New player experience (4 characters leveled, 2 - lvl80+, 1 70+) My Feedback on Path of Exile

To start of i just wanna give my perspective on the game and honest feedback i did enjoy the game quite a lot, supported the game as well by buying those supporter packs as im aware PoE2 is in the making (which to me looks a lot better) not just visually. That said i'm not posting this to open a discussion really i don't have the necessary energy for this as im sick, but i still would like to share my experience on the game after done 4 characters cleared tier 16maps and about..., 248 hrs into the game according to steam.


1: Diverse Starting Strengths for Characters:
It's not just about leveling speed, but the initial strength of certain characters based on movement or skill tree advantages. Some characters start significantly stronger than others, leading to a stark contrast in early experiences—a great start for some and a challenging one for others.

2: Complex Skill Tree and Skill Understanding:
The complexity of the skill tree extends to individual skills, causing confusion in specialized builds like minions. Terms like "offering" lack in-game explanation, pushing players to external sources like GhazzyTV's videos for understanding. The vast skill pool with unclear descriptions adds to new players' confusion. Simplifying skill descriptions or introducing in-game tutorials for specialized mechanics could significantly aid understanding.

3: Insufficient In-Game Guidance:
Players rely heavily on external guides due to the lack of in-game explanations for essential mechanics like the gem system or progression paths. A more comprehensive in-game tutorial system or tooltips could significantly ease the learning curve.

4: Campaign Bugs, Endgame Hurdles, and Currency Grind:
Occasional bugs in the campaign disrupt player progress. Moreover, reaching endgame content requires an extensive amount of currency for gear upgrades, creating a barrier to progression. The necessity to repeatedly grind through older tiers or missions for currency to afford essential gear for endgame levels feels excessive and poorly designed, hindering the natural flow of progression.

5: Refund System Punishment due to Lack of Guidance:
The game's poor explanation and absence of guidance extend to the skill refund system, which becomes punishing for new players. Refund points, obtained through missions, are insufficient for correcting mistakes in the skill tree. This lack of flexibility forces new players to either grind currency for more refund points or start anew from scratch, leading to extreme frustration.

I hope..., that some of the devs will consider addresing atleast for new players/beginners to get a lot...., more info and guidance ingame for PoE2.

lvl 80 = not yet exit the tutorial of the game

Pretty fair. I can understand that. However, the main thing is that POE will not not hand hold you, almost all knowledge will come from external sources. Tools also come from external sources. At least you have a trade site managed by Path of Exile.

1+2+3+5) This basically comes down to following a build guide. For the leveling phase (the campaign), some strategies are generic. If you don't follow a guide, you won't be able to go far and you will easily run out respec points with no way to recoup the losses. Of course in some cases, wording is unclear and you can try asking in the discord, even experienced players do that.

Fundamentally it goes like this: Anything with attacks is heavily gear dependent. If your weapon is bad, you will have very very low damage, gem links don't have as much power.

Spells on the other hand have power built into them, they do benefit from having good gear, but just having the links to get it onto a 4l is usually enough to blast through anything till white maps.

4) I've not seen any campaign bugs. I totally agree on gearing, you're basically starved for resources and have to even find a correct base and get it socketed. You also get a brutal start in act 1 due to having no elemental resistance and this can't be corrected till right before the end of act 1. You need to focus on not getting hit.

It's not uncommon to wear gear from significantly earlier acts just because you don't find anything better. The only way to circumvent this is to use essences to easily alch items which are linked with a fixed property and craft resistances/life on there.

Please also check out the vendor recipe system to guarantee some mods like increased physical damage on weapons.

Ye i mean don't get me wrong most of PoE specifically looking at the gameplay is amazing, im having a blast in that regard.

just lack of so much information for a new player coming in is just wow... a big smack in the face for everything that we have to learn, gladly there are atleast ways/tools to get "some" info, cuz if those didn't exist i probably wouldn't have come far if at all.

but ye i have been following build guides for those 3 builds completely, cleared all missions as well as side missions, as some of the missions give refund and/or passive skill points.

although PoB does help in its way, its quite overwhelming at first glance since its a lot of data coming at you at once, which is why i partially look at PoB currently and mostly at Maxroll (as im following a guide there) maxroll is for me personally a lot more newb friendly ig you could say to start of with.

I do like the game a lot though, and PoE2 seems in some regards to be more player friendly, since the gem system is completely re-designed and more looks amazing btw from what i can tell.

I do hope in some... way as PoE1 and 2 stay seperate games confirmed by devs that they do implement more newb friendly guides/info etc.. into as well as poe2 as in poe1, as currently PoE2 doesn't exist for playerbase yet outside of videos, promoting PoE2 is fair in every right obviously, but i believe that most including myself instantly look at PoE1 and compare it in "some" way..., try to get to learn the ways of Path of Exile, before hopping in to the 2nd game.

and poe1 just makes it not easy to get into which i believe is a letdown for a lot of players which to my perspective is unfortnuate, as the game has amazing qualities to it, but lacks in guidance for newbs like myself.

