Gus's League 1 Feedback

This is feedback after having played through the end game, getting through corrupted delirious T15 maps, almost exclusively with a friend (until my meta build made multiplayer mapping horrible). I've got 253 hours in the game and my overall experience was a fantastic one. I loved the game, there isn't another ARPG that comes close to this experience, and I think at times it represents a true evolution of the genre.

That being said, I wanted to provide feedback because I believe this game is at times falling into the same rut as most/all ARPG's since Diablo 2 - combat becomes trivialized, mandatory aspects are hidden/difficult-to-acquire/present, and the end game content is a slog to get to because of this.

# Art

From an artistic perspective this game is in its own league. Diablo from an environment perspective comes close but otherwise the animations, lighting, effects, sound, creature design, etc are unbelievably good. I hate how much the graphics of a game influence my enjoyment of it, but PoE2 will only reap the benefits of that character flaw of mine.

I especially appreciate when monsters spawn out of the environment instead of just standing around. The beetles pouring out of the walls, the skeletons coming out of the tombs, the spiders climbing up the side of the map, the elephants stampeding on paradise island. Those go a long way towards making the world feel real for me and I appreciate that element.

# Why I Play ARPG's

I play ARPG's because it's the genre that get's closest to the DND fantasy realization from a combat perspective. I want to roll a Wizard, have a dozen cool looking spells that fit my theme, and then fight monsters and bosses that drop gear that visually and mechanically modifies my character. I wanna chase those rares, beat all the unique content, ideally do it with friends in a party, and then reroll my character as a Monk or a Sorceror or what have you. Do it all again.

From Software has mastered the "fighting monsters and bosses" angle with the skill expression making me feel like a badass fighter as I get better at the game. But they fall short of the wizard or ranger or pure fantasy of character themeing. I want to highlight where PoE2 feels like magic - when I'm being rewarded for my skill expression while using tools that no other game provides me (or provides a less visually or tactile version) in a build that feels thematic to me.

For this reason the first three acts of the campaign felt nearly perfect. I rolled a Warrior and I had seen the "wield two handed weapons in one hand" node and thought "there's my theme". I wanted to swing a big fuckin weapon as slowly as possible and it feel like a train when it hits. I wanted to handicap myself speed wise to reward myself with attack damage, I saw the nodes on the tree that enabled or encouraged that behavior, and that's where i went (X% less attack speed for X% more damage). I did rolling slam, infernal warcry, the leap, boneshatter. I got into this stun the enemy and then wail on them. It felt great. I had to dodge moves, I had to attack in specific windows, and I got rewarded with disgusting damage compared to my merc-playing companion.

When I got sunder and i saw the combo form of stun -> break armor -> consume armor for crit I was hooked. It was everything I wanted. Meaty slow slams that did obscene damage. I explicitly didn't want to take things that didn't fit this theme, the ground mods, the volcano slam, the totems. That's great, that means there's another warrior for me to roll down the line.

The story was engaging, the mobs were little combat puzzles, and the bosses were rewarding from a skill perspective. I found the campaign a breeze, in fact I wish it was harder. The dream of people dying 1-3 times before beating the bosses was not a reality for me, there were only two or three fights that actually hit that mark and all I had to do to make that a reality was buy a good starting weapon from the vendor, dump my currency into it, and be set for literally the entire act. I've played the campaign entirely through as an archmage spark merc and partially through as 2 other off-meta characters that same experience has held true.

So the campaign was engaging, it was a stream of fresh content, it had clear objectives, it made me feel cool as a warrior/sorceror/merc, and every drop felt meaningful. It was the best campaign since D3 at least and if it loses comparatively (I'm not sure it does) it would be because they had a complete story, with great cinematics, and an easy to love theme/story. I assume when the game is complete this will be my favorite campaign.

