Make path of exile great (again)

Hi everyone,

After playing this league longer than intended, and also enjoying it quite a lot, I felt like giving my feedback on the current state of poe.

- The game has really gone a long way. I played back when the game had only three acts, but in different difficulties (normal, cruel, merciless). Many parts of the game were worse than they are right now, but I think that some of them were actually better at the time (more on that below).
- Then I took a long break, played some Heist, POE Royale, and now Settlers. This league, for the first time, I felt like completing the game. I made a lvl 100 character, my own build (Ascendant, lightning strike + molten strike, two 6-links), that could do anything in the game. Bought mageblood, got perfect voices, etc. So I hope my feedback is meaningful, as it comes from someone with a decent amount of experience and play time. In addition, recently I have seen a youtube video about the history of poe. I read that the developers originally got inspired by diablo 2 (d2), which I also played quite a bit. So I want to add some things which d2 does better imho, and which poe could do as well.
- I realize that developers might be focusing on poe2 mostly, but who knows, maybe my feedback is also relevant in this regard to some extent.

Quick summary: I have some good ideas for additional content, and for changes which would improve the player experience possibly.
Overall, the game was a lot of fun to play. I had a great time figuring out all the new stuff. But there is also considerable room for improvement in my opinion, and I am missing some aspects of "old poe", which were actually really good.

In the following allow me to be a bit more critical. The game has some serious issues in my opinion, and I would like to address those:

itemization/loot
- To say it in simple terms, the game is a "garbage simulator". It's incredible how much loot drops, and how bad 99% of it is. Of course I was using a loot filter, but that is not the core of the problem. The game in the first place should drop much fewer loot, so a loot filter is not needed, or provide predetermined ones focusing more on item level/stats, etc., so the majority of loot with bad rolls is not shown anymore once you have reached a certain point. This could easily be implemented in poe. Instead, people currently are relying on all kind of loot filters from popular or not so popular streamers; I think it's a bad solution.
- Moreover, divine orbs drop way too rarely, although this is actually the most exciting thing in poe (keeping extremely rare currency aside for now). Instead, I have to do harvest with crop rotation to be effective (you can do other strats to, but anything with harvest is better than without harvest)...it's on average maybe 0.5 divine per map, but so boring. How does that make any sense? I do for example 30 maps, do not find a single divine orb, but 15 divines in harvest currency? Sometimes I was thinking to name the game "path of harvest", because that's what it mostly is right now. You need the yellow juice for so many meta crafts that it has insane value; it feels imbalanced.
- Moreover, bosses like Maven that are considerably hard should have a much higher chance to drop divine orbs, in addition to everything else they drop. This is arguably the hardest boss in the game, and often it only drops unique items worth about 10 chaos orbs. Seriously? For the amount of time you need to farm her invitation? That doesn't seem adequate. In my opinion, a lot of the content should be evaluated again in terms of efforts/rewards.
- When I played d2, for example, the whole experience was always way more exciting. I can't explain why, the amount of items and affixes was much lower. But that kind of shows you that you don't need endless amount of uniques and rares to make a good game. For instance, in d2 the most exciting items were unique items, especially with perfect rolls (e.g. you probably remember the iconic 250% ED grandfather). And actually in old poe this was true as well! There was Kaom's heart, and there was Lioneyes, or Taryns Shiver. Now all of these items are extreme bad and low valued. You could easily make uniques more powerful by increasing their damage or defence ranges, so at least perfect rolls are worth something. Unique items could also be made unmodifiable by divine orbs to avoid easy perfection and to make good drops more exciting. Right now unique items are the least exciting things to me that can happen. Very few exceptions that are super rare, such as mageblood or headhunter, do not change this fact at all.

Crafting:
- Crafting currently is brutal. Unless you play a lot at the league start and swim in currency, you will have a hard time to get those divine orbs needed for a good craft for your endgame build. But okay, let's say you get the currency, which eventually happens, but then the item can still brick in many cases if you are unlucky (e.g., think of veiled orbs that replace your crafted t1 mod, or if you are forced to annul).
- This "punishing" system is very bad in my opinion, as it leads to demotivation and a feeling of lost progress. While I totally understand that crafting perfect items has to be difficult, I think there are better ways than this "backward orientation" that is currently in place. You can certainly think of something. And don't tell me "you don't need perfect items, sir!". It's wrong. For T17s and ubers, you exactly need perfect items, unless you are playing the nr1 meta build maybe (ES trickster)
- Crafting with recombinators is also painful. It's one way to craft perfect items, often the only way, but it feels even more punishing to me than the usual way. You need to farm/trade endless bases, which takes considerable time, only to make very few usable "feeders". But what you need is endless "feeders", as only two of them will result in the final desired craft. It works as intended, but it is the least fun way to craft anything that I have experienced.

