with the game, some feedback

I mean, I say two main problems, but we still have performance and the endgame problems too. However, since there is no way to know what 0.5 will change, let's just ignore those

1) Right now it feels like every skill comes with a pair (or more), and the game keeps pushing me into what it wants me to play

I don't even dislike combo gameplay by itself. Combo gameplay can be good, that's not really my problem. The problem is that a lot of the time it doesn't feel like I am combining two ideas together, it feels like I picked one skill that got shipped missing half its body and the second skill is there to give it back (and then I also pick the passives that were intended for it)

That is a very different feeling

Yea, I know you can brute force a lot of things in late game anyway. With enough gear, how gear scales in this game you can make plenty of weird stuff clear t16. I myself got to lvl 100 with some really offmeta stuff. That's not the point

The point is why would I do that when the skill itself feels like an uphill battle the whole time (especially campaign) unless I follow the rails that were obviously put in front of it. It feels like I'm crippling myself by default, like some self imposed challenge run where I intentionally ignore the parts of the package that are clearly meant to complete the skill

This is especially noticeable with spells

There are technically "fire", "ice" and "lightning" spells, but a lot of the time it doesn't really feel like the game even understands those identities. If I make a fire mage, I made a fire mage because I want to play a fire mage. I didn't make a fire mage because I want to use ice and lightning side skills sometimes just so my fire skill can finally feel usable. If I wanted that, I would just make a multi element mage to begin with

And before someone says "well that's just you roleplaying lol lmao", yea, sure. But that's part of the appeal of a rpg for many people, me included. If the game keeps telling me "sure, you can be a pure fire mage, but your skill will be dramatically worse, your fireball will be like a sneeze unless you also do the other stuff we had in mind", then that is a restriction even if technically the button works

That's where the problem really is for me. The restriction is soft, but it's so obviously there that you just know that you're doing the wrong thing by not doing what the devs want you to do. You're crippling yourself on purpose

You see it with non spell stuff too. Pick X skill and very often it comes with this unspoken "okay now also use Y or Z because otherwise you're just crippling yourself for no reason". Remember the Druid trailer and the Slam + Volcano gameplay? Yea

Again, I'm not saying this because skill interaction is bad, but because too often the interaction feels less like synergy and more like obligation so your skill doesn't feel like incomplete garbage

Firestorm is probably the cleanest example of what I mean

Without fire infusion it's bad to the point that the skill is barely a skill. The area is small, so you end up wanting Magnified Area, but increasing the radius also spreads the droplets more, so the skill starts fighting itself. Then you accept that fire infusion is needed and suddenly it gives it the frequency and radius that make it feel actually usable (where it should have been in the first place). Fine. Let's accept that part

But even then it still doesn't stop there. The game keeps pushing the whole "feed it more infusions" idea, and at that point the question changes to: if I am already doing this much setup, why am I doing it for a skill that still doesn't feel like the reward matches the amount of rails I had to sit on?

Too many skills feel undertuned or awkward at baseline and only start feeling "right" once you obey the intended package and planned passives for them

And that kind of design takes away at one of the main reasons I play poe in the first place

I don't want every skill to be fully self contained and braindead. I'm not asking for one button on everything. But I also don't think the answer is making skills feel half finished until you reluctantly shove in the missing dev approved pieces

I sincerely hope this is mostly an early access gem pool problem and not a core design direction. Because if the actual philosophy is "build freedom exists, but first follow the intended stuff we want", then that is a pretty bad direction for a game which, imo, biggest strength has always been letting players work with their own ideas


2) The game needs to show way more information ingame, especially for crafting

I already had a whole discussion about this before, and I still think this is one of the biggest things to solve

Way too much important info is hidden. Not just "advanced minmax info", but basic useful info that should obviously be visible once you start interacting with crafting in any meaningful way

Boots are a simple example. If 35% movement speed is only available from ilvl 82+, the game should tell me this somewhere when I'm looking at the affix pool or interacting with the item. This is just basic item info, not some mystical secret that someone needs to study on 3rd party websites

A proper crafting UI would go a long way here, and I don't mean dumbing down crafting. I mean actually presenting information in a sane way because right now a lot of the friction is not complexity, it is just annoyance. Those are not the same thing

