Anybody feel the new POE2 0.5 endgame is a massive chore?
Title. Separating league and Atlas points has been the most painful endgame experience for me. The destination is great and very promising, but the journey is not.
After 10-20 hours of campaign, which is already exhausting for me, I have to do another massive chore just to begin playing the game the way I like. This was not the case in 0.4. Once I reached the endgame, I could immediately invest into whichever farming strategy I wanted to play.
I know I will have a lot of fun experiencing the new, vastly improved endgame mechanics, but the problem is that trying to get there already kills nearly all of my fun and motivation. I don’t think I can enjoy any league mechanic before unlocking a decent amount of Atlas points.
Currently, I unlock Atlas points by speedrunning empty, low-level maps, skipping all objectives, and running straight to the boss. Rinse and repeat until Arbiter. This is not to mention that early-game map sustain is also a problem.
Unlocking Atlas points is pretty much mandatory, yet players have little to no agency over it. Everybody has the exact same Atlas, and to me it feels very boring and, in some ways, meaningless. The few choices that do exist are hardly meaningful enough to be felt.
People say I can ignore the Atlas, stop rushing to Arbiter, and go straight into league mechanics, but honestly, that doesn’t seem like an option to me. Running a league mechanic without 4-mod (or at least 3-mod) tablets feels really bad. There are also far too many travel maps just to reach those mechanics, each rewarding me with nothing but a waste of time.
I really don’t mind sinking dozens of hours into grinding POE2. I just want those dozens of hours to be fun, and currently, early endgame isn’t fun until 20–30 hours later.