A somewhat new player's review of Path of VexOhmIstDol

Bump for being the best feedback post I have read, ever. I agree with almost everything. Thank you for writing it down so well.

Nice to see this thread still has some activity, after I've been "on hiatus" for several months from a game that definitely feels like it's still in beta.

Basically, I think PoE breaks the cardinal rule of ARPGs, in that the primary activity in a game should be killing lots of monsters in smooth/fluid and interesting ways.

But PoE breaks that rule in several ways:

1) Specialized difficulty-spike monsters practically no matter what your build is.

-Melee? Voidbearers, massive hit monsters (Kole!).

-Ranged (particularly bow)? Gap closers! (Can't tell you how many times I've died to Torr Olgosso on my LA ranger, as well as other rogue exiles with gap closers--i.e. flicker strike rogue, that charge/vulnerability ranger, and Torr Olgosso). Leap slamming monsters also hurt, and let's not forget devourers. Also, those shielded guys in Scepter of God.

-Defense? Vulnerability, reflect (you eat every last bit of it).

-DPS comes from fast attacks? Lightning Thorns.

-Overly high DPS? Reflect.

-Evasion? Physical spells that simply bypass your evasion roll completely, and rock your world because you have no defense.

-Energy shield? Chaos damage (unless you go Chaos Inoculation.), on-hit effects (stun, freeze, etc...)

Genuine difficulty should mean monsters/bosses that possess relatively equal levels of difficulty for every character, for various reasons. "Fake" difficulty, at least in my book, is basically "how do we gimp this particular build" or "well, our AI programmers suck, so we can't make a particularly engaging fight, so let's just massively up the numbers on the monsters so that the moment a single hit lands, you're in a world of hurt". Or basically, if you quantified difficulty, a *well-designed* difficulty curve would have low variance. A *poorly-designed* difficulty curve has high variance. And for anyone that can't understand this, go and take a statistics 101 class.

I can't speak for everyone, but I find high-variance difficulty curves to be obnoxious and a telltale sign of poor design and poor AI coding.

This whole stop-go style of play IMO is just not enjoyable. The one central thing about

2) Lack of counterplay. For instance, compare the reflect mechanics to Diablo 2's monster elemental enchantments. Fire and ice was basically a case of "get back, shoot and scoot so you avoid the nova". Lightning enchantment was "stay back and weave between the bolts". Granted, you were screwed somewhat if you were melee, but if you were melee, you had a massive BO with a barbarian, a spirit of the vine (IIRC) as a Druid, a resist aura as a Paladin (along with those amazing paladin shields), javazons could hit from distance, so could sins (shurikens), and there was always the merc. So even if your gear (or even your build) wasn't up to snuff, there were still things you could do to mitigate the "don't get hit by this!" effects. Not so much in PoE.

3) That the best way to attain loot is to sit in trade and flip items by underpaying for them and then overselling, rather than killing mobs, is a travesty. Sure, there should be some aspect of trading to a game--and that aspect should be "I have this wand, he has that bow, I don't need this wand, I need that bow", poof. Sometimes you have an easily found medium of exchange (E.G. perfect gems, full stash of gold) that allows for liquidity in trading. Not so in PoE. Everything is based around chaos and exalts--and while chaos orbs are gated behind obnoxiously rare amulets/rings, exalteds are "cross your fingers".

Frankly, I think that this third point really drives a stake through the core aspect of ARPGs, which is "kill monsters!", and the above two points are what makes it uninteresting. I mean when it's more profitable per unit of time to fleece newer players by either underpaying and/or overcharging as opposed to looking for gear with characters that can wipe out dungeons in minutes, there's something dreadfully wrong.


Also, one aspect I'd like to highlight regarding "hardcore" vs. not--IMO the best measure of that isn't "how much time do you have to burn to get to endgame", but "how fast can someone that knows what they're doing get to endgame on their own"? Because in Diablo 2, there were stories of Barbarians solo-clearing hell at level 36 through smart leaping past a bunch of monsters, and then of course there's the old gag about sorceresses being able to solo hell naked.

Instead, the best way to proceed through PoE is overfarming, overleveling, and generally, overgrinding. That is, go *SLOW*, as opposed to go fast.

I mean alright, the company is named "Grinding Gear Games", but as Chris Wilson said in his interview with AtheneWins, Blizzard is attempting to bring ARPGs to the masses--and, well, there's nothing wrong with depth, but a game doesn't become unpopular because of depth. But at the end of the day, it's how all that depth works in execution. And in execution, it's not working. It isn't just that it isn't D2, but that it's not *fun*.

One other thing I'd like to add--it's no secret that botting, duping, and perhaps (if you want to reach), outdated graphics aged D2 out. But if you participated among the decent community websites, you had a much better experience. The issue of bots (especially in a free game) is an issue, no doubt, but at the end of the day, the things that "sunk" D2 LoD were artifacts of the time due to technology that would be considered archaic for these days. So the whole economy of high runes and Enigmas being dispensed like candy never should have happened. Sorceresses should have continued to be the only class that could zip zap zoom around the world, short of a few very lucky people (who hopefully would have done something more creative than telehammer spam). But if you look at exalts as High Runes (because that's *exactly* what they are--no, they're actually much worse. Because with runes, you had guaranteed good properties, and if you collected the right ones, a freaking godly item), then what you have is basically this:

A watered down item system (sets, runewords, RNG control crafting recipes--where?) that screws over the rank and file gamer for the benefit of the flippers, gameplay that, well, *also* screws over the rank and file gamer for the benefit of the "hardcore" (otherwise known as those lucky enough to pick up a bunch of high life rolls on otherwise solid gear)...none of these are particularly demanding from a "skill" perspective in terms of "how do you deal with this collection of monsters".

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One other thing I'd like to add--it's no secret that botting, duping, and perhaps (if you want to reach), outdated graphics aged D2 out. But if you participated among the decent community websites, you had a much better experience. The issue of bots (especially in a free game) is an issue, no doubt, but at the end of the day, the things that "sunk" D2 LoD were artifacts of the time due to technology that would be considered archaic for these days. So the whole economy of high runes and Enigmas being dispensed like candy never should have happened. Sorceresses should have continued to be the only class that could zip zap zoom around the world, short of a few very lucky people (who hopefully would have done something more creative than telehammer spam). But if you look at exalts as High Runes (because that's *exactly* what they are--no, they're actually much worse. Because with runes, you had guaranteed good properties, and if you collected the right ones, a freaking godly item), then what you have is basically this:

The realms and the game overall was in MUCH better shape in 1.09 and prior versions.

The problems that you describe with respect to PoE were introduced into D2 with the 1.10 patch. There was very little build variety; the majority of viable builds that were viable in 1.09 were totally killed in 1.10 and most were forced to trade for runes in order for your gear to be powerful enough to handle retardedly overtuned mobs in hell difficulty.

Diablo 2 would never ever have picked up the following that it did if the 1.10 balance was what gamers experienced when the game was released. Anyone attempting to distil a fun game based on Diablo 2 1.10+ item mechanics/economics is going to fail miserably.