# Campaign Feedback

Before i get to the endgame, I wish the campaign was:

- Slightly harder, or the optional content was harder. I want opportunities to push my build and be rewarded for that during the campaign. Based on memory I died once or twice to the act 2 boss learning the sand mechanic of standing next to the NPC, I died once to balabala learning the poison, I died to the forgemaster as i learned that it was a dps check (so fuckin cool), and I died to Donkey Kong with that big ol slam probably 3 times (it was very unforgiving and I loved that lol). Oh Act 3 boss killed me once teaching me to respect the lasers. Again, no more than 10 deaths some of which were due to playing with a friend who would at times get blown up and then leave me me having to solo more than half of a juiced healthbar.
- More boss unique drops. In my ideal game, every boss has a unique drop that we see them use (or it's implied) that then we can use. I want the sword of the act 1 boss and I want it to do that V ice slam or maybe I can place it into the ground and it does AoE damage before I recall it like he does. I want the pillar of Donkey Kong or a belt that he may have been wearing under that fur. I want to feel like if I farmed this boss here or especially in end game I would get their specific loot. Having zero idea about what Sekamas vs Chaos vs Ritual gives me during the campaign I think is a big miss. I wish I had felt incentivized to stop mid campaign and farm those just for fun. I think that's why i like Essence so much: a clear list of rewards who's power fits into every build (good crafting materials), a clear list of the challenge, I can choose to engage or not, and loot only found through this system (although I'll touch on that later). Now I just wish it just showed up way more and dropped more essences per instance.
- Slight tangent, I would like to see more items that provide unique abilities or modify my current ability - even if it's just cosmetically. I'd like uniques with build defining abilities, I'd like to see uniques that change my fireball to be green and demonic, I'd like to see unique's that do cosmetic things around my character (I swore you guys talked about a rat themed gear that summoned rats around corpses or something at one point). I'd like to be able to watch a stream or video and know some number of the uniques a person is wearing based on the changes to their abilities, the abilities themselves, or the cosmetic effects around them. I think making all items physical in the game and worn is a huge step in the right direction, I'd like to see more.
- With 5 people playing on launch night and the next day, the game isn't built for that large of a party. Monsters die too quickly, the on screen effects become cluttered, some people are always playing a walking simulator behind those in the front. I don't honestly think this can be fixed but I write this here to say there is a huge demand in my circle for games that are party orientated. Deep Rock Galactic, Remnant 2, Helldivers. Not a single ARPG does this well and the promise that Diablo's world bosses make isn't even remotely present in the rest of the game (or their open world concept). So I read that PoE2 supports up to 6 people and I would kill for content designed for 6 people or 4 or 3. Playing with one other person has been enjoyable but with the current tuning we meet up at boss fights and that's it - it doesn't heighten the experience like in Remnants 2 or define the play style like Helldivers. I'll save the rest of the coop feedback for another section but I will say the Act 1 boss with 5 people was one of my favorite gaming memories in memory. Five people playing as best they can, people dying and having to get rezzed, people complaining about moves as others are easily dodging them, the effect of five of us standing in the coolest mist as the boss leaps at us. It was cinematic. Thanks for that.

# End Game Transition

The endgame transition was painful. We went from engaging combat to little skill expression and nearly instant deaths. From a clear objective to trees that read "to get points fight a boss in 20 levels to get the first two points" or "defeat the King in the Mists to get the first two points" and I didn't see a single key fragment until I got to like T10 maps or something. From gear being important but not necessary to critically essential - even to play content far under your current level. From a seemless coop experience of dying, rezzing, and fighting the same content together - to now if someone dies they have to stay dead until the map is complete to get the quest progress, I can't rez, and if they leave they have to wait for me to finish anyway because nothing is easy to farm outside of starting another map.

Some of this is easy tutorial stuff, some of this is tuning, some of this approaches design questions and that's where I'm most interested in hearing the dev's thoughts. Because based on the interviews I was hoping the endgame would continue the campaigns pacing and engagement levels, but the current implementation is close enough to PoE1 that I worry that's where we're staying.

