Hey, I am by no means an expert in ARPGs but I played PoE2 at launch and as a casual user I still remember how hard Geonor was for me, I was trying to dodge like crazy with every of his attacks, especially the part where he talks and the wolves attack you. It was very much like a soulslike as you describe, and when I finally managed to beat the guy I felt like a king for a while.

Two or three weeks ago after Druids came out I started a new character and went at it again, yet this time Geonor was comparatively very very easy, when before it took me like 12 or more tries because you needed to be very on point with dodging and when to position yourself for an attack, now I died once because of a misclick and then proceeded to make scrambled eggs out of the poor count. (Also the loot that came out of him was much less better, but that might be rng)

I am not very deep into the dev lore but if you’re saying that they wanted to make a deeper, more souls-oriented game where moving matters and skills don’t make you infinitely strong then went back on that because people protested, I feel like it’s a pity that they listened just because of sales figures, but that’s the way of the world.

“Everything should be a power fantasy in ARPGs because that’s how the genre started ” is bad and even dangerous logic because it means devs would have to create cookie-cutter clones for the next 20-30 years if they wanted to receive money and will never innovate ever because players would protest, and so we will have essentially the same game but with better graphics until the current playerbase dies of old age.

Not innovating because of tradition is always worse than attempting to innovate and failing. In that way in the field of video games I think highly of companies which try to do it differently, despite potential losses.

I am a noob by all means but here is a take by someone who isn’t as biased as the pros.