[Feedback] Revert Campaign Difficulty to Patch 0.1, Campaign Is Too Easy Now

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I just showed up. im with you. the difficulty is the entire point.

Remove all your items and here is your difficulty.

People don't understand that in an arpg with 10000 items, 10000 affixes, 10000 skills, 10000 supports, 10000 passives this is literally impossible to make "difficulty". Either you go in a right direction and everything is easy, or you go in a wrong direction and everything is super hard up to impossible. There is nothing that can fix this.

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CharlesJT#7681 wrote:

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default_mp3#9394 wrote:

POE2 will stay as POE1 but slower.

In my opinion, that is the wrong direction for PoE2. PoE2 should have its own identity of engaging methodical combat. PoE 1&2 should diverge from one another as separate games, not converge.

Atleast, that is the vision Jonathan speaks of in previous interviews.

Well they still got a time to change things before 1.0 launch. But for now it just looks that way. Once they reintroduce scarabs and divination cards to the game it will be officially over.

The "Passionate Minority" versus the "Casual Majority"

The brutal comparison
PoE2's current ~9,000 players represents a 99% drop from its peak of 578,569. Meanwhile PoE1 right now has roughly 50,000 concurrent players — about 6x more than its own sequel.

Source
https://steamcharts.com/app/2694490

Opposing Viewpoints of Gameplay
GGG is talented enough to make genuinely great combat — they just keep designing it for the player who views difficulty as the point, while the much larger audience views difficulty as an obstacle between them and fun.

Those are fundamentally different relationships with the same game, and PoE2 currently only serves one of them.

Myself, I just started POE2 about 2 weeks ago (typically play POE1 SSF HC and making it to maps is not suprising, it's expected). Not to impress you but to impress upon you, I enjoy a fun, challenging game however if I have to sum up POE2 in its current state:

"The progression feels like a chore rather than an adventure."

I play a game for fun, relaxation, and escape first and foremost, not for an achievement. It seems the majority is within this camp except for the vocal "passionate minority" God love ya.

There has to be a happy medium and if you aren't playing SSF HC and want it harder, then you're alienating the "filthy casuals" who are the lifeblood of the game.

Maybe things can meet a bit in the middle? Things definitely got nerfed a bit too far into carebear territory imo. Some things were a bit too much, but now they got nerfed too far.
The powercreep should be addressed as well, but separately.



Either way, I fully support:

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600lbpanther#3839 wrote:

The brutal comparison
PoE2's current ~9,000 players represents a 99% drop from its peak of 578,569. Meanwhile PoE1 right now has roughly 50,000 concurrent players — about 6x more than its own sequel.

Source
https://steamcharts.com/app/2694490

Wouldn`t call it brutal or even comparison to be honest. 0.4 is 4 months old, majority of playerbase is done with current season for many weeks. In the meantime poe1, last epoch and diablo4 released their seasons so its natural that core hns playerbase is somewhere else. As hcssf player this doesn`t concern you that much and can start whenever you want but its way more complicated with trade.

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600lbpanther#3839 wrote:

The "Passionate Minority" versus the "Casual Majority"

The brutal comparison
PoE2's current ~9,000 players represents a 99% drop from its peak of 578,569. Meanwhile PoE1 right now has roughly 50,000 concurrent players — about 6x more than its own sequel.

Source
https://steamcharts.com/app/2694490

Opposing Viewpoints of Gameplay
GGG is talented enough to make genuinely great combat — they just keep designing it for the player who views difficulty as the point, while the much larger audience views difficulty as an obstacle between them and fun.

Those are fundamentally different relationships with the same game, and PoE2 currently only serves one of them.

Myself, I just started POE2 about 2 weeks ago (typically play POE1 SSF HC and making it to maps is not suprising, it's expected). Not to impress you but to impress upon you, I enjoy a fun, challenging game however if I have to sum up POE2 in its current state:

"The progression feels like a chore rather than an adventure."

I play a game for fun, relaxation, and escape first and foremost, not for an achievement. It seems the majority is within this camp except for the vocal "passionate minority" God love ya.

There has to be a happy medium and if you aren't playing SSF HC and want it harder, then you're alienating the "filthy casuals" who are the lifeblood of the game.

useless player count

season is 4 month old, we are fully geared.

we are waiting for 0.5

I showed up after mirrage failed to engage me.
mid season.

