My first and last impressions of PoE, and what needs to change for this game to be fun.

#1. The game is simultaneously 'too easy' and 'too hard.'

What do I mean? If your DPS is high enough, the entire game is trivial. You don't even have to interact with most mechanics. I deleted final form Lycia in like 3 seconds and didn't even see her abilities. Talk about anti-climactic.

When you build your character for the sake of fun, however, you aren't doing anything. You're failing the side-content, you're not beating bosses, you're struggling to map.

What is the meta? High move speed, high DPS, ranged attacks that are spammed as fast as possible, stack auras. (With some builds like spark, you don't even aim. You just stand there and spam while the screen gets cleared by the randomness...)

If you want to play something different, you're screwed. You won't earn the currency needed to scale it, because you can't do the content to get the currency. So, your choice is to play the build the game demands to get the currency to play the build you *want* to play, or go essentially nowhere.

There's an endless plethora of on-death mechanics mobs get that make it awful to play the game any differently. To stop moving is death. Forget channeling, forget melee, everything is DoT stacking zoom zoom max DPS, and everyone is scaling their build with DoTs and skill gem levels. 20-25%% of builds use skin of the lords as BiS because of the scaling design.

#2. Gear

Most builds will hit a very hard wall at the start of maps and need massive currency investments that they can't reasonably acquire.

The game very, very badly needs more mid-tier scaling options available. Too many builds hit a stalling point where they aren't scaling, and TO scale, they need something extremely expensive or rare. So much so, that you're better off making another character and farming currency for it than continuing to play the one you need the currency for. This has got to change.

Crafting is an option, perhaps, to allow mid-tier gear to be crafted more easily. Restrict the number of mods, the values of the mods, whatever. There need to be more incremental scaling stepping stones in many of the skills in the game, rather than going from 10-50c a piece of gear to 20-50divs a piece in the next tier.

#3. The 6-link socket system naturally funnels players into using a single skill for everything. It becomes their hammer, and everything becomes a nail. It would be really nice to have more builds that aren't one-trick ponies.

#4. Stop trying to one-shot me. Stop it. It's not fun or interactive.

My health pool evaporating instantly is not engaging combat, it's jarring, and usually when it happens I don't even know what the source of the damage was because the game is so chaotic with frequently 50-100+ enemies engaging. The least you could do is add a sentence in the chat that says "Flaming skeleton man killed you with a critical hit for 17,000 fire spell damage."

Of course, once you have enough gear, this almost completely goes away. Now that I have 100% suppress, one-shots just don't happen. Spell suppress being chance based rather than mitigation based like armour is also a severe pain point that absolutely needs to change.

It's much more interesting when you're pushed to low life, and fighting on low life for an extended period of time.. rather than your health bar instantly changing colors on your screen from near empty to full every 0.1 seconds as is common in PoE combat.

#5. Chill with the random 'you can't do this' effects.

Having so many random map mods that are devastating to so many builds is asinine. There is no reason for a map to randomly reflect a type of damage. There is also absolutely no reason for a random mob in a map to reflect damage. GGG said they were removing random damage reflection mods because they were such bad design.. then put them back in. Ugh.

Just let me have fun playing the game, please. I tried so many builds and tried so hard to make it work, only to be repeatedly prevented from having fun by an endless list of nuisances.

#6. The community.

Good god, the community. I have never seen a PvE game with this level of toxicity and elitism. The global chat should just be permanently disabled if it can't be moderated, because all it does is act as a vehicle for toxic vets to abuse new players. All day, every day, the chat is just filled with vitriol and abuse and nothing gets done. Day after day, the same people being jerks to everyone they see go on unpunished. I have reported heinous stuff more times than I can count and most of those people never seem to even get a timeout.

I got a mute for this:

Meanwhile someone I reported for telling someone to kill themselves is still hanging around being a jerk on the daily.

I'm massively disappointed in you, GGG. You don't seem to care at all based on your actions. That claim that you were going to address toxicity is completely hollow.

"poopsock league" isn't fun.

it throws rewards left and right after you, there is no challenge while progressing and no feeling of rewards cause drops are meaningless, you only feel rewarded if the game drops more than you saw professional streamers having dropped on their runs.

it indeed breeds entitled players who naturally want more and more, totally ignoring what would make them feel rewarded (scarcity of drops).

ruthless mode is different, there are more gamers playing it and the overal (and small) community is much nicer.

This is a pretty good summary of things to improve.

