After finding PoE1 to be largely mediocre, I listened to you fuckers against my better judgement and bought the second game.
Thus far (just levelled past 10) I'm fairly satisfied. The sequel is a major improvement in a lot of ways that I find critical as a BG2/IWD fan - dungeons, encounter design and variety, exploration, and loot. It also does a much better job of evoking the spirit of adventure the IE games excelled at, though it still suffers from a disappointingly limp-dicked main plot disconnected from anything interesting going on in the setting. And it is a fun and well-realized setting, writing quality aside. I'm not even especially bothered by said writing being relatively bad by Obsidian standards. It would be nice if companions were more colourful (Serafen is the only one who actually feels alive, much like Durance did in the first game), and if they stopped asking me for relationship advice, but whatever, doesn't matter that much.
My main problem with it continues to be the combat. Part of it is that I still feel the core philosophy of having each class have a comparable amount of active abilities is stupid as hell in a game where you control the whole party simultaneously, and leads to lots of pointless busywork and skills with no impact. And I don't know whether this is because of the underlying "unified" combat resolution system or due to bad enemy and ability design, but I find myself not caring about most of what enemies do. To be fair, in PoE1 I only cared about Charm/Dominate, and PoE2 added healing reductions to that, so there is an improvement. But in IE games, I cared about practically every status effect, and having to actively remove them in combat and prepare for the truly nasty ones like level drain made the combat pleasantly interactive. In PoE2, I'm playing on PotD with upscaling, not really powergaming or optimizing my builds, and I don't give a shit about poison, or the plethora of short-duration CC effects that I can't do anything about even if I wanted to.
Plus, visually it's just a clusterfuck, and something about the pathfinding makes it really difficult to position your party the way you want to.
But, overall the game is a pleasant surprise, and while I still prefer DOS2, it's much closer than I'd have expected. Kind of a pity it seems to not be selling that well.