We welcome First Impression posts! Please be nice to those posts.

The game in its current state is, for me at least, not enjoyable at all. This is due to incredible lag spikes and even game crashes that appear every time I launch the game and then use any skills for the first few times in this session.
So it's always a gamble at each start of playing. The game freezes and either you are lucky and somehow survive or you get killed from a pack of enemies during lagspike/crash. Needless to say you wont come very far in the content with those issues. So stop playing at all until it eventually gets fixed seems to be the only way to go.

I was writing my own comment when I decided to go and read what people had said about it, in case someone voiced it better. Someone did :

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Tides5 a écrit :

1.
User Un-friendly game.

1.1
Pretty self-explanatory i think. It just takes a LONG time and a lot of reading to even start to understand some of the underlying mechanics in the game, such as the vendor system, the differences between prefix suffix and such. Terribly unfriendly to a new player and is bound to scare away loads of potential players (customers!)

3.2
There are simply WAY WAY WAY WAY too many unexplained things in the game.
Like, whats a mirrored item and why cant i change it? Whats the difference between "Vaal Ground Slam" "Ground Slam" and "Ground Slam (Corrupted)"
What does block threshhold mean?

YES. A lot in this game is VERY obscure. I mean so obscure that unless someone tells you about it, you won't even know the right questions to ask and you won't even know to look that up on the Internet. This is a BIG problem. The vendor recipes system is a very good example of that. I played a bit in beta and learned about it then... and a few days ago I taught a friend about it who is a much more experienced player that I am. What does that tell you?

This is the kind of thing I would like to be clued in as I play (through NPCs?) and not by happenstance or by randomly catching a conversation in chat. It is a very big downside in my opinion and a big obstacle in picking up this game for the long term. You really don't want to make learning your GAME a tedious task.

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Tides5 a écrit :

2.
Replayability

2.1
The game ruins its own replayability by forcing me to go through 4 acts 3 times before i even see what people refer to as end game. I'm used to playing a game FOR the end game, so not even reaching it after over 100 hours played is just outright depressing.
(I'm acually a bit insulted i dont get achivement for completing game b4 3rd time around)

2.2
Already the second time going through act 1 I instantly notice that many areas have zero randomness to them, such as Tidal Island, making the replay becomes that much more stale and bland quicker.

I'm not even done with my first playthrough. I'm already experiencing replayability tiredness simply by having made a second character. I can't believe I'll have to do that for every new character I make... which will be unavoidable because...

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Tides5 a écrit :

4. Freedom equals chaos
Probably my biggest gripe about this game, is that the passive grid is extremely large and I constantly fear that I am building my character in a way that will inevitably cause it to suck.

The result of the above (4) is that i go and create a new character with a bit more knowledge in my backpack. But that cause me to completely stall up in act 1 just being bored cuz i have already gone thru Act 1 9 times without ever getting a character that i feel like "This is working!"

... because I will inevitably mess up my characters and have to start over.* I'm sorry, but making it so expensive (currency and/or time) to remake a build and coupling it with a complete absence of guidance is unacceptable. There is absolutely nothing in game that can point you in the right direction and it is so easy to mess up very badly as a new player to the point where you can't even progress unless you grind and grind and grind, it can really be a turn off.

The only way I would say you could fix that without affecting your current system is to make a mode that's available from the start, where people can make a character and freely experience builds in an arena, with all skill points and items available, free of charge. Then it would be easier even for a new player to make a half-decent build and to learn about how to make a proper build that synergizes well with items.

*Unfortunately, I had to resort to copy pasting a build that people who know what they're doing made. Because I have no intention of getting to the end of the game (or not being able to, like when I last played in beta) and having to start over and to have to do it 5 times. This took half the fun out of this game by making the biggest and most unique part of it irrelevant, but this is better than having to start over.

Another thing I noticed by exploring builds is that most "good" builds appear to be single-button builds. I think I'm going to get bored fast. I really think you need to address that. I really like the skill gems sytems, but this is a huge flaw.

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Tides5 a écrit :

Minor annoyances

3.1
Bag space is too limited. I feel like advoiding the strongboxes simple cuz it takes me 5 minutes to peddle back and forth to town with the stuff that drops, just cause of the severely limited bag space.

I understand you need money, but the current inventory space is ridiculous and it's actually NOT helping us hoarders give you more money for tabs. At first I was doing normal - magic - rare vendor receipes, which of course required a LOT of stash space. So in beta I bought 6 tabs. However, the small inventory space quickly made doing it extremely tedious and I have pretty much given up on doing it. It would be MUCH more tempting for me to do it (and to buy extra stash tabs to do it) if I didn't have to go back to town every 10 minutes or less to empty my pockets. It really really sucks that I have to stop playing, make my way back to a waypoint and make my way back to where I was to go dump my stuff.