Trade
- Trade for me is a core part of the game. I actually like trading, but not the way it is currently implemented in poe. It simply feels outdated and too slow. The currency exchange added in Settlers was a big step in the right direction, but more could be done.
- First, why do I have to go to someone's hideout if I want to trade with them? Everyone could simply open a trade window from their hideout instead, which would make it faster and more convenient. So what could hideouts be used for if not for trading invites? Maybe you could add pvp to hideouts, some sort of hideout "invasions", where people could bet for currency if they want to fight. Just a spontaneous idea.
- Second, literally everyone is using external trading tools for price checks, to save time. Generally external tools are bad and should be avoided. Why not implement a simple solution yourself, similar to poe awakened trade, but more based on the game engine? It would make trading much more enjoyable and you could make it more professional too. There is a lot of market manipulation right now in trade (so called price fixers who list items cheaper than what they are to depress the price of newly listed items), and this could easily be circumvented by using the average price of the recent 100 trades, or more sophisticated methods to avoid outliers...
- Third, the official trading website is very bad to operate. For example, if I want to do a new search at the top, but I have still activated some small box on the right side, the search doesn't work. The website should realize when I search something new by name that the box is not relevant anymore (simply auto-reset maybe). Also it needs some sort of completion for popular search entries, to make life easier.
- Fourth, offering bulk trades is currently cumbersome. This should be easier, similar to doing normal trades.

Content
- While I like most of the content that was added to the game since the beginning (e.g., Atziri, Sirius the Awakaner, the Immortal Syndicate, High Templar Venarius, Maven, etc.), it feels a bit bloated right now, with too much content, and often content that seems to be primarily targeted at being innovative, which doesn't always seem to be best for the game --- that is, go away from action-RPG elements into different directions, which are often too slow or feel cumbersome, such as Heist or creating economic villages in Settlers league. Overall I liked Settlers a lot, but not really for the econ simulation, which for me was not complex enough to make it interesting for this type of mechanic, but more for the additional currency it provided.
- Maybe it would be a good idea for future leagues to focus more on balancing existing content, skills, and loot, instead of too much additional content all the time? While I really like exploring new things, I personally would find it satisfying enough if you simply added a new huge dungeon/area, with several layers, and an endgame boss at the end. Simple but effective. The deeper you go, the more dangerous it gets. Poe is in the end mainly about killing monsters, isn't it?
- As a consequence of all this content, there is also way too many people to interact with. Your hideout is full of them, then currently you also have the settlers village full of them, etc. Why not make one character for the whole village to interact with, who offers everything in a simple menu? Wouldn't that be simpler and more effective, and also imply less work for you to begin with?
- I want to add one more thing. When I used to play d2, one cool feature was the diablo clone. It could only be created by selling a random number of stone of jordans to any vendor. I enjoyed that, because at the beginning, it inclined the community to work together to find out how to solve this "riddle", and at the same time, it created a sink for one of the most expensive item in the game. You could do something like that for mageblood, adorned, maybe. This would add an interesting twist to the game.
- Another idea I had would be to make content drops dependent on how many players are relatively speaking in this area. Let's say Ziggurat is the hardest map in the game, no one likes it. I think it could be interesting to increase for example rarity of Ziggurat by 200%, if only 20% of the total playerbase in poe was in that zone. This would connect the whole world and community somehow, and would make farming less attractive and more dangerous zones more interesting.

Skill tree and atlas
- The skill tree is amazing. Poe's core feature. Not much to add here. About the atlas tree, I get the idea why you have added three trees. People can effectively swap between farming strats. But honestly, when I experienced this feature at first I found it very confusing. Why give me suddenly a full new tree? I was just happy with my previous one, then I got a new one. And then a third. In the end I used them all extensively, respeced multiple times, but the solution doesn't seem ideal. Imho there should be one tree at max. Also, I think that mapping loses a lot of excitement when you can predetermine the content to the maximum as is currently the case. If you had only one tree, it would not be that extreme anymore.

