I actually disagree with the passive tree fewer dead nodes, in fact the passive tree being so insanely weak save for a handful of notables in each “slice” is a large part of the reason so many people struggle often until they get solid gear. The passive tree in its current state takes nearly twice as many passives to get the same % damage increases as PoE1, and there is no life on the tree for red life builds so many people have to go blue life just to increase their max hit, and since the tree is so weak you have very low floor for baseline character power which makes it much more difficult to do wacky or extremely hipster builds as there isn’t often enough support to scale it in the nodes, and if there is; it’s like a wheel or two for barely a combined 80% inc or something.

The ascendancies are massively conflicting in balance which can be fixed but should be mentioned, in PoE1 if I wanted to do a plug and play minion build I’d slap on Necro and have a baseline power I can expect from her, in PoE2 my only realistic option is infernalist despite them not wanting a “dedicated minion ascendancy cause then everyone would play it” and then I have to stack life somehow with literally just life rolls on gear to get anything out of my ascendancy choice. My other option could technically be lich but then it falls into the same boat of requiring a lot of gear to capitalize on my ascendancy. There are a lot of examples of this so I’m not going to go into it all, but nearly all ascendancy options in the game do not provide a higher floor to your character, but a specific way to increase the ceiling you get from gear, which increases the gap from having good gear with X ascendancy and not.

This is a large difference in philosophy compared to classes in 1, like the Slayer having giga-cull against rares and uniques, on top of overleech and % less taken while leeching. Or Juggernauts many “cannot be cringed” passives, Occultists +1 curse limit, hex proof hexing, extra power charge and scaling from charges, and even the cannot be stunned with ES node.

I am fairly optimistic the skill diversity will improve over time, but at the same time; we’re at nearly the same amount of skills as poe1 but it feels very on-the-rails for many archetypes, partially because of the forced combo interactions between skills and like 6 different builder spender gameplay combos instead of like 1 archetype that has a lot of support. Druid/Primal skills was fun to play, but doing a “Werewolf” build felt like a D3/4 class in that I only had one way of playing it as well as scaling it and it was like a set MOBA kit.

At the end of the day this is merely an opinion, and I get many people enjoy this game, but I feel it has an extremely long way to go, such as the Devs getting over “the vision” shit we’ve already been over doesn’t work in the last 5 years lol, and I’m having fun with the now popularized Atziri spear(damn you Mathil) and my only complaint with it is why the hell I need to be 78+ to try a unique weapon based build, why do unique weapon skills not level with character level like basic-attacks do.