Love hate relation with PoE, The good are very Good, but the bad, are really BAD

Path of Exile's always amused me by having simultaneously the most punishing casual experience of any ARPG I've ever played and the least punishing hardcore mode of any ARPG I've ever played (like for real you keep your character when you die in hardcore lmao)

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Downfall89 wrote:

I dont get the lab. It takes a total of 15-20min to do all Labs. So even if you dont like them you dont need to use a lot of time there.

For the xp penalty, work harder on your survivability, get better at mechanics. It forces you to progress and get better even though you dont play hardcore.

Both can be fun with the right mindset

Imo

Lab is meh. A bit tedious after you play for years. What I don't like is the number of lab enchantments available. Helmet enchantment with good mods on helmet is getting expensive every league due to new skills added and each skill gets 3 lab enchantments to choose from. There's what, 500 enchantments now?

I think there are 611 possible helm enchants... yeah basically impossible SSF to get what you're after. It's easier to get a headhunter because you'll have 10 Doctors from running Burial Chambers faster than a lame helm enchant usually

I've only been super lucky one time and it was with wrong base.

Agree with most of OP and other posts here, the game has a lot of goods enough to make me dive for a lot in a single league, but the bads make me stay away for 3-4 leagues.
Like OP said as of now it has become the game i keep coming back into while waiting for other games/patches.

The bads that i really can't stand:
GGG at its core is a greedy + lazy anti consumer corporate, i work with these companies and GGG is easily among these.

They either are not brilliant as a whole or there is someone in the high tower that actively self torpedoes his own company with very dubious choices (think about a George Lucas situation).

Many things are deliberately held back until the end or not bothered at all because these don't bring money (apparently).
Examples:
- Trade in the pc client vs trade in consoles and chinese client.
- They let most stuff to be done by 3rd parties totally free of charge. Loot filter, POB, overlay, trade, TFT, etc
- They announced POE2 only after D4 trailer went public, both companies did show some highly probable BS trailers of games that god knows how will turn out in reality 3-4ys later.

Most everything is balanced around the wrong pool base.
Examples:

- They chase those 10 streamers and make everything for them. Example: detonate dead mobs were RIP and they didnt give a shit about it for years, until one day Zizaran got oneshot by a DD totem and it was posted on reddit, so in under one week BAM detonate dead was fixed.

- They chase those alt+f4 macroers and call it "HC". So instead of balancing the game, they do it all the other way around, they leave alt+F4 and they try in every possible way to oneshot those HC people so they can't alt+f4 quickly enough, to the detriment of all the other players who try to make conventional "tanky" chars. Example: Maven and all those big bosses are absolute shit and guess what you regularly see them being "done" with logouts in "hc".

- They are absolute boot lickers of the angry teenage memer base of reddit. Result: community is the most immature toxic i've ever witnessed (to the point that lately GGG tried to do something about it with some warning posts in reddit), and it's a pve game imagine if it was pvp lol.

- The designers are either big Harry Potter fans and love mages and hate melee, or they just dont know what to do about it.
League after league we get crazy stuff about auto trigger spells, crazy stacking casters and the like which people do en masse.
Meanwhile melee is always some underwhelming pre nerfed done homework (legion and slams lol). Even the mechanically same and OP skills are biased this way, cyclone attack makes you move at half speed, BV spell lets you zoom at 200% movespeed with 5+mil dps.

- Or maybe they dont know how to read data (high survivorship bias) so they see that 90% are playing BV/VD/casters and they think they must make more of it. Same stuff with the "everything on timer", i think it comes from this data bias.

- It is the only game that got taken over by a bigger greedy company and it actually became better feature wise

Melee is this awesome thing you need to invest in but scales like a motherfucker. The sky is the limit basically.

the ugly:

-make 6 link with fusing. Waste of money.
-get oneshooted and dont know why. This league i took 2 times oneshoot at start of the ritual. And still waiting to know why.
-reflect damage mod. What a waste
-lab... holy shit, still there...
-craft: need to go to university arround 5 years, and call the gods of RNG. 5 Years playing poe, and still waiting for get a good craft. Watch videos of "pro" players, following his tips, and only crap crafts. Funny yah?

As i said many times, not for being a game with a lot of mechanics is funny.. see Project Diablo 2. A game what was made 20 years ago, with new features, QoL changes, and more, and rocks so hard.
In the other side, you have PoE, with a looooooooooooooot of mechanics, and too much RNG in all. Last league i did 150 exalts, in this league i did 10 ex being possitive.

I didnt play last 2 legaues, came here after that. And im bored again, have no hopes about hit end game content.. for what? for get more frustrated? nah, i dont play for that

I'm with you on most points, especially labs, ughh, it's the only thing preventing me from making additional characters. I absolutely lament doing it. It feels like a chore in every sense.

Wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the same thing regurgitated over and over, the same dull design with the same dull traps with the same dull boss fight each time.

I like that there is a death penalty. The only problem I see with it is how easy it is to die in the end-game, simply due to objectively BS mechanics that GGG are too stubborn to fix.

They have made it so in order to be able to read and remember all 10,000 different attacks and spells going on, you essentially have to dedicate your life to the game. Casual players have it even worse. Mapping, Rituals and boss fights are severely bloated with a multitude of effects and attacks, to a point it just blurs together into incomprehensible mess.

This amounts to only a handful of builds being viable for end-game content out of potential thousands you could make. Builds that either do 50x the damage of 99% of other builds or specialized builds with 95% dmg mitigation.

POE in a nutshell is rewarding those that live and breathe the game, while all newcomers and casuals are presented with lead boots- because that's the effect of coming into a game that's both brutal, unforgiving and unbelievably complex and having to deal with 10 years worth of league mechanics all at once.

In context of league start, by the time a new player has learned/relearned basic stuff like the atlas, the league is essentially over.