The colouring of the Passive Skill tree is a UX crime.

edit: originally said Atlas by mistake. The Atlas isn’t too bad.

The biggest jarring offender for me has to be the whole gem menu and I mean everything related to gems

I wanna be able to compare my current equipment while browsing the Market. Please and thank you.

Finding out added QOL additions/Basic functionality in PoE1 aren’t in PoE2 is fucking jarring.

When you open the currency exchange, you’re not defaulted to the Text box so you have to click it before typing.

You’re unable to see your Wombgifts from the Stash.

You cannot Ctrl+Click to instantly hatch a Wombgift.

I know there are more but it’s late and I’m tired.

Oh, here’s are two that have been driving me crazy that are new to either game.

Why doesn’t it tell you how much Tribute you need before your next Audience with the King? Why is it just a blank bar that fills up.

What do the different mirror shard colors mean on the Delirium Bar? (Green/Purple). At least the Orange one obviously spawns a boss and Red opens up a portal to the Loathsome Mire.

As a graphic designer the UI is excruciatingly painful to look at. I’ve thought several times that maybe I should redesign it and send it to GGG.

Yaaaa I gotta agree, I’m constantly fighting the game on the most basic things

I mean, try to set weapon slots for skills on the steam deck. The skill description goes right on top of the UI that tells you what buttons do what, so you have to switch around to catch a glimpse of what it says. And even then, it’s multiple layers deep to find it.

Weapon set passives are atrocious in trying to differentiate between them, and good God the lack of in game explanation on how to actually use them made me think something was bugged when the game first launched.

Or hey, just today I noticed on my steam deck there’s no way to actually find out what a special icon above a map in the fortress actually does because I can’t hover over it. Why not just add that line to the actual map description?

I had to Google why I couldn’t allocate passives for a league mechanic in it’s tree even though I had enough points. It’s tied to beating the pinnacle boss, but the game doesn’t tell you that lol

There’s so many more examples but ya wanted to throw these in

It’s a joke at this point, I tried to list the issues I saw to make a similar post and was overwhelmed by the task.

The amount of straight up lies in the UI (your armour real effect, dps, and so on), information gated behind too many actions…

One example with the new atlas : let’s put the quests hub on the right. Sure but it’s not to tp to it, you move the camera and then you need to click on the hub then traverse. To do all this you need to use the map device, the U menu does not work for this.

It’s one of so many little frustrations that slowly add up.

The main offender for me is the gem uncut menu and support uncut menu, I played 4x in alpha with better UI.

The amount of things we accept in this game is indeed flabbergasting.

Left aligning text to make things easier to read in general seems to be ancient precursor technology, lost to time.

Also you forgot to mention how you can’t see the base damage put out by summoned monsters unless they’re summoned in a number of cases.

The one that is bugging me is that in PoE1 they finally changed it so that if you click the buy/sell currency slot it would instantly go to the search box so you could type right away.

Suddenly in PoE2 they don’t do that anymore, so I end up opening half the panels when I start typing.

The inconsistency between games is killing me.

The devs are too used to their way of operating and not looking at the UI/UX from the perspective of someone who doesn’t understand the game inside and out.

They NEED TO hire a competent UI person, it’s obvious that whatever the process they’ve been using leaves too much to be desired.

The whole weapon set point thing is absolutely garbage. It should be be clear to the players the goal is to “Use this point for both weapon set, or use it for Weapon set 1 or 2”. Not whatever the F those (0)/24 crap they’ve got with color shading that’s difficult to see.

Not sure also why they make both the UI for MKB and controller so substantially different from one another. Like this is probably the only game I play where you even need to log out if you’re switching inputs

Switching between MKB and controller should be a seamless experience. It’s practically mandatory for modern games

The are so many UI elements that cause an awful user experience in a lot of parts of the game. Luckily the game is so good we can look past most of them. But GOD I wish GGG would work on it.

I’m playing a martial artist as my first character this season. I look top left to see if i have power charges. Bottom left to see if I have enough ward to cast my ward skill. Bottom right to see if I have combo. And middle of the screen to actually play the game. It an awful experience and makes me not want to use combo/ward skills at all.

Agree with a lot of this, mostly because I was elated back in 0.1 to see they tried to actually demonstrate real values in the game, rather than having us dig them up in PoB. They need to continue doing this to make stuff accessible without third party tools.

Only thing I disagree with is the holding alt for tiers. I know it’s annoying, but I understand why: a new player is already wholly overwhelmed with information. Some random T with some inexplicable number next to it is complete nonsense at initial point of entry. Now, I admit, it could be togglable, but the Twhatever definitely needs to be off by default in the current gear information system.