I dont think they are trying to change any of this before PoE2 though, which is a shame.

Yet another complaint thread which implies that the game can only be played in a certain way. Guess we can't get rid of this naivete

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Yet another complaint thread which implies that the game can only be played in a certain way. Guess we can't get rid of this naivete

Whats the draw of pretending there is no meta?

Like, what benefit do you get?

I mean, just 2 seconds looking at your Sanctum characters.

ED trickster
Ice trap sabo heat shiver
Cyclone champ

No chain hook? Sunder? Storm call? ....


Whats your personal benefit pretending there is no meta and you don't play it. Honestly would like to understand.

Heh, nice strawman. There is a meta in every game. Doesn't mean you must play it. Yet the OP and so many people pretend that it is impossible to do anything but play a certain way, which is pathetic. They don't even try something else.

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trixxar wrote:

No chain hook? Sunder? Storm call? ....


Whats your personal benefit pretending there is no meta and you don't play it. Honestly would like to understand.

I don't think i've repeated a build 2 leagues in a row in recent memory of playing PoE. There are enough good skills and playstyles, no need to bring up the handful of bad skill gems every time. But funny that you bring up sunder because at some point dual wielding axe sunder was flavor of the day.

Every single arpg would have some underperforming & overperforming skills. It's fine to have a meta as long as that meta is not the same for years without changing.

#1: Mostly agree. Player power creep has grown exponentially for years, and to compensate the game devs have been forced to engage the players in an offscreen and/or oneshot spike damage arms race. Bosses all have to have invulnerability phases now to prevent 50 div+ builds from blowing them away in under a second. Monsters have to have on-death effects just so players can't play the game with their eyes closed. And so on.

#2: This is simply untrue. You can clear white maps with literally any skill on self-found gear, or no remotely decent gear at all (the Ruthless players say hi). Don't have resistances? Run purity of elements instead of your primary damage aura until you get that sorted out, and enjoy the free shock/chill/freeze immunity while you're at it.

#3: This is being changed for (before?) PoE2, for the exact reason you're describing, although it's worth mentioning that many builds do use two damage skills currently: one for clearing, and one for single target. For instance, almost every single kind of archer is going to run a Barrage setup for killing bosses, but clearing maps with barrage is Hell.

#4: See point 1. Player power creep is simply to the point where monsters incapable of one-shot killing players might as well not do damage at all. I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm simply pointing out that you are complaining about symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself.

#5: Hard disagree. If map mods weren't significant, they'd have no purpose in the game at all. Also, GGG said they'd remove RANDOM reflect from the game. A mod which clearly states "enemies reflect physical damage" is not random.

#6: Why would you ever leave global chat on? Genuinely asking, I want to know what it is you get from the experience because the internet is and has always been an open sewer where people hide behind anonymity and act like children to try and the get attention they're denied in the real world. Just turn global off and never look back, mine hasn't been on in years.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

Heh, nice strawman. There is a meta in every game. Doesn't mean you must play it. Yet the OP and so many people pretend that it is impossible to do anything but play a certain way, which is pathetic. They don't even try something else.

Your use of "have" or "impossible" is equally at fault.

Someone beat Sirus using autoattack, so you don't have to use skill gems.

People beat ubers with 1.5k life, so you don't have to go higher.

Michael Jordan played at mvp level in a finals game with the stomach flu so when you are sick the next time its not impossible to be an NBA finals MVP.

In an infinite universe someone will beat the game with no talent points, skill gems, or weapons, with random button presses. It is not impossible, in an infinite universe.



You use the tenses in a hyperbolic manner to pretend that issues do not exist.

Not impossible and reasonable are not the same thing. Talking with someone who does not understand that is.. not a good use of time.


You are being dishonest and you know it. Its a straw man to say that people are arguing it is impossible. The game funnels people into a meta and your own characters prove it.

I ask you again, why pretend? Whats in it for you?

Agree to most points, personally I dont care about ingame chats.

I would add, the lack of a permanent league just doesnt work for me. It started with resetting the atlas each league, then I see existing items got changed in standard, then the exalt and divine trainwreck. And then of course there are the "balance" efforts that dont balance anything I care about but do wreck okayish builds. After 2 years of not playing I come back to a way too different game, not even the wiki is up-to-date with all the random changes that have not improved the game in any way.

All good to have to play 200+ hours every 3 months if you play leagues. I dont want to put this amount of time in the game. If I could play a bit of standard every once in a while, without every league messing with my stuff every and each way, I would.