Drakk the ARPG-ist's PoE Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Hi GGG & the PoE Community!

I'm Drakk. I love ARPG's of the Sword and Sorcery bent. They are hands down my favorite games to play, and I have played. them. to. death! Since Diablo 1 I have been Drakk, the melee ARPG'ist: I have had endgame melee builds, multiples of them, in many flavors, in Diablo 1, 2, & 3 (reaching the top 50-100 in SC ladders pretty much every season for Barbarian in D3, sometimes even top 10-20, at least until the tryhards bump people off the last day of the season); not to mention the other close competitors: Torchlight, Baldur's Gate, BG: Dark Alliance, EQ/CoN & its companions, Gauntlet, and many others. I simply love whacking things to death and harvesting the 1337 loots across so many titles in this genre and I feel very strongly about the health and direction of the genre as a whole: in the spirit of that sentiment, I would like to submit a full review of PoE after giving the game a deep dive and testing out 5 endgame melee builds at level 85-93. Here we go!

The Good

-Endgame Content:
Endgame in PoE is absolutely fabulous! No other ARPG I've played gives you so much to do once you reach the higher levels to improve your characters and continue to progress even when the campaign is a distant memory. Is it repetitive/is there more to be desired for such content? Yes of course, however, PoE does it better than any title in recent memory and my hat is off to the GGG team for the system they created. There are always little ways in which you can improve your build and character, and having those goals even when sufficiently geared for endgame content makes the player feel powerful and gives them a sense of a place to go. I love it!

-Customization
The available combination of skills, gear, and abilities that empower a player to reach and succeed in endgame content in PoE is sufficiently vast and allows players to add their own flavor to their build and characters without having to forgo endgame content and also without having to adhere to the meta in the strictest sense, which is unfortunately the case in most other titles. Are there Cheese builds that exploit unbalanced/overlooked mechanics to snooze through the game? Yes of course, but I don't begrudge those players or GGG for that because so many other builds and variations are still able to enter the ring in terms of endgame content and potentially do well, and that is a great feat that gets me excited about PoE

-Trading
It's great and supports the customization aspect of the game since loot is not character bound; its kinda lame that players who do not purchase premium stash tabs are not able to really participate in it to a significant degree but hey you guys got to make your $ somewhere and it does not cut them off entirely. Overall Awesome!

-Hideouts, Masters, & Dailies
Love 'em! Great way for the player to make the game more their own and explore other facets of the game. More of this stuff the merrier!

The Bad

'The Bad' Category is for shortcomings that I feel are painful but that are common to the ARPG genre and would not be fair to hold PoE to the fire over since they're not the only ones without the ability to address/balance these issues.

-Melee vs. Casters/Ranged
No ARPG I have ever played since the 90s has been able to resolve the difference in power, survive-ability, and progression potential between melee and caster/ranged builds. I don't know why this is the case, but its something melee players are forced to accept in every ARPG, and PoE is no different -- PoE is slightly less bad insofar as the DPS potential for both archetypes from my perspective is roughly equal.

HOWEVER, their is one egregious aspect of this imbalance in PoE, and to me that is the survivability toolkit available to melee characters. Namely the VAST superiority of Energy Shield over ALL of the pieces of the toolkit most readily available to melee players - HP, Armor, Block Chance, all of these stats are pitiful when compared to the tankiness a caster can achieve simply by stacking ES related buffs. Consider this in combination with the fact that melee actually has to get in range and smack things/expose themselves to danger, and the whole system becomes bad, bad bad bad.

-Flasks
This is a matter of my personal taste and hence not in Ugly. I think flasks are silly. "Excuse me monsters, I am parched! Please pause hitting me for one moment while I sort through my portable refrigerator for the flavor of magic mountain dew that will allow me to get unfrozen! How am I moving my arms when I'm frozen you ask? Who cares!" I guess this contributes to gameplay with more buttons to mash, but I don't like being beholden to my jamba juice selection/charges just to play a build which would work without them if they didn't have to exist in the game. Other games have them or a variation of them, and my opinion of them in PoE is no different than in those cases: They're restrictive and silly.

The Ugly

The Ugly category is for things that GGG/PoE developers have the ability to fix/improve but haven't; things that would prevent me from becoming a supporter for future expansions, or even cause me to stop playing outright.

-One-shot mechanics + EXP Loss on Death.

I don't have a problem with either of these mechanics in isolation: players should be rewarded for learning and mitigating the mechanics of dangerous monsters, and punished when they do not; HOWEVER, in PoE's current state with both of these elements being so unforgiving, they need to be mutually exclusive. Right now this system cuts good builds off from content and progression entirely with exactly zero recourse for player correction. How my berserker, with 6.8k HP, 160+ res and 5k armor unbuffed/unflasked can waltz through T14 maps for hours and then in a T11 map in one hit from a monster offscreen while fully buffed with zero room for player correction destroy me and lose all of that progress, is utterly ridiculous. Whats worse is how painfully COMMON this sort of scenario is lvl 85+.

In those situations it feels like one of those early 80s console era games where developers didn't think hardly at all in terms of player experience and difficulty and took shortcuts instead to increase "difficulty". Those games/franchises did not survive into the current day without significant changes for a reason, if at all. With these mechanics in place in PoE you are forcing a vast majority of your player base towards cheese/exploit builds or to quit the game entirely after spending a great deal of time on a build they love but cannot advance through no fault of their own. Not smart if you care about growing & maintaining your player base. Whenever I put PoE down and go to a different game for a while, its always when I've lost hours of time to this sort of cheapness, or lag, which brings me to...