Take omen of homogenizing as an example from last season. To use that decently well, you had to know modifier tags, know if the thing you were targeting was prefix or suffix, know what other possible rolls shared those tags, know at which ilvl affixes start appearing, know tiers, know weights or at least have a rough idea of them, and on top of that know where your plan could still go wrong because the wording is vague enough that you end up opening a third party site anyway

And what does the game itself really tell you? Prefix or suffix, and the tier number. That's about it

You can guess that "cast speed" is a caster type affix or that "level of all chaos spell skills" is tied to chaos or caster tags, but "guessing" is the whole problem. It stays guess until you open a website and check information that should have been ingame to begin with

Desecration is another obvious example

Never mind the lord specific stuff. There are many, many affixes that only come from desecration, only go on certain item types, and only exist in specific prefix or suffix slots. Unless you study this game like a holy scripture, there is no way in hell most players are remembering even 10% of that

This is bad UI. Not difficulty. Not depth. Just annoyance and bad UI

A lot of this could be improved with very basic quality of life and a crafting UI

If I put an item into a desecrate window, or some future crafting window (hopefully), the game should show me what can happen to that item. Not necessarily exact odds if GGG does not want to go that far, but at least the possible modifiers, what slots they can go in, and whether a given affix is even in the pool

For example, something as simple as a side panel on the desecrate window would already help a lot

You put in a pair of boots, and the game shows:

"Resistances available"
press there to show the stuff
"#% to Cold Resistance"
"#% to Lightning Resistance"
"#% to Chaos Resistance"
"#% to Fire Resistance"
"#% to Fire and Chaos Resistance"

Then a "Defenses" part, then "Desecrated mods", and whatever else is relevant for that item

That alone would remove so much pointless friction for both new players and old ones

And no, that would not turn the game into d4. People need to stop acting like basic information being visible is some kind of betrayal of poe identity. You are not deleting complexity, you are just removing the part where people have to tab out for information that should be obvious

That kind of UI helps everybody. It helps new players because the game stops feeling like it is actively hiding the rules from them. It helps casual players because they can engage with crafting without needing a phd. It helps hardcore players because even they should not have to play "remember the affix spreadsheet" every time they touch an item

That is why I keep bringing up Last Epoch crafting UI to my friends even though I dislike that game for many other reasons. If there is one thing it does right, it is that the game actually tries to show you what is going on

Poe2 does not need to copy Last Epoch crafting system, but imo it should absolutely learn from the idea that the player should be allowed to see the game they are playing

+1, agree with both points. GGG relies too heavily on 3rd party sites for "free" work that they dont have to do including crafting you mention, price checks, even path of building.

And also, yeah most skills are not viable in and of themselves. Hope they address both of these issues in the future.

Completely agree, solid points.

I’d say I have to massively -1 this thread, especially point 2.


1) not seeing this issue on my end

You sound like you just want one button gameplay and nothing else.

Your example of fire storm proves that.

Game has that, it also has combos


Both are true for spells and attacks

Adds complexity for combos as well as weapon swapping and a swap tree. You can choose if you want to do this or not.

The same way you can choose to curse or not, or expose or not.

It seems you are drawing an arbitrary line at the skills themselves but are perfectly fine(I would hopefully assume) that cursing is okay



2) don’t see this as an issue.

And yes you do “want D4” with the information you just want given to you



Is this really so hard to understand? This stuff isn’t knowledge acquired by third party websites, this is stuff someone can learn on their own.

That’s part of skill expression. Active learning.

You want to take this away and have a little journal like WoW telling you everything. Passive learning. Waiting for everything to be told to you before you make a decision so you can just regurgitate what was said or presented.


No.

"

Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

2) don’t see this as an issue.

And yes you do “want D4” with the information you just want given to you



Is this really so hard to understand? This stuff isn’t knowledge acquired by third party websites, this is stuff someone can learn on their own.

That’s part of skill expression. Active learning.

You want to take this away and have a little journal like WoW telling you everything. Passive learning. Waiting for everything to be told to you before you make a decision so you can just regurgitate what was said or presented.


No.

Go into this blind.
At what point does the game tell you that you need 75% resistances in all?
Why isn't 50 ok? Why not 80? Why is 75 max?
At what point does the game tell you the most effective defensive strat?
When does the game tell you what skill is more effective to build around?
Where on the tree does it tell you that you lack dmg when you can wipe mobs but do no dmg to a boss?
Where is the combat log to assist with learning?

The game is about as anti new player as you can get.

