Spent 250+ Hours on PoE in the New Season. (Feedback Review)

Probably baby numbers to a fair number of you. But this is my first experience with Path of Exile. My friend got me to try it because I am a fan of diablo-esque games.

To preface my criticism: Overall. The game was fun. I did enjoy a fair amount of my time playing PoE. I do not personally think it's overall a bad game, or that no one should be enjoying this game, or whatever conclusion some might jump to.

However it seems to be completely built around being inconvenient. From the ungodly amounts of different currencies taking up so much space you are basically required to spend money on the "Free" game to be able to manage everything (not even mentioning the Scarabs, the Divination Cards, Map Shards, Maps themselves and a host of other things that all take up inventory), the extremely harsh penalties for dying later on in the game to the point you can grind exp for a while, and in one death have a half dozen map's worth of exp utterly erased in an instant. (Yes I know there's an omen that lessens it, but constantly having to have them is expensive).

Further, there is far too many Mechanics in the game that walking into this game as a new player it is rather overwhelming. Unless you are just blindly following "Starter" builds you're going to struggle, and unfortunately. If you don't like the play style of those "Starter" builds you are basically completely out of luck.

Much of the community seems to assume you have years worth of knowledge already known or available to you, and refuses to elaborate. Hearing "X boss is easy" or "It's easy to do Y" or "Fix your build and all your problems will be gone." are common phrases you will run into, and none of these remotely actually addresses issues a new player might be running into. A fine example of this is constantly hearing "The Admiral is an easy boss fight." but no one cared to stop and explain the reason he's an easy boss fight is that there's a dead zone on the north of the map that lets you basically skip entire phases of the fight. If you didn't happen to run to the north, or no one told you, you'd probably never know this because the entire rest of the map is engulfed in phase effects.

The game also suffers from being out for so long, that -finding- information by simply googling it leads to complete misunderstandings, because a mechanic was removed, but not updated on wiki sites. Or builds you might want to try to build are over five years out of date to the point the build trees are completely different due to updates so that information is useless. (An example, I read online that as a melee character, I could get my weapon quality over 20% to increase my damage, by having hillock be in syndicate safehouses (Specifically anything but intervention) and high ranking. Turns out, after spending days trying to get hillock onto transportation, I am told by people in global chat that this mechanics been completely removed, but it's still up on the wiki's as a valid strategy to increase weapon quality)

That's not even touching on the fact that hit boxes are often completely whacky and you can often end up physically being "Outside of an effect" only to be hit by it anyways because it's actually larger than the visual indicators.

Getting killed by 1 actually dangerous effect buried in 10+ basically harmless Effects going on on your screen at once is also a very common frustrating occurrence. 80% of my deaths in Path of Exile were sudden out of nowhere and from effects I physically could not see in the myriad of visual effects that are constantly on the screen. Despite being a character that is running 6 Endurance Charges (With basically 100% uptime), has 90% armor (over 60k) and 80% elemental resistances to everything, and having over 4,500 hp. Being instantly killed out of nowhere was still a common occurrence, and I'm simply sitting here staring at my "you died" screen actively wondering what in the world killed me when I cleared 90% of this map without taking any meaningful damage or ever dropping under 75% hp.

In the end, the deeper into the end game I got, the more aggravating and less fun Path of Exile felt. As of this, I'm probably going to put path of Exile down for a while. Having seen previews and things on Path of Exile 2 has lead me to being interested. So I might try Path of Exile 2.

I've died 415 times. Never cared one bit. You shouldn't too. Level 100 is a joke you pay for.

Well....in terms of visual cues and the comments "x is easy":

How many tries did you make against a certain obstacle before trying to "look up" the answer elsewhere? Because 1 or 2 tries, or even a full 6-portal amount is simply not enough. Nor should it be enough. That is ONE encounter in the grand scheme of the game.

If there happens to be a signficant challenge at some random point in the game, it is likely due to a deficit in the build being exploited by the enemy. This isn't even a "git gud" situation: it is the basis of all arpgs and rpgs in general. You have to digest and think about what your build may be lacking.

This is where guides and wikis simply offer no help....they cannot meet you where you are in experience, build, or unique situation. They offer general information that ultimately ends up being meaningless to a player incapable or unwilling to self-assess.

The reason why many folks respond with short, somewhat unhelpful answers, is because 99.9% of the "problems" that newer players offer as feedback tend to be straight up "easy" fixes. For example, players will complain that a boss is super hard, yet they are running around with next to no cold resistance on a boss that exclusively does cold damage (such as Merveil in Act 1). If you as a player are unwilling to figure that one out, people are not so kind as to walk you through incredibly basic mechanics here. Not saying this is your issue, but I'm saying that it is highly likely contributing...


You are right, 250 hours is a drop in the ocean in terms of gameplay. If you expected to know the ins and outs of every single mechanic of the game in that short amount of time, in a single league, then you came into the game with wrong expectations.

In Diablo, most decisions are simply made FOR you by the game or they simply do not matter. In PoE, you are required to think and re-plan. Diablo is designed to be easy, VERY easy, by default. PoE is designed to be challenging across its whole journey.

For the wiki....there is a very easy answer to that.

