PoE 2 is fun until I engage with the endgame (trading / crafting)

Brother there are many builds that are on the cheaper side that don't require much trading.

I'm a very heavy Poe 1 vet and played Poe 2 for the first time to endgame and I started the league 2 weeks ago after inflation went through the roof.

I straight up said I like wolf I'm going to do a wolf build. I put it together for less than 50 div. Crafted some stuff to save money and I can do almost all of endgame stuff I tried so far.

If you want to play the meta, expect meta prices. You know how many times I played a meta build in poe1 over a decade? Never. You know how many times I exploit meta items and sell them so I can fund my cheaper builds? Everytime.

I'm just saying is you can do endgame without requiring hundreds of divines. This is THE league to play off meta builds cause items are dirt cheap for that

I don't really get your point. A div budget is just another name for time budget. In poe2, as well as d4 and other arpg games, your time is the currency. You will get drops that are not for your build but can be exchanged for drops that are suitable for you, especially if you play non-meta builds. Someone telling you a build needs 500 div to get online is no different than telling you you need to target farm for 20 hours in d4 to get the drops for your build. You are ok with the latter but not the former?

Did I make another account and post this? Dude, you are saying my exact feelings about the game. I love poe2, but once I hit mapping, it’s basically over. That’s why I’m playing like 7 different characters right now. Don’t really care to learn high level crafting or any of that. It’s just too much

This season I did my living with crafting and I cannot agree more... Crafting totally sucks... You have billion things you don't want and just 1 thing that you want.

Crafting something like a decent staff takes a lot of time. And the decent staff or a wand is useless. You cannot do t15. So you need better one.

I spent like 1500 div on a wand with self crafting. Imagine if I had to buy them.

It took be 3 hours of boring chaos slam to craft a wand. Who the heck designed this system.

It is soo idiotic. Crafting an attack based item is little easy with essences.

Armour, headgear gloves boots are so damn hard to craft and achieve what you want. Don't get me started on ring and amulet.

Nothing is casual player friendly in this game. Diablo 4 is abysmally easy people claim. But in my opinion it has much better quality of life and crafting than this stupid game.

I enjoy everything In this except endgame and crafting. Don't come and advice me to play poe1 now .. I don't want to do that.. it's outdated and has bad movement systems. I hate it

This is actually Poe 2 (and Poe 1) game genre. It's not pure Action RPG, but some kind of PVE MMORPG with indirect interaction via market.

My main pet peeve is that actual crafting is reserved to an extremely wealthy minority. Most of the playerbase just has to rely on random Exalting and the occasional desecration. Maybe using a 2x1 exalt omen and that's it. Anything more deterministic requires several divines and you can still brick it, so you actually need a large stack of divs to make it statistically sustainable.

If you need say 10 divs to make crafting interesting and slightly deterministic, but you have about 50% chance of still bricking the item, you'd need at least 40 or 50 divines to be able to make a return on investment and minimize risk of having an unlucky streak and just burning all your wealth for nothing.

Currently, the shitty low budget coin-toss crafting is keeping the early grinders getting richer and the rest of us staying on the poor end.

Edit: fat finger typing

I have the same feeling. I can't agree more!

Fully with you brother. The fact that for most players, everything on the ground could be replaced with a quantity of gold, depending on the quality of the gear and made gold the currency of player trading - nothing would change. Because for most people it's exactly as you say, "build is expensive", "I just dropped 2 mirrors" and the whole idea of the rarest drop, the mirror of kalandra, being borderline useless for something like SSF, is something that keeps me awake at night.

I know, I know, there are SSF-viable builds and I did one this league, I had a lot of fun with a thorns build and completed some of the T3 bosses, but I have a feeling that there are only a handful of such "specialized" builds that you can do.

One aspect that I think gets brushed aside is the community aspect. This isn't just a PoE2 thing btw, Diablo 2 also to some extent has this "wow I dropped a small charm this seems good" -> "I just dropped 15 jah's" to me seems really unattractive. SSF is the secondary way to play an ARPG (heck, even other types of RPG, WoW has the same problem, leveling up professions like mining and blacksmithing for a lot of people is just, buying the materials from auction house and doing the smelting and smithing actions, instead of gathering materials for yourself). It makes it significantly harder for you to interact with the community at large.

Alas, this is just an old-man-yells-at-cloud thing, I know y'all having fun, I just want the role-playing part in my RPG to have more breathing space rather than a spreadsheet visualization.

I agree 100% with you, and I would recommend you to try last epoch, there's a whole SSF mechanic which you can kinda target farm the itens you want and the crafting is good

Completely agree. Im 200 hours in also and feel basically the same - I really like the game but the reliance of everything around crafting is just kind of bonkers to me. An ARPG that encourages you to spend more time at base crafting (which lets be real, is more like gambling) rather than out there collecting loot just seems a wrong direction to go. And because everything revolves around crafting, it means the loot that drops is significantly worse - I can't actually remember the last time I found an item that dropped in a good enough state that I was ready to equip it.

Another knock on effect I've found is that the game doesnt encourage you to push higher difficulties unless you're 100% sure you can beat them - in other ARPGs you might find a great piece of equipment that made struggling at a high difficulty worth it. But in POE2, why do that when all the difficulty does is increase your chance of some crafting materials, which due to them being RNG when used anyway don't even guarantee you can improve your gear. Its easier to just farm currency at lower difficulties first, gamble enough to upgrade, and only then make the next step.

The worst thing is the crafting system isn't even interesting, its just convoluted RNG masked as 'complexity'. I've seen people call this the best ARPG crafting system, which seems bonkers to me. Last Epoch's crafting is far superior, as it has some RNG but also a good amount of player control and choice. Spamming omens and orbs just to hit the lottery on a particular affix until you either brick the item or run out of currency is not a good crafting system