We welcome First Impression posts! Please be nice to those posts.

Greetings!

Playing a witch, SamanthaStoneHeart.
Am at level 38, Act 4, so, have seen some of the came.

Played Diablo I and II forever, but skipped III.

Great graphics.
Good idea to keep crafting out of lower levels.
Flaming Skulls are overpowered.
Good passive skill tree, cool idea of having the gem modifier.
Drop rate - character level - monster level pretty well balanced. Dropping more would unbalance character to monster combat.
Maps are good, both from a size, monster content & environment design point of view.
I enjoy exploring the side-maps.
Interaction with NPCs adds depth, NPCs are spaced appropriately throughout Acts.

May do some PVP & events.

Planning on purchasing a pet to support the game as I can.

Highly recommend keeping announcements in-house while informing various gaming sites of the game's development. Have you tried Arstechnica for a review? Your exposure would be huge.

Keep up the good work!

I played POE a few years ago and I came back recently to give it another try. I have forgotten everything about POE so I feel like a new player.

Okay here is my first expression:

1) Trading is ruining the game.
The Why: Because all party games are about WTB and WTS and unfortunately not about grinding and area or bosses. There would be nothing wrong with removing trade completely. Diablo 3 died in the very first month because the game was more about trading than gaming. Not to mention people giving free items. I mean I spent several hours farming and I found a bow which made me so happy but then I see in trade channel that some guy is giving an even better bow out for free. I felt like my grinding was completely pointless. And after about 12 hours of grinding I now feel that I wasted my time with this game. Perhaps make everyone happy by creating a permanent league with no trading. That would make me stay in this game.


2) Crafting an item should be more progressive and less based on luck.
The why: Because crafting based on pure luck might require 30+ Jeweller's Orb, Orb of Fusing, Chromatic Orb etc. and that is really too cumbersome. Instead, I suggest for the following; 1 Orb of Fusing should add 1 link every time. You may reduce the drop rate of orbs because now we do not need 30 orbs but we simply need 5 to connect 6 sockets together. Similarly, with Jeweller's Orb, it should add a socket every time. So a chest items needs 6 Jeweller's Orb to be fully socketed. With Chromatic Orb you should be able to choose the color on a socket etc. See this way these orbs are more valuable and players feel that when they find one then they can progress their character towards their goal.

I usually do not review a game, but this is such a good game. But these above flaws are ruining it for me. Thank you for taking your time reading this.

Best regards
HugeInJapan

This game is insanely hard for solo players. Nuff said.

I recently came back after a long hiatus and it seems like the same things "grind my gears" again.


1. Oneshots everywhere! No consistency, no difficulty curve, just random stuff instantly killing you without a warning. After experiencing all possible ways of dying instantly (and there are many) you will learn to avoid them (or at least try to). But of course this will come after after days and days of frustration and multiple levels worth of EXP lost. Some of those oneshots are avoidable, but many are not, which largely depends on your build and available gear. Needless to say that this isn't challenging or "hard", just frustrating and unintuitive. This also applies to overtuned bosses that are completely out of place and should be moved to higher tier maps and some Act 4 stuff.
If you want to tell new players that they are supposed to stack survivablity nodes and gear exclusively and play only safe builds, you should do so starting from Act 1, and remove all offensive and "noob trap" nodes like evasion, same goes for evasion gear. Not just smack them in the face after they have played for weeks and already have a build of sorts going on.

An example of a game that clearly tells you that you are "not supposed to be here" is the good old D2. What happened when you moved out of the rogue encampment in hell difficulty on a bad character, geared with crap? You died to goddamn quill rats and you knew that you've got a homework to deal with. What happens in PoE? You clear one map with no issues, clear another, kill an unique boss and then suddenly get instakilled by some rare or a pack of devourers, or revenants, or something else. This is the issue with the game, inconsistency and absurd difficulty spikes that are out of place and you often can't overcome them by playing better because you need specific gear and build archetype to handle bullshit of such caliber. Even if you figure out something to deal with those issues, the EXP is already lost, which only discourages people from even attempting the overtuned content because what's the point? They don't provide better rewards than the easy stuff you've killed before them, the only reward is potential hours of EXP grinding lost.