Progression, currency, balance and skill gems
- This is my major critique point about the current state of the game. The game praises itself for endless build opportunities and skill gems. But in reality, 95% are crap. Everyone plays the same meta builds, and if you don't, most of the time you are screwed. You will at least not be able to do T16s, T17s, and certainly not ubers.
- This could easily be fixed. Use your internal hero editor (which I assume you have), check each skill, add the obvious supports for maximum damage (this could certainly be automized in a hero editor as well), and see if it sucks or not. If it sucks, modify the skill, so it doesn't suck anymore. In this league, I had my fair share of bad characters (two in total), as usually I am enjoying to test my own builds. It's a lot of fun at first but usually deteriorates very quickly.
- A lot of the content does not seem to be balanced very well. The focus seems to be on very few meta builds (e.g., ES trickster, with 22k HP), but that should not be the norm. Playing a normal non-meta build, poe is actually very hard. For example, immortal syndicate, abyss, or even harvest, it is very difficult at first when you aren't geared yet. You seem to be somehow forgetting that not everyone is following a guide when they play the game at first, and I can only imagine a lot of people are dropping out soon out of frustration.
- With respect to drops, I get the feeling that often the game drops really good items/currency only, when you don't need them anymore. This gives a bad feeling of progression. Example: my character finally finds a 6-link chest, because I can do harder content such as corrupted t16 maps? Well, I took a long time to farm 1.5k fusings before to make my own 6l chest, so it doesn't really help me at all. I had plenty of such moments when I was able to do content I couldn't do before only when I got upgrades elsewhere. The keyword here is smart loot. While poe has certainly improved in this regard compared to the past, at least this is what I feel, the overall loot experience is unfortunately still pretty bad. Most of the time you don't even ID potentially good rare items, as 99% of it is bad anyways, so IDing 100% would be a waste of time even if the 1% was decent. All players eventually care about is currency (including divination cards), scarabs, and maps, with few exceptions.
- With respect to skill gems, one cool thing to do in the future would be to combine skill gems into new ones, taking over modifiers from both skill gems. While I realize this would be very hard work to implement, it would basically change the whole game entirely, allowing hundreds of new builds. Awesome.
- Also, I would like to address the drop rate of T17 maps. I think it is a bad idea to hide the final content behind rng as much as is currently the case. If the only thing left for someone to do is ubers, and they are out of T17s, it is really not fun at all to farm T16s until they finally acquire enough T17s to get another uber attempt.
- Progression during the later phases of the league becomes much harder and less fun. You need a ton of divine orbs to craft good gear. I found it always strange that there is somehow such a huge supply available, although the raw drops are so rare (probably the exchange comes into play here). It would be nice if every t16+ boss in the game drops at least 1 to 5 chaos orbs in addition to a decent chance (maybe 1/10 to 1/8) to drop 1 divine orb. This would make mapping, the core of poe, much more exciting. As long as loot is not fixed, I feel this would be an easy solution to keep players more interested during later stages of the game.
- Finally, using regular expressions to select good modifiers of maps should be made a lot easier and cleaner for players. Right now, this comes again from external tools/websites, something that does not seem ideal.

Outdated content that should be reworked, mostly for more fluency and better effort-reward ratio
- Shaper: you need to kill for 4 mini bosses before him, and two additional bosses during the fight when he beams you away. This fight seems really outdated, the rewards are way too low for the amount of time and effort required.
Solution: remove the two additional bosses you have to defeat during the fight when he teleports you away. They are easy and it's just a waste of time. OR: make the monster drop much better loot so it is worth the time.
- Elder Guardians: way too slow. Increase the speed of the animation the elder needs to perform until the guardians spawn, and until they are teleported in later phases.
- Labyrinth: slow, not fun at all. Rewards are way too bad for the zone, aside from ascension of course and transfigured gems, I think there should be more. Right now most people think of this zone as something very cumbersome to do, especially because of traps.
- Menagerie: killing beasts in the Menagerie for the purpose of crafting seems outdated and too slow. It doesn't add anything, players always manage the fight. Why not simply add the craft to the benchcraft, or a similar crafting device made for the menagerie, once you have captured a beast?
- Forbidden Sanctum: very niche content, most builds can't do it. You need a lot of dps and to be tanky. Once you reach that point, doing Sanctum is usually not your first choice anymore anyways.

General suggestion
While I like the game it currently is, I feel there could be more connections between the players. Right now there is global chat etc., but that doesn't seem to be enough. Global chat in poe reminds me of channels in d2, but kind of worse, as you don't see the other person's character. What would be really cool is some kind of large endgame city/area, where all players are united. I realize that this is technically very challenging, but you could add limitations in vision or otherwise, to make it possible. This city could also have an arena, where people could do pvp, and observers could make bets. It could also have a live auction, where players put items to sell them at the highest offer (if at least 10 offers are made and a fraction of the items worth based of your exchange value is reached, to avoid fraud). Also, I remember there was a time when you offered "POE Royale", good times. I think this was a lot of fun. You could do something like that maybe at the end of the league for everyone's real league characters, matching players based on dps, and possibly reducing overall pvp dps so it is still fun to play. Or even if you did the old Royale more regularly at the end of the leagues that would be a cool thing.

