I actually hate it very much. Act 1 should not feel like endgame. Last boss in A1 is about as fun as tearing teeth, his fog phase is complete bullshit, i'm getting Sirius vibes from him, though he's not oneshotting me, he's 3 shotting me but those attacks are nearly unavoidable and he restricts you to the small area with strong adds.

If you equip scepter with skeleton skill and also skeleton skill from crystal by the end of act 1 you get 5, maybe 6. less if you use other minions or passive skills.

And, it's not gonna be enough, they had a "great" idea of everything having like 5 times more HP than it should so every fight is absolute slog. Don't even ask about bosses, they are slightly easier than PoE end game bosses, BUT THIS IS ACT 1, you gonna dodge hundreds of times and boss fights are also 5 times longer than they should. Oh, and skeletons are also frail so boss just smack them and go for you, you cannot spam them and they are ignored by most mobs who just go for you.

Yo 1 day late but I got through act 1 mostly by summoning skeletons and it was pretty smooth. After act 1 you don't have many summoner skills that are good for damage except the Raging Spirit buff (summons floating skulls that deal fire damage when you cast fire spells). Using Raging Spirits by itself ends up being the best choice for acts 2 and 3. By act 3 you get access to another good minion, the skeleton reaver, and later in act 1 cruel you get the skeleton brute. These are fairly strong.

If you wanna play summoner it definitely works but be ready to see them die a lot unless you get decent gear that keeps the alive. A sceptre with +1 to level of all minion skills is mandatory as soon as you can find it. Later on (act 2) you will get +2 to level of all minion skills. Also around act 2 it will be possible to find a helmet with +1 minion skills too, but it might be pretty hard to get one. Both of those things will keep your minions alive and dealing decent damage. Then you just grab minion nodes on the tree and they'll be even better. Once you get to cruel difficulty you'll have a minon army.

People are pretty divided on the game so far, it's definitely very difficult which can be polarizing. I'm loving the difficulty personally, but I will definitely agree with dead that it feels too scarce atm. If you don't constantly check the vendors every time you level up, you'll fall behind on gear progression and you won't find much loot on the ground, so the vendors are the key to keeping pace. The game also seems to make it difficult to change your character around significantly; if you're deadset on minions you'll be fine, but I wanted to go cold spells after act 3 and found it nearly impossible to make the transition work since I had few resources to rework my character.

Did you finished first act?

Is PoE2 accessible at all to someone who has played maybe 30 minutes of an ARPG before?

Depend what other thing you played, it actually do play A LOT like 3rd person action game with timely dodges and such, but as someone who play hack & slash (but refuse to use the misleading label ARPG) since diablo 1 i said it's inaccessible to me. Also i wonder what the chat dudes are smoking saying it it about as hard as Diablo 2, no, it's MUCH harder.

The game does bombard you with information, it explains everything in case you're not familiar. It's a fairly deep game, has lots of mechanics to learn. It's a big time investment to get familiar with it, but most of the non-ARPG players who have tried it out seem to really enjoy it, and it seems to onboard those players well enough. It'll be free eventually so if you don't wanna take the risk you can wait until next year.

Yes, as in every other game in the genre, problem is, i can't get there, which is totally first time in the genre. And i noticed even the anti fun brigate complains about Act 2 and class ascenscion.

Though i suppose that the end game could be actually easier than the act 1 because looking at the skill system (which is awesome) and passives, there is no chance in hell that we won't soon get really OP builds. Problem is, while PoE 1 was game which already strongly encouraged playing meta because of very complicated builds, in PoE 2 it is even more complicated due to the skills and passives synergy AND the default punishing difficulty level will make this even more the problem.

Unfortunately both ingame chat and forums/reddit are full of absolute worst scum of cuckpit worth g*mer gatekeeping scum telling you to git gud. I tried for 2 hours now to get any help for the wolf count boss and guess what, i got insulted more times than in all other hack & slash games ever and ofc nobody helped.

And i'm 100% sure what will happen later, all those scum will start whining and crying that people play only meta builds and devs need to nerf them.

If you become surrounded, you are trapped and die. You can’t move through enemies at all, Normal monsters take 5-6 hits to kill.

This is precisely the problem with that boss. All others can be killed at range but this one has a phase where it locks you in tiny space with tons of mobs and pounce on you from outside visibility ever 5 seconds of so for insane damage.

Also there is no promised trade, at least not yet, i just wasted entire saturday playing it, got to the same boss on two different classes and got stopped at the same place every time. Now i'm frustrated as fuck and i literally never felt so cheated after buying a game.