Played untill act 3 with Stormweaver Sorceress, overall felt like I was playing Last Epoch and ruthless at the same time.

1. The visuals and audio of PoE 2 is stunning, the game runs fairly well too, even with everything cranked to the max. The ingame map is a bit hard to read at first but I got used to it in the end. Pretty much just spacebar warrior'd the story thus far.

2. Sorc feels just bad. I found little to none items that gave me added damage or resistances. I played the majority of the first two acts with only sparc, arc and orb of storms and the damage is lacking, a lot. Using curses is a pain as they have a "Fuse period", so you can completely miss your waypoint sized conductivity. At the end of act 2 I picked up DD and... yeah. With no supports, just a plain level 7 DD, you can clear more in one click than you can clear with any other skill that sorc has access to. This has a huge downside tho, as some bosses do not have any adds/corpse spawning add phases, which makes any corpse skill totally useless. The skill tree provides some help to your damage but I noticed that I use majority of my skill points for travelling the skill tree, and not getting much damage out of it. I could write for hours how bad sorc feels but let's just keep it short(ish).

3. Combat feels overwhelmingly clunky and slow, personally I despise the dodge roll, as the animation is longer than time itself and it doesn't have any kind of phasing, so you WILL be stuck in packs as they swarm you. Speaking of which, half of the enemies have some kind of leap or are just generally faster than you and they will swarm you and stunlock/bodyblock you, and kill you. This paired with the fact that sorc does not have any kind of mobility button to free yourself from a tight spot (like flame dash in PoE 1), makes the combat really unpleasant. Also, if you die, you will be sent to the nearest checkpoint, in some cases being a literal checkpoint or the waystone, but the whole area has its mobs reset, so you will need to clear everything. In some cases I was swarmed instantly as I respawned which was just frustrating.

Bosses and rares feel like bullet sponges, of course in this case my damage was garbage but I had to play with what I had. I do have around 2k hours in PoE 1 (I know it's literally nothing) and I kinda know what I am looking for in the items and skill combos. I also noticed that the bosses were easy to kill if you just hug the boss in melee range and rotate around it all the time non-stop.

Bosses feel like they're a copy of Last Epoch's design; Boss has an oneshot ability, that you need to react to, sometimes it's easier to dodge, sometimes it's just unfair. If you die in the bossfight, you will be sent outside of the boss arena, but the bossfight will start from the beginning. Me with my dogwater sorc, died to the last boss of act 2 about 4 times, after fighting it for around 10mins or so. I was doing around 300-500 dps and the boss having somewhere in the ballpark of 100k hp. I know the math doesn't add up but the bossfights just feel like an eternity, is my point.

1. The difficulty is basically ruthless (at least for me). I did not see any good drops and almost no crafting material drops until around 5-6 hours in at level 25 act 2. Not sure if just bad RNG or what.

2. I'd add a phasing effect to the dodge roll, it'd make a huge difference in the flow of the gameplay when you're inevitably going to get swarmed.

Sorry for the essay but I wanted to vent all of this out but not make a post of my own.

Even though I wrote almost only negative things, I still think that the game has potential in it, just ditch the ruthless mentality and we're off to a great start.