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All in all, I don't think I will be playing this very long. This means that I will not be investing any new money into this game. I can already feel myself getting tired of it. It will be a fun thing to play every now and then when I'm bored I guess, but that's about all.

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Nicymarbot a écrit :

All in all, I don't think I will be playing this very long. This means that I will not be investing any new money into this game. I can already feel myself getting tired of it. It will be a fun thing to play every now and then when I'm bored I guess, but that's about all.

As a veteran player I can agree with some of your points of how PoE should be ideally, however I have some points to make:

1. Use poe wiki for everything. I literally type in google search "poe wiki ____" on anything about poe that I want to know. It gives you a lot of information that you want to know, and the PoE devs try to keep it updated.

2. I have 9 characters above level 90 and 2 above 88 in standard league. I know how replayability can be boring in other games. PoE is not one of those games. In fact, a portion of the playerbase plays only in new leagues, and they have to start from scratch every time a new league comes out. It is not a hassle to start a new char, use new skills, make new builds. Yes, the path you take will mostly be the same, but you'll start to become more efficient and do it faster and faster. It isn't about the quests or dialogues; the motivation comes from trying out new builds.

3. I can see in an ideal world where the game gives you tips on how to efficiently allocate points in your passive tree to get to where you want. This game doesn't do that. It doesn't know where you want to go. It grants you the freedom to place your points anywhere you wish, whether it be efficient or not. It can be a good thing or a bad thing. At any rate, there are multiple skill tree planners out there that you can download to plan out your 123 points (level 100, unrealistic) or 117 (lv94, more realistic). Personally, I use PoeSkillTree (just google that).

4. I can tell you that most builds are rarely single-button. Most of the time, they have their main skill (right-click) and something else, whether it be movement skills that you spam to move faster or dodge stuff; curses that you might want to apply; secondary skills that you press every now and then to enhance your main skill.

5. I didn't really understand what you meant by normal-magic-rare vendor recipe, but the only recipe you should be doing is the chaos recipe (full set of un-id rares to get 2 chaos orbs). As for looting, I only pick up small rares like helms, boots, gloves, accessories to fit one full inventory space to eventually id and vendor for alteration orbs. If you want to be overzealous and pick up all the rares that you find, you will need to go back and forth multiple times. Sure, you'd get more alts but is it worth the hassle. I've had a magic find builds where I'd go back and forth at least 5 times (using up almost all 6 portals) in one map. At that point it becomes a different game; a game of looting.

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Laserty1 a écrit :

Hi,

All i can say they game is laggy but other than that the game is neat. But i want to know why we dont start with a skill point at lvl 1 since it makes sense to me that you would, and I dont know if u can do this but if u can, can u change Chaos Inoculation Max HP to 10 since it will help greatly with extending other comboes, and if you can't please Message me why?

you don't have to be GGG to answer that question
Just think about auras, with right setup you could have 5-7 auras reserving 9 of your 10 hp. It would be LL setup but without needing Shavs or chaos resist lol.

Well started first playing at end of 2012, after watching few Kripp videos, played some time at 2013 launch, but stopped for several reasons. And now im back already for few days and can say some things about the game, the game I returned to and for good I hope. The game really is mature and corsepondelly polsihed, as when i was younger it seems little to dark and even scary, played that time witch to level 50+, templar to 34 and marauder. It was lacking some active skills back then and i got involved with diablo 3, wich is a fiasco and I trully regret buying that game and spending time on it. Now, some years later Path of Exile is more alive and awesoem then never, some new skills and mechanics makes it beatifull and colorfull. Even the enviorment and its graqphical otpions seems the best for me and they truly have some meaning ingame, cause of this unforgiving continent Wraeclast, really it all sums very well. I have been insome of good graphical and not bad handeled mmos and other games but all from what poe is made: currency, graphics, story, skills, passive tree and more is most unquie and desirable experience, the most smooth one I ever had. Please keep the good work.

Here in Spain got lag in some games, even diablo 3 game is and was pretty laggy sometimes, but since forsaken masters update didnt had any lag or desync ever.Getting some fps drop while openening rare chests that spawns tons of mobs , but not a single freeze or any other tecnical issue, can move character anytime while that mobs are spawning, even if fps drops too 30, but never in any map it drops so. Only when spawning mobs from protected chests. All time fps 60, or 50+ if in town with some ppl with
some decoration effects.