This was a long write-up. Thanks for reading. There is no tl;dr, sorry ;)
Cheers

Some time later I want to add two more important points I have forgotton

Long-term-motivation/endgame
I've briefly addressed the topic of endgame before, but not gotton into the details. So here is what I wanted to add:
When I played the campaign it had a lot of fun because there was always the feeling of progression. Both in terms of levels, in terms of gems, and in terms of gear. Simple craftinging recipes were also fun to improve rare items. But one you get higher, let's say lvl 90+, it becomes much harder to progress. Again, this might not be true if you are playing a popular and strong meta build, but the build options in poe are endless, so a player who doesn't read any guide before playing the game will likely pick something bad and as a result will be struggling later on.
Also, you need a lot of divines for crafting good items, and these drop very rarely. So you need to trade (assuming you play trade league).
And here comes the issue: if you miss the league start, you are in a big disadvantage in terms of wealth. The value of items generally drops very fast as time in league passes. In my case, for instance, I missed the league start. I was still able to get the powerful key items required for my build, but when I was finished, I felt like barely anyone was playing anymore. At least there is hardly any trade requests going on right now. Obviously the new Settlers necro league plays a role here, but the issue existed already before it has started.
So a big problem seems to be the player retention. I don't think this issue can be easily resolved. There is the hardcore gamers who will finish endgame within the first week and who will make most of the currency selling items expensively that other players need for their builds, and then there is the casual gamers who will never even finish their build as the game becomes harder and harder later on, and they realize their build sucks. Some of those might stay of course if they followed a good guide.
To address this, in my humble opinion and as stated before, I think there needs to be more divine/chaos drops at the later stages of the game, especially for harder content, to keep up the feeling of progression and to allow anyone to finish their builds within 3 months league time.
Moreover, I think it would be great to lay some of the focus more on pvp and not just on pvm. Let me briefly talk about pvp in d2, where it was a lot of fun to play, and very popular. In d2, you could have up to 8 players per game. Usually pvp took place in act1 outside the rogue encampment, near the bridge. This system was good, as it not only allowed 1vs1, but also team play such as 2vs2, etc. Moreover, there was usually a lot of funny communication going on, players challenging other players, betting on who would win, etc. In effect, there was a bigger connection between players, which is something I am missing in poe, where the usual players are just farming by themselves. Of course, pvp has to be balanced in a certain way so that not everyone is simply one-shot. I guess damage has to be scaled down a lot. But I believe something like that, maybe even with a more professional betting system and more players that could join a pvp designated area to watch and/or fight (maybe up to 100), would be really cool and keep players for a much longer time than is currently the case. If it works, league time could also be increased, giving you more time to prepare updates for the next season(s).
Another thing is that after lvl 100, it feels kind of unreasonable to play any more, as you cannot level up. Why not make it much harder to reach lvl 100, so people can barely do it in 3 months time? Or add more levels or something similar to paragon levels in d3 (I dont like d3, but the system worked well in this regard) to retain motivation.
I also think that t17 maps are generally too hard, even though my build can do them. The large majority of players has to roll these maps with chaos orbs until they can even run them. I see why they are there - the ultimate challenge for people who want to do all the content available in poe. But if you had a good pvp system in place it would not be necessary to have this imbalaned pvm content. The same as for t17 maps can be said for Valdo's puzzle box maps of course. There is just too many mods that completely nullify builds, which should not be the case in my opinion.


One-handed vs two-handed weapons
In my build I decided to use a two-handed sword, as it has higher damage than one-handed swords. This was fine for all of the game, and even now it is okay with mageblood and two defensive flasks (jade + granite), but without that gear, I think a one-handed weapon + a shield is always superior to a two-handed weapon. To do t17 map bosses, all that matters is to not be one-shot by the boss. A shield with normal block and spell block is very valuable here. But if your whole build is two-handed-based, it's usually too late or too costly to switch. I think what we need here is certain passive key stones that allow two-handed weapon users to transform some of their damage into defenses instead, or other similar mechanics, to bring both type of weapon systems (one-handed and two-handed) more in line, if the players aim to do that.
Otherwise the decision is always to make one-handed builds, as you will have enough dps in endgame anyways (assuming your build is good), but not enough defenses necessarily, if you decide to play something else.