In D2, act bosses were challenging but doable, yet they actually felt dangerous and exciting, the fights also took quite some time yet it didn't feel overbearing. In PoE they are either a joke or a snoozefest of zerging back and getting instagibbed over and over (Act 4 Piety, Malachai) because the mechanics you're supposed to avoid aren't actually avoidable. There are some nicely designed bosses there and there but they go unnoticed because most are either dummies or mindless oneshot machines.

I think GGG developers don't understand the concept of difficulty and challenge very well, because such "mechanics" aren't difficult or challenging and anyone can just browse the forum for the latest fotm build to faceroll with if they're having issues. They just limit, and in many cases actually punish people trying to play properly and utilize the tools given to them because resorting to bullshit like offscreening is actually way more effective and safe and the most effective builds require close to zero input besides holding down the right mouse button.

I must also say that this issue is largely aggravated by the heavily limited vision range, skills firing from offscreen and often extremely quick monsters. If the field of vision was expanded to a reasonable degree, players would be able to react a lot better and not have heart attacks every time some projectile or leaping/charging monster appears on the edge of the screen. The limited awareness when combined with generally very fast movement speed (for both players and monsters) creates very chaotic and disorienting situations.

2. Overpowered and "cheesy" builds. CoC, Discharge, whatever is fotm and the many variants of heavy tank builds that are still able to dish out insane ranged damage that puts the so so called "glass cannons" to shame. The heavy focus on absurdly strong ranged damage that goes offscreen, trigger gems and passive builds over trying to play the game actively and finding synergy between skills is just limiting all possible variety and forces GGG to commit bad design choices to accomodate idiotic gameplay styles, which only makes the rest suffer for no reason.
This has reached a very high levels of absurdity as we can see that the most effective casters are tanky melee builds that don't actually cast anything and other similar cases. This is what happens when there's too much "freedom".

Yet a lot of potentially interesting and fun builds will never be viable because the content is overdone and "balanced" around the former.

3. Too much junk loot. This isn't a big issue per se but something that mildly aggravates me, scanning through piles of rubble all day along gets pretty tiring. I know we now have stuff like loot filter but this only illustrates the issue. Quality over quantity would be a more enjoyable concept.
I assume this is done with crafting/orbing in mind but let's be honest, only a few item types are actually desirable for this and only past a certain item level. Blues are left on the floor 99.9% of the times as well.

By the way, who do those Karui themed maces quite literally constitute a good 25% of the total loot?

I've come back from a long long break.

I rebuild passives, and screw something up and I have to wait until the next patch to (probably) get them reset for me. I need to have a grace period so I can keep fiddling around with a character until I'm satisfied. Lock my XP and don't let me complete quests for all I care.. just let me reassign passives, rejigger gear, and experiment with skills before I progress.


I have characters with no gear on, and although I have a lot of tabs of gear, and they are organized by level and sometimes by "topic" it's silly-hard to figure out what to wear.

Figuring my gear out is extremely hard without a whole-stash search. Load the entirety of it up into memory and let me search it all via an alternate search mechanic. Or should I continue using an external application?

I can't see the item level requirements of gear because socketed gems get "in the way".


I still can't figure out how to make one of these "tanky" build people go on about. I get spanked easily. I guess I need to _really_ focus on +health, +defence and gear.. but I still see no way to play like all those gameplay videos that, for example, GGG puts out to showcase new skills.

Evasion is still a garbage mechanic. Dodge dodge one-shot.


I've had brutal disconnection issues when changing zones. Sometimes it's just fine, and sometimes I have to give up for a while. This is a network security issue on my end. I'd rather not be allowed to connect than have to pray to have a zone let me in.

I have bookmarks of my old passive trees, but they're all denied to me because of updates. The URL needs to be version-sensitive. Keep the old trees around forever. I want to see things like:

https://www.pathofexile.com/fullscreen-passive-skill-tree/v2.0/ABCDEfoo


It feels like some skills are incredibly overpowered compared to others. Lightning arrow is phenomenal and burning arrow is lukewarm.


I started a new character in this season's stuff, just to re-learn to play. It's brutally hard. I do like it, but I'm really ticked off that I have no understanding of any of the new skills.. I can't plan a passive tree ahead of time. Am I expected to look things up on a wiki or a build guide? Sure, maybe I could start bartering with players to get skills, but it would be nice to have access to more of them via a store of some sort. I should look into my masters I suppose. I recall they sell them, though I haven't thought of them until just now.


