PoE Love/Hate relationship

Hi, I am an average casual poe player since beta(on and off). Game has come along way since then and mostly in a positive way. In this post i will try to point out most of my gripes with the game in attempt to find similar experiences in PoE community.

PoE is heavily influenced by Diablo 2 specially gameplay where you generally scale one skill to the full potential, slap a movement skill and call it a day. Just as in D2 items and talents play a major roll behind a scenes and can potentially change intended use of skill/ability design. That being said theorycrafting is the most alluring part of the game(atlest for me).

First Gripe: Skill gems.
-Melee skills: At first glance 32ish skills seem like alot, but after weapon type restrictions, build, skill tags(such as aoe and projectile), weapon stats and even how fun the skill is you end up with meh most of the time. For example its impossible to build Inquisitor for melee crit cap to take advantage of "inevitable Judgement" (unless you use Trypanon which is a league exclusive.. and that's whole nother gripe). In fact currently(2.3) are two or three skills considered "Tier 1" meaning viable for end game content. These limitations are created by wonky skill design and "league exclusive items" and can probably be reworked or reintroduced in better fashion(yes, I am looking at you Zana and Divination cards)

-Support gems: I got beef with few the rest can leave the room.
Poison support, poison in general is weird as fuck, i still have no idea how and if it stacks and WTF is double dip.
Multistrike make you go ATATATATATATA, i love it! till you need to move THE FUCK away from aoe that meant to one shot, but you are literary planted there while attack animation rolls out(lets be honest every one of us got one shotted with 6+ life and stacking defenses as one point)

-Temporary Leagues: 3 or so moths leagues that "introduce" new gear and mechanics are pretty much what drives the game as aside from Zana and Divination cards is the only way to experience new shit. Why am i forced to start over every time to see what little they have added and then removed.

-Content: i remember Chris Wilson saying that there is plenty of content on State of the Exile 53(...i think), well lets see we got maps, Atziri, Labyrinth and Zana(I guess) ...ugh that's it as far as the core game goes right? but we are missing the best part imagine a league that has all of the good stuff till now. League where clusterfuck fun shit is happening around every corner plus all the currently gated items, that's what i want to play not chopped down version.

Don't game me wrong i like the game, i just think i could be so much better considering the content is already there just gated/or removed. This is getting too long I'm out.

P.S. Make Flicker Strike great again.

Denial. You're not casual. No casual player would post on a game forum like this. You're an addict like the rest of us.

I'm in the same boat, I've loved this game since release. I want to play it but I have a hard time motivating myself to do so now. I keep looking at skill gems, items, monsters, leagues and just bewildered as to why they don't touch some of this stuff up.

I lab was kind of a bust for me.. it's not hard to do but also not entertaining. As well as the past leagues not staying as part of the game. Why bother working on this content updates if you have no intention of keeping it around. I don't think I have ever enjoyed mapping. I want a challenge but I don't want to play roulette to do so.

Personally, I feel this game needs a big change to it. Maybe this ~endgame~ patch coming up will be it. Or maybe this game has hit its ceiling.

Let's not make this another lab discussion.

Well, the problem with the temp leagues ist, that if they wouldn't force you to start anew, the content would be finished overnight.
Also I, and I suppose a lot of other people, too, really like that restarting is required. Playing with nothing, happily picking up every halfway decent item, trying to gather funds for your core gear and having an incentive to try out a new build is really what keeps this game going for me.

In terms of skillbalance... I really don't believe all this "only t1 skills are viable for endgame" bullshit. Ascendancy gave us so much more power potential that you can make pretty much every skill in the roster work, if you want to. Yes, there's most likely a more effective or efficient way, but I don't think that you will hit a brick wall before say t14 Maps playing with idk... Elemental Hit.

"

BundesHeinz wrote:

Let's not make this another lab discussion.

The lab sucks and doesn't belong in this game. There's no avoiding that, it's so obvious on both accounts. The shitty lab is why I don't play anymore. They remove it, I *might* start loving the game again. (Or at least start playing again.)

"

BundesHeinz wrote:

Let's not make this another lab discussion.

Why not ? Its obviously an issue for many, and the rest just ignore it, but in doing so the issue still remains. 2 Q&A parts and literally not a single answer to the lab questions, and believe me there were many.



On topic : My gripe is the way the labyrinth is implemented and forced on players, gating character development behind a totally alienating and unfitting for an ARPG like PoE playstyle. FUCK that shit.

2nd issue : How is it possible that the game's performance almost always gets worse with every single update? Like seriously this needs skill and focus to achieve, like literally how fucked up the engine is? Or what the hell do they add and it gets worse? Literally the performance of open beta was 100 times better than anything after that (except desync), fuck.

The game in its core is superb though, great work GGG on everything. Lets hope the future holds even better things for it and for the company.

My gripe with Labyrinth is that its mandatory for ascendancy points which means you have to build a character that can handle Izaro or let some one kill him for you. I like the idea of enchants but most of them blow and its pain in a ass farming for the one you like. Honestly i can't say i dislike Labyrinth, but as a mandatory part of the build Izaro is too physical heavy for majority of builds.


Six linking is another one of my gripes, with RNG being huge factor most 6L out there are fortunate accidents while trying to 5L. The options for obtaining 6L are ether win a lottery or save up(aside from Tabula)


Also skills have "tiers" simply because some are far better then the others. Skills are one of many enabling factors in build, so your choice of skill will be the difference between killing something, killing something fast or killing something fast and comfortable. As far as "end game" goes i think few bosses we have are a big part of it(Atziri, Izaro and maybe core Mal) and some skills will struggle more then others vs those bosses(skill like Flicker Strike for example).

Love/Hate relationship with PoE does describe it very well for me

if I go broadly, here's what I like and dislike

Dislike:

1. skills being items (gems), they made most gems acquirable via vendors, so that helped a lot but there's still the problem of socket number, links and color on equipment

2. the passive tree, because you have to go through a path, you cannot get everything you want, some things are just too far away from each other, sure it makes for a system that's smarter, more complex but it also limits you

3. point and click controls

4. randomization, equipment can roll any attributes and those attributes can have any range, making it virtually impossible to obtain what you want and is designed to make you grind/farm and trade

5. inventory management

6. difficulty balance, the game is made so that you kill and die fast, having almost no time to react to damage or being killed in one hit is frustrating, death is a meta element, it doesn't halt your progress, it makes you grind more, if I could quicksave/quickload then the difficulty wouldn't be a problem but that's not possible in a multiplayer online game

7. cannot be modded, can't cheat (not in the sense of actually cheating against someone but in messing with the gameplay)

Like:

1. Deep Customization, whether it be via the passive tree or with unique items, it's nice to try different builds (I actually dislike unique items, because you are "stuck" using them if you want that particular unique effect they provide, I would rather obtain those effects via the passive tree instead)

2. randomization (again), map layout, enemies, item drops, not knowing what to expect and not being able to predict what's coming makes for nice replay value

3. art, setting and story, not much to say other than I like it...

4. Isometric camera (like but wish I could have options for different viewpoints)

basically I dislike PoE for being a traditional loot arpg but like it for almost everything else, I know, I'm pretty stupid for playing it and being here