Imagine you’ve mastered chess..
you're a modern Bobby Fischer: knights, bishops, pawns, the whole symphony memorized.
Now imagine after a new "season," your knight suddenly moves like a rook, your pawns lay traps, the queen becomes radioactive, and the board tilts itself every five minutes.
Sure, it’s still the same board, but there’s nothing fun about having to relearn it, while the developers snicker behind the curtain.

That’s Path of Exile 2 in a nutshell.
Every season arrives with such monstrous changes that you’re not playing PoE 2 anymore, you’re floundering, helpless, wondering why your old tricks are now useless rituals in a gothic parody.
Yet somehow, you're still trudging through the same maps, using the same gems, chasing the same endgame you can’t escape.
It’s like being stuck in an IKEA showroom of ARPG mechanics, same decor, different nightmare.

Players don’t stick around. They come back for the novelty of a new season, try it for a minute, then vanish like houseguests who show up for the booze and bail when you ask them to help wash dishes.
Remember when "easy to play, hard to master" meant something? PoE 2 seems to have abandoned that along with subtlety.
Now it’s massive maps, innumerable skills, subclasses upon subclasses, an atlas the size of Europe, and a skill tree so vast it induces existential dread.

You can’t just swap out chess pieces and force a brain transplant mid-game.
The core is still the same: skills, loot, endgame. But every patch layers on more systems to memorize, more builds to reinvent, more fixes that break your favorite one.
You’re doing the same dance, but the music keeps changing tempo, and somehow you’re always off-beat.


TLDR:
Path of Exile 2 keeps resetting itself every season with massive changes, forcing players to relearn everything while still staring at the same game.
The player base spikes at launch, then plummets within weeks as people realize nothing’s really fixed.
Its oversized complexity, skill trees, maps, bosses, turns what should be “easy to play, hard to master” into “hard to play, impossible to enjoy.”
It’s basically chess where all the pieces got new rules, but you’re still stuck at the same board, wondering why you came back.

This post was edited by Steen on Aug 22 2025 01:33pm

It's an unfinished game, and nothing you did at the beginning matters. it will keep changing too, so adapt or fuck off. qqkbythx

this. obviously.

Pointless thread is pointless. Its an EA game, come back at launch and stop being willfully ignorant.

why are you mad tho

Im not? Just calling a spade a spade lol

i think GGG is going in the right direction.

I was sceptical pre 0.3 but now i am soothed.



isnt that something positive? that it is hard to master AND difficult to play?

Ah yes, the classic Early Access defense:
‘It’s unfinished, so it’s supposed to feel unfinished.’

That’s like serving me raw chicken and telling me to come back when the restaurant learns how to use an oven.
Sure, I get the recipe might change before the grand opening, but right now I’m chewing salmonella and being asked to clap for the chef’s ‘vision.’

And telling players to just ‘adapt’ every season? That’s not depth, that’s whiplash.
It’s the difference between learning a martial art and being thrown into a mosh pit where the rules of gravity change every three minutes.

I’m not mad it’s Early Access. I’m mad that every time I sit down to play, it feels less like progress and more like Groundhog Day with extra homework.

If you didn't like eating raw chicken you wouldn't be here.

Wanting the meal to be edible isn’t the same as hating the restaurant.

People play PoE 2 because the core recipe is good.
The spice, the flavor, the crunch of a crit build hitting just right.
But when every other bite is undercooked, and the waiter tells you it’s supposed to taste like that because the kitchen isn’t finished, you shouldn’t praise the man.

We’re here because we want it to be great. But pretending the rawness is a feature instead of a problem? That’s not fandom, that’s Stockholm Syndrome."