PoE1 emphasizes your weapon as an attack build to a degree. And your ability to meet that demand while leveling through drops, barebones crafting, and the bench is somewhat achievable. The passive tree is putting in a lot of work too. I still prefer to league start something that doesn't depend on it.
PoE2 overemphasizes the importance of your weapon. Not only that, they've decided to throw casters into this mess. And since they've essentially removed concoction skills from the game, I don't think any build archetype can skate by on bad drop luck like they can in PoE1.
I don't actually disagree that PoE2 currently overweights weapon quality but this is one of those critiques where PoE1 gets a massive nostalgia pass for having many of the same problems, just papered over by years of accumulated systems and player familiarity.
PoE1 absolutely emphasizes weapon power for attack builds, and leveling "smoothly" is only achievable if you already know which vendor recipes, crafts, bench mods, and stopgap uniques to lean on. That isn't good onboarding, it's just veteran knowledge doing unpaid design work. New or returning players in PoE1 still brick characters all the time due to bad weapon luck. We just don't talk about it because the community has collectively decided that's part of the game's "charm".
The same goes for casters. The idea that PoE1 casters are immune to gearing friction is revisionist. They rely heavily on gem levels, specific supports, reservation math, and early aura access, all things PoE2 hasn't fully fleshed out yet. PoE1 feels smoother because it has a decade of band-aids: concoctions, overpowered leveling skills, vendor recipes, league mechanics that vomit gear, and a passive tree bloated enough to brute-force bad luck. PoE2 stripped those crutches away before replacing them, so the pain is more visible, not fundamentally new.
And yes, losing concoction-style skills removes an important pressure valve. But let's not pretend PoE1 didn't spend years nerfing or soft-deleting the exact same safety nets whenever they became too reliable. The difference is that PoE1 is allowed to be inconsistent because it's "the real PoE," while PoE2 gets framed as broken for exposing the same dependency chains more honestly.
This is where a lot of the political-style tribalism has bled into gaming, and it's exhausting. When one game does something, people bend over backward to justify it as a positive or "part of the design." When another game does the exact same thing, it suddenly becomes proof that the game is fundamentally broken. Players criticize PoE2 for weapon reliance while defending PoE1's version of the same problem as "build knowledge," "planning," or "skill expression." In reality,
both games struggle when power is too tightly coupled to gear early on. PoE1 just masks it better because players already know how to route around it.
So the criticism isn't wrong, but it gets selectively applied. If PoE2 is guilty of overemphasizing weapons, then PoE1 has been guilty of it for years. The real issue isn't which game does it "worse," it's that PoE2 hasn't yet rebuilt the scaffolding PoE1 accumulated to mitigate the exact same friction.
Burnem Wizfyre
gave me.
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