Yeah I got level 72, and decided to wait for either a patch or the full release, depending on what I am gaming at the time. Early access was fun for the EA of course, but now it is clear that changes should be made.

Better balancing, all weapons, classes and acts released will be great fun. All EA stuff being locked to EA servers also sucks, so even if you like your class, you have to restart to experience all acts with that class.

Damn, I didn't think there would be end game at all yet until 1.0. That's one he'll of an Early Access title. 

Haha, yeah it's a good one for "value for money", 120 hours co-op so far!

The patch promises better balance and more rewards for the end game, hopefully just in time before we lose interest. It also promises more bosses though :/ We 'touched' one last night, both instant dead before we could see what happened lol. (One of those 'activate' boss pile things)

Adding a checkpoint and resurrection in these zones would instantly fix it for us. We don't mind difficult, we do mind no retries.

CRPGs can be very addicting and yeah, you gotta go grinding now I guess. Can't wait to try this on 1.0 although I fear I will not be playing anything else for six months if I do like with Diablo 4. 

Did you try diablo 4? It's not as mechanically deep as PoE series and I can't say how it stacks up to PoE2 but it's actually really fun, I sank 450 hours in it last year and was still having a blast afterward, I'd still dabble in it but my save got lost moving to PS5 for some reason. 

Not tried, I burned out on Diablo 3 quite quickly, plus my wife likes medieval fantasy more than hell themed fantasy, so we never played that in co-op.

And nowadays Acti-Blizzard is on my 'black list' so not inclined to try D4 atm. But it is one of the few alternatives for couch co-op.

Well, if ya need to fall back on it and can put the morals aside then it's fantastic, casual enough but it doesn't need to be hardcore in my opinion, some of these games just need to be mindless fun, dopamine fueled blasts to play and it does just that.  

The upscaling on Black Myth Wu Kongs performance mode is some of the worst I've ever seen. Absolutely atrociously bad, the army with the spears at the start is so bad you'd wonder are they a fancy kind of fence. Thankfully there is a balanced mode which alleviates some of it on fur and what not but damn, I'd nearly go for the choppy 30fps in this situation. Idk, a mostly linear game is this badly optimised, it doesn't even look particularly great, many PS4 pro games look better when vompared to it's quality mode. Third party devs need to get there shit together, this is embarrassing.

It's disastrous right now. UE5 has been a cancer so far, and it's spreading. In the past two years, the only halfway optimized games I've played have been from smaller studios. There's really no excuse for the state of it, not even the most brutal rigs on earth can run modern games properly. It's like the old Crysis meme suddenly became industry standard philosophy.

We got 'stuck' on PoE2, repeatedly dying in the end game by one hit deaths. So we tried a ranger witch combo for a night, start over, see if that's enjoyable. While it's fun to see the minions on screen helping, it kinda takes the action and thus the fun away. Standing back with a pew pew shooter lol. Just the sound alone was very disappointing after warrior/monk combo. And the same problems as first time, bosses are ridiculous difficulty spikes in the first round (better on cruel). Sure we could've beefed up our new characters with money, materials and old gear from the shared stash but that takes half the progression fun away and makes loot totally pointless.

Anyway standing back isn't fun for us, so I set out to rebuild my wife's warrior. Rerouted a bunch of passives, support gems and skills. Now with time of need and overwhelming presence, another aoe attack and most importantly replaced half her gear. By buying random gear items from the merchant until finally some piece with over 100 health on it came up, then build that up. In the end I got her over 500 more hp, 2159 now, as well as better resistances.

It worked she can tank now at the easy levels at least. And now I'm the liability lol. I keep dying attempting a tier 2 map, one hit deaths in all the chaos. My wife managed to go on and finish the entire tier 2 zone by herself so her warrior at least works now. I guess now I have to fix my gear, resistances and hp. Kinda annoying the game relies so heavily on gear stats.

The patch dropped yesterday which changed stuff around for the endgame. Waystones seem to drop a bit more frequently now, however only t1. We, or rather my wife manged to complete the second t2 map, but since then we've only got more t1 waystones. There are now checkpoints in the endgame map, only good for warping and topping up flasks the first time you find them. Death is still permanent, glitches are still there. My wife could finish one zone without me but in another it bugged out again when she got too far from my corpse, screen locked, blindly portal out, can't get back in. Even with her logged in by herself it wouldn't allow her to go back claiming she died and wasn't allowed back in...

It was great fun running into an acceleration shrine. My monk is already very fast, 1.88 attacks per second quarterstaff, lot of speed enhancements, shrine on top and it was hard to follow what was happening on the screen lol.

They boosted Armor in the patch as well, it's still not terribly strong, but it's a lot more viable. Warrior should be an easier time overall with these latest changes. I rolled a new one just to try it, it's quite fun! I have three characters on the 70s now, the Witch is close to 80, but the leveling is slow overall. Currently doing Tier 9 maps with the Infernalist Witch, the mobs aren't all that bad but on-ground effects usually kill me. "Burning Ground" affix is the bane of my existence in this game, the damage needs some serious tweaking. I've also failed my third Ascendancy with the Witch three times in a row, leaving me with tokens that can only make it worse (higher level and even harder). Some of the mechanics in the Trials of Sekhema are just pure BS.