I still hate the accuracy mechanic. With a passion.

"

spiralofhope wrote:

Sure, maybe I could start bartering with players to get skills, but it would be nice to have access to more of them via a store of some sort.

You don't like the selection that jewelry vendors have in their second tab? :)

I am new to this game and I am stuck at act 4 normal because I am too weak. I tried to buy some equipment form other players. But either I could not afford it, or the players were offline. After 2 hours of “trade” without getting 1 item, I gave up and decided not to come back until there is an auction house or anything that makes trading easier.

I'll just leave it here...

"

SufferH wrote:

First of all i want to apologize for my bad english, but i just have to share my frustration with this game... no, not with the game, with that fucking act 4!

Also, i want to adress "the pros" all over the internet who are mocking players that complain about act 4 being too hard. Get fucking life, ok? I love playing games, i love spending my free time playing rpg's, but i have other things to think about... i don't have free 1000+ hours to spend in a game learning every character build and experiment with it. What i like to do after work is sit down and relax with a good game and just having fun time. Don't get me wrong if i have the time i like to do big maratons, i played Risen for 9 hours straight one weekend.. yes sometimes i will do that, so i consider myself to be a gamer and not just a guy who plays ocasionally. I also like chalenge, but fair chalenge, not some bullshit like in Dark Souls with its retarded PC port and beyond belief broken controls. I beat fucking Gothic back in the day and anyone who is into rpgs knows how hard Gothic is, but also the chalenge there is realistic and fair. I don't have to grind for hundreds of hours in Gothic to stand chance. I also like Diablo 2, and while admit that Diablo 2 requires some grinding too, id say that it's 100 time more fair to the player than Act 4 in Path of Exile.
So what the hell happend? I was having a blast with the first 3 acts and i was almost ready to declare Path of Exile the best hack and slash Diablo style rpg ever. I love this game but my god how broken can the challenge get? So i started 3 weeks ago with a ranger character and everything was great. I build it around fast bow attacks and i was destroying everything with the "ice shot" and "split arrow gems" and also with some good rare equipment that i found troughout the first two act. My first death was in some corrupted cave in act 2 and many i was very close to death.
But then something happened in act 3, the game just stopped giving me good equipment. Also inthe first 3 acts i got 5 unique items, yes, 5! Gues what, non of them was for my class, i was in fucking rage when number 5 dropped and end up being boots with 100% rarity of the items found in low life, but the boots were for a fucking mage class! I can keep all this unique equipment, but again, i don't have the time or desire to master the game with every class... i like Ranger and want play as fuciking ranger and want to build my ranger to level 100, but i have to be fucking retarded no lifer to do the same with all other classes, think about how many times would i have to replay the fucking game for that.
Back to the point... After 4 or 5 deaths in act 3 not counting the deaths in the act boss where i got fucking destroyed due to my bad equipment (i gues) i tought that it time to make diference so i used my precious orbs that i've colleted from trading and shit, and forged for myself some kickass rare equipment. With my new stuff and all the confidence in the world i dived in act 4 and got annihilated! I died more than 10 times in the first hour... What the fuck? Fucking fire totems killing me in a blink of an eye? WTF? That's not even a boss! I just rage quit that shit, but i'm not done, i'm going to return and get my revenge, i will finish this shit, but i just know that will probably cost me like 100 more deaths beffore i beat this act, seing how unfair and broken is.
Fuck act 4!

...because I'm sure that'd be exactly my feedback if I joined the game now and not at the end of OB.

Labyrinth:

death: restart
unexpected disconnection: restart

so...

always restart, no chance to complete - annoying :(

please add a portal to this or increase the timout for unexpected disconnection - sometimes an area just loads 10 seconds ore more - and you stay there, knowing there will be a "unexpected disconnection" with no reason just because it took too long to load the area - once the area is load the "disconnection" occurs - but of course there never was a real disconnection, ist just caused by this timeout after 6 seconds

I have been playing Path since it started and have loved most of it. I do have a small suggestion that may help people that have complained about bag space. If say for instance you have an expansion that people can get from the store, this might relieve having to go back to town too often. The other thought I had was maybe a pet that could be sent back with items to sell.
I intend to try the labyrinth in the next couple of days to see how I fare.
I wish GGG all the best for years to come and will keep playing even when I also play other games to try them.
I keep coming back as this game is just too good.