So the campaign is very high quality, and the bosses genuinely are some of the best in the genre.

But the core of an ARPG is its endgame and PoE2 has no soul there. There's no foundation. You play random maps the game tells you to, and almost all of them are a horrible slog to play through. Terrible layouts, abysmal terrain, obnoxious visuals, the entire game is custom build to waste your time. The maps alone are extremely unrewarding, so to juice them up you need to path towards nearby towers to buff maps in range. This means plowing through even more garbage maps to reach a tower, run through the tower (which itself is a garbage, unrewarding map), and then finally you get to juice several nearby maps.

Juicing stacks, so before running good maps, you wanna run more garbage to nearby towers to giga stack the good maps as much as possible. Then, finally, after hours of boring setup, you can finally run your dozen or so juiced maps before the realization sinks in that you have to do this all over again.

In PoE1 to giga juice a map, you slam mods on a map, dump delirium orbs on it, beef up that quality, rub a krangulator orb on it, then toss it in your map device with 5 amazing scarabs. Total length of setting up this process? About 2 minutes.

This is not a system that can be "improved", it would need to be crushed and rebuilt from the ground up, a feat that will take them years. I spent so much time mapping thinking that if I just kept pushing, I'd find the fun. Never happened. None of my divines or other good drops illicited any excitement or reaction in me, just fueled an escalating sense of apathy and resentment towards the entire system.

The TL;DR is that GGG slammed a Vaal orb on PoE2 and the result is unusable vendor trash. Oh and it's clear at this point they killed PoE1 for this too, which really baffles me how they could purposefully screw up PoE2 this badly. It's another case of the developers being ashamed of their own game and being determined to speedrun ruining it as fast as possible.

So the campaign is very high quality, and the bosses genuinely are some of the best in the genre. But the core of an ARPG is its endgame and PoE2 has no soul there. There's no foundation. You play random maps the game tells you to, and almost all of them are a horrible slog to play through. Terrible layouts, abysmal terrain, obnoxious visuals, the entire game is custom build to waste your time. The maps alone are extremely unrewarding, so to juice them up you need to path towards nearby towers to buff maps in range. This means plowing through even more garbage maps to reach a tower, run through the tower (which itself is a garbage, unrewarding map), and then finally you get to juice several nearby maps. Juicing stacks, so before running good maps, you wanna run more garbage to nearby towers to giga stack the good maps as much as possible. Then, finally, after hours of boring setup, you can finally run your dozen or so juiced maps before the realization sinks in that you have to do this all over again. In PoE1 to giga juice a map, you slam mods on a map, dump delirium orbs on it, beef up that quality, rub a krangulator orb on it, then toss it in your map device with 5 amazing scarabs. Total length of setting up this process? About 2 minutes. This is not a system that can be "improved", it would need to be crushed and rebuilt from the ground up, a feat that will take them years. I spent so much time mapping thinking that if I just kept pushing, I'd find the fun. Never happened. None of my divines or other good drops illicited any excitement or reaction in me, just fueled an escalating sense of apathy and resentment towards the entire system. The TL;DR is that GGG slammed a Vaal orb on PoE2 and the result is unusable vendor trash. Oh and it's clear at this point they killed PoE1 for this too, which really baffles me how they could purposefully screw up PoE2 this badly. It's another case of the developers being ashamed of their own game and being determined to speedrun ruining it as fast as possible.