-PoE Servers

Did I think it was awesome I could play with my old D2 friends from Germany whilst being US-based at first? You bet I did! Do I actually do it anymore? Hell no. Especially not on characters I care about/devote the most time to. It's anti-fun being outside of your home-server. Desync'ing through difficult content, watching my HP bar run out because the game thinks I'm three screens back standing on a trap, jittery gameplay as if I was walking through soup. Wayyyyyyyy tooo common of an occurance. Fix your networking system. It sucks.

-Uniques

I love that uniques are rare, at the beginning of my PoE experience it was so goddamned exciting to see one drop, and a great change of pace from my D3 days where it rained uniques for no reason. Now at higher levels, however, I don't care if one drops. 99% of your endgame uniques flat out suck because of their rarity combined with their "catch" mods -- get 500hp, but lose 6 fucking sockets, fix your chaos res, but tank your HP. What this selection engenders is a system where my characters raid dungeons STRICTLY hoping for currency and orbs that I don't need to be in endgame content to farm, or I find myself playing the yellow craft/loot casino because those items are far better in almost every slot on everyone's builds.

Looking for great loot is the bread and butter of ARPGs, and your uniques are flat out undermining this core mechanic. The tyranny of yellow-RNG is NOT a loot system, its a currency/gambling system, and reminiscent of the RMAH days of D3, and we all know how much of a catastrophe that nearly was for that franchise.

Conclusion

That's all I feel confident/sane enough to cover at this stage of my PoE experience. I hope the insights have been helpful or at least entertaining, and I look forward to improvements that will allow me to continue playing this great addition to the ARPG library.

Ta-Ta Not-a-Cockroaches!

Drakk

I find it kind of hard to agree on about half of your points.

"

Char1983 wrote:

I find it kind of hard to agree on about half of your points.

Thanks for your input!

I mean, the problem is: How much of the end-game content have you actually seen? For me, what sucks is that it is so gated. And can be trivialized. I would love an infinitely-scaling difficulty, but that, sadly, is not part of this game.

EDIT: As for the uniques, there is a lot of cool uniques that you can make creative builds with. I love that. And as for the flasks - I agree that it is not logical, but then again a lot of things in this game are not logical. And the mechanics is interesting.

WOW! A list of things that haven't been said 100 times before!!

/s

"

Char1983 wrote:

I mean, the problem is: How much of the end-game content have you actually seen? For me, what sucks is that it is so gated. And can be trivialized. I would love an infinitely-scaling difficulty, but that, sadly, is not part of this game.

EDIT: As for the uniques, there is a lot of cool uniques that you can make creative builds with. I love that. And as for the flasks - I agree that it is not logical, but then again a lot of things in this game are not logical. And the mechanics is interesting.

As much as I have been able to really, and so far compared to ARPG endgame competitors there really is a lot going on at this point in the positive for PoE, even if there needs to be more down the line.

"

Prisus wrote:

WOW! A list of things that haven't been said 100 times before!!

/s

Hi there! As I stated in my post, I am a new-ish player to PoE, so these sentiments are new to me. Glad to know from the salty veteran community that I have managed to put my finger on the pulse of the issues in such a short time; thanks for your input!

I find it odd that you think the trading system is good. This is because the community dislikes the current trade system. In its current state it is not even a trade system, its a bartering system which is actually different.

You see trade is the exchange of an agreed upon currency for items. Trade is essentially what we use in reality. We use dollars, or w/e currency is used in our country to buy things from some one else. This is not what is used in POE. This is what is and was used in Diablo 3. The agreed upon currency was Gold and it could be used to buy everything.

POE uses a bartering system, and because of that "trade" in POE sucks. You see we use items with intrinsic value for exchanging of goods. The more rare the "currency" the more value we place on it. The higher the quantity of said currency in the community the lower the value of said item.

This becomes problematic because bartering requires both people be present at the same time to make an exchange. Most items people barter for have little to no value (most trash uniques only sell for a few chaos orbs). At end game you do not want to stop farming to trade for a lowsy chaos or two. As such it is very common to whisper some one to buy something and never get a reply. For the few you do whisper who reply they are often doing something and tell you to wait, such as Lab. The buyer is impatient though and often never waits.

This makes bartering difficult unless you set time aside to make no progression on your character specifically to barter with others. Its a bad system that segregates the community based on where they live and when they are able to play. Some one in a different time zone might want my item when I am offline but they will never see it.



We want a real trade system. One where people can buy or sell items to people without being present. Unfortunately that is hard to do in a bartering system unless the items we use as currency are givin a set value or these items can be converted into a primary currency we can use for trade and then convert back down into the items we currently use as currency. You could say chaos orbs are the primary currency since most items are sold in chaos, but people will still try to buy in alternative forms of currency. Some items are so valuable you cant even trade for them in chaos orbs as you would require more than 1 trade to make the exchange, therefore you risk getting scammed. Some items are worth so little that even 1 chaos orb is over priced.

Pretty fair list, and I heavily agree with your uglys. Servers are a much better then they before, desync in this game used to be ultra crazy.

"

RagnarokChu wrote:

Pretty fair list, and I heavily agree with your uglys. Servers are a much better then they before, desync in this game used to be ultra crazy.

Thanks for your reply man!

God, I can't imagine desync being worse than it already is that's atrocious!

May your maps be mercifully lag-free exile.

Drakk