I had my own build, I looked at no content after launch day, and I organically played and had a great time. I hit T1 maps, struggled, T2 and T3 maps were absolutely blowing me up and my friend. We did a night of getting crushed and we looked up build guides the next night. We didn't feel empowered to fix our builds ourselves, we were forced to engage with trade, we felt forced to leave the game to figure out why we went from breezing through Act 3 cruel to white mobs annihilating us. That was a horrible experience, and at that point I started running some pretty common end game warrior tech just to feel like I can survive and map. Sure I was able to push T9 at the time because of this, but the build wasn't mine, the gear was slow to upgrade, and the combat was far less engaging. From a genre defining gameplay experience to just another ARPG - which was painful.

## Individual End Game Points

- Resistances went from not mattering to being essential to survive even a basic encounter. Life and defenses on gear felt the same way but less obviously critical - the difference between being res capped and an extra 200 armor on my Warrior was night and day in terms of importance.
- I think ARPG dev's take this for granted but mandating gear checkpoints is not assumed for a casual. No NPC mentions resistances as being important, no tooltip says "Hey you have a cap of 75% and right now it's not important to hit that but it will be". If any content assumes some checkpoints, I think there needs to be some clear signposting that that is the case. This is partially why I think the campaign needs to be harder. It needs to ramp me from "Put on the best gear you can find" to "Start prioritizing X, Y, and Z because it's going to slowly be expected of you". I don't know if we should be allowed to leave campaign if we're not ready for some amount of mapping, and I don't think it's good game design to rely on youtubers to explain what a player needs to prioritize to get past even the first couple tiers of end game content (T1-T5 maps).
- The distance between objectives changed drastically. We went from at least one cool boss in every zone, which naturally progressed into the next important zone, which naturally forwarded the story to a endless number of zones each worth marginally more/less than the other and who's objectives were something like 20+ levels away and at least 10 tiers of maps away. I went from engaging with a game to grinding for a vague objective I didn't really understand (does each system have shards which build into keys which let me fight the boss? What are logbooks? Do I need to find a special portal in Delerium or...?). I went from repeating no bosses to fighting the same 3 or 4 bosses 3 or 4 times in endgame. Which is wild to me. If there are 50+ bosses why is there one predetermined boss per map and why does it feel like I've seen less bosses in my entire end game experience than I did in the first act of the campaign? Why have I fought the spore druid more times than any other 10 bosses in the game combined?
- If I am to leave the campaign at level 65, I want meaningful meta progress by level 70 at the latest. And i do not mean Atlas World Tree points which read "Gain 10% chance to get a map so you can keep mapping" I mean material that rewards me for chasing down boss nodes, I mean boons that reward me for hyper focusing on an end game system, that make my end game experience mine or more fun or noticeably more rewarding.
- To hammer this point home, the current Atlas tree is not cool or a place I can express how I like to play. Every node feels like it boils down to some percentage increase in loot and that there is a right answer and the average player won't know what the right answer is unless they collect a bunch of data themselves (or more likely go online and find the right atlas build). Finding more waystones isn't cool, 3% more pack density isn't cool. I wish there were nodes that actually changed how the game felt, rewarded you, or challenged you - not just number go up nodes.
- The tuning went from engaging a pack at a time (which felt like an intentional encounter) and a dark souls boss battle to a flood of nearly indistinguishable monsters either being blown up or blowing you up and boss fights that are either slogs but not dangerous or one of us blowing the other up in seconds. I have tuned my build as was required of me and now most maps are pressing one button to sprint through the mobs and watch the screen explode until I get to a rare and then I press a two button combo and they get blown up (and this is a low power build). This isn't player power to me, this isn't a power fantasy, this has become a click farming game. This wouldn't warrant a post because that's what literally every other ARPG has been in my experience, mind numbing end game repetition. But PoE2's campaign was an evolution of the genre and the endgame feels like a reset. *In fact my entire reason for posting this is to get this point across* - there are players like me who **like an engaging gameplay loop as presented in the campaign** - and when I hear streamers or read reddit wanting PoE1 levels of zoom and explosions and one button clicks I get disheartened that the devs may feel deincentivized to providing this gameplay in the end game.
- If people want easier, more repetitive gameplay then they should play content they're overfarmed for. I believe the properly tuned content for a character at their power level should be the speed of the campaign or slower, it should be skill testing fights and reward better loot than anything easier. ARPGs have this difficulty scale built in, overfarm and reduce the difficulty and increase the speed, push your build to higher level content - up the difficulty and decrease the speed. Right now that's not the case, the difficulty is purely numbers going skyhigh - not skill tests.
- Coop play went from amazing and fun to painful and wasteful. I have almost my entire playtime with one other person and mapping sucks so much for two people. If one person dies they have to wait there, dead, staring at nothing to keep the mapping progress. And if they leave they have nothing to farm, no way to get back, so they have to sit and wait for the other person to clear the map. Most of the end game mechanics turn off if the owner of the map dies, no expedition, no ritual, no quick delirium end (not even sure the emotions drop). If we're in the trials they get booted entirely and if they're the key owner the other player is forced to end their run as well. This is the **one area that PoE2 is way worse than the competition**. Last Epoch and Diablo have none of this friction.
- Let us pay for the trials with two identical keys, or cut the loot a bit everytime someone dies, or buff the monsters (ideally in a skill testing way not a numbers testing way), or do something that let's all players keep playing for the love of god. I would happily game with my friend who dies all the time, and lose half my loot potential, if we got to just keep playing. But when he dies and he's sitting their on youtube waiting for me to finish up - it's excruciating.

