I posted not that long ago that I wandered back into POE2 recently, only to get pissed off after 30 minutes and turn it off. I had contemplated deleting it from internal storage but since my PS5 isn't anywhere near full, I just decided to leave it be.
After speaking to @bozz in the comments of my previous post, I followed his advice and kept at it and now, even though it pains me to recognize that I was wrong, I can admit fault when it is there.
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I only just realized that "Dawn of the Hunt" changed the game a certain degree, but other than chasing down these flying spirit things for a mini boss, I haven't noticed that much of a difference in gameplay, perhaps that is only for endgame content, I dunno.
So one of my big gripes about the game was the fact that there were massive difficulty spikes at bosses meaning that you easily just wander through the level leading up to the boss and then get absolutely whooped by whatever the boss happens to be.
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This was particularly evident at a boss called "Silverfist" that is wandering in the jungle of act 3. This is the first true boss that I can recall encountering that isn't inside of their own contained zone. So you will just be popping off shots and trash mobs and out of nowhere a massive health bar appears in the top center of your screen. At first this was fun but then my enjoyment turned to frustration as he swung this column to a building that he is using as a weapon and of course one-shotted me. The annoying thing about being killed by this boss is that you can't just reload and have another go at him because all of the trash mobs have also respawned on the same map so in effect this makes the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, what have you encounter even more difficult.
This was what encouraged me to turn the game off in anger. Up to this point I have been frustrated by one-shotting bosses but I always had the ability to just one on one them and not be surrounded by other enemies popping off shots at me as well.
In the end my Hive buddy convinced me to keep at it and I decided to simply not fight him and move on to the next area. I then started to enjoy the game again even though in a nearby zone I was once again faced with another boss that is dramatically more difficult than the zone he is in called the Machinarium. The boss' name is Blackjaw and he is extremely tough as well with some sort of one-shot-kill attack very similar to Silverfist. This was more manageable though because when you lose and respawn, you have to ONLY face him again, not him and his legion of trash mobs surrounding him.
As it turns out both of these bosses are completely optional anyway so had I just not wanted to face them that would have been fine as well.
As it turns out I would later end up returning to Silverfist about 5 levels higher than when I first encountered him and quite easily destroyed him.
So I guess this is the moral of the story here: If you get to a boss and it is too difficult, go back out and level up a bit. The difference in my damage output was night and day in those 5 levels and I really don't even understand why that is the case.
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While I still have my gripes about this game I do find that if you are looking to just wander around and kill things for the hopes of a good loot drop, this is rather mindless entertainment on the regular portions of the various levels. Plus you get XP even if you aren't doing anything of consequence. For me with my lightning deadeye ranger, I rarely need to use anything other than my standard lightning arrow attack, so killing stuff in a map isn't something that even requires my full attention and every now and then, something interesting will drop.
I still haven't ventured much into crafting and think I will leave that to the pros that have a lot more spare time than I do.
The connectivity issues persist though, and this is something that is going to continue to annoy me to no end because I know that it is not my issue. There are times that I get the loading screen for a particular map and once it takes beyond a certain amount of time I already know it isn't going to complete at all.
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If you ever find yourself staring at this screen with the "Grinding Gears" at the bottom for more than 30 seconds, you can basically just give up, it isn't going to load. In the past this would just stay on your screen endlessly but it appears as though they patched it to give up after a certain amount of time. Then they show the usual bullshit "unexpected network error" message as you attempt to re-login only to have the exact same thing happen.
I suppose since this is a free-to-play game upon its release that we really can't get too upset about this but the fact that the 1-player game needs to be always online is something that annoys me about this entire fiasco. Why always be online? I'm not interacting with any other person.
The rubber-banding and late response time on actions is a game-killer too because I have been whittled down by attacks that I couldn't even see in real time because the connectivity issues persist. The rubber-banding is pretty bad still as well. I would imagine that GGG is working on this but honestly, not much has chanced since December of last year and if they want this to launch successfully once it goes properly live, they really need to be heavily focusing on this.
There are loads of videos out there that tell you how to "fix this" but seriously, I don't want to have to fix a game to play it. Isn't that the job of the people who made it?
For now this is a good thing that I keep on the back burner waiting for a time that I just want to lean back on the sofa and run around killing stuff. I still get that little dopamine rush when something good drops randomly, and I think that is the appeal of all ARPG's.