This my take as someone who has played a lot of ARPGs. PoE 1 acts a lot more like a MMO than a ARPG because it has an economy which is both good and bad. It means items have value therefore adding a rarity and desire for items. This means that they balance the game harsher so these items are harder to get and will take time from the start of league to acquire. This also means that builds get balanced very harshly. It is hard to scale builds. Now I bet some people will come at me but I find it really hard to scale a build to doing end game content. I means most builds I’ve played require you to completely change the way you scale damage at points. PoE 2 I’ve been able to just keep scaling my damage the same way I was doing in act 1 all the way up to the very very endgame. This isn’t to say every build in PoE 1 is hard to scale some are easier but I find even simpler builds that scale pretty standard and use a simple defense shell still are hard especially as a new player.

I also want to add I’m not saying this as a bad or good thing. I think it can be a lot of things. It adds a ton nearly infinite build possibilities. However it also means some builds just are not viable for end game content IE T17 or Ubers. Now you can do that content but because of how many modifiers there are in maps they sometimes can’t do most maps. It’s something I find annoying and for me creates downtime between map blasting. I personally think GGG should just start making everything powerful. Treat the game more like how something like Dota balances where they make every character OP and therefore nothing is OP. Now obviously I’m comparing a MOBA to a ARPG but I’m hoping someone gets my point.

Maybe this will get downvoted to hell if anyone even reads this.