# Combat and Loot

The biggest point I want to make is I want combat that is rewarding from a skill perspective, thematic, and non-repetitive. I do not need to blow up ever-increasing pack sizes to feel like my character is progressing. If mapping was walking into a single room, with a boss, or 3 rare mobs and their minions (and the mods were skill based mods), and I had to best them in combat to get all the loot of a normal map - I would have 10x more fun. Campaign was far more enjoyable to me than current mapping and if every player power system had to have their numbers squashed to make that possible I would happily take that trade. I don't want or need to feel like I can make a character 1000x tankier or that has 1000x dps. I need to feel like I can make a character who is 25% tankier then the boss expects, or that i do 25% more damage than a boss expects. I want to be able to make a character that does 50% more damage than the boss expects but I'm 10% less tanky than the boss expects. I absolutely never want to walk into a pinnacle boss fight (or any boss fight) and delete them before they get through their second attack/ability. I want to play the same game 50 times with 50 completely different builds and abilities and combos and chase legendaries.

I do not need to see an ever increasing of loot dropped from monsters, in fact maybe this is a controversial opinion but more loot is actually a negative. I hate leaving any object on the ground and right now I have to. I'm fine with leaving most bases on the ground, I'm find with leaving a blue or two, but when I'm running through maps ignoring 9/10 drops we've gone too far. I would love to walk into that room, kill that combat puzzle like a darksouls game, and get one single item that had impossibly high rolls or a cool unique effect or hell even a cosmetic transmog than what I'm currently getting. I'd even take a 50 stack of any currency item over 100 blues and golds dropping, having to ID them, trying to scan them to see if they've got anything worthwhile on them, and then recycling them for 1/10th of an orb.

I like the tier system. I wish it was used like 10 fold more. Every time a zone wants to drop 5 blue's I want those to condense into a single blue of a higher tier. I want to see my first tier item drop during the first instance I may want to grind an area, like if I farm a zone for a second time or maybe a third time I want tier 1's to start dropping in the campaign so getting stuck in an area is nearly impossible. And when I get to the end game I want the baseline to be tier 1. In fact, I want whatever tier system the end game comes in to correlate directly with loot tiers. If I'm in a T1 map I want the baseline to be tier 1. T15 drops T15 loot. I don't know how many tiers there are right now, and I don't care lol, I want to *know* that when I do harder content I'm getting better drops and right now I couldn't tell the difference between T1-T5 and T6-T9. When i do a two floor trial or a three floor or a four floor trial I want the difference in quality to be apparent from the first room and the first loot pile.

# Random Game Theory

If something is mandatory, I need to either be explicitly told that and given the tools to accomplish that objective OR I need to be given it freely. If capped resistances are mandatory I need to be told that and given the tools to accomplish it - because capping resistances is not the fun part of the game, at most they are a progress bar to the next fun part.

