What I Love, Hate, and Loathe about Path of Exile

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Xendran wrote:

Levelling past 70 may have been hard 2 years ago, but now you can level to 85 easily. Just gotta have decent clear speed.

Even if this is true (which hasn't been my experience), it's still very difficult to experiment with different builds as well as being heavily time consuming. First, you need not only a "decent clear speed" but also the defenses to survive (since otherwise the XP penalty will slow progress to a crawl), and needing both funnels you into a few "optimal" builds rather than encouraging experimentation. Second, you have to find the maps to clear, and the 70+ drop rate is so low that you'll spend a good amount of time in lower-level maps getting extremely slow XP while still taking all the risks.

To put it another way:

The early levels have too little going for them. There's no reason to use currency and there's not much room to experiment with your skills or passives. Neither build nor items are engaging. This is fine for a brand new player, although it assumes they'll stick around for the game to get interesting. This is not so good for an experienced player who dreads dredging through the early game.

The later levels have a different problem. The progression is tedious, the combat repetitive and the capacity to tinker with your build and items limited. There are reasons for this too: to incentivize rerolling and increase replay value. But given the mixed feelings surrounding the early game this seems somewhat of a sadistic trap by GGG.

The game truly shines when it facilitates experimentation and dynamic combat (not using the same skill or types of gear, etc). And that happens during the middle portion of the leveling experience.

I know GGG is hardcore, yada yada. They know what makes their game fun, yet they relegate it to a limited portion of the character experience. Why? Are they afraid that players will quickly get bored? That seems to contradict what everyone says in feedback. If players could feel they were making progress while maintaining the dynamic characteristics of the 30-60 range, it's likely they'd keep playing, and keep enjoying themselves.