PoE - is a darksouls game in hack and slash genre, truly diablo 2 succesor. Would be need apply unquies items appearence visible in chars inventory but not ingame, i could note that unquies appeareans only differs in inventory but in game they got normal appears of base item type from wich they come. Apart that, its all good.

My honest first impressions is that the leveling system or rather running it through 3 times makes me feel ill physically when I think about rolling a new character during a league. The game's learning curve is quite high even for veteran rpg players. It's more that I hate repeating the same quests 3 times. I have heard that you may be working on fixing that soon though, but I'd rather fresh more acts and none repeating to maps overall. I love the storyline that is in play right now. I'd also love for perhaps an option closer to a loot filter for our builds to allow more self-found viability and perhaps tighter control of item levels when they drop. I'm not saying every drop should be an upgrade but at a certain point only max sockets are end game viable for many builds which already filters down a fair bit of loot unless you feel like trying luck with currency. I'd rather take a white piece of loot with right socks and either try to chance, essence, or alch it to find what I'm looking for slightly better but the issue is finding the viable bases to attempt it. That would help significantly in my opinion, but that's some of my feedback and first impressions I've had coming from many other rpgs some modern others older. A certain fun offline optioned one has a lot of mods that are popular implementing similar things to extend life.

I have played for a long time, but I went on a hiatus, so a lot of content is new to me that I can give first impressions feedback on. I would say I'm a casual player who doesn't trade a lot, and I mostly only enjoy surviving the hardcore league. Every topic I mention here will be something I've never seen in my previous playthrough.



TOPIC: Act 4- great. That Daresso's arena was my favorite hehe. I really liked the "locked in a cage, fight ur way out" theme. The mines/caves were too long, so was malachai's innards and to some extent kaom's path. Kaom's path was cool too because it had a theme. Almost got one shotted by some kind of poison/bleed in Daresso's Arena on cruel, that was... pretty crazy and unexpected. I spammed my potions, then got hit by the same attack again and almost died again ;D Was it some kind of bleed/poison trapper? Still not sure.


TOPIC: Mapping - I never mapped before actually, and mapping was fun stuff.

TOPIC: Essence - The only times I failed to kill an essence mob was when it regened life too fast while being too dangerous to apply DPS for long periods of time without having to portal for more potions. Essence mobs are fun stuff, lots of rare items this league.



TOPIC: Overall feel of the game- I actually feel like this game was better sort of "thematically" when it first released. My opinion may be unpopular but I'll explain why: when this game first came out, every map had a theme, and every "theme" was its own sort of challenge. Like the beach was zombies and pooping sandcrabs. The map after was rhoas that charged you and oneshot you lmao (I have great memories of being stunlock oneshot by rhoas). Then I would die to cold squids, goats, the exploding wolves, flickerstrike spiders, exploding mervail sperm, exploding dudes in the west forest, etc...

But right now I feel like some of the areas are just "random monsters jumbled together randomly", and on top of that I feel like all these "challenging themes" are now trivial. Almost nothing on that list of "ways I used to die" hit me hard anymore. And as a result, it feels like there's no longer a "theme" to many of the areas anymore, since the diverse themes have all been dilluted to "faceroll your way through all these various methods of tickles". Daresso map definitely still had a theme to it though. Kaom's too with the cute little totems.

But the question might be: does it need to be un-nerfed? The answer is no I guess... Because now it's much easier to get to level 70, so I suppose the focus of the game is definitely mapping now. I hear people complain it's a pain to level their characters, but I don't feel that's the case yet. I just think it wasn't as challenging, memorable, or "wow this area had a really cool theme" as it used to be.

Thinking back, I wonder if this game got easier just because the new Blasphemy+Enfeeble combo is OP in reducing damage taken.

TOPIC: LABYRINTH - holy shit I hate traps. As a person who plays with not-so-stable internet, FUCK TRAPS. You know my first character died to traps this league, and my second character almost died to traps as well... FUCK TRAPS. I really disliked Torchlight series because of its traps oneshotting my hardcore characters. It's really dumb to die to traps. I hear some people say traps are easy to deal with, but I don't give a fuck what they say, fuck traps, fuck your saws, your spikes, etc.. If you get a boss or mob to kill me, that's great, I am interested in learning to deal with that situation. But if you want me to BLINDLY (since this is random generated) run through spike field, into saws, rely on my internet connection and blind reflexes, and die to traps... I feel nothing but salt and annoyance.

I don't mind the length of the lab I hear some people complain about, it's actually kind of fun. But the traps, I hate the traps. The traps make the length of the lab terrible. As a result of the traps alone, the entire labyrinth I would rate as the worst part of my POE experience now.