I do not think Move speed should be mandatory. The game should have some designed speed, and then going above that speed should cost you something. If every moment to moment is engaging and rewarding then move speed isn't necessary. If it becomes mandatory, like it feels like it is for the Arbiter of Ash, it should be given to me or signposted and made easy to achieve. This might be a separate topic, and one you guys have far more time to think about, but if a stat is mandatory for all builds it should be an implicit. I would rather remove all damage affixes and replace them with cool/niche affixes and move the damage multipliers to implicit than chase a 4-6 perfectly rolled piece of gear for every item upgrade starting at like T5 maps. When only a perfectly rolled item is viable it makes loot feel way worse and progress chunky instead of smooth and incremental. Same for charm slots, same for move speed, action speed, chance to block, etc. I feel like the pool of affixes is small and simple - they don't effect how I play, they just make numbers go up, and that's not compelling.

I like that ascendancies are not free to get, that makes sense to me. I like the trial system - it seems varied, expandable, and non-repetitive. The Trial of the Sekhemas is an amazing game within the game, it was obvious to me - a new player - that favoring relics with defensive stats was a way to change the difficulty. I like that the trials favor different builds and that I have to play differently between the two.

I like traps.

Any system that requires time as a cost, should have a way of skill expression/reward in that loop. In the Trial of the Sekhemas when you do the "survive X time" rooms rares spawn and if you kill enough of them the room auto completes. When you do the race rooms your skill/build helps dictate how long those rooms last. In the Trial of Chaos there are multiple instances where this is not the case. When escorting the statue (super cool aesthetically) there is no skill expression/reward. In the "survive X time" chamber there is no skill expression/reward. In the sacrifice circles, there is no skill expression/reward. They all take a set amount of time. This made the Trial of Chaos feel far worse than the Trial of the Sekhemas for my group and I. It felt the longest, it felt the least rewarding, and I never got better at it because there was never anything to get better at. You just power crept the challenge.

I hate that I have to run the Trial of Chaos 3 times to fight the pinnacle boss. Maybe that'll get fixed if you fix the trials other issues, but in the first trial had 1 key 1 boss. The 2 trial had 2 keys 1 boss and it took forever to farm the 3 part key. If the third trial has 3 keys for one boss I'll blow a gasket lol. Also, minor tangent, the corrupted keys are SO cool for the Trial of Chaos - expand that system or let me do it more frequently. The fact that I know there are better keys but I can only use them 1/3rd of the time no matter how well I play sucks. That makes the 2 vanilla runs feel worse just by comparison.

## What is the Point of Spark

I only bring up this question because it feels like a relic from Diablo. What is the point of Spark from an action game perspective. It doesn't reward accuracy, it doesn't perform a unique mechanical role except for maybe doing damage around a corner, it's not a visually clear ability. At some point playing an Elementalist after playing a Mace Barb I just stopped and thought "my barb to do this much damage had to sprint into packs, theoretically putting him in danger, or slowly slam the ground and set up a combo which I had to time or aim. This spark ability requires no skill, no timing, no risk, just hold left click and do damage." I don't know if an ability that can't have skill expression belongs in an action based game. Like could you imagine a DOTA character having Spark? I don't think so, cause it doesn't add anything except for an ability with the tags "lightning" and "projectile". IDK, anytime I see a game trying to shake up the genre and then watching them carry over relics of the past I want to make sure it was done with good reason. DND is a great example of having to carry over spells that don't make sense but are valuable to the brand and it makes the gameplay worse imho.

