In response to your original post/question, it feels like a completely different game already from beta/pre-season, even S1. They made a ton of minor improvements since then all add up to the game feeling significantly smoother, faster, fun. Mount improvements, more stash boxes, updated vendor locations, lower tier loot dropping as salvage so your bags don’t fill up as quickly, a bit more end-game stuff to do like more bosses, way more XP gain so it’s not as grindy, more build balancing so every class is a bit more viable. Even though barbs can one-shot with HotA, every class has the strong right now.
The issue isn’t that it’s too hard or slow… It’s more like, the game lacks challenge, it lacks incentive and motivation, it lacks meaningful content, and it lacks build diversity. They fixed up a ton of what they already had, but it feels like it’s still in early access… They should’ve just released it calling it Early Access and I think that would set way more realistic expectations, but they came in with trumpets blaring like this is the great and mighty Diablo when only the campaign and stuff was really ironed out.
Like Urza said, the classes need like, waaaay more options. Like massive reworks to the game. From the ground up. It has the potential, they have the staff and the budget. But it’s like they’re too scared to task risks and be wrong, but that in itself is the wrong decision.
Right now, each class has about five builds that are all more or less centered around each of their core abilities, and there’s very little variation with how that will look player to player. They all only focus on one or two stats, maybe one or two elements/damage types, maybe a mvt ability and some defensive ones.
Minion builds have no minion abilities. You’re a Necro who can’t even control the dead and the skill tree actually makes you way stronger endgame by sacrificing all your minions than keeping them. They haven’t fixed that since beta. Where’s the bone armor, or minion teleport / bone surfing, or skeleton-charge, etc. You cant choose fire skeletons. There are unique items in the game that aren’t even viable in any build. There are paragon glyphs that aren’t used by anyone. There are still like, half of the skill tree for each class that are barely used in any build, and the only choices they give are very limited.
I loved the campaign, I still love the classes and think it’s very fun. I enjoy it a lot. I’ve put like 900 hrs into it so far. But end game is still empty… once you hit 100 and complete season journey, that’s really kind of about it until next season unless you wanna roll alts or play hardcore. But as very little connects btwn characters, and everything resets every season, even that can get old. There’s basically no reason to even play eternal realm. And despite it having an amazing console co-op experience and stuff, it has still very weak socialization options and no trading which just really makes it feel like, pretty empty when you find gear you can’t use and want to give to your friends & fam.
I think everyone basically agrees… season 2 gave us hope that the game could be really good. They really do some things right, but they totally miss on other things. Hopefully with how good Last Epoch’s build diversity is and PoE coming out soon, it’ll light a fire for them to really get inspired or get their rears in gear with the kind of fundamental changes needed.