New Player Experience

I don't know if this is the right place, but I wanted to share my experience as a player completely new to not only POE, but the genre as a whole. I don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings and if you disagree with me, then we can agree to disagree, no need to get personal.

First, I wanted to say - I love this game. It's like crack to me, where I'm kind of tired and don't feel like playing for a bit, but as soon as I walk away I feel like I want more.
With that said, there are a couple of issues I have with the game, though given that we are in early access, perhaps some of these will get fixed.

1) Ground effects are too potent for how long they stay on the ground. The most frustrating thing in this game for me are ground effects. The second I walk into something, my health just disappears and that is with maxed out resistances. If something is hitting me at the moment or I'm stuck between the wall and a mob of...well...mobs, I am not getting out alive. Additionally, if I killed everything in a narrow corridor, I'm stuck waiting for ground effects to disappear for like 15 seconds which in gaming terms is an eternity. In my opinion, ground and on-death effects aren't great but can be just fine if they're not so potent that they completely deplete your health in 2 seconds. Finally, ground effects can hide one under another, and the player doesn't even see what they're getting killed by (like fire hiding under iced ground).

2) Delerium fog is unbelievably annoying. It's totally fine during the delirium effect when it's temporary, but when I make delirious waystones, every map I'm on is covered in fog, hiding ground effects and small mobs. It becomes completely unplayable on dark maps with a lot of ground clutter (like decay). I think that can easily be solved by making delerious mobs (waystone ones), change form (look like delirium mobs), without covering the entire map in fog. After all, the mechanic does say that "Mobs become more delirious". Additionally, delirium mobs disable some of the builds (namely builds that rely on on-death effects, like herald of ice) by not triggering said effects.

3) Trade. I realize that trade has been a pain point forever now (yeah, I've watched some arguments) and I understand why both devs and players are hesitant to change it. I think the main pain point for players isn't even the lack of an auction house, it's about going to an external website to find items and then meeting them to trade. I think the solution can be implemented as a mix of what the player wants and what makes the trade the trade now:

*An NPC can be made that offers a GUI window which does what the website does now for search.
*A selling player does what they do now. Puts an item in a premium stash tab.
*A buyer has 2 buttons - Buy and Negotiate. Pressing the buy option sends the selling player a message "buyingPlayer wants to buy your item blahblahblah... Do you want to sell it?" giving them a yes/no option. If the player presses "yes" the buyer automatically buys the item without the need to travel to another player. If the answer is no, a response message is sent.
If a buyer uses the "negotiate" button, they get a window where they can set their offer price, and the cycle repeats from the player's side. Items should also only be shown if the players are online.

4) The game should have a built-in item filter and a version of "Exile Exchange" where it gives a player these abilities without having to download third party software.

5) We should be able to reroll bad max level waystones in a 3-1 ratio. Kind of like reforging. If I have 3 rare waystones that I don't intend to play, I should be able to reforge those into another tier 15 waystone. Even if it's white and not rare, I'd take it. For now, I just have a bunch of rare t15 stones cluttering the stash.

6) The game needs a bit of optimization. While my PC is older, I do run a 1080 and i7 - 7700. I think it should perform fairly well on "balance" graphics and not stutter as much. Also, the default upscale mode has way too many artifacts to be viable.

7) I still don't understand why map get completely ruined by death. There are too many punish mechanics on maps for a death. The loot disappears, the map modifications (boss, delirium etc) also get wiped, and the player gets 10% xp penalty. I'm actually fine with the xp penalty, but please don't completely reset the map. If you do have to completely reset it, please leave the modifiers in place. Right now, dying makes me want to leave the PC.

8) The breach is fine. Don't touch it.

PS. I do love this game. I'm sure most people post their grievances and not positives here, but I want everyone to know, this game is awesome. I just think it has some opportunities to get even better.

While I am not yet in the endgame myself and I have no experience regarding the endgame , I do agree with your points.
After 100 hours I barely managed to get into Act3 on Cruelty with my monk and I do admit that for me it's a skill issue, I'm 100% sure that I did not do something correct.

I love the game as well, and I'm not complaining about it, but I admint that there are a few things that would be better to be taken care of like:

1) Poison caused by mobs
2) Do not remove 10% of resistences after you get to the next act
3) Slows are annoying
4) The Charms are a great idea, but they feek weak
5) Some bosses are unbalanced in my view
I struggled so god damn much with and it's really annoying because I just run out of either Life or Mana and as a Monk I'm struggling to do physical damage without any elemental skills in combination.

I was lucky enough that I decided to go for Ice Strike and this has helped me...but I had to go back and forth in the maps to try to level up, hope for drops so I can change my gear and so on.

6) Make just a few small adjustments that explain better the need of resistences and stop removing 10% of resistances
7) Increase the drop rate between/during the normal ACTs
8) Stop punishing us with removing EXP after dying

P.S: as I have said, I love the game and I admit that for me it was 100% a skill issue, but this does not mean that it should take 100 hours to get to Act 3 cruelty which I jsut started and it required redoing the same maps 3 times to level up as I kept loosing EXP.