Never played PO1, my 2 cents on PO2

I'm nearing the end of act 2 on sorc.

• 95% of my deaths are caused by mobs surrounding me in a circle or them pushing me into a corner. Meanwhile when I roll into them in an attempt to get ou they don't buldge, even if it's a small piece of shit of a mob it's like a wall. Feels unfair and annoying.
• Idk about the overall pace of the game but some things needs to be adjusted. Since the beginning it feels like my character is garbage no matter what I try. It takes ages to kill packs of mobs and progress through the maps. At first I was thinking it would get better but it doesn't and it's starting to become rly boring tbh. The maps are huge and there is a lot of mobs, it's like this game have the pace of Elden Ring with 10x the mob count and it just feels off.
• When you die because of some stupid stuff like getting surrounded and everything respawn and you have to reclear everything again it sucks. It's not even hard because often I just die out of boredome. Like I'm spamming my shit for 15 min straight and loose attention and I'm dead. It's just a waste of time, it's boring and it sucks dude.
• Art is top tier on every lvl
• Enemy variety is impressive
• Great boss design, I like the difficulty
• Great character feedback
• Some really cool combinations with various skills and modularity with gem system, seems good so far.
• It feels like gear upgrades are very rare and if you have the chance to get one: not meaningful at all in term of power gain. This game is also the less rewarding thing I've played in a while. You kill a hard campaign boss and he literally drops the most garbage useless loot ever. Super unexciting. Loot is very important for any RPG and seems like it sucks hard in this one. It makes me not care and not wanna explore more of the map because there is basically no reward anyway. Like in ER you can find cool weapons, armors or talismans by exploring the corners or the map. In PO2 absolutely nothing so why bother.
• Lvling up and unlocking new passive skill points in the big tree is boring. Most of the stuff in it sounds weak and uninteresting.
• Re-allocating skill points is very expensive and that really sucks. It should be free for a while, let people try shit, who cares.
• Lack of gear and gem drops pushes me Into being stuck using boring spells in order to progress through the game. Once again it's just the campaign dude, it should be the opportunity to test a ton of stuff and play with what I like. Imho you need to showcase the strengths of your game as soon of possible (build variety and possibility) to hook the new players, meanwhile it seems like the exact opposite is being done in this first EA build.

Overall it really feels like POE2 could be a lot of fun with just some simple tweaks and balance because the content of the game is great. But as of now it's trying too hard to be giga hardcore and slow for no reason ? Also forcing players into choices by lack of gear, gems and expensive respec early in the campaign is the wrong path to take in order to gain interest from new players.