GGG had the task to take the best of PoE 1, transfer it to a new engine, and voila, but, alas, this is souls-like rogue-like with complex defense/attack scaling, and this is definitely not about a "beginner-friendly system".

This game is not about "friendliness", but about meta classes. Certain characters have deep balance issues.

It was very stuffy on frost sorс, terrible damage scaling (or lack thereof), there is no flat attack on wands/scepters, everything is very bad. Winning with pure skills and a dodge is a disgusting game design, we need a rebalance of the gem skill towards increasing damage. There are naturally no resources to craft what is needed into a weapon in Act 1. I tried to pass it for 5 hours, but I couldn't. Deleted it.

Then created an archer, flat damage rolls more easily on bows and quivers, acts flew by unnoticed, bosses are wiped into dust in a nanosecond. At the beginning of Act 4, Lightning Arrow has 4k tooltip damage and increases to 6k by the end of Act 6 - and it's all on the same bow quiver as in A3. On this character, I began to notice how cool the locations were worked out, how interesting and detailed the bosses and their surroundings look, what attention to detail and lore was highlighted.

I assume that after the end of EA there will be a certain rebalance, and perhaps movement skills will be added (now it's clear why there aren't any, the developers have been trying for several years, and now they want to show us how beautiful their product looks. With movement skills, the acts would fly by too fast, and people just wouldn't notice this splendor).

And it should be treated exactly like another game, and not as a "continuation".

The acts are actually beautiful and interesting. I even liked them (But not too often, haha. I don't have the strength for the second character precisely because of the disappointment of the endgame).

But endgame is too much. Huge maps of 10 square kilometers, you run for 30 minutes looking for rare mobs or a boss to kill, and an endless world map. Sandboxes are never interesting, unless it's a survivor in a cooperative. This is clearly not enough to keep a significant number of people in the endgame and keep motivation at the proper level. Now, with the inflated locations, they simply became uninteresting to explore on maps, there is a feeling of wasting time.

There is no point in describing minor problems and existing currency printing interruptions, all this will be corrected over time (I hope that MF will also be nerfed).