PoE right now is so easy you can do everything as a SSF. Trading then becomes nothing more than bragging rights. If anything it should be the reverse, it should be less power creep. RNG is a moot point. As I said you can do everything on your own in SSF, I personally never trade for maps and always get what I want so obviously the RNG is not as bad as some people claim. Finally you are missing the big point of having an online game - no cheating. Grim Dawn is cool and all but it is way too easy to open a bunch of files and cheat, thus any achievements there are diminished. Servers and always online fix that, you know your achievements are legit and so are the achievements of others.
PoE has its problems like an outdated laggy engine and insane levels of power creep but its definitely not as bad as some people would want to believe.
No idea why People like PoE anyway. I liked it at the beginning, but the Combats are weak, and all other Points you guys mentioned. It had good ideas though
I never claimed PoE is bad. I played Synthesis league for 2 months or so.
I am just pointing out the problems. The title is what I dislike about PoE, not what I like about PoE, which I will happily posted as well. One shouldn’t confuse criticism with hatred. If you think I am harsh on PoE, you should see my thread in Wolcen, which I torn the game to pieces, but not because I hate it, but I want it to be good. Obvously it is subjective, but its 100% honest.
Back to PoE, there is no real leaderbroad in PoE so why bother to cheat. The reason for online is mostly for MTXs.
You think with the prices they charge, many players wouldn’t cheat. Also if offline, people will just made better ones (which isn’t hard considering how ugly most of the MTX armors are), & GGG gets no income.
Fair enough. I think lack of good MP is a negative for PoE. It make the game stale very fast.
To put it in perspective, I played PoE for a month & boredom started, but I manage to reach 3 months in Diablo before I started to get bored, mostly due to MP, and how fun it is to play with friends and clanmates in META pushing or just chill low GR.
Don’t get me wrong, I like PoE, but without a good MP, its just feel like a missed opportunity.
Multiplayer does exist but it is extremely limited. Its mostly about certain exp runs but since I never cared going to 100 I never bothered. The other usually seen multiplayer activity is farming with dedicated aura/curse bots. I am not sure how else they are going to expand it. If they make it too lucrative playing solo would be a detriment so I am perfectly content with the current situation. Plus the engine is bad at handling too many effects on the screen as the previous 2 leagues proved.
I hate to agree with KMQ about anything but … he is right about most of the complaints.
I am absolutely astounded that GGG has ignored the technical issues to such an extreme extent. Seriously. It is embarrassing. They pretend (for MONTHS as he says) that nothing is wrong or it is not their code (it is your PC, your isp, your ssd, or wtf) and then … voila! They suddenly admit it and this is just stupid and very unprofessional.
Zero community engagement beyond hyping is probably true, but even if it isn’t, it certainly gives that appearance so what is the difference whether it is true or not?
I don’t think anyone can argue that the power creep is massively damaging at this point. Go look at old vids if your memory fails or you didn’t play back then, here is your proof.
I feel sad/bad about it because I really like PoE; the story, many skills, mapping (well not as much now), etc. but … GGG is behaving very poorly.
I will not discuss the lootbox thing as it is really controversial and I never liked them much, and don’t give a shit one way or the other, but I know some people HATE them. I think they will disappear eventually due to fear of regulation but God knows what these people will cook up to replace them. Might be worse!
As I’ve ranted about multiple times on the discord, my issues with PoE are not due to complexity, but because the game is overly simple. Every build feels like a flowchart, and so many skills function similarly.
People say the skill tree is complex, but it’s not at all. There’s almost zero choice in what nodes you pick. First you take life, then you take the best damage and speed nodes in range that match your weapon/element. Grab crit if you’re crit, more damage if you’re not. A large majority of circles are hardly worth taking if they don’t provide such stats or if the numbers are strictly worse than other nearby nodes.
Grim Dawn’s devotions and this game’s skill trees provide far more choice than the massive blob tree PoE has.