Thanks for this comment! It's rare enough that a genuinely new player sticks around long enough to give decent feedback these days, and it's stuff that GGG really does need to hear. Some thoughts on your different points:

1 - Good point, but you're only about... 99% right. The issue is not an imbalance between different character classes or passive tree options at level 1, it's that some skills are vastly superior to others at level 1. You're still mostly right though because the skills available to new players (or league starters) are class dependent until you reach the end of act 3.

Why's the distinction important?

Well, I don't think anyone would argue (at least I hope they wouldn't because this isn't remotely subjective, it's a matter of math) with me saying that Ice Shot is a much better skill than Cleave. Assuming an equivalent weapon it deals more damage, faster, from further away, while applying an incredibly useful debuff to enemies hit. Ice Shot is available to the Ranger, Cleave is available to Marauder. Does this make the low-level Ranger better than the Marauder? Not if you can go to your hideout and buy ice shot from Lilly, but for your first character of the league absolutely. But the class itself really has nothing to do with this imbalance: the Duelist gets access to both skills, and a Duelist using Cleave is worse than a Duelist using Ice Shot.

2 - Just in case you were not aware, you can often hold Alt to get some advanced explanations of specific terms being used. Not always, though: in the Minion mastery "increased effect of Offerings" there is no possible way to know what is being referred to unless you knew already. This specific example should absolutely be reworded to "increased effect of all Offering skills," and if you've got any more examples like this definitely let GGG know.

3 - PoE has a pretty good tutorial that absolutely nobody reads, and it's the #1 thing I'd like to be changed in the entire game. Forcing people to read a guide instead of teaching through gameplay is a needless point of friction left over from The Old Days when there was no alternative. But it's 2024 now, so it's time that PoE's tutorial system stopped acting like it were the 1990s.

4 - Not sure what bugs you ran into, but if you get any more type /bug in the chat box and let GGG know. As for gearing, I don't know why Orbs of Binding aren't 10 times as common as they currently are. Nobody uses them at all for endgame crafting, so it's weird that they aren't available when players genuinely need them. I'd even go one step further, and make them drop 20 times as often as they do right now but they can't drop in any areas above level 68.

5 - Great point, completely agree with every single you said. I've been long advocating for a free (optional) full character respec at the start of act 6 to encourage a lot more experimentation while newer players figure out what kind of build they want to be. The current system very harshly punishes players who don't have a plan for their build going in, which is something no truly new player could possibly have.

No worries! i want PoE2 to become a better version of PoE1 (newb friendly wise), as they have mentioned many times that they want new players to come to PoE2 and they even mentioned themselves that when they see PoE2 and realise it isn't out yet, they lean towards PoE1 and see how overwhelming it is.

Which kinda makes me confused why they haven't done this over the past years? atleast i haven't been there but it doesn't seem like a lot of newb friendly info.

But i don't wanna only give 1sided perspective tbh, ive mentioned my newb frustration perspectives but there are many things i do love about this game!

"

2 - Just in case you were not aware, you can often hold Alt

ye ive had "some" help here and there to setup a filter and eh.., how sort of the trading site works, and a ( - ) that automatically makes it easier to search for stuff not needed to type the entire word..
and... ehm.., Path of Building (even though its... a lot of info and overwhelming) so new pple atleast i had to take a ton of time to carefully slowly.... get to know it a "bit".

3:, ive actually not skipped the guide but i never really was sure what the guide actually was as i never "really" saw something helpeful so i may accidantly hit the skip tutorial button without knowing...

4: the bug was purely a waypoint in ehm.. act 9? or so where you have to find specific doors in quite the big area, but the quest marker on the mapoverlay in the game at a specific place where i was standing in the map it popped up and then i saw it, but it was from a location i jsut cleared everything...?
so i went into it again re-cleared everything, went outside, and there was the quest marker again???

eventually i just ran around trying to fid that 1 door of that 1 quest i had left over there, turns out it was all the way on the other side of the map!? so weird.....

i've indeed seen that ( /bug ) command before as its a tooltip ingame for loading screen ive seen, but it gives you some weird number and tells you to go somewhere? ive never actually done that as i thought it was confusing.

5: ye exactly, the very first time i went into the game with my mindset *i like zombies/minions, just beeing a necromancer summoning the undead to do my bidding.

ive seen some amazing builds in the past videos and i giggled in excitement to try it out!

only to realise to late..., that my entire skilltree was sapparently wrong or well most of it anyway as minions worked differently then i thought and apparently others to as Ghazzytv? or something made a video explaining this.