# Multiplayer Feedback

I touched on mapping sucking with friends. I touched on trials and end game systems sucking with friends. I touched on their being a real desire for a multiplayer Action-focused ARPG. There are only a few extra points I want to add.
- Visual clutter felt almost directly tied to individual classes. Mages and Witches felt like they made the screen far more busy than the merc, monk, and barb did. This reduced the fun my casual party had because they stopped being able to see things easily. Multiple times people died to effects off their screen, because a mob or boss was targeting a different player who was on their screen. Many monster attacks became hard to see when playing with multiple players.
- With the current tuning, even in multiplayer basic monsters got eviscerated by a single player. Which meant most people were just following the person in the lead. That's not engaging. In Left 4 Dead everyone is killing basic zombies and then we team up to fight the elites. In Remnant 2 we're all constantly working on the foremost wave of enemies, or killing those that just surrounded us. I would enjoy PoE2 more if the multiplayer gameplay felt engaging for all players are rewarding for playing together. I accept that this might not be the the right ARPG for that, but it's what I want and what is missing from the ARPG scene.
- Loot felt poorly split between friends a lot of the time. Like at an essence one player gets all 3 essences. I love seeing the loot my friends get while we play. I don't like it that it feels like less loot when summed together. If I spend an alch, 2 exalts, some of the cheaper emotions, and a vaal orb on a key to make it more difficult I want to make sure we're all walking away with way more than that in loot because we're doing the most difficult content. Sometimes it felt okay, but when I played alone I found divine orbs dropping semi-frequently and consistently. When we played together no one found any divine orbs at that same rough cadence or consistency. It felt like we were being punished.

## Trading vs Solo-Self-Found

I think trading is unhealthy for an ARPG because it encourages the dev to balance around players being able to trade and that makes the average item drop experience worse. I like that trading let's me get rewards from content I don't enjoy doing (Trial of Chaos this league), but other than that it only provides me a way of getting loot faster than I organically could by playing in the least fun way. It hides the problems inherent to the existing systems of organic progression, drop rates, and crafting by allowing such large quantities of people to smooth out everyone's experience while robbing them of getting all of those good drops themselves. So I don't like trading to start.

That being said, it's the default mode and I assumed it was what everything was balanced around. I hated having to use a web portal. I spent a non-insignificant amount of game time toggling between game and firefox searching for items that were 4-6 perfectly rolled affixes because that was all that constituted an upgrade after a certain tier of map and I wasn't getting enough bases to constantly craft (and that crafting was a pure slot machine). Whispering people only for them to not respond, reneg on a deal, or spam me when I was underselling an item was a bad experience. If trading is going to remain the default experience then trading must be brought into the game client.

Ideally, however, I don't want to play trade. The problem is the only other option is Solo-Self-Found which removes the major way I want to play - with my friends. I want to play with my friends, I want to trade with my friends, and I want the drops to be generous such that we don't have to grind out keys to then grind bosses to find the one drop we want from them. My second most requested feature, after maintaining engaging action orientated combat throughout the entire game, is creating a solution where my friends and I can play with no-trade-balanced drop rates but still trade amongst ourselves. I don't care if it's a new game mode where only guild members can trade together, I don't care if I have to pay a small private server fee so only people I invite can play in that pseudo-SSF environment, I don't care if it's Last Epoch's faction separation where I get SSF drop rates but my loot is bound to my account except for with those people I'm currently playing with or with friends whom I have a special currency for (although LE needs to up the drop rate of those currencies a ton).

I thought the faction design was clean but honestly private servers sound amazing.
# The Time-Cost per League

I spent 250 hours over mostly two characters getting to the end game pinnacle bosses. The first one didn't make it because I saw the meta builds going 100x faster and I swapped over. My second character probably represents 150 of those hours. I imagine I could get more efficient with that timing, it would ruin some of my fun playing the campaign in the optimal way instead of a worse version of my end game build, but I could do it. But it wouldn't shave off more than 10 hours because I zoomed through the campaign as is. So let's be generous and call it 130 hours for me to get to the first level of all end game bosses and the arbiter of ash with a meta build and a small starting wealth. That is way too much time for the first rung of difficulty for all of the content. I expect as more content is added, even if more player power is added, that time-cost will grow overtime. I beat Last Epoch's pinnacle content in less than 90 hours and even that was too long. I'm not saying every thing you ever add to the game has to be beatable in 90 hours of playtime, I'm just saying the game has to be extremely fun still after 60 hours (4 x 16 hour weekends of game time, which seems like a reasonable ask to get 4 months of my year dedicated to this game assuming 4 leagues) for me to want to put in any additional time. There has to be meaningful and cool milestones and content every couple of hours all the way up to the pinnacle bosses. If there ever has to be a grind, it has to be after the first difficulty of all the content has been beaten.

