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

Everything was ok before the moment when oligarchs from standart come and destroy economic. So now economic is same and i dont see the reason to play at prophecy league.

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morbo wrote:

They take the time to answer to trivial requests and fulfill them

Sure they do.

First post here so please be gentle ;-)

I'm a new player, only started about a month ago after running across a youtube gameplay video...seemed solid and at no cost, why not? I'm apparently the dreaded "casual" player - I only have a few hours here and there to unwind due to career, family, etc.

The gameplay itself is fantastic in my opinion, reminds me of the glory days of Diablo II. Nice story, nice graphics, random mapgen keeps things relatively fresh when running through areas multiple times. The character and item customization is awesome. You guys really did something special here, hats off to you.

All that being said, there's some REALLY annoying things about gameplay that already have numerous threads bitching about them, but hey, I'm a new guy whose opinion is uncorrupted from the glory days of PoE past. So here goes:

1. LAG. Everywhere, at the most inopportune times. I'm in the EU, the two nearest servers to me are Frankfurt and Paris. My ping to each is around 30, so I should have a good experience. My rig is extreme overkill for most anything I throw at it (i7 @ 4.2Ghz, 24Gb RAM, 2x240Gb SSD's in raid0, 250Mb/s fiber optic internet, etc etc etc. It absolutely plows through everything except this game...lots and lots of lag spikes that last for several seconds at times...and it usually results in my untimely death before I even realize I'm being attacked. Things are noticeably worse after the recent patch - now I'm lagging even when not in battle (I play on my own, no parties). I've even lagged completely out of the game a few times and got disconnected (which never, ever happens on any of the other online games I've played).

2. The death penalty. I completely understand the mechanics and reasoning behind punishing a player for dying in-game. Sounds great on paper, but in practice it's more than aggravating for casual players such as myself. I plow through normal mobs without slowing down, then I hit a minor boss that can take a huge amount of punishment and can fart me to death from halfway across the map. I'll get frozen, rushed and pummeled by minions, and speared in the head in the blink of an eye, oftentimes with no time to react. On a good day there's no lag, on the average day several seconds of lag at the start of every skirmish equals instant death when the server finally catches up to my PC and I'm looking at what's left of my character smeared on the ground like a skidmark. So I die, lose experience which takes a considerable amount of time to make up again, go back and get the same treatment. My choice is to either avoid that area (makes no sense, I want the experience and potential loot), or lose days worth of experience to fight and lose again and again under the same circumstances until I finally wear them down.

Maybe my build is crap, or maybe I'm doing something wrong. Either way, it's not a good experience and I'm already dreading firing up the game because I'm at the point already (at level 58, one month of casual gamepley) where it's no longer a pleasure to play, but an irritating exercise in futility to try and level up to get to the more interesting aspects of the game. I need the experience to improve my character, yet I'm losing my ass (and experience) trying to get there. It's a grind with no reward (actually, a grind with a considerable penalty). Change my build or loadout? Sure, would love to...but I need that experience to do so. The experience that I'm losing.

I'd love to sit and play PoE and enjoy the experience - it has a buttload of potential and beats D3 hands down...but the above points already have me looking elsewhere for the few hours of PC gaming that I have left these days. The recent lagging has only added insult to the death penalty injuries...

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DookieBlaylock wrote:

1. LAG. Everywhere, at the most inopportune times.
2. Maybe my build is crap, or maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Maybe I can help you with these problems:
1. Have you tried adding --noasync after the command line of PoE shortcut? The command line should look like "F:\Games\Path of Exile\PathOfExile.exe" --noasync
The developers recently changed game assets preloading principle, it affects some users performance.
The line --noasync forces the game to use old loading method.
2. Navigate to your profile privacy settings and turn off the "Hide characters tab" option. I'll try to optimise your skill tree and maybe I'll be able to give some advices regarding your gear.

Thanks for your offer of help - I'll try the nosync settings next time I have the chance to play (hopefully a bit this weekend).

