Leveling Experience in Campaign

I like the campaign. Story and lore are good. Somehow it feels slow though. I would like an option to start different, like different maps or something.

The acts in PoE are quick and to the point. There are a few areas that drag, but people can bang out the whole thing in a few hours. Plenty of movement speed and travel skills to zip you right through.

The acts in PoE2 are the opposite. Your characters are slower, and don't have very good travel skills. Lots of tools are still missing from the toolkit. The areas that don't drag are rare, most of them are huge expanses of dead ends and Scooby-Doo doors, always wandering around trying to find some side quest item.

Your progress is severely hindered also. Your gem levels and "crafting bench" (read: runes) are all RNG. You need RNG to link more skills, requiring you to invest in Jeweler's orbs before you can test support interactions with new skills, instead of them just being low level.

I think PoE 2's campaign needs to do one of two things:

• Streamline the campaign to remove bloat hours. Story areas could be reduced in size by 25% and they'd still be large. Half the areas have smaller versions of themselves before or after (Dreadnought, Dreadnought Vanguard as an example) that could be trimmed away and we'd lose nothing. Quest item drops that either drop immediately from the first pack or require 15 minutes of full clearing (clan relics, sacrificial heart) need to be balanced.

• Give us a "Skip Campaign" button that lands an un-ascended and naked level 64 character in the Endgame with Doriyani and Co. Make it cost a million gold.

I'm the opposite. Levelling in PoE2 is smooth and fun for me, but in PoE1 I kinda hate a lot of it. Just feels like a grind.

I wish they would give an option for those that don't like the campaign to level in a different but less efficient way as the campaign so that the vision of the game is still built around the campaign but you can skip it if you really hate it.

But then again, I love levelling toons in D2R. A well balanced campaign with map that are crazy long is so fun to progress into.

I’m the opposite. I often give up on poe leagues a few hours in because the early gameplay is not fun and I’ve done that part of the campaign too many times.,

i really enjoy being reckless in PoE1 campaign. zoom through, quicksilver or two, flame dash, maybe die and maybe not. but the zone doesn’t reset if i do, i actually do survive, and it’s a fun “on the edge of my seat” experience
and hcssf for league start is a blast too when servers are dying more than i do