You are commenting on the official website of the game. Why didn't you just go to the "community wiki" linked here, rather than a completely random google search lol?

That's just amateur internet usage right there. Has nothing to do with how "long" the game has been around. Because the ACTUAL wiki, linked right on this site, has the correct information within minutes of it being released by GGG.




***Here's a quick example: you had trouble with Admiral fight. He pretty clearly uses cold damage. Did you switch to a sapphire flask and try? How about checking your cold resistance stats and seeing if you could raise it? How's your chill and freeze immunity / avoidance? How is your overall life pool? These are the things you should be self assessing.

On your highest level character, you have no life on five pieces of gear. I can't imagine you have anywhere near capped resistances. The most basic of basic defenses you haven't bothered to pay any attention to, and so you die. Learning special boss mechanics helps, but paying attention the very lowest most basic mechanics in the game helps a heck of a lot more. A wiki page isn't going to tell you to "fix your resistances" or "get more life" because that should be assumed.

People who "help" assume you are willing to do the bare minimum for yourself. When they see that isn't true...they become critical.

A lot of insight good points as someone who is new to the game.
You should always check the poewiki.net(ggg supported) as the game change a lot every league(mostly).

Your jugg pretty decent, crit avoidance should help a lot. And it's okey to stop playing and go back in next league or you will end like those sad complainers ;D

Well said. The game is confusing if you're doing it alone. You do have to keep up with it, a bit like a job, it evolves every few months. That's what keeps a lot of us engaged in it. That's what makes it different than other games. It's why some of us consider it an amazing game. It does have cons and you've outlined them well. There really isn't much more to it.

Keep up and have fun or move on to a different game. Not in a rude way, just in a "life is short, have your own fun" or "get in where you fit in". :)

Good luck.

"

Nyariatheshaman wrote:

Much of the community seems to assume you have years worth of knowledge already known or available to you, and refuses to elaborate. Hearing "X boss is easy" or "It's easy to do Y" or "Fix your build and all your problems will be gone." are common phrases you will run into, and none of these remotely actually addresses issues a new player might be running into. A fine example of this is constantly hearing "The Admiral is an easy boss fight." but no one cared to stop and explain the reason he's an easy boss fight is that there's a dead zone on the north of the map that lets you basically skip entire phases of the fight. If you didn't happen to run to the north, or no one told you, you'd probably never know this because the entire rest of the map is engulfed in phase effects.

If you want PoE knowledge, the PoE and PoE builds subreddits are a better place to get it. Any big changes/stealth nerfs are quickly noted in the subreddits.

We just like to sling poo at each other on these forums.

Maybe you did not read my entire post. But I did point out on my Juggernaut that I have 80%+ Resistances in All Elemental Damage Types, 4.5k HP, and constantly have 6 Endurance Charges up, as well as having over 60,000 armor. (90% physical damage reduction)

I made sure to add that to the post because I didn't want people to assume I was getting "One shot" because I had no resistances, or health. That's clearly not the case given that 6 Endurance Charges is 24% resistance to both physical and elemental damage, on top of the 80% Elemental resistance, the Chaos damage being mitigated by armor ascendancy, and the 60k armor on top of 4.5k hp.

I'm not walking around with 30% all resistances with 2k hp, complaining I'm being one shot in T16 Maps randomly.

I can completely understand that I probably don't understand all the mechanics of the game. My criticism was that there was too many mechanics, currencies, and different things to keep track of to begin with, which is why I mentioned I was particularly interested in PoE 2 based on what's been shown. It looks like it is significantly less bloated in sheer ridiculous amounts of mechanics.

There is:

Essences
Strongboxes
Delve
The menagerie
The sacred Groves
The Wild Woods
The Difference Influences (Searing or Eater of Worlds)
Maven's non-sense.
Shaper / Elder things.
Ultimatum
Betrayal
Incursions
Abyss
Expeditions
Blight Encounters
Delirium Maps / Events
Synthesis Mechanics / Maps
The Settlers of Kalguur
Breaches
Legion Encounters
Ritual Encounters
Heists

And I'm pretty sure there's even more things that I didn't mention.

Honestly, it's a god send that you can hard shut off some of these. Because Without the ability to it'd be an absolute headache.

As I said, I am looking forward to Path of Exile 2, in which most of this bloat is trimmed off.

6 charges is very low, you should have double this amount.

"

Nyariatheshaman wrote:

Maybe you did not read my entire post. But I did point out on my Juggernaut that I have 80%+ Resistances in All Elemental Damage Types, 4.5k HP, and constantly have 6 Endurance Charges up, as well as having over 60,000 armor. (90% physical damage reduction)

Per Chatgpt:

Armor's Effectiveness Against Big Hits:
Armor Calculation: Armor is more effective against smaller hits. The reduction percentage is calculated based on the amount of armor you have relative to the size of the incoming hit.

Diminishing Returns: When facing a very large hit, your armor's effectiveness diminishes. For example, against a small hit, your armor might reduce the damage by 90%, but against a much larger hit, the reduction could drop significantly.

Formula: The damage reduction from armor is calculated using the formula:

Reduction = Armor/(Armor+10×Damage)

This means as the incoming damage increases, the percentage of damage mitigated by armor decreases.