I always felt this game was unrewarding… There is a lot of bad loot and hardly ever any good loot. Talking about poe 1 now.
Sometimes the character felt powerful but very quickly it’s back to dying in one or two hits. I guess it’s hard to balance the game so it’s always at a decent difficulty level considering all variations in gear and skill.
It also felt like they wanted players to craft gear by dice rolls, wasting a lot of time and effort on random number generator.
I would put this game into the category “play if you don’t have a job and/or family”.
Yeah, the insistence on trading as a key part of the game (despite the garbage trading system) absolutely murders your loot, which is just a huge drag in a loot game.
Global trading means drop rates and gear quality have to be kept down across the entire playerbase, so stinginess is built in deeply on top of GGG’s inherent worship of time-wasting and RNG.
BTW, PoE2 separates skill gems from gear and removes color gem slot restrictions, so that at least frees you of the way PoE1 needed a drop to be good and to get good links and to get the colors you needed on those links. On the other hand, the simplified gem system is missing some life and fun. You don’t even level gems by using them anymore. You just burn a higher level gem drop to level a gem you already have.