I'm against the concept of leagues. I like to play a lot of games and I like to beat those games and move on. I like to maintain my progression. But I've read and listened to why leagues are good for PoE2 and I like the nature of a seasonal content drop that I can play. I wish it all came to Eternal so I could minimize the forced repeated gameplay time. But assuming only part of the league comes to Eternal after a delay (my understanding as to how it worked in PoE) I would have a much worse experience with the game if the current time cost was maintained for every league. Not completing everything in a league, I suspect, will make me want to skip some leagues so I can devout more time to a single league and beat all of it's content. But if I'm grinding as much as I was this first league, I think I would burn out of the whole experience quickly. So please consider shortening **and** enriching the climb to pinnacle content so that leagues aren't chores. Or send everything to Eternal so we can play the new content and keep our old characters and progress. I can't give this game every league what I gave it at launch. Which is fine, I just want to help you interpret your player retention numbers, my consistent playtime was not because I liked the end game being the PoE1 style it's because it was all new and I wanted to write this review.
# I Missed Legendaries

The last concept I'll touch on is Legendaries from Last Epoch. I didn't enjoy getting a bunch of unique gear pieces that because of their stat block felt relegated to the early game. I love the concept of leveling uniques, that's cool, but the fact that so many uniques felt dead in the water was rough. I might also be partially biased but I like having a unique in every slot.

So in comes one of Last Epoch's best features, Legendaries. Your uniques drop with a variable amount of Legendary Potential, with drop rates that are individually balanced for each unique, and you can smash an item with max affixes together with that unique to create a legendary item that steals it's Legendary Potential number of affixes from that item. This is such a cool system and it elevates the build potential in the game. Maybe you guys have tried something like this in the past or maybe you're cooking up something similar, but if you were gonna steal one thing from other games it'd first be the seemless multiplayer experience of Last Epoch, then the SF guild such that drop rates were more fun but trading was limited to my friends, and then finally Legendaries (although the name should be reversed, legendaries being the items that drop and uniques being the items we forge - cause those are more unique).

## Conclusion, 250 hours is too much

This review was too long, I'm sorry. Please tell me if it was helpful or not, as it'll help me decide if I write something similar for every league I play. Please tell me if you'd prefer a video format or a certain word count, I'm happy to oblige in the future. Thanks for the great first league.

This isn't all of the points, but it's the most important and succinct ones:

- The game was fantastic for the first 3 acts. I had one of my favorite gaming memories to date fighting Count Geonor with 5 friends.
- Combat eventually devolves to PoE speed and it loses me quickly. I want an action based, engaging combat system. Anything PoE speed should be relegated to over leveled content and therefore less efficient farming.
- Anything mandatory should be removed, given freely, or heavily signposted. Movement speed, resistances, damage affixes on items, etc. Mandatory nodes or any node that just makes the numbers go up on at least the Atlas Tree should be reworked to be more interesting.
- The game systems should either be designed with multiplayer in mind or this game should be solo. Multiplayer in the end game was a really bad experience and it's the one place PoE2 is definitively worse than its competitors.
- Trade needs to be in game. SSF needs a non-solo variant. I want to play with my friends but I want to find everything myself or in my friend group *without un-fun grinding*.
- Anything the developers expect us to do every league should not take a person more than 100 hours to get to, I'd honestly shoot for 60 or 70 at most. If that list does not contain all of the endgame and pinnacle bosses I think I'd be upset.
- I think nothing is more important than defining the expected play experience (Act 1-3 vs endgame) and then committing to that across the game. I personally want engaging slower combat and if zooming is ever allowed it's either at the last 5% of the game's expected content and/or it's strictly for over leveled content where you're way more powerful than you should be.