380+ hours spent on PoE 2 because VoH lasted 3 weeks for me. And I wasn’t even playing SB, I played Victimize Rogue.
The final outcome is this:
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In PoE 2, if you don’t know what you are doing, you won’t progress at all: If you are in the campaign you’ll be stuck as early as act 2 and if you are mapping you won’t level up due to XP lost on death. You have to know how to solve your resistances because a 10% is a big number for survival and damage.
It isn’t a matter of being smart or not, you just have to know what you are doing. -
In Diablo 4, it simply doesn’t matter because the progression doesn’t exist. You will never get stuck in the campaign because the campaign wasn’t developed to killed you but to tell you the story.
When you reach level 60 you can easily get to Torment 1 and everything drops there. Have fun and blast monsters until next season, so on and so on.
They are both bad games from my perspective. Games that rely exclusively on RNG to keep the player interest is a bad game, but that’s because the industry have evolved into this to have a reason to sell the next patch/season/league and keep people talking about the next buff/nerf.