Nanomachin

Each of those elements is either incorrect, completely mundane (every other fight has it) or blown out of proportion, so I'll skip that call.

Bombs are arguably cheaper and just as strong. Items in generals scale to such heights that maxing one item skill on anyone is pretty much the way to go (but then why wouldn't you be maxing alchemy).

One thing I haven't heard mentioned is weapon active abilities. I think their balance is generally a bit out of whack. First off, we know reliable full attack actives are usually why dual wield ends up being strictly better than two handers (there are other factors, such as two handers not quite having the penetration one would expect from them, especially greatsword). Similarly the built-in "no recovery" that guns have is what makes them desirable for a lot of shenanigans that involve spamming skills that take your weapon into account without actually needing to ever reload your weapon. To be perfectly frank, I don't understand why that's a thing. It's fun... for a little while, because you have the satisfaction of having discovered a way to game the system, but when you start reflecting on the implication you realize it makes some entire weapon types more desirable than others for reasons that are frankly pretty stupid. The end result being, what weapon types are actually good have nothing to do with the inherent qualities of that weapon type and everything to do with how abilities behave. That's not really a good thing in my opinion. The main problem with full attacks in my opinion currently is that, you only ever go through the recovery/reload of one of your weapons if you're dual wielding. This makes full attacks so much better dual wielding instead of 2handing or 1handing that the discussion pretty much ends here. There is no logical reason to not be dual wielding when you plan on using full attack actives, it's pretty much unjustifiable. My question to that is : why not actually make recovery work with full attack the way it actually should. Make the user go through the recovery of each of his active weapons after using it. Force him to reload both guns. That way, there is a cost attached. Dual wielding still amounts to more burst damage from a full attack, but is longer to recover from. 2hander does less damage, but you get to act quicker. 1hander is the quickest and has the highest accuracy, but does the least damage. Simple stuff. There's a kind of dual wield fetishism in the design of both POE games that I think is strongly hurting weapon balance and weapon choice strategy, and it's a real shame. Second, stuff like evasive fire. Not having inherent weapon recovery / reload tied to it's usage makes absolutely no sense to me. It is pretty cool to have rangers teleport around shooting everything like they're Matrix stunt doubles until they run out of resources, but I can't in good faith say "this is how things should be". The skill should apply the recovery / reload of the equipped weapon imo, it's just silly not to.

As far as I know summoned weapon enchantment works exactly like normal weapon enchantment, neither increases the base weapon damage.

I don't think any armor gain should ever scale with power level.

Not really, mind-blades, puppetmaster, ectopsychic echo, body attunement, borrowed instinct, ring leader, amplified wave, disintegration are all great options to have. Ciphers suffer a bit from having a weak PL 1 but are otherwise fine.

You'll have to explain to me what's brilliant about attaching on-hit paralysis on top of otherwise basic mooks and call it a day.

It depends on the ability / item. Some get +5% duration and damage per powerlevel, some get +10%. They all get +1 accuracy per powerlevel (on top of the +2 per ability level accuracy bonus inherent to any item / ability).

Resting supplies are not limited, they just impose a loading screen tax on the player. There is nothing in the economy of PoE 1 and 2 that makes limited resting a fully fledged game mechanic instead of just something that forces you to go back to town and buy more firewood. If you want to see a game loop that successfully makes resting a thing, look at Darkest Dungeon - but POE is not Darkest Dungeon, and it cannot stop players from or punish them for walking out the dungeon and back into town. There has never been a successful implementation of resting in games like POE, you need to let it go. Agreed, I wouldn't mind seeing Camping Supplies return (with lower cap based on difficulty, like in Pillars 1). Want to Empower every encounter? Go ahead, but it's going to cost you precious real time and copper (for crew wages, food and camping supplies). Now if I want to clear content as efficiently as possible, I'm going to save those Empowers for the toughest encounters, or to save a character from getting injured. Costing the player time won't stop everyone from abusing the rest system, but it would make most people think before they hit that magic button. At least it worked on me in Pillars 1. Camping supplies were a good idea made bad because Obsidian didn't commit. If every map didn't have 1-3 camping supplies somewhere on it then being limited to carrying two would have made resting feel actually limited (despite what some say most players don't have the patience to regularly run back to town to buy more) but as it was you could pretty much rest whenever needed without any problems. So yeah, if be happy to see them return so long as they aren't scattered across the world.

Turning that around, what's the point of getting to endgame to meet fantastical, gigantic creatures like dragons, krakens and giant ancient golems if they feel like an average enemy foot soldier ?

Is there a particular reason why disintegrate is not mentioned in this thread ? At the time I thought the damage numbers on that skill was a typo, but it turns out to be the real thing. I don't know how it's possible to design any boss in a game where that spell is a thing.

Yeah, this. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why people are singling out POE 2 for being too easy. I wouldn't be able to name a crpg that's harder than POE 1 & 2.

High content scaling will do nothing if there's not a major toning down of characters, he's right in saying some builds just don't care about whatever is in front of them

I'm a bit confused as to the effects of this passive, and I don't know if the current behavior is the result of one of the game's bugs or if it's really what this passive is supposed to do. Currently, at PL 9, the result are as follows : it still only gives 1 point of armor rating, and the counter damage it produces is increase in accuracy by +18, has +2.3 penetration, and no bonus damage. I can understand why the armor rating would not increase with powerlevel, that would probably be a bit too good. I do not understand however why the damage portion of the retaliation ability recieves absolutely no bonus damage to help it scale in the lategame. Would anybody know for sure how that passive is supposed to work and if that's the intended behavior ?