I genuinely don't enjoy our want to sit there and learn every aspect of an entire game by experimenting, especially not in this genre, and especially not in this phase of my life. When I was young and could play infinitely maybe; even then I play for mechanics, I've never really cared about storyline or discovery in any game I've played. Interestingly it seems GGG mostly agrees with OPs point 2, given their increased push towards tooltips and making the game accessible. To me the whole, discovery crowd just feels a lot like a form of elitist gatekeeping. There are certainly things that can or should be secret or to be discovered, but I don't think pretty basic game mechanics should fall under that personally.

"

Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

I’d say I have to massively -1 this thread, especially point 2.


1) not seeing this issue on my end

You sound like you just want one button gameplay and nothing else.

Your example of fire storm proves that.

Game has that, it also has combos


Both are true for spells and attacks

Adds complexity for combos as well as weapon swapping and a swap tree. You can choose if you want to do this or not.

The same way you can choose to curse or not, or expose or not.

It seems you are drawing an arbitrary line at the skills themselves but are perfectly fine(I would hopefully assume) that cursing is okay



2) don’t see this as an issue.

And yes you do “want D4” with the information you just want given to you



Is this really so hard to understand? This stuff isn’t knowledge acquired by third party websites, this is stuff someone can learn on their own.

That’s part of skill expression. Active learning.

You want to take this away and have a little journal like WoW telling you everything. Passive learning. Waiting for everything to be told to you before you make a decision so you can just regurgitate what was said or presented.


No.

I think you misunderstood what I said in point 1

I'm not asking for one button gameplay. Obviously I'm fine with setup existing, cursing included

What I'm talking about is when the setup doesn't feel like payoff or synergy but like the core skill was balanced with missing limbs unless you also use the obvious pair skill/package the devs had in mind. I'm not saying combos shouldn't exist

That is why I used firestorm as the example. You say it proves your point, but for me it proves mine. If a skill feels like shit until you feed it the obvious thing that gives it what it should have had to begin with, then yea, I'm going to say that doesn't feel like I'm doing a combo but enabling the skill to even exist in the first place

And on point 2, there is a difference between learning a system and the game doing a bad job of showing its own rules. Someone being able to learn it on their own isn't defense of bad UI. By that logic literally any terrible interface can be defended because eventually some dude with too much free time will eventually memorize it

Skill expression is what you do with the info once you have it, it has nothing to do with alt tabbing and going to a 3rd party website

I don't really agree with either of your comments. On the first one, you're treating "I don’t want skills to feel half finished without their pair" as if I said "remove combos", which I didn't

On the second one, you're treating "show basic useful info ingame" as if I said "remove complexity", which I also didn't

"

iHiems#0168 wrote:

2) The game needs to show way more information ingame, especially for crafting

I already had a whole discussion about this before, and I still think this is one of the biggest things to solve

Way too much important info is hidden. Not just "advanced minmax info", but basic useful info that should obviously be visible once you start interacting with crafting in any meaningful way

Boots are a simple example. If 35% movement speed is only available from ilvl 82+, the game should tell me this somewhere when I'm looking at the affix pool or interacting with the item. This is just basic item info, not some mystical secret that someone needs to study on 3rd party websites

A proper crafting UI would go a long way here, and I don't mean dumbing down crafting. I mean actually presenting information in a sane way because right now a lot of the friction is not complexity, it is just annoyance. Those are not the same thing

Take omen of homogenizing as an example from last season. To use that decently well, you had to know modifier tags, know if the thing you were targeting was prefix or suffix, know what other possible rolls shared those tags, know at which ilvl affixes start appearing, know tiers, know weights or at least have a rough idea of them, and on top of that know where your plan could still go wrong because the wording is vague enough that you end up opening a third party site anyway

+1 To the thread especially crafting.

It's important to understand the difference between *can* learn something and *has* to learn something. Not everyone wants to (or can) learn this crafting system.

Should be accessible to all and not require a deep dive into esoteric knowledge that someone doesn't necessarily want to learn. Some people just want to craft some nice boots and shouldn't be penalized because they haven't put in the extensive time (read: work) to understand the system.

Almost the entire community uses Path of Building to theorycraft builds. PoE2DB helps players look up items and what affixes they can roll. The community has built an entire parallel software ecosystem — build planners, crafting simulators, price checkers, loot filters, modifier databases — specifically because the game doesn't provide this information itself. The fact that we need all of these external sources to play Path of Exile efficiently isn't great.

