Update is out next Thursday.
They added act 4.
They're removing the cruel difficulty (previously you had to run through acts 1-3 twice consecutively, now you run 1-4 + 3 small "interlude acts" that serve as fodder to level you up)
They added new tiers to support gems and removed the restriction that stopped you from having multiple of the same type supporting different skills.
They added a new auction house system that allows trading buying items from other players with no need for them to accept the trade, so if an item is listed on the trade site you may always buy it instantly.
There's a lot of balance changes and additions to the crafting system, too. It's looking like a biiiiig patch.
time to line up for the slop!
Patch 0.2 was horrible because they did manually nerfed literally every single working build from 0.1 and added a new class that had one working build. There was nothing to even play anymore, endgame was just riding the extreme edge of manual coordination and reflex.
I played Patch 0.1 to level 98 and it was also not good. When I saw the Patch 0.2 patchnotes, I decided to not play it at all because I knew how bad it would be. I didn't have to play 0.2 to know that it would be bad. The summary of my post is that most of the "improvements" in the 0.3 patchnotes are just reverting things to how they were in POE 1. The essence of Patch 0.3 is that being like POE 1 is good and being like POE 2 is bad.
The fundamental design ideas of POE 2 is bad. Making up weird rules like having no life nodes on the passive tree or limiting each skill to only 1 weapon type is bad design. Designating 1 weapon type to each character class is a bad game design. We're seeing them go back on some of these bad designs, like splitting reward and difficulty on waystone mods.
The reason that POE 2 sucks is probably Jonathan. Jonathan has said that he likes the things about POE 2 that most other people do not like.
There's like a 50% chance that Patch 0.3 is as bad as Patch 0.2.
I think that one is a good design decision. If you play a life based build in POE2 you don't have to waste half of your tree on life. That's one of the most creativity-stifling parts of POE1: every class has like 2 or 3 templates for trees that you have to start with, sets of life nodes that you have to grab. Every life based build has a similar shape near its start (grab all the life nodes near your start) then there's a few variations of which other life clusters you grab based on what direction you're pathing to. In comparison, POE2 has a lot more freedom because you actually invest in stats that are specific to your build (unless you're ES then you're in the same situation as POE1). The main thing holding back POE2's tree, IMO, was the way many nodes are pure pathing nodes that have no reason to exist except to make paths between parts of the tree longer; they're adding a ton of new nodes this patch so that problem will be reduced.
I agree with you regarding the 1 weapon type per skill restriction. It's very creativity stifling, and it means unique weapons are very pigeonholed into specific builds since there are a limited number of skills that work with each one. That could also use being more like POE1.