Completely agree, but I will say the visual design like the backgrounds / borders / fluff look amazing, there are so many different UI pages with different details and background that fit the games theme perfectly

I think whoever is their design lead, just got the job because of veterancy and not because of skill. And now they are blocking real improvements.

Can’t think of any other reason why a whole department of ui/ux designers isn’t able to improve the game’s ui/ux.

My biggest pet peeve is that I can’t easily see the DPS of the weapon I have equipped. I don’t want to have to manually calculate that every time I want to craft a potential upgrade or search for an upgrade on trade, just make it plainly visible when you hover over the weapon jfc.

Completely agree. The UI and UX in this game are aggressively terrible.

Want to search for a specific currency in the Currency Exchange? Better make sure you manually click the search field, or understand CTRL+F is an option because they refuse to move the cursor to the relevant window you’re CLEARLY using.

Fill out a trade search? Be sure to click search, because hitting Enter (like would be intuitive) is just going to open chat.

Why can’t I access my map tab from inside the atlas screen? Instead I have to manually grab a map every time.

Why can’t I use the price checker anywhere but town and my hideout?

Why does that price checker search for exact values, rather than at least giving the option for a weighted search? (without having to manually set it up)

Is there a way to see an item’s modifier tiers without looking them up elsewhere, or having them memorized when that item is listed on the trade site? If there is, I’m unfamiliar with it.

The game is also aggressively unintuitive and unfriendly to new players who aren’t familiar with the various Alt, CTRL, Shift combinations to do specific tasks.

I also find the shop horrible to navigate when I’m looking for things like a tab to buy. They don’t seem to be in any particular order, and it is happy to show you duplicate tabs, like a currency tab, I’d never have a reason to purchase.

I was playing yesterday and my son briefly watched over my shoulder and asked “Why do they use Excel for the UI?”

I had to laugh. So true.

Seamless switch from controller to KB/M on PC would also be amazing.

I’m red/green color blind. The weapon set passive line on the tree looks completely IDENTICAL to the main tree. I’m not sure why they didn’t use colors that were clearly different from the main tree. Like blue.

It’s funny because I’m professionally trained in UX design and I can see the areas where they really did a good job with UX. The issue is that while they did superb in some areas, other areas look like a UX designer has never been close to touching them. 

They have 260+ developers but still not a single one has solid background on UI/UX. Shame.

The UX and UI of Poe 1 is terrible so I think they simply didn’t learn.

They really should invest in a proper UI team though. It’s one thing to be a niche indy studio and not have things like accessibility features. It’s another to be raising a AAA game without stuff like that. Hell, there isn’t even a color blind mode

Why is there NO indicator what weapon set is currently active, outside of the inventory. I am using 2 sets with the same weapon and the same skills. I have to open the inventory multiple times to check and ensure I am using the correct one for the thing I am doing (clearing vs more focused dmg + ignite)

I for one do not understand why elemental ailment threshold is shown on the character screen but stun threshold is not. A small thing to be sure, but one that irks me.

I’ve been doing normal software development for nearly 30 years now and I can state one thing about game devs: They all suck when they have to build a user friendly menu, workflow or whatever. I mean, I get it, they have by far more complicated things to solve, but it’s alwas so bad…

Also why is there no support menu without a gem to spend 😭

You ask why its stil so bad? You should instead ask why its worse than in poe 1. How i miss just hovering over the symbol in the bar to check my dps gains. So many bad design changes in this game just for the sake of change from poe 1. Its infuriating honestly.

PS: POE1 skill info is also not perfect but its just better.

Still not sure how to check Sekhema debuffs on a controller. And it is the one thing using my mouse to hover over doesn’t resolve. Irritating.

Why can I not mix inputs like Controller + KB+Mouse …. Jesus.

The is a reason most people use pob instead of the ingame character sheet to make a build. I guess they focused on all the other stuff since the community has a workaround. Don’t get me wrong i agree that the ui needs some love too.

Throw in there quest design with the UX too. Nonsensical dialogues cause you did things in the “wrong” order. You missclicked anywhere on the screen while some NPC was explaining something about the atlas? Well, the atlas closed and you missed it. Quest items not being automatically handed to you, instead you need to talk to the NPC again, despite the game not even hinting at it.

Not a single one of the endgame questlines without this sort of stuff.
Did I mention bugs?

If any quest-driven game had this level of jank, it’d be considered a meme.

Read that as fingerblasted…

Anyone quality testing this game has got to be yes man, there is no way there has been multiple iterations and improvement made on this UI and this is the “end” result. Alongside the movement/rollslop the UI is up there with the biggest annoyances with poe2

Never let Software engineers create UI lol.