Don't take my word for it, here's a quote from mobalytics in their understanding the BASICS PART 1 (https://mobalytics.gg/poe-2/guides/crafting-basics-part-1):

"I tried to keep it as simple as possible in this beginners guide to PoE 2 items, but the item system in this game is incredibly complex. As confusing as it might seem now, itemisation in Path of Exile 2 is absolutely fascinating and rewarding to understand."

Showing players what an item can maximally roll in the tooltip is very low investment to implement while helping to remove a major reason a new player opens a third party tab mid-session.

"

Skyvortex#7923 wrote:

At what point does the game tell you that you need 75% resistances in all?
Why isn't 50 ok? Why not 80? Why is 75 max?
At what point does the game tell you the most effective defensive strat?
When does the game tell you what skill is more effective to build around?
Where on the tree does it tell you that you lack dmg when you can wipe mobs but do no dmg to a boss?
Where is the combat log to assist with learning?

The game is about as anti new player as you can get.

This is one of the easiest games to get into as a new player. None of this needs to be told to you.

"

iHiems#0168 wrote:

I think you misunderstood what I said in point 1

I'm not asking for one button gameplay. Obviously I'm fine with setup existing, cursing included

What I'm talking about is when the setup doesn't feel like payoff or synergy but like the core skill was balanced with missing limbs unless you also use the obvious pair skill/package the devs had in mind. I'm not saying combos shouldn't exist

That is why I used firestorm as the example. You say it proves your point, but for me it proves mine. If a skill feels like shit until you feed it the obvious thing that gives it what it should have had to begin with, then yea, I'm going to say that doesn't feel like I'm doing a combo but enabling the skill to even exist in the first place

So what do you want from fire storm then?

I assume you just want it powerful from the get go from what you are saying in this and the previous statement.


So you should beable to just 1 button it and not worry about building any infusions for it.


Which no.

Spell out your solution because this is what youre implying with both of your statements. You want the skill "Finished" (not requiring all this build of infusions your words)


And if you build for infusions correctly this is something that you barely have to interact with. Its only the start of the game where things might take a bit more time.


But everything is "weak" or "feels like its missing something" at that stage of the game.

"

iHiems#0168 wrote:

Skill expression is what you do with the info once you have it, it has nothing to do with alt tabbing and going to a 3rd party website

But thats because you decided to do that. Thats entirely on you thinking you have to.

You dont.

Thats every game since the internet started existing, onward.

Thats the majority of the player base (especially on the forums)

They are all guide gamers. So they all think they need a guide to play.


Thats ease of access, people like to play on easy mode. Majority anyways. Thats all gaming. Its very niche to go into single player games and just select legendary, or hard or expert or mythic etc etc...

Thats just path of least resistance. Not a game issue.


There will always be a 3rd party site. Even when you DO have things like WoW does with its journal telling you all damage types, a combat log, addons you can get like DBM....


Youre just moving the dial towards information you do want further over.


Someone had to put all that stuff on "3rd party tools". Why are you choosing to interact with that instead of doing what that someone did at the start?

Thats not the games fault for that choice.

"

Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

So what do you want from fire storm then?

I assume you just want it powerful from the get go from what you are saying in this and the previous statement.


So you should beable to just 1 button it and not worry about building any infusions for it.


Which no.

Spell out your solution because this is what youre implying with both of your statements. You want the skill "Finished" (not requiring all this build of infusions your words)


And if you build for infusions correctly this is something that you barely have to interact with. Its only the start of the game where things might take a bit more time.


But everything is "weak" or "feels like its missing something" at that stage of the game.

Come on bro, you're just being pedantic for the sake of it at this point

I've seen your other replies in this forum before, you're smarter than that, so I don't buy that you can't see the distinction

Are you seriously, straight face, going to tell me you don't understand the difference between a skill being complete as base and then becoming better through setup x a skill feeling like it has half of what iwas supposed have missing until you attach the obvious package it was designed around?

And "everything feels weak early game" is not really an answer. There is a humongous difference between a skill being weaker early because progression exists, and a skill feeling structurally incomplete until you feed it the exact kind of interaction it was obviously balanced around



I'm not going to keep arguing about the crafting either, we will just agree to disagree. If you really find that qol like this is bad for the game and its players (especially new ones) and not your personal opinion, I really have nothing else to say