Patience is key.

I've recently crossed the 100 hours of playtime mark and all this time was spent exclusively on hardcore without any regrets, thank you GGG for making an awesome game.

200 Hour Edit: Having finished playing all the currently available classes through the campaign multiple times & explored much of the endgame on hardcore, I can say with confidence that it is very unlikely that any other similar game will replace POE 2 for me anytime soon.

500 Hour Edit: My latest character ~ HCExiledPotioneer has just died on position 11 on the HCSSF ladder. This one has been my longest played and most enjoyable experience with the game so far, my only real complaint would be the insane exp requirements but asides from that there are very few issues that aren't related to balance and I am confident that they'll iron them out before release.

1000 Hour Edit: The Third Edict or patch 0.3 was an amazing experience, I took my ED Lich to the top of HCSSF and stopped playing the league right about when I hit somewhere around the top 20s. Act 4 is beautiful and a change of pace compared to the other 3 acts as you have a lot of choice as to where you'd like to go first. The interludes were also an amazing solution to the campaign problem we had previously. All in all 0.3 was the best time I've had on the game yet.

Now as we hit 0.4 the launch was a bit rough but it is mostly fixed now with quick buffs to the temple, the league did introduce a lot of new weird bugs but we also got big performance improvements and druid of course. As the endgame changes were delayed I expect less playtime this patch but putting all that aside the new class, skills & getting to experience the top left side of the skill tree has been a blast.