FreeKaner
Prophet of the Dumpsterfire
The complaints that Pilllars are full of "awesome buttons" are by far the highest point of mental diarrhea I have ever seen around here, and that says a lot. The problem with the systems is exactly the opposite, everything is so obsessively balanced, nothing is awesome.
BG 1&2 was always about countering awesome with awesome, overpowered with overpowered, which has a side effect of making people delude themselves that they're amazing at video games.
Yes my favourite complaints from the crowd which love BG2 and hate PoE are the complaints also exist in BG2 if not at a greater degree. Don't get me wrong PoE has a lot of shortcomings, both narrative and gameplay wise and plenty of areas those can be improved upon and I don't agree with Sawyer's balance down principle or making rogues, fighters and barbarians magical but it feels to me half the shit people say about PoE are run through a generic complaint creator they copy paste here. My favourite about that would definitely be how generic and bland PoE is when BG2 is literally the cheesy medieval fantasy with clichés upon clichés, I am not saying there is anything bad about that, it has its place but honestly do people even read what they write?
People who wanted a BG3 exactly like BG2 except more content were disappoint, I just don't see why people STILL do this day want to play with 2nd edition D&D ruleset. If you ask me that sort of bound to Pen&paper rulesets were step stones we should moved away from long ago, they are rulesets made for abstracting actions behind dice rolls and built characters with dice rolls to make runs unique and so people don't play with same optimized characters every time. They don't have place in computer games where abstraction calculation can be made automatically by the computer instantaneously and games are made unique by expertise of the writers not quirkiness of the GM. I just don't understand the obsession to have the D&D ruleset in RPG games, nor D&D tropes, do people just want to play nostalgia, not new things?
Also caster classes in PoE can do "awesome" things but by the time you can invoke these awesome buttons game is already about to end. I guess WM solved that problem but it is irrelevant anyway, it is just the same generic complaints about awesome buttons or likening an RPG to a MMO or MOBA. Those became Hitler of RPGs anyway. Don't like a game? Call it a MMO or MOBA.