Your top 3 downsides of POE

Not done with the league

1. Time consuming - I am roughly 6 days played with a lvl 90 and 84 character, deep in red maps, I have never seen sirus and I play a couple leagues a year. Made sure to get shaper before he was removed as the end game boss.
2. Level of RNG crafting - 100 alts to get seething flask, haven't six linked an item since before poe moved to steam >_>
3. Too many league mechanics - There are parts of the game I literally ignore because they aren't explained and I didn't play the league it was a thing. I just don't care enough most of the time. Looking at you syndicate!

1) Skill tree easily read after my first 6 days of playtime, & pro builds built after 3 weeks. When I want or wanted - it to take 3 months to learn. So; added + in depth, randomized trees. With rarities of passive stones, shuffled. One big orb of leylines, rather than sides. Then +30 added point range added to the tree, beyond what's already available.

2) Hasn't made guild vs guild or group vs group pvp maps or further updates. Made pvp into a side-hobby section, when it should be for the main game. (take notes from IRO's, " War of Emperium" 30vs30vs30vs30 people fyi GGG). So POE hopefully makes siege vs siege 20vs20 maps, with npc allies at least. I mean some mix between dynasty warriors & a moba is good enough, just make it for the main game, not royal.

3) Lacks multiplayer towns or the size of them / is aimed at single player audience / when I want POE to be aimed at mmorpg audience instead. Giving players more to do in town. Among other "outside of hideout" (not instanced), field events.

P.s. Lastly, strategy based party play requiring a new " Healer " class, however possible, for POE 2.

1. Trade. I wish people could just buy it straight from my tab, instead of counting on me to drop everything I’m doing so I can sell my wares in person. Half the time I bother to stop what I’m doing, I get to my HO and they drop the group as soon as I get there or as I’m getting the goods out of the stash. Nowadays I don’t bother if I’m not already in HO or town.

2. Too much useless loot. I only pick up currencies, maps, and gear I can sell for currency like chrom or jewels. It’s not worth picking anything else up cause 100% stuff I pick up is worthless.

3. Start buffing skills that aren’t used much. ggg just seems to nerf the top builds without giving love to most of the other skills.

1. Basically there is no crafting in this game
2. Damage intake and defence options are absolutely not balanced and feels very bad. There is not enough VIABLE defence options on skill tree/built-in into ascendancies. Or they are simply to weak (what's the point of 6% damage reduction node, when you get hit for 200k dmg?)
3. Atlas progression is to long and borring. Plus climbing up map tiers is one of the most horrible things in this game. You hit 87-89lvl and still in white maps.
4. Sirus
5. Too much useless loot. I would rather get 1item per 5 or 10maps but it would drop with smart/good rolls (like belt with life and at least 2 ressists, weapon with phys rolls/etc. etc., like talismans used to drop). Atm there is no rare loot in PoE worth taking.

1. Too much gambling. This is bad when you dislike gambling like me an I barely touch the whole crafting thing as a result.

2. Campaign takes too long. We don't need 10 acts that we will never revisit with our higher level characters unless it's maybe a Quarry run for a league mechanic or something. The main game is the atlas now.

3. Nerfs. Too many now. Nerfs are what made me unistall last time. It's not quite so bad for me now but I've barely played the past two weeks. The nerfs make my builds feel weaker and that is not a good feeling to give your players.

Its the nerfs, there is no point to invest time and currency into character that loses most of his power after next league. It shows that developers dosent respect their clients time.

Economy - Everything is based on this including a terrible trade system

No Balance - There is no balance, FR Totems are OP while other skills are shit, With enough investment you can trivialise every aspect of the game. Mobs have to be able to insta gib you because nothing is balanced against anything, including the economy.

Bloat - So many leagues are rolled over into the main game without being finished or balanced, they just get nerfed so they're not worth engaging with. There too many systems unrelated to each other. Everything feels disconnected.

I'll leave it there, but the way the approached player power creep in 3.15 makes me wonder who's in charge and is there any communication between members of GGG, Even Chris doesn't seem to know what's happening. 3.15 was a disaster. Unless 3.16 addresses the mistakes of 3.15 I can't see people returning.

In order of most to not-most...




1) Forced oneshots to give the illusion of "more to learn," which keeps people playing the game because it's "still challenging". But everyone gets oneshot, and you can't always avoid it. Characters with 20k raw HP and every mitigation type in the game still get oneshot instantly by something that came out of nowhere. It's just junky. And it's fake difficulty. This is the actual sole reason I no longer play the game, and can't bring myself to load it up, either, because as soon as I die, I'll feel like a stupid idiot for letting myself get lured in by the fun of the game (which is planning out a character build on your own).

2) No auction house. In saying this, let's include trying to have this conversation as part of this downside of PoE. Trying to logically explain why an AH would be good for the game is so beyond frustrating with this community, and it actually serves as an iron wall that "protects" the game from becoming better. Going through 30+ people that are AFK or just manipulating prices with no intention to sell, people that are unwilling to spend their time selling cheap things for 1 Chaos, people that refuse to swap off their League character to sell something on Standard... There's absolutely no reason not to have an automated AH. Every argument against it is riddled in fallacies and logical holes. But this is not the place to discuss this... Just do a simple search. If you dare.

3) The community. In a way, this should maybe be #2, or even #1... Also in a way, the community is the CAUSE for every single problem this game has. I could write a book about what I despise about this community, and how this community continuously drives this game into the mud, mostly due to the ingrained elitism and general "if you don't like it, you can GET OUTTTT" mentality. People here think that fighting to keep the game bad makes them a hardcore gamer. They even combat quality of life changes. Not everyone, mind you, but the extreme end of the spectrum still well-illustrates the overall problem. Everyone acts like ANYTHING that makes the game easier, whether QoL or otherwise, is a terrible step in the wrong direction of improving the most hardcore game on Earth, Path of Exile! And this is VASTLY oversimplifying the problem that is the community.

1) God awful performance. Out of all games that were not completely busted to the point of being unplayable, PoE is the WOSRT performing game I have ever played, and I have played Fallout 76 beta. Stutters, slowdowns, FPS drops... My hardware improves dramatically overtime, allowing me to play most demanding games on high settings, but PoE with practically the same graphics as in 2012 (nobody cares about improved shadows and lighting in a game with this much visual bloat on the screen) keeps working like crap. Not to mention the god awful loading times, even on SSD.

2) Poor options customization. Can't fully disable shadows, but most importantly, cant remove or reduce effects density, even though the engine supports this (I have seen screenshots of people doing it with some mods or ini file tweaks, which are obviously bannable). But the reason for this is so baffling and insane I still cannot believe someone can actually operate like this - apparently wast majority of playerbase has to suffer from performance issues because otherwise "streamers would play on low settings and it would give bad marketing to the game"... Just, wow. No further comment here.

3) Visual bloat. In the endgame, the whole screen is one big rainbow of explosions and a weird mush of enemies that you barely even recognize before you wipe most of the screen and move on. Combined with 2), this makes the game not very enjoyable at top level, just one big multicolored laggy mess that you navigate in brain afk mode, with RNG rewards and minimal input from the player, it's practically a casino slot machine but without the real money part. Boss battles (the top ones) are more enjoyable and interesting, but all of them are currency, RNG or map progression gated, so you can't just boss rush, you have to go back to the maps and watch some more laggy rainbows with occasional damage spikes out of nowhere. Many bosses also have visual clarity issues, but not on the level of general gameplay.

I have more issues with the game, but it was asked to list my top 3.

1- Fusings and 6L's

2- 6L's and Fusings

3- Lusings and 6F's