I've changed my privacy settings so my character is viewable. This is my first build in PoE, so I'm sure some mistakes were made as there's a LOT of options in the builds. I add dexterity wherever possible, and kinda went for max speed for DPS (critical in D3, maybe not so much here). I can plow through pretty much any mob I run into with total ease - it's those one-hit wonders that kill me from across the screen that annoys me to no end ;-)

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DookieBlaylock wrote:

This is my first build in PoE, so I'm sure some mistakes were made as there's a LOT of options in the builds. I add dexterity wherever possible, and kinda went for max speed for DPS (critical in D3, maybe not so much here). I can plow through pretty much any mob I run into with total ease - it's those one-hit wonders that kill me from across the screen that annoys me to no end ;-)

The big problem with your build is that survivability is hugely important in POE. You need to invest quite a bit into making sure your character stays alive. You're a life-based character, which means that you should be taking many life nodes on the tree and getting as much life on your gear as possible. You also really want to get your elemental resistances up to 75% (135% before the 60% penalty for being in merciless difficulty).

At level 66, you only have one life roll total on your gear, and that's a low roll. You should optimally have high life rolls on everything that can roll life. You also have zero (!!!) life nodes on the passive tree. You should have quite a few of those at this point. Between life nodes and rolls on your gear you should have roughly 3000 life total. Your low life combined with the fact that you haven't invested into evasion or dodge means you're going to fall over dead every time you're hit by a gust of wind.

Your tree is very flawed with tons of bad pathing and inefficient nodes. POE's respec system is pricey when you have to make tons of changes. I'm not sure exactly how many regret orbs you'd need to salvage your tree, but it would be quite an undertaking. I went for that option on my first character (a similarly terrible archer with no life nodes that died constantly :D) years ago, but you can also just start a new character.

Your skills are all over the place and some of your supports are suboptimal or even incompatible. I highly recommend going to the builds section of the forum and finding something you like that looks interesting, whether it be an archer to respec into or a different build entirely. The build guide will show you the sorts of stuff to pay attention to (life, resists, mitigation, gear, gems, etc.).

Good luck with the archer if you decide to salvage her! I had a lot of fun playing my archer way back then after all the respeccing, skill switching, and buying new gear. It's a totally different game when everything stops killing you instantly.

Edit: I never closed the tab with your character open, and I just noticed that she's in standard. You might want to just reroll in Prophecy league instead of doing a respec. That way you can check out the cool new league mechanics and fix your build at the same time. There's also a larger and more active player base, so you'll be able to get decent gear more easily if you want to do some trading.

It's also worth mentioning that you will be able to respec that entire character in Standard for free at the end of the Prophecy league, so don't delete it. Just wait for the free full respec, and you can salvage it then.

Hello there,

this might be a longish first impressions post, so I'll have to ask for your patience. I came to PoE from Diablo 3, having read about it on the Diablo 3 forums and getting curious because I loved the entire Diablo Series and many claimed this game was just like it or even better. So... let's get to the first impressions.

1. Character creation

While it is essentially nice that the characters have a background (something they never had in the Diablo games), I missed any information on their core skill sets, the stats they rely on and so forth. All that information I had to find through google, but it was not included in the character creation setting.

2. First Steps, Skills, Sales and Stash

The early learning curve was pretty good to my eyes, one picks up swiftly on how to gain skills (gems and sockets), learns about support gems and so forth. It was not until later in the game that I realized that I ought to have paid attention to the number/color of sockets on various dropped items that I vendored or never brought back to camp. As the number of support gems is rather limited in the beginning the truth of 4-5 chains becomes only real by the time one is close to Act 4.

What struck me negative was the package and stash. The bags were always full because items take an inconveniently huge amount of space, going back to camp often is limited by scrolls, and over all the HANDLING of pack of Stash was clunky. Sorting the stash is annoying, because one cannot swiftly right-click the items from stash into the bag or vice versa. The drag and drop is often imprecise, not to mention the annoyances with clicking on scrolls. That's a technical part that I found really annoying.

Another part that again required the use of google was trading. There is no ingame information on what the traders give for which item type or configuration. For coherent information one has to jump out of the game again and search the internet. While a complex system of currency is certainly enganging, having to research it out of game is not.

3. The Skill Tree

I love the skill tree, plain and simple. It's huge, it's complex and it's fun. There is only one downside to it: it does not permit much experimentation, as it can only be reset by single points and not as a whole. Which makes respeccing and changing the set-up impossible. That's a serious downside in my eyes.

4. The Story

In the beginning and through most of Act I I found the story quite interesting. Being sentenced to transportation, thrown onto the coast and meeting other survivors, trying to secure some living for those who made it ashore. The quest to clear the road inland, so people can reach a place of better food and shelter was a logical reason to tangle with the warden of Axiom prison. But once I got to Act II things became strange, suddenly the guys from Act I had decided to not move inland, and from that point on the story felt disjointed for me. Okay, it made sense to help the other encampment against the bandits, but the overall narrative became thing and the question on why one's character would continue the journey grew bigger. Things like Dominus - he's the guy who sent us to Exile and now he is here - made no sense. I listened to many of the engravings and other story sources, but from Act II onward the story unraveled more and more.

