475 Hours - 4/5 Endgame Characters

I'm just going to address things that you haven't somewhat covered that I would like to see addressed:

Economy
The economy distribution is pretty bad, very obviously following a power law where the top .01% of players own 99% of the good-good. There's a lot going on here. The players exploiting the quant/rarity bonus from party play are actually absurd and I think this system needs tuned to some extent.

The problem that emerges from this is that despite being someone with way too many hours invested, I can barely participate in the market. This is a manifold problem with the item weights, crafting expenses, and item drops more generally, which is exacerbated by price-insensitive people who are accumulating currency by abusing systems in a way that precludes most players from equivalent participation. Moreover, I expect RMT is also a factor in this as well.

On one hand I've tried, extensively, to farm up meaningful upgrades. I've got a pretty mid-endgame chest and a pretty mid-endgame staff with the bases I desire. I've spent way too many hours trying to naturally drop and/or craft items to no avail. Any sense of progress has been translated to currency, and in combination with the aforementioned economy any sense of progress has been completely ablated. Staffs are still listed at somewhere between my total net worth (which I expect is far greater than 95% of legit, normal players with exceptions for the extraordinarily lucky).

Meaningful crafting options are exceedingly expensive, and in spite of their great expense offer no determinism, as such are liable to produce the very same T1 equilibrium that all other methods of item generation do.

Ultimately it feels like the game isn't, and hasn't respected the amount of "investment" that I've put into it.


Hybrid Character and Stats
Reconsider the way that you elect to stat check hybrid classes. I just bought a staff for 8d and I can't use it without rebalancing my stats. This is obnoxious non-gameplay wankery. It's unclear to me precisely the reason - I immediately quit upon realizing this. Either my INT or my DEX are too low to use my staff. I've already stymied my skill leveling, and as a result everything is at level 18 or below despite being on a level 94 character. Now what?: I get to go spend time on the market looking for some equivalent ring(s)/amulet/gloves for a stat whose sole purpose (except when I run my HoWA) is to enable the use of my pretty mid skills. This is a basic build, I'm not particularly stretched out and everything exists largely within the proximity of the Monk tree, and the resultant build isn't exceptional at anything - I don't think with these givens I should be struggling to support my lvl18 skills. Instead I just feel bad every time I slot in a new piece of gear since I'm always on the precipice of this. Conversely I can go virtually all-in on INT on my witch and never really deal with this issue, and, ostensibly, she will be stronger in all metrics (though she isn't because I ran chaos skills, which is not in a particularly good state)

Item Rarity + Mandatory Affixes
This is a mistake. I have a really nice HoWA that I practically never wear because my MF gear is just going to be so much better for me to do anything other than +3/4 pinnacle bosses - and even then there's obviously a significant draw for me to wear them in these cases as well. It doesn't feel good, or nice, or smart. It just feels bad to have to slap a bunch of slots full of MF gear to be able to actually meaningfully impact my currency accrual, e.g. play the game as it stands. Currency is a means to an end, and this essentially makes it the end in and of itself, with further issues being the aforementioned exploiters and RMT which I expect has resulted in grossly exaggerated prices.

Moreover, there is a whole other category of mandatory affixes which don't provide anything interesting. Resistances are boring, passive stats that offer nothing but a check-pass. They're antiquated, and there's so much more that could be done in the suffix slot to make gear more meaningful, but here we're stuck shoehorning as much as we can get on all pieces or the inordinately expensive optimized route of getting the biggest resistances on the fewest pieces possible to reach cap. This sucks, and again limits build diversity. These could be removed with active skills, or passives in the tree, but such things are, from what I've seen, virtually nonexistant in the current game. I would suggest giving players the option to obviate this awful system with more passive tree resistances and skill-based resistances both in active and passive forms.

Movement speed is a must-have on boots, and again, I would recommend, as have many before me, putting it in the implicit, or having a separate class of them without defenses which can exceed %MS on defensive boots. Or putting it in the tree. Something that isn't the current model. My argument is that it's less about the MS%, and more about increasing the build diversity. As it stands it's something that falls into a "can't do without" and this is made even more salient with the effects it has on skills and dodge rolls. You could also affect this with dodge roll in the tree, something increasing distance/recovery for instance. But with the current systems in place this just feels like it may as well be integrated elsewhere, or both with an explicit cap on total MS%. Also consider more items like Expert Scalpers for other classes.

Finally I would argue is mandatory stats like this that are causing the power drawdown in characters like the Warrior. If I didn't have to roll a bunch of resistances, you could put more lines in that make more sense which duly enhances potential build variety and may indeed offer more opportunities for an item to have value. As it stands the suffix list on something like a chest is boring.


Waystones
I don't like the consumable system (never have). Maybe you could make these a stackable currency that gets ID'd (when magic/rare/unique) upon placement into the device with exceptions for corrupted waystones and instead of a stash tab, a map device that acts as a crafting bench allowing players to roll up maps. Let players reforge and mod maps here with free access to the currency in their currency tabs and withdraw desirable maps for selling, while allowing stacking. I get that you need to sell tabs, but this system is and has been asinine and results in way too much non-gameplay.

Waystone mods are also annoying and boring.

Volatiles
Volatiles and the rest of the ground effects disproportionately affect melee. This is especially the case with chaos volatiles as they do not always register contact with the player, and in way too many cases this leads to repeatedly trying to trigger several, missing one, needing to avoid the explosion, and then triggering the last one and drastically reducing the attack window. This is so obnoxious, and it was an issue in PoE1 as well. Please reconsider the design of these to be more consistent and level the playing field for melee here, since ranged is almost totally unaffected by these and the various ground effects/explosions/etc...

Overall Balance
Warrior felt so good through the campaign if we subtract out the overwhelmingly punishing things like ice zealots throwing an infinity of eyes at you, and the CC stuff bosses dump out ad nauseum - which again is disproportionately punishing for Warriors (particularly Mace Warriors) without due recompense for their high-commitment attacks. The early game feels like what you said you wanted to produce, there was a lot more meaningful timing and dodging. Things felt fair and balanced (mostly, y'all really gotta get more accurate at indicating the limits of damage). Once things hit cruel though, this balance regime fell right off and from then on more or less felt like PoE1 to me, which I was hoping for some real, tangible change. But I haven't went all-in since Breach so what do I know?

UI
Please give us more UI options, put out a community poll. Let us elect the console skillbar/health UI on M&K. I like the classic one but I've had enough of it, it's super obscuring. Please also consider putting status effects/debuffs near the health or the center of the screen (preferably making them more accessible for mousing) as it stands they're kinda burdensome to look at, and moreso to mouse. Better yet if y'all would allow for some custom stuff, though I know you say no every time, I hope you break one day and allow for custom HUDs.

Accolades
Excellent work on the graphics. The art and engine team are absolute units. The new animations are slick (do something about crescendo, though). Nice job getting and keeping everything running on D1, anybody whinging about that has never done anything creative/engineering at scale. Whoever is doing all the shader work is also a sicko and I love it, the blood effects in Ultimatum are so cool. Audio is lit. Performance has been really impressive IMO, I'm on a 3080/5800x/1440@16:9 and running everything on max with GI (low shadows) and manage to hit 120 pretty much always. Excited to see what the gameplay team cooks up for the real endgame. It's been really cool watching you guys grow up as a developer.

Cheers.