izigame.me

I've played 2000+ hours of Path of Exile 1. There was a real chance this game might not have been for people who like PoE1, but I like it better. The slower pace allows for decision making, in a meaningful way - there has been a lot of thought and design that's gone into "what is a modern ARPG" here that's come out of hard won knowledge making PoE1, not from guessing or momentum from the first game.
It's early in the game's life (and my time with it), but a lot of my gripes from PoE1 have not come over to the sequel. PoE often felt like a game about making a build and playing the game was just an equation to see if you were right in how you made the build, rather than playing that build being fun. We will see how that goes long-term, but for now, it feels like a game again.
(and I've always been here for the lore, they do a good job despite the genre fans really not appreciating it)
20 hours: Completed the Act3 story, took my time - if you like the lore, it's good! Gameplay is damn solid and continues to be fun, let's see how Cruel and Endgame treat me. This is early access, they WILL be blowing up builds with balancing, so don't bitch about it. It's what early access is for you thimby toves.
48 hours: Completed Cruel, it's neat how they changed up act3->Cruel and then Cruel->endgame.
Current (120 hours): Endgame is a bit lacking. Little things (like not being able to mouse over tooltips on the atlas but once an area is selected, those tooltips work) and big things (standard PoE scaling resulting in one shots without being able to tell it's coming, If you die it eats all your portals for the map (why have only 6 if it's for looting only?), crafting being pretty sparse aside from orb spam) are a problem for endgame right now, but it's early access. Plenty here to play, and maybe fair to just try new builds rather than grind out current endgame. Not much guidance for endgame questing or directing you towards mechanics to hit bossing, either - I expect it will all come, but currently not there.