Anyway, as I was saying, the moves start to feel the same, everything blends together when monsters are just dying in one-shot to massive AoEs. Almost every move has the same build too. You take your main damaging move, auras that just add stats and make the mana system feel useless, a hex that lowers relevant resists, and then whatever move you can fit that just adds to your main skill’s damage. Most one-shots toward the player will one-shot almost any build, so the differentiation between tank and non-tank hardly exists. All that matters is having enough AoE and damage to zoom through content and make the maximum amount of money, and the market is growing more inflated, so you really need that money to upgrade your build.
I have more complaints, but I can’t think of every single one at the moment. Perhaps I’m also just burnt out due to playing the game for so long… but a lot of that burn out is due to things feeling so similar despite playing different builds every league
Looks like you never tried any creative PoE builds. Last time I played I had 3 characters:
Avatar of Fire Melee Totems (this one relatively straightforward)
Baron Necromancer (this requires you to gather 1200 strength along with minion nodes, and I ended up using Brawn jewels, Blood Magic, Brutality, and a cheap aura like level 1 mana regen just to trigger some bonuses on my minions)
Flat lightning damage Lightning Arrow/Barrage totems. Now this was something. All my base damage was from items that add flat lightning damage, including those static electricity jewels. Most bow nodes were useless, since they scaled physical damage. Between planting totems, I was plinking away with multishot Frenzy with double curse on hit. I was so amused by the build I spent like 15 exalts on it (barrage helm, sun flask, etc), though I barely managed to kill Shaper with it.
What drives me mad about playing PoE is probably my own perfectionism. Once I was through initial learning stage, I strated to really crave for loot, currency, and those sweet league prizes. But I just couldn’t stop, I wanted the best tier rewards.
As a result I have 2 completed totems (Talisman and Harbinger) in my hideout. But this experience was so taxing on my nerves I lost my will to play PoE further.
I’ve done my fair share of interesting path of exile builds, and usually try to go against whatever the meta is during a current league.
Some notable build examples were my EO SoS Cremation build, my flat lightning scaling Shrapnel Shot Traps Deadeye, my Shock Nova CwC Lightning Tendrils Inquisitor, and my Ignite Proliferation Infernal Blow 2h Mace Elementalist.
At the end of the day, however, the gameplay still boiled down to one-shotting everything or being one-shot myself, so despite the vastly different mechanics of the skills, all the gameplay began to feel the same. Even Uber Elder, which I once struggled with immensely, is just something I sweep away nowadays due to the insane damage on every build.
I think that’s why I prefer builds in this game and Grim Dawn. When monsters aren’t instantly deleted and when AoE doesn’t consume the screen, you begin to appreciate the tradeoffs and mechanics of each individual skill.
Another thing that I find negative about PoE is evetually you will overpowered the game, & every build is a braindead speedbuild that play the same because enemies fall like dominos, except for like less than 1% of the time against muliple stage end bosses.
Spam your AoE skill,
movement skill/piano your flasks
repeat 1 & 2.
Diablo 3 for instance, have far less builds, but most pushing builds feel different & play different. “Spam big AoE-Movement skill” just wouldn’t work for 99% of pushing builds. YOu need to know when to use your cooldown, buff/debuff, where to position, which enemies to engage, which to skip. Group them, isolate, or lead them etc. If you play in group, even more critical to know group synergy & how to compliment one another.
MP in PoE, is the ones with fastest movement & AoE skills clearing, the rest picking up left behind loot.
I want to bash POE as well, not because I think it is all bad, but because it was good, could be amazing, and puts a lot of effort into becoming worse. They somehow got into their heads that grinding was why people liked to play it, and they should make more grinds at every turn.
It’s still better than Last Epoch (sorry devs, but it’s still beta here), so if you like this game, it’s worth looking at. In fact, most of the problems mentioned in this thread are solved if you simply play the game to about the halfway point (level 80 - 90), and only play cheap builds.
I agree with your ideas, specially with trading and bugs. GGG is very stubborn towards making a easy to use trade system, people are wasting hours just to trade, this condition of trade is literally unheard of any online game in 2019.
For the bugs part ; there are so many game breaking bugs unsolved or solved in months. It seems half of their studio resources is focusing on creating cosmetics instead of fixing damn bugs.
My only fear that EHG follows that path and falls into the greed… I hope not.
