Long campaign + Long atlas setup = burnout before I can start juicing

Path of Homework

Yeah like alot of people are saying, by the time Im finished with the atlas points, Im pretty much burned out already

too much nothing inbetween having a blast

I feel backwards, I personally do not like the Atlas tree, the huge amount of points, etc. I don't feel like I was excited at all about it and I feel like there were no real, actualy meaningful choices to make. I much prefer POE1s feeling of "Choose your Endgame" as opposed to POE2s feeling of "Complete your Endgame".

I talked about this when 0.5 released. The "setup" tax seems to be applied to almost everything. I think it really started at the Vaal Temple league, where you set up the crystals then set up temple, then eventually run it. Now we can't just do Audience with king whenever we like, we HAVE to find a spot for Crux on the map. We can't just farm breachstones. We HAVE to use breach shards on the tree to get a breachstone, to then put on the map in dedicated locations. It's just an endless chains of: Do X, then do Y then do Z and then you can wait for the next cycle to do it again. I don't know if they're just afraid of people getting through content too fast and getting bored and not playing, while they don't realise that the setup leading up to the content could also be considered as boring and put people off playing. I don't even think 1.0 is going to change very much from what we have so we're gonna have to wait for some time to see any meaningful updates.

I'm still not sold on the infinite nature of the atlas.
Once I'm done with my quests and I'm supposedly set up for the endgame, I loose all momentum.

really hope ggg watches this. poe 2 has A LOT of problems but fixing the end game chores issue would go a long way towards keeping people around.

the fact that the teleport tablet cost 50-60c 5-6d, tells you lots about it. People are paying 6d to skip 10 maps worth of travel.

11:32 That is such an astute observation, that's the feeling I get when running the atlas. If I'm getting my main tree points I cannot, by the design of the game, get other points also, like my Ritual, like my Abyss, my Expedition.
If I am ''running'' towards a Citadel Boss, I am not farming other things on the way. If it's not clear why it feels bad to the guy reading my comment, think of it like this. If the few maps in between where you are and where you see the map you want to get can be run just the same with a T1, no mod map, that's the tax.
That's a map you simply to have to run despite the fact you don't gain anything notable from it. Even if it has a random Atlas Map Mod, like 50% increased rarity, it doesn't matter, you'll find another one of those later. If you just want the Citadel fight to possible get a super rare lineage gem, then everything else between you and that is a tax.

That doesn't happen in Poe1, I never have to run a map without having a clear goal, there's no ''I just have to pass through here.'' If run a t10 Underground Sea map, it's to get the Pantheon bonus and then I never have to see that map again. Unless I come up with a farming strategy on that map. All the bad layout maps I have to run in the league, I run them once for the passive tree and I'm never forced to run them again, I'm never paying tax for running my farming strategy, for running maps I like.

The atlas passive tree is completely F'ed for how the endgame is played now.
There is absolutely no point in having 300 points and then unlocking them all at the same time (apart from maybe the first couple hours of progression).
It's literally never a choice of "I have one new passive point, which one should I allocate? A or B?"... You just get them ALL. So why not just group up a ton of those small bonuses into a tree that has 50~ points total and save us a ton of clicking?
Right now it's an absolute joke, I refuse to think this is how they wanna actually ship the game

krafting and choosing and sorting tablets after alterations , alchemys and exalting , corrupting and sorting waystones is what kills it for me

I agree with you, everything is explained well and laid in an easy to understand way.   My most resent experience:  I played 0.5.5 up until the first Arbiter, then it hit me, I had to do all that progression over again, all those countless quests, I would have to do countless unreasonably large maps with frustrating layouts.  I ended up logging out at this point, I hope something changes before 1.0.

The worst thing about it is how little it respects your time. Like in poe1 I can run some quick liquidation strategy for 1-2h and accomplish something, but in poe2 if I'm not gonna veg out for hours on end I might as well not login

Yes! You nailed it. This focus on travel map friction is quite demotivating in the atlas. Makes me quit early every time.

I only played 2 leagues of PoE2 and I'm already completely burned out from this atlas system. Such a drag. Everything is a drag.

I feel bad saying it because I know the infinite atlas took a lot of effort to get working properly but I just feel that interacting with it is a negative feeling experience. Every map I have to pick a direction (unnecessary decision) and wonder if I should have picked a different direction (unnecessary fomo) I have to stop progressing when I run into a mechanic that is valuable if I'm not interested in extracting max value from that mechanic in the moment (loss of momentum) I have to scroll around the map looking for stuff, I can't run the map layouts I want, and the fact that the atlas is infinite means that there's not even a sense of progress to moving around on it. even if they come up with interesting things to do with it, it will still be menu busywork that I just don't want to deal with

It's genuinely the most unfun thing ever to spent 3 hours to setup maps in cities + deli to then run those maps in an hour. Like, out of 12 hour session, you basically do what you want 25% of the time. People at GGG clearly haven't ran enough endgame to understand the issue yet.

Commenting before I saw the whole thing, but just wanted to chime in one point - the atlas progression also feels so dogshit because the baseline is so unrewarding that you're often finishing the early maps without a damn alchemy orb drop. Nearly all of the inherent base juice got taken away and you have to spend points to just get to something that doesn't feel atrocious to play.

Agree, the endgame is pure busywork. Like it takes so long and is so tedious that my character's progression is finished and I only killed the quest version of Arbiter of Divinity and only have one point in one Atlas master.

Completing the main Atlas skill tree and unlocking all masters pretty much is the prerequisite to actually farm league mechanics, but I am tired and burnt out halfway through the setup phase of the endgame.