All of my friends quit POE2 already because endgame simply isnt fun. (all have 2k-10k hours). A lot of the systems are a downgrade.

Its kinda sad that we've all anticipated the Early Access, but in a week the majority has quit already because of massive design flaws & system downgrades. By now they've all quit except one.

The majority shared the same opinions:

- Crafting is basically gone
- The Passive Skill tree is a massive downgrade, lacking masteries and nodes that have any real impact. The Scion wheel removal removes any meaningful traversal to other sides too, limiting builds. Board feels more like D4 Paragon launch boards.
- Gameplay & Builds are extremely narrow because of extreme weapon locking & combo systems. Most skills interact with eachother, resulting in many players playing exactly the same.

The following is shared among all who've played endgame:

- Melee is worse than POE and without any range gimmicks unplayable in higher endgame.
- The Map system is filled with design flaws and needs a complete rework. POE2 offers zero replayability to farm specific areas because you can only complete each map once. Any meaniningful juicing is out of the window because you cant play towers to their full strength.
- Maps are way too large.
- Hunting rares sucks. Bosses gave a good feeling of map completion. We all shared the feeling of beeing endgame having no real purpose or game flow. (Atlas Progression/Map Completions). The new 'clear 10 maps of this tier for 2 points' definitely played into it.
- Massive lack of bossing in endgame in general, one of the strength of poe2.
- Endgame Region Traversal is way too large for the sake of beeing large.
- 1 Portal stresses out the majority of players. Most want to chill, but 1 portal hinders them. It also hinders them to meaningful learn from their mistakes (especially bosses).
- Most stopped bothering with Ascendancy trials altogether, because rng sucks and it wasnt fun.
- Game lost any direction in endgame. Methodical Combat simply doesnt work. It kills any feeling of progression in endgame. Either you're fast & you win or you're slow and you lose. The whole monster design doesnt fit slow archetypes at all.

I think even though most of us are extreme POE Fans, we cant see ourself returning in less than a year, because too many systems need a complete rework to be functional. Maybe the game is designed for Ruthless players, we're not sure. But Ruthless was DOA.