I had nothing. from nothing the game was hard.
act4/5 very hard. the only way through was raw skill.
I was rationing my exalts.

i understand why people who are geared to the gills
want more difficulty. but dont forget. newbies
are facing a hell of an uphill battle. (which I liked!)

the reason it feels good to outmaneuver and kill a boss
is because its hard.

"we chose to go to the moon, and do the other things... not
because they are easy, but because they are hard"

Steamcharts are convenient because you can always make the numbers mean whatever you want.

I played hc PoE1 and hcssf PoE1 the second it was available as a permanent league. I watched PoE1 turn into a game that had some semblance of strategy that revolved around player input in the 2013-2016 era to one that catered almost strictly to the group you're referring to that merely tolerates anything between them and being a zooming demi-god, and that's entirely what the game revolves around now.

Building a character is done almost entirely in PoB because the actual events happening in the game and the gameplay itself has been made to be insignificant. Outside of a handful of pinnacle bossfights (and some that have made it in ever since the same PoE2 bossfight designers started designing PoE1 bossfights), combat in endgame is boiled down to a flurry of dicerolls that occur in the 0.2 seconds a mob is alive between the time you dash into the pack and use your 1 "main" skill to explode it.

Is it any surprise that when you become used to this that any other game that asks you to interact with it using your brain a little bit, or offers a bit more gameplay complexity, rather than just being a walking simulator into the endgame via colour-by-numbers PoB template, that it feels like a "chore"?

It was a breath of fresh air for me and I haven't looked back from PoE1.

Plenty of people enjoy challenging themselves in a game recreationally.

For those that don't, there's still PoE1. Besides, the people who view "difficulty as an obstacle between them and fun" will never, ever, ever be able to be satisfied by any design decisions that aren't "put me directly in the endgame with god gear" - so why should the design cater to them? They're never going to be satisfied.

Not to mention every single one of those player's ability to enjoy the game in the first place is reliant on someone else to "suffer" (as they would put it) through the difficulty to design their builds for them.

If you ask me, when the choice is between people who will practically never be satisfied until there's a direct dopamine drip installed directly into their veins vs people who actually like to play and interact with the game and be challenged rather than just tolerate it - and who also support the players who don't want to do their own thinking, it's pretty clear who a game should be designed for first.

I'm not saying it needs to be a brutal dark-souls experience or anything, but the camp that advocates for the brain-off play style doesn't stop until the game becomes cookie clicker. It happened in PoE1, and that sort of thing should stay there.

I was a huge proponent of nerfing some bosses in 0.1 and still think it was appropriate.

however,
it has now gone entirely too far in the direction of easy.
a friend of mine who has never played an arpg before decided to try POE2 in 0.3 and basically just facerolled every campaign boss with little to no difficulty.

i think they should move things back towards 0.1 but quite not all the way.

On Inversion and Who Actually Needs Whom

There's a useful mental model from Charlie Munger, who borrowed it from the mathematician Carl Jacobi: *"Invert, always invert."* When a problem seems intractable from one direction, flip it and approach from the other side.

So let's invert the usual argument.

The passionate minority often frames this as: *"If you make the game more accessible you'll ruin it — we'll leave and the game will die."*

Here's where the inversion becomes interesting. The question worth asking isn't "will hardcore players leave if the game becomes more accessible?" — it's "where would you go?"

This isn't meant unkindly. It's a genuine question. The investment the hardcore community has made in PoE2 — the builds, the knowledge, the identity, the forum presence, the thousands of hours — that investment doesn't transfer. Last Epoch is a different game. PoE1 is increasingly dated by GGG's own admission. The passionate minority isn't holding leverage over GGG. In many cases, GGG holds the leverage over them.

Meanwhile GGG has a commercial reality to operate within. A game that retains only its most hardcore players between patches — as the declining floor numbers between each content spike clearly show — is not a growing business. It's a slowly shrinking one dressed up in launch-week enthusiasm.

The players who left after 4 hours weren't unskilled. They were rational. They made a reasonable judgment that the return on their leisure time wasn't there. That's not a skill problem. That's a design problem.

GGG's long term success depends on converting curious newcomers into retained players — not on preserving the comfort of those already converted. The hardcore community is the foundation, not the ceiling.

Inverting the whole argument: the passionate minority may be the least likely to actually leave, and the casual majority are the ones GGG genuinely cannot afford to keep losing.