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That said.., now that i sort of.. was forced to follow guides from maxroll or PoB, which somewhat help but most of em are not very well detailed, most go from level 1-10 then 50-70,

ehmm.. end 11/49? nope doesnt exist.., which instantly let me just somewhat look very far ahead of myself and making the wrong decision to first go for a bit more damage, where i instead later on noticed that i really should have focused more on mana regeneration and maximum life... so i was having a rough time...

as well as that i noticed how Zombies/minions in this game feel okayish... as of the start, but later on.., while you seem to "can" make zombies tanky, you either have to focus on your zombies/specters/golems for becoming powerful and the character "you the player" becoming extremely squishy, that it doesn't really feel right...

as i was getting 1shotted literally with 4buffs on those things that always are on and have % reservation of mana,
- more armour
- take dmg/life first from specter then from you
and 2 others i can't remember.., focusing on defense as well

i was extremely confused how i got 1shotted with everything i had on, spend chaos on my gear that i earned in map tiers, i got excited after buying those gear pieces as "they seemed REALY GOOD" so i was happy!, untill.... welp the first boss i encountered in the map, even random mobs sometimes just oneshotting me while my zombies completely tanked everything -_- .........

im not sure rather im just a big noob here or if the game has some re-belancing to do around zombies, so i asked someone more experienced in PoE, and his response as i quote was:

"

Oh ye, don't play zombies, they got nerfed into the ground over the years....

-_- well then..., ofcourse this is just 1 persons word, but as a new player "noob" call it whatever i went onto a different character cuz apparently zombies were just blehhhh,

so i tried "Templar" with raging spirits, and that gaurdian or something from ascension?

what a difference...., i barely reached level 14 and i was already a massive tank and extremely powerful compared to my Witch with zombies, specters, raging spirits etc...

Genuilly don't wanna touch zombies ever again as the differnce in not only progression but new player experience was SO different between Templar srs guardian guide i think it was? and Witch zombies...

Horrible.., simply horrible it was to play zombies...
bought a skin for them and everything welp....

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i hope that well someone reads this aside from members so the devs have "some" idea how new players feel/experience the game.

again i like the game, but to my short 240ish hrs of experience of my Witch necromancer zombies, and 2/3 other classes, Zombies are worthless (it feels) as i was a 1shot to...

templar is amazing as a tank, but in endgame massive currency grind super..... annoying...

boneshatter overal prety good feeling gameplay wise anyway, although the constant Leap or Jump whatever it was to basically rush things and get stuck after walls or simple objects ye......, that sucks..

anyway hope my msg isnt to long and to ehmm negative? perhaps rlly just try to be honest about my experience as i want to see PoE2 as well as 1 see becoming better for noobs like myself. (new players)

Not posting to start an argument either, because everything you wrote is 100% valid as a new player. However, as a player with more devoted time I have a different perspective on a lot of your points that only TIME can truly fix, which I believe to be a GOOD part of the game design.

1) This is unavoidable. Totally unavoidable. This game prides itself on "unlimited" builds". Plus there are 6 classes with 16 ascendancies. They all CAN'T be equal otherwise...we would have no class system. Personally, having a generic start where every character and every skill is ultimately equal in performance re: speed, power, defense, etc. is really really really bad. As you gain more experience, these starting "differences" fade anyway. I would also add that this adds to the first round of "replayability" for new players. The fact that you can restart as 6 completely different passive starting points with 6 very different levels of power, speed, etc. means that you will have a brand new experience right from day 1 on a new character.

2) The complexity of the skill tree is the single greatest draw in PoE. It is the reason PoE exists today and has continued to exist for over a decade. There are things that could be more clear with more in-game information but the actual level of difficulty and time required to fully understand the tree is a necessary evil and primary feature of PoE. HOWEVER, your point #5 would be immensely helpful with this and I agree that players need more options for FULL respecs. Not unlimited, but at least 1 if not 2 especially during the campaign. Getting 2 respec points for a quest when a single wheel has 5 or 6 nodes on average is....not great design.

3) I'll just say "yes" to this. There is plenty of additional info PoE could provide the player in-game without having an effect on game difficulty or being too obtrusive. I don't know why the design philosophy over the years was "provide as little as possible", but it really should change and I hope it does for PoE 2.

4) Hard to determine what's a "bug" vs what's normal as a brand new player. Unless you are getting stuck in walls, its more likely something you just have never encountered before. Also, the barrier to progression is what creates a need for time in the game. It is hard to get the balance just right, but there is always a need for systems to slow your progress towards god-hood and ultimately end-of-game. This is a grinding game. You START this game, knowing that eventually there will be a grind. If that is not something that's on your mind, then you really chose the wrong game and genre.

5) yep agreed 100%

I support one free reset of the passive skill tree and the atlas tree