I’m finding trying to follow a build guide fairly painful with weapon sets. Red and green and gold and then overlay of the same colours has had me re-spec more than once.

Another one: Why are 90% of tooltips missing? There is so much I want to mouse over for an explanation only to find there is literally no information. So back to google again to find out something that could just be a tooltip… lol

Also why does clicking on an item move it to inventory but clicking on an item with inventory open does not?

Why do quest items block inventory space? You can’t play “town is lava” when you have to return to sell items every 3 minutes because the stupid sacrificial heart and shark fin take up so much space until you finally get to where you can use them.

Why does clicking a gem from stash and then closing the skill choice also close stash?

Why does inventory close when I open skills or character menu? At least make that shit configurable.

I hate typing stat filters in the trade menu because it doesn’t clear each time you add one, unlike in PoE1.

for me it’s the gem cutting screen. Somehow they’ve made it worse

Why can we not have the detailed version as standard when inspecting items, at least make it an option it’s genuinely like 10 min of work?

Dont forget changing options unpauses the game

I can’t see the map overlay. It blends in with a lot of things when chaos is happening and you are zooming. I’d like to be able to change the color.

I agree. Did y’all know you can allocate 2 nodes in the same row in your Atlas Master tree? I’ve been playing for a week and only found out earlier lmao.

I think most currencies and materials in poe2 is a huge step back from poe1. Don’t get me wrong, the designs are cool, but everything looks washed out and samey. Essences barely have any color, making it hard to see which is which. Same with liquids when you compare to poe1 oils. Currency has less character. Still have a hard time seeing which is which of Aug and trans.

the biggest one i hate so much is when I open currency exchange and click I want i start typing right away and it opens up a ton of random tabs…. it makes you open currency exchange and click into the search box….

just let me start typing right away

You need 5 clicks to get to a league hideout. If you plan on anointing stuff/genesis tree, that’s so many clicks across a whole league.

To be honest as much as a GGG simp as I am, their UI team/people have always been a little lacking. I suspect some of its because the game engine is homemade and ancient so they probably don’t have as much flexibility as we think to change things.

Everyone in this thread is talking about features/menus and stuff but the actual base UI for playing the game is still a war crime. HP in one corner, important/relevant buffs debuffs in another, skill CDS/charges in a third with mana.. all the relevant information you need for combat is spread between opposite corners.

I understand their reasoning with not wanting WoW full weakaura/customization but like.. just let us have a few choices or re-imagine it to be less terrible at least.

Yeah as someone who studied UX/UI it is many things that should be fixed for better QOL

As a casual gamer i would love armour comparisons to have “red” for you will lose this if you equip this item and “green” you will gain/increase this if you equip this.

Hard agree. Hopefully this is significantly improved for 1.0.

The stuff that annoys me the most is that perfect essences/alloys don’t show if they give prefix/suffix and unveiling doesnt say the tier of the mod so you have to go to a 3rd party website for basic crafting.

True, its pretty bad. I hope they give it some love before 1.0

Yaaaa I gotta agree, I’m constantly fighting the game on the most basic things

I mean, try to set weapon slots for skills on the steam deck. The skill description goes right on top of the UI that tells you what buttons do what, so you have to switch around to catch a glimpse of what it says. And even then, it’s multiple layers deep to find it.

Weapon set passives are atrocious in trying to differentiate between them, and good God the lack of in game explanation on how to actually use them made me think something was bugged when the game first launched.

Or hey, just today I noticed on my steam deck there’s no way to actually find out what a special icon above a map in the fortress actually does because I can’t hover over it. Why not just add that line to the actual map description?

I had to Google why I couldn’t allocate passives for a league mechanic in it’s tree even though I had enough points. It’s tied to beating the pinnacle boss, but the game doesn’t tell you that lol

There’s so many more examples but ya wanted to throw these in

GGG hasnt made a good UI in over 13 years. Why are you expecting different?

Tbh that’s games in general. That 99% of game UI’s aren’t editable/drag and drop is just weird to me since the backend UI designer for most games has that function built in just not exposed to the player for some reason.

As 10+ year DotA player I just want my minimap in the bottom right corner.. is that so much to ask

Act 2 quest map is yellow quest icons on a yellow background, blease GGG.

UI is the hardest part of game dev. I agree the alt tooltip on items isn’t the best especially when crafting (and let me search items for specific affix tiers please).

For 1. and 2. juste use PoB, the in-game tooltip will never be accurate. Even if they get tooltip updates right it won’t account for buffs, conditional damage buffs, enemies resistances, and so on.

