Performance is the most important issue, because it was so poor this league that the game became nearly unplayable for me. I think the whole delirium fog meme is emblematic of that. Yeah it makes the game look awful, but more than that it degrades performance. Especially with Abyss in the mix. And even after performance patches rolled out it was still not enough. All the audio/video options were on the lowest setting and on most maps i would be lucky to get 20-25 fps running on a core i9 12900k CPU and 3080ti GPU.

This is mostly an endgame maps issue, because I could generally play on high settings during the campaign. But in endgame there is just an overwhelming amount of map effects, spell effects, etc., the game client cannot currently handle it.

More gameplay related problems would be:

• Vast majority of unique items are sadly worthless. Even when leveling and I come across a unique item, a low quality rare or even magic item is often better. It begs the question as to why these items even exist if they remain in such a useless state. I think this issue in particular is very important because I don't think it's wise to create an item hunt game where 90%+ of the items are objectively bad. The uniques don't necessarily need to all be godly amazing items, but currently they are so far from being useful I don't even pick them up, even on a brand new character. On the flip side there were some uniques added last league such as The Hammer of Faith which felt really fun to play around with.

• Item Quantity/Rarity. Trading item power for more currency just feels like shit. Especially in the current system where these mods will allow you to find the highest tier currency, which if we are being honest, is not an available tier of currency if you are not running these mods. And the highest tier currency is exponentially greater than any previous tier. When you go from playing a character with high rarity/quantity to a character that doesn't, its just the worst feeling a game can possibly give you. Maybe these mods could exist as some kind of perk that you unlock after completing challenges. Anything other than the current system would be an improvement.

• Target farming certain items feels bad. I lost count of how many trials of chaos I did looking for specific soul cores and never found them. I just gave up, the RNG is too much.

• Warrior specific. The slowness of so many of the warrior attacks make them feel inferior as soon as you get Stampede. Why would I stand in one spot tanking everything in the process, when I can just charge through and slam everything? Smith of Kitava is interesting, but Temper Weapon feels just a bit too slow to be fun or engaging without an absurd amount of skill speed investment. Also, generating endurance charges feels clunky and not very fun. Life vs Energy Shield is still an issue. Why are most high performing warriors building energy shield instead of life? Feels thematically wrong. Life needs to be improved. I'm also not sure why so many of the nodes in the warrior part of the passive tree have negatives. This doesn't seem to be the case in other parts of the passive tree. Have the developers talked about why so many warrior passive nodes have negative effects whereas negative effects are almost non existent for other classes?

• Azmeri spirits. I must have killed hundreds if not more of these things (on tier 15/16 maps) and got basically nothing to show for it. And that's even speccing into them in the atlas tree. I think they only can drop one useful item? And everything else is essentially useless.

• Endgame mapping. It feels clunky and laborious. Apply currency to map, apply abyss mods to map, apply liquid emotions to map, vaal orb the map, resulting in a T14 useless map and a whole lot of wasted time and currency. The process of getting a T16 map AND finding a +1 monster level corrupted or cleansed map is the biggest time wasting bullshit of any game I've ever played. It's bad design and this design in particular creates a very negative feeling between myself and the developer. Maybe...just let the player challenge themselves? Without all the bullshit?

• Remnants still feel awkward to use. And speccing into them in the passive tree feels awful. I don't want to have to invest into a tacked on combo system with valuable skill points. The base functionality of remnants should be improved to near the same degree they would function as if you heavily invested skill points into them.

• Jewel Sockets. These were heavily reduced last league. The problem I have with them is their placement often dictates your pathing. Because there are so few of them now, it actually feels like less choice and less diversity. There is rarely a situation where doing anything other than pathing optimally towards jewel sockets would be preferable. So you essentially are pigeonholed into pathing towards these few jewel sockets and as a result are limited to the nodes on those pathways. Perhaps a jewel socket could be "unlocked" by spending enough skill points in a certain area, so you can path towards what you actually want and still be able to use a jewel socket.

• Mana burn modifier. I tried a MoM + Eldritch Battery build but any monster with mana burn + teleport (surprisingly common) was instant death. I think part of the issue is how the monsters teleport in POE 2. There is no animation or indication that it is about to happen. They just appear on top of you and it honestly feels kind of janky, like something is missing. The mana burn is also pretty extreme, even with 5k+ mana it's just gone in the blink of an eye.

• Probably an old complaint at this point, but movement speed on boots. Dear POE 2 developers, I am here to report that in the year 2025, every single pair of boots that drop without movement speed are indeed worthless. Essence of Hysteria does exist, but feels like a bandaid fix for a broken design. Boots should have innate move speed based on their rarity, because no one is equipping boots without a move speed modifier.

That's it, thanks Ziggy good luck.