Oh and btw, I played an ES/Life hybrid character. Maybe that's why I hated the traps so much. It does EXTRA damage to me based on my ES, and I had little way to recover it.

Izaro fight was fun, and it was very fun to learn the mechanics of how that boss worked. I almost ripped and logged out twice because I didn't realize how the buffs and shit worked, which was really fun for me.


TOPIC: ASCENDENCIES - great! I would like to see additional ascendancy options added, that'd be very fun to have! Also, what in the hell is up with Scion ascendancy? It's.. pretty bad lmao. I haven't even tried it yet because I know a passive point is not worth another class's ascendency point lmao. How about +5 passive points (however many passives/travelnodes u think 2 ascendencies is worth)? Or like +7 travel nodes? I dono guys I don't get it with her, but I haven't tried it yet.


TOPIC: SKILLS - I made a flicker strike trickster, but the blade vortex did SO MUCH DAMAGE and has SO MUCH UTILITY AND CLEAR POTENTIAL that I just switched to bladevortex/bladefall selfcast lmao. Also, I played saboteur, which was fun, and I feel like ice trap is just significantly better than all the other trap options. Arc traps were cool, but the cooldown time for icetrap makes it win imo.

You guys made so many neat new skills since I last played, it's all great, and I want to see more. New skills make this game fun!

I really like how you can purchase lots of gems from vendors and get builds going easier now. That's also great.


TOPIC: 3 difficulties debate - meh, felt alright still. I just hate having to do labyrinth AGAIN (because i hate traps!) Most quest rewards become less appealing after each difficulty, and after each character made.


TOPIC: Lore - it got a lot more interesting since I last played. Just wanted to mention this.


TOPIC: Jewels in your passive tree - this was such a great idea!


OVERALL: a lot more pros than cons. Besides on-release, I absolutely enjoyed myself the most during this season. If I had any further suggestion it's just add more skill gems, to give us even more playstyles. I think Melee needs it's own version of flame blast (Like the Greatsword in MonsterHunter, not like the earthquake skill), and more mobility skills are always fun.

Hi GGG!

First : Thank you for your impressive game!

i announced my "first impression" of poe (good after some month of standard ladder)
here :

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1763729

Dont forget : even if graphics are truely not all, the first impression of the game
lets many of my d3 friends switch back to d3 or wow. and i met a lot of people "trying" poe
and switching back to what they are accustomed.

and its a long way, till you BEGIN to understand the genius of this game, and i also
had many breaks - and beginning again and again and again - before i could slowly start to
understand.

There are many people out there in d3 who search for a new game experience, but dont have the
long breath to find "into poe"

and thats a REAL long way. thats good.

SO please - after rather disappointing d3 announcements - open the bottle - and use your chance :)

I would love to give a first impression of end game. But it doesn't drop for me, so can't play it. Rest of game is really amazing. t13+ maps are a myth to me though. They simply don't exist.

To this day, nearly 3000 hours play time later (I played for a year before linking to steam), I cannot understand the reasoning behind gating the end game content behind miniscule RNG chances. The system is ok with me actually, but for the love of all that is holy increases the drop rate of t11 on up.

It is really my ONLY complaint about this otherwise great game.

Been playing, off and on, since Open Beta. Standard League only, solo for the vast vast majority of it. I don't group up, I don't seek help, I don't trade for anything. I sort of want to play the game strictly on my own ability and the RNG.

I typically play intensely 100 hours or so with each new content drop before going back to something else. In this way I've eventually gotten two characters to the mid-80s.

I'm still learning constantly, mostly because I refuse to dig too deeply into other's builds. I do my wiki reading at least, but there's no fun for me in replicating someone else's build at all. I like that special rush you get when you put together your own combination and see it work, rather than just replicating what looked cool on Youtube.

For me PoE has always been a few things:

1. Less-than-technically competent. Sorry guys, whether it's your budget or your skill sets, PoE has never played truly gracefully at any point of its history. Now it peforms better than ever before, but it still has ugly technical and performance blemishes.

2. Wonderfully freeform and complex in its interactions. I judge every ARPG I touch by how restrictive and layered it is compared to PoE.

3. Rewarding. Even though I may go dozens and dozens of hours without upgrading my main in any way, I always feel like I've gotten a little something for my time, between maps, currency and all the other sundry stuff added over the years.

