Feedback Collection

I have played quite a bit of POE2, though I am probably classified as semi-casual. I play a few characters per league to test things out and see if I can make viable builds. To save time, here is a quick list of issues I will cover.

1) gem requirements - levelling vs endgame and mixed builds
2) build diversity- endgame is only a power fantasy for 3-4 specific builds
3) defenses - armor and evasion have improved but ES is king <- breaks tank vs caster
4) pointless modifiers - leech, light radius, reduced ailment duration, +threshold
5) currency/crafting - only the most hardcore players can craft everyone else has to buy

GEM REQUIREMENTS

Lowering the stat requirement from ~200 to ~150 helped a lot, but this is still an issue. Gems have 2 requirements, the attributes and the level/tier. This causes 2 separate problems.

The first problem is that any build that wants to leverage skills/buffs from more than 1 stat will be looking to get around 60 passive tree nodes for those attributes, this uses half of the passive tree points they will ever get. This leads to giving up on a lot of valuable small and notable passives just so you can use a weapon and spells. It seems possible to use weapon set skill points to enable mixed gem requirements, but it means you can't then use them to buff the actual skills. My main gripe here is that it prevents a lot of build flexibility, so you go all in on one stat and one gem type rather than creating cool unique characters.

I'd recommend aligning the gem requirements to dual stat weapons capping out ~100.

The second problem is that gem tier requirements split the game solidly between a levelling build and an endgame build. Since the last bit of spirit and T14 gems come late in the interludes, most builds don't exist till endgame. The saving grace right now is that the broken meta builds only use T1 or T4 skills and then add T14 spirit gems, but the T14 skills should be build viable and it would be nice to use endgame style builds during campaign so it feels more like growing into endgame rather than 2 separate games. Today, it feels like you play 1 game with a character whose build is meh, then you spend a bunch of your gold to respec to play a separate game with a different character.

I'd recommend either eliminating the minimum tier for gems or contract this to maybe T10 instead of 14 at the top. I would also like to see 100 spirit sooner than the end of the game, but gear is able to mitigate this in most cases.

BUILD DIVERSITY

I believe GGG is already well aware of this, but it is a big problem, so including it here. Power Fantasy endgame builds almost always rely on a broken mechanic or very specific combination of rare endgame drops. In every league there is 1 skill and a small set of items that every farmer gets. Spark, lightning spear, choir of storms, HoWA, herald chaining, CoC, etc. This is because only 1 or 2 skills is/are capable of handling both single target and large groups, combined with the fact that if you just pick a primary skill and build a passive tree to support it, you will likely not be able to kill most bosses in a timely manner. Having weapon set passive points does allow for a clear build/skill and a boss build/skill as long as the nodes for both are close together and only the weapons need to be different, but it introduces a lot of complexity for the average player to solve. Needing to solve this in order to beat pinnacle bosses, sure, needing to solve it to beat a map, not great.

I'd recommend taking a look at each skill and actually testing it as a primary skill in T15 without broken mechanics and tweak till it is viable and fun.

DEFENSES

This is getting better, but there are still clear issues here. Armor has gotten a lot better and deflection has given evasion a boost, but ES is still MUCH stronger for 2 reasons.

1) It is relatively easy to get to 8k+ ES While it is only somewhat easy to get to around 2k life. Even if all damage were Chaos doing double damage to ES, the ES is effectively twice as big as life.
2) ES regenerates by default at 12.5% while life regens at 0, and even with every regen node in the tree is about 4.5% base, maybe 9% with all life regen increases, but this is going to take every passive point to accomplish leaving none for other defenses or damage.

I'd recommend increasing life from strength from +2 to +5, and providing a base regen rate either similar to ES with a delay that can be reduced or a low percent like 4% similar to mana

POINTLESS MODIFIERS

There are a few affixes and abilities that just don't do anything.

1) leech - due to leech resistance in endgame and the loss of stacks when at full resource, and only physical counting while most skills convert to another damage type, the leech percent needs to be 20% of damage with vaal pact to make it instant or you need to hit so hard that there are no monsters to hit you anyway so no need to leech.
2) light radius - just bricks an item. This wastes an affix that could be even slightly beneficial. It might as well be - item can have 1 less affix.
3) reduced ailment duration - ailments that can be reduced are not common enough for this to matter. bleed and poison mostly, most poisons that are scary act as ground effects, and both of these are resolvable with charms.
4) +threshold - if your base threshold is low enough to be a problem, it is too low for +100 to fix.
5) move speed - boots without at least +15% by act 2 are basically not boots, they are vendor trash.

I'd recommend
1) either get rid of leech entirely or make it based off all attack damage. Currently leech is only maybe viable for a character based entirely in the warrior tree with a physical weapon and physical skill. The spell leech ascendancy node doesn't scale well because it is so far from leech boosts and there is no gear for it.
2,3,4) Just get rid of them
5) go the way of charm slots, make this implicit on boots

CURRENCY/CRAFTING

These just don't drop enough for casual players to use. While completing the campaign for the first time, unless you pick up and disenchant everything, you won't have enough transmutes and augments to improve gear. Even with disenchanting every rare, you won't have enough regals to keep yourself in rare gear. You won't see anywhere near enough exalts to keep 1 piece of gear at 6 affixes through campaign. You won't see a divine. This means a casual player is far better off selling all drops to vendor to buy vendor items and saving their exalts to buy 1 exalt items off trade every 5-10 levels instead of attempting to make an item. Once in endgame stuff starts dropping more reliably up to exalts, but the greater and perfect exalts needed for reliable crafts are super rare, so it is still better to just buy everything and maybe attempt to craft a single item. Each league, divine orbs end up being worth 1500 exalts, meaning they drop a lot less frequently.

I'd recommend dramatically increasing the exalt orb drop rate maybe 10x as well as divines maybe 3x.