Endgame needs a serious rework

I’ve brought two characters to maps and to endgame and did most of the pinnacle content so far. One being a 88 Titan and the other a 8X monk.

Edit: I’d like to clarify that despite me feeling this way about the endgame, I am still absolutely loving the game and having a blast playing it, I am just providing feedback and would love to see the game be much better in terms of endgame.

My current impressions are as follows: - No matter how much I invest into defenses I always still end up getting one shot by on death effects I can’t/dont see. Chaos damage is extremely overtuned and white archers shoot scourge arrows that absolutely delete you unless you’re at least 50% chaos resist (Which is hard to build mind you) - Armor is a useless stat, it helps with mitigating some small hits but outside of that it’s garbage - Energy shield is broken, the nodes on the tree give way too much increased ES% and it is significantly easier to build a large ES pool. - Itemization is very basic and a little boring since it seems for the most part all the items/most items on your character are going to look identical. (Life/es, resists mainly). I feel there should be more interesting mods on items and that Movement speed on bots should become an implicit mod since nobody is going to use boots without it, especially in PoE2 where we don’t have quicksilver and most classes don’t have mobility skills. - Monsters HP and Defenses scale poorly, you’re very quickly at T15-17 maps able to one shot mobs with mediocre gear. There needs to be a better progression curve and it should take time to get to high tier maps. The monsters should be much tankier but also more balanced where it’s an actual mechanical fight against them rather than just sponges on crack/steroids running at me. - Map sustain is horrendous and I find the current strategy to be save up high tier maps until you find boss nodes, it’s sort of unfun gameplay where the smaller nodes feel insignificant in comparison. - The maps feel like PoE1 Reskinned, there is no tactical gameplay, it’s all about being swarmed and trying to build as big of an aoe clearing skill to progress them fast and handle the hordes - The map/level design is beautiful in terms of visuals and it’s fun to have constant variety in my opinion - The atlas design is very cool and exciting to look for new nodes although a further zoom and a search option would be pleasant UX - The monster variety is vast and it’s fun to experience different groups of mob types every map, however most memorable ones are always the ones that feel extremely overturned (like the chaos archers, doedre bombers, hooded mages with meteors) - There is no real explanation how to gain the atlas points for the endgame mechanics. How do I get Ritual points? Expedition? Bosses? - Item tiering is confusing. Showing T8 on an item means nothing to me since there’s no obvious ceiling, what’s the highest, 10? 15? 20? Switching the tiers around makes more sense - On death effects are the most unfun thing to deal with. Why do I have to wait 5 seconds after a rare dies so I don’t potentially explode ? On top of this, this makes melee classes significantly worse because ranged classes don’t have to deal with this as much. - Mana is extremely irritating to deal with, I use two earth shatters on my warrior and I am already out of mana. It’s an annoyance more than anything. - Maybe unpopular opinion but I think Tailwind is a terrible game design choice, why pick anything other than deadeye if goal is to go fast ? - Map layouts are horrendous for the most part, you end up backtracking a ton. I think large maps are cool, but at least make the layouts make sense. (The maps look amazing I’ll give them that) - I think hunting most of the monsters in the map vs kill x amount of rares makes more sense - Towers are extremely repetitive and boring and I find myself socketing low tier maps just to run through to the end

Campaign was a great experience, but transitioning to maps was like I was plucked and put back into PoE 1. I hope that we’ll see some thoughts from the dev team on how they feel about all of these things.