PoE needs to optimize calculations involving tens of thousands of variables both on client and server-side. It’s reeeeeally hard to code that without making exploits or bugs, and that part of the code is constantly changing with new items, gems, passives, etc.

I imagine the pace they work doesn’t lend them an opportunity to clean it up. They also make everything modular, so just some tool tips, and nested tool tips are something they can just hack together for quick league content. Just slap a dialog with a list of things and a button and call it good.

Buttons in the game are very VERY small for absolutely no reason. When i want to open a map why is the button 1/1000th of the total screen size. There could be a big red button covering 80% of the screen. I want to open a map or reforge an item, not walk away from the device if i click at the bottom pixels of the button.

Why are there quest items in your inventory?

why do you have to look in the top left , bottom left AND bottom left part of your screen for vital buff / hp information?

The more you look, the worse it gets

When I saw the old UI in the early PoE 2 footage, I thought it MUST be a placeholder. And then they kept it and somehow they managed to make the UI even WORSE than PoE 1.

I think it have a lot of minor issues but none are making the game unplayable. It is not an easy job and most issues don’t have an easy fix. UX/UI is not easy especially for games with this amount of info. On top of that, they also have to accomodate controller user and console player, too. Still, I hope they would continue to improve this bit by bit.

They’re probably still hiring

I fully agree with your first point, but the others are bs. The tiers of the modifiers add a fun gamba, and deterministic crafting via whittling.

Totems should not benefit from your pin chance at ally they are totems, they are not you. Usually if a stat saya gaon xyz, that is only for you.

I know they wanted to hire UI/UX designers, and now I want to see the results of their work

those aren’t even the worse.

if i’m playing a wolf druid, and i want to put a freezing mark on my pounce skill, i can’t do it.

because i need a bow equipped to be able to create that gem.

why?

just let people create gems with no restrictions, the restriction is if i can equip it or not.

One thing bothering me is how in-game tooltip or even POB can’t accurately calculate how much damage whirling assault does on hollow form. In game tooltip has zero damage numbers for any skill attached to hollow form. POB says I only have 1.8k DPS which sounds crazy because there’s no way I’m doing T15 maps and killing bosses within 5-10s with that kind of DPS.

At least PoE2 pretends to show you your minion stats. In PoE1 you only see those in PoB

“Some of these fixes are not as hard as you think.” lol you don’t understand how a UI works in games then.

It was discussed years ago why this is harder than simply just changing some simple line of code, it was in some interview with poe1 at the time how UI elements aren’t instant update because of server response times vs player movement, etc stuff like that. That is why in Poe1 when you do see a small update that makes game easier to use its normally every league not all at once. Its complicated to change one item, because it can break others.

I just want an option to toggle the old energy shield visual over my health globe, if I’m playing a pure ES character that little bar is basically no good to me.

Search selection is barely visible in all passive trees

Guess what the people who work there now are probably new hires and some were probably not even teenagers when poe1 came out

The passive tree and weapon set passives make me think I may be colorblind…

Two things I would add:

Why does disabling the quest tracker, not hide all quests?

Why is the console UI better then the PC UI?

Please Luigi Mangione save this games UX like you saved Civ 6

The skill creation/upgrade menu needs to be entirely decoupled from the uncut gems. It should be a tab from the Skill menu, and you should be able to go in, click as many create/upgrades as you want without the window changing as long as you have the uncut gems in your inventory/stash.

Upgrading multiple gems in a row really underscores how bad the UI/UX is. It’s so many clicks and so many windows you have to keep reopening. It’s stupid.

I want to add the fact that Buffs are STILL top left of the screen. Sometimes I cannot see how many Power Charges I have because the boss hp bar is on top of it.

Keeping Poe1 UI was a huge disappointment honestly.

The only good thing about both POE games is when you are actively playing it. Like, controlling the character, killing stuff. EVERYTHING ELSE IS SHIT. ALL OF IT.

Point 2 is my biggest gripe, but also the reason pob exists lol.

I had the joy of seeing Brutality support seemingly not increase the damage of my spirit bear, despite it only doing phys damage. Tooltips change for skeletons tho, go figure 

i mean its in beta

I noticed some Path of Exile keywords in this post:

• DPS - Damage per Second

^(I am a bot.) ^| ^(All acronyms) ^| ^(Suggest)

The terrible UI/UX feels like a choice for the Poe vibes at this point.

UI/UX is underfunded on most projects. It’s really bad at GGG, and it’s clear their department just doesn’t exist - so the developers are designing it instead, not unusual as a cost cutting effort - but developers should never touch UI, they all suck at it.