path of exile 2 free weekend: after action report

with some degree of trepidation, i played the free weekend for path of exile 2. and while there were highlights and lowlights... i think i liked it a lot more than i expected. dangerously more than i expected. part of me just wants to drop everything and play more. but there's a lot of other things i like doing! maybe i just shouldn't sleep. or i should quit my job. life-destroying choices aside, here's how it broke down with the caveat that i only made it midway through act 2.

• the good:
• wasd controls. this is the big highlight in my opinon. the original path of exile works like classic diablo - you click somewhere to move. this is awkward at best, but it works considerably better with a game running at diablo 2's speed than path of exile's. direct movement controls is just so much more precise as you have different controls for where you're moving and where you're attacking and don't have to constantly be making tons of precise mouse movement to not die. plus there's a dodge roll and a sprint too, instead of needing to depend on something that costs mana like poe1's whirling blades.
• you can now stay a while and listen and identify all your items at once in town, at the ominous "hooded one". portals can be created with a button too instead of needing a scroll.
• better checkpointing when you die (there are checkpoints scattered around, instead of going to town or the closed waypoint) and when you log out (the zone you have a portal into is preserved for you and will be the way you left it).
• no more flask piano - just two slots usually given to health and mana flasks. belts add in some auto-triggered charms that seem like they'll take over the utility flask job.
• as a certified labyrinth enjoyer, the new ascendancy class unlock trial is pretty cool. supposedly it gets a lot harder later on though.
• a lot of really nice areas and towns and stuff. nothing felt like you were wandering in circles forever like the prison in act 1 of path of exile 2.
• all my stash tabs came over and don't need to be repurchased. they could have easily double-billed me for those.
• the bad:
• it's early but class balance is maybe in a pretty bad state. i started trying a monk and it was a bad time all the way until i gave up somewhere around the hunting grounds. then i looked for "what is meta" and rolled a lightning arrow deadeye. this was faster, more survivable, and more fun than the monk. mathil's been having success with the monk though and so maybe it's just a matter of persistence and being more particular about your gear.
• skills and skill management. i'm glad we don't have to depend on linking sockets on gear like in path of exile, but the way you get gems makes it pretty hard to try things early on. you can't even look at the list of gems unless you have an uncut gem, which you can then convert into a chosen skill.
• skill flexibility. a lot of skills are designed to work in particular combos and there's not a lot of room to try things different than that. it also looks like every skill is tied to exactly one weapon.
• ground effects everywhere. this is part of what makes playing a melee character painful - if a boss is standing on a bunch of frozen ground, the melee character more or less has to suck it up. or scale projectiles off their melee weapon, which is a common choice.
• really dumb voice lines during combat from your character. i actually just muted them, which also mutes in-town dialogue, which isn't ideal.

anyway, that's how i wound up feeling... and i'm still thinking about buying in and getting back into it. we'll see.