Act IV made the whole thing even worse, because neither the beast nor what Piety, Malachi and their ilk actually were about, was really explained. In short - the whole "threat" never materialized in the same way as "Diablo will free his brothers and restart the Sin War" did.

5. Difficulty

While I got on well through Acts I- III, I found the Difficulty Change in Act IV a bit strange. Especially the boss battles. They could be done, but only with dying once or twice through the fight. (I did stack a lot of Shield/Life for my witch, not sure how more DPS focused builds fare here), knowing that with the next stage of difficulty, there's an experience penalty for death, I feel it's more than just a bit punishing to make Act IV as hard as it is.

Regarding Death: I don't mind doing a longer corpse run when I die, that's one thing one learns in WoW, running from the Crossroads Graveyard to the other end of the Barrens, but what I find a but prohibitive is the whole "you lose XP when you die" in Cruel and Merciless. While I will try Cruel Difficulty, this is one of the points that might have me not staying with the game long term. I generally dislike games that punish mistakes/experimentation, that go with the whole "do it right or do it not all" vibe. Which also comes back to the frustration of not being able to simply re-spec and try different builts on a character.

6. Trading II

On the Forums I found the advice of trading with other players for items I might want. Only... trading here means spamming trade chat and hope the person is in the same town/instance as I am. No Auction House, no other option to trade... that's a huge downside in my eyes, especially if trading for items becomes more necessary at higher difficulties.

7. Prophecies, Ascendence and endgame items

Again I have to say - the lack of ingame explanation is what I found most annoying. I ran into the Trial in Axiom prison, completed it, and still had the quest to "Complete all the trials" no further explanation of any kind. Prophecies were not explained at all. In both cases I had to leave the game and look the stuff up. It seriously disrupts the game experience having to look things up on outside sources.

I came across several items "of Dawn" dropped in Vaal areas, I have a vague idea that they are somehow endgame related, but will again have to research them outside the game, as the ingame information is not exactly big. Same for Divination cards.

8. Overall impression

The overall impression is that it is an interesting game, with great ways to built a character and implement skills. But rather punishing in some ways and frustrating in some too. I will try Cruel now that I am through with normal mode, and then see what happens. But with some of the things I mentioned, chances are I'll not be playing long-term.

To be an exile, is to breathe death while being alive...

Well. 3 days into the game. Lvl 32 in act 3 and I'm.. stunned.
I really don't know where to begin with. The lore, the map design, the npc appearances, the backround music, the - at times - truly sickening atmosphere with the talks of the npcs as background.
I really don't know.
Of course it gets another story, when you replay everything including merciless.
But wow, I'm really impressed. And you know what?
After all this years of playing games of every kind.. this is the first time, I really got hooked again, staying at a game for hours and hours, fascinated by the whole "product".

To be honest. The lore is like philosophy. (no further explanation possible due the lack of words)

It even tickles the own dark chambers of your subconsciousness, having the mood to be an exile.
The whole thaumaturgy-thing can also be compared to our own history, where kings of France and England were treated as healers and personalities like Jesus, or Franz from Assisi got known.

Grinding Gear Games, you did a really great job here. I'm grateful for being able to spend my spare time in here.

The only thing I percieve as negative is the lack of customization of the character in terms of 3D-Art of the items. But you work on that already, as I've noticed on the forums.

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I will re-write another feedback, once I hit merciless.

Thanks.

This is my first impression of the game after playing 262 hours in two seasons

The game is very good but very repetitive. To level up your character up to level 70 or 80 and get good drops (maps) you will need to replay the game 2x times (4 acts each). Now, multiply this by each character you will have in the future: you will play the same game 9x times or more! It's insane!

GGG needs to take into account that the player will play the same game three times for each character, and many of us wants many characters!

And before you say that this kind of ARPG is like this, Diablo 2 style: do not forget that the seasons and some maps are repetitions of parts of the game with a few alterations.

GGG should create more acts and make the game longer, so it would not be so repetitive. In the future, could even delete Cruel mode and keep only Normal, Merciless and Hardcore in one league.