4. Tuned way too high sometimes. Dominus back in the day, Malachai, Izaro (sometimes), various map bosses, the amount of spike damage in this game has always been berzerk. It feels like, as an admitted scrub, that once players had builds with reasonable survivability and insane DPS, it dictated the way content works. My highest level toon has shit DPS compared to a lot of what I see out there, but I manage to keep the deaths down. It's often discouraging to fight bosses on my melee toon then switch to my summoner and watch her obliterate it in a fraction of the time. As an aside, Immunities are not something I ever thought I'd see in PoE. The idea that suddenly you need at least two characters to meet all challenges is kind of antithetical to what I thought PoE was supposed to be about. You don't invest ??? hours in a character only to find your entire build is invalidate by one boss mechanic, who ever though that was a good idea? Give them enhanced resistance, that's totally fair, make some builds work harder for it. (*COUGH* MELEE *COUGH*) But don't just give bosses total immunity.

5. Not friendly to Flavorful builds at all. It took me a while to learn how to focus on specific aspects of a build for it to be even Merciless viable. Fewer skills, more support of said skills, more capitalizing on different priorities via gear choices and uniques. Being a generalist tends to hurt you in this game and I think that makes it hard for some people to get into. I've been playing my Scion as my main since she was released and slowly refining a sword and board/Spectral Throw build. And there have been times I've wanted to walk away from the game entirely because of how difficult it was to make it viable. But I was too stubborn to admit defeat, got some drops that really helped and slowly refined and pared down the build to what really mattered. And now it tediously chops its way higher in levels. I did it while keeping my build to what I felt was flavorful to a degree....but I can easily see someone else climbing that mountain, looking down and going "You know, this isn't really what I wanted in the first place. I wanted to be a fast moving melee guy and instead I ended up shooting Ice Spears or some shit." A lot of my friends have had this complaint with PoE.

6. Hard to get my friends to play. Many of them simply can't find an appreciation for PoE despite getting why I like it on some level. I can't really blame them sometimes. Graphically you either like its style or it looks, at best, old fashioned and hard to read. Technical problems. Lag. Penalties at the highest level of play. A huge grind just to reach the "end game", from the perspective of your casual player who probably enjoyed Diablo 3. Seemingly byzantine skill tree. A real lack of flash or pizazz in a lot of departments. (Stark is one way you might define PoE's look. Barren, compared to a visual orgy like Diablo 3, is another.) I've tried a few times to bring people to PoE. The last friend I managed to get all the way through Normal before the Malachai fight broke his spirit completely. (He got to experience that Death Zerg Rush to kill a boss, when you know you're hopelessly outclassed in every department.)

7. Infuriating. This game has pissed me off more times in recent memory than any game I've played in the last 10 years. Seriously. Literally "have to get up and walk away so I don't punch my monitor" mad. ESPECIALLY in the pre-lockstep days, but even now. When some bullshit hits before your brain can even process it happened. When you're dropped out of game and something is unrecoverable like a master mission. When you watch hours of progress go up in smoke in 10 minutes. When you get fucked in the Labyrinth by traps and a touch of lag. While this is mostly on the technical side of things, PoE has seriously hacked me off. I've learned to take it in stride over the years but when I've been playing for a while and I eat a bullshit death that comes out of left field, is when I retire it until the next content update.

8. Irresistible. It's the game I've played the most since I quit WoW years and years ago. The unapologetic challenge is appealing for someone like me, despite how I sometimes resent it. The metric of advancement is appealing (lots of ways to get things, make progress, it's metered rather than D3's habit of rewarding the player trivially every 30 seconds.) The fact it's not a game that's easy or intuitive to play, much like Dwarf Fortress, makes me feel special for having gotten as far as I have (even though I know it's not very far and that I'm not special.) That it is still one of the fairest F2P games out there in terms of its economy. I've even come to see the Death Penalty as a good thing because it gives the game some edge, some reason to be something other than boringly competent like D3's endgame. (I may also just have Stockholm's Syndrome after not being able to walk away from the game.)

It's hard not to have a love/hate relationship with PoE sometimes. From the times you stand back in appreciation for all the moving parts working together, and the little touches they've continued to build out the game with, to the bewilderment at wondering just who in the hell they're deving this stuff for sometimes.

If I had one wish for PoE, it'd be that they step up their visual game. PoE has some really high rez goodness in its visuals going on that some how has always fallen flat. Particle effects are incredibly detailed and yet they're not really all that interesting at the end of the day. That's been PoE's look since Day 1. (It was Titan Quest's look too.) That realistic grittiness. That stuff is all ok...I've just always wished there was some actual life and color in PoE. And I'm one of the people that said D3 was too cartoony. Say what you will about Blizzard games, murky is not how you would describe their visuals and yet murky and dumpy has always been PoE's look. And the animations...well, there's been plenty said about those already.