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

Dropped game few leagues ago, I think during protoss blue laser beams invasion on rainbow bridges. Judging by stuff like tower defence I did not miss much. However, from all leagues I played I think this one has best design idea:

- It is fully optional (but please fix dude spawning during boss fights)
- You choose the time and place you engage content (which is usually some wall or rock or bunch of trees between you and Nuclear Missiles TM)
- You have some control over difficulty of content (extra Chaos Damage + more loot? Bring it on, I'ma immune. Hexproof? nothx)
- Rewards are instaneous and well, rewarding (if you close your eyes that most uniques have no use for you anyway; but that's just me, as a D2 pre op-runes fan I believe that no item system in ARPG should dominate over others because it takes away choice in how you gear up)

I like how Master missions are linked with mapping, as again, the player decides how many he wants to do and on what difficulty. You can farm a Master you want whole day if you want.

The Atlas in the beginning was a bit confusing, and I still don't know what House Atreides, House Harkonnen and such colors mean on it, or what increases chance to meet the bosses, but kill bosses > collect shiny rocks > upgrade maps is easy enough, and I like how goal driven it is.

I am not sure why people rage so much on some of these bosses, their mechanics are quite obvious compared to most even old NES arcade games - Baranar's Star with his checkers/can't go there, Banner Saga dude you just do damage to and clear totems and House Ordos I figured out on first try, although I do run CI and I can see him being potentially annoying for melee (but then whole game is).

Sadly the good ideas (collect parts of monsters and make your own bosses - this can be its whole own game) are often ruined by GGG visual department. The thicc black sauce for Metamorphs is probably one of the worst effects I've seen so far in game, and summoning them can lead to FPS drops and even crashed my game twice. I realise you tried to make them distinct, but because player would always fight them 1 on 1, and you can see morph on the map, it's not a big deal; and because everything is under same slime effect, you can't see that well the phases of the morph when it shapeshifts.

Remove the black thing, and if bosses would switch between phases slowly and had some windup before changing to new attack patterns it would work so much better.

And one other thing.

For the new/returning player like me, the amount of affixes/suffixes on items became just overwhelming. I think it is long time players should have gotten an option to not alt-tab every time they craft to remember what weird glow on item can roll what. It should be either upgraded crafting bench, or some affix/suffix encyclopedia inside the game.

Partially I'd like to say the same about "heart and soul" of PoE, I mean the skill tree. I understand it is supposed to be grand puzzle/tuning tool to figure out, but I doubt anyone uses it to actually build their characters in because it simply has no in-bult hints and respecing has a price. So people who are good at the game just use PoB and such, and in the end grand skill tree acts just like some way to scare new people. I think tweaking it should be cheaper and it should have more information in UI about values it adds to your build.

Still enjoying the most powerful excel spread character building in ARPGs on the market.

This is my first full League (I started towards the end of Blight) and there's much to love and hate about this.

After almost 250 hours and multiple Ascended characters, I figured this was a good point in providing my impressions.

The Good:

Character and gear customization is a lot of fun, however I was hit with Paradox of Choice for the first fifty hours, as it was way too much. Once I got used to everything, I enjoyed the large customization aspects.

Trading is amazing and it's nice to have that social aspect.

The fact that the League content is opt-in and not opt-out. I don't have to deal with a Metamorph if I don't want to. This was the same in Blight, personally I don't like tower defense games and that one drove me nuts.

The controls are easy to get used to and customize like a dream. Anything that lets me put actions where my finger movements feels natural is such a welcome thing. I don't like having to think about if I'm hitting the right or wrong keyboard button.

Many options to customize the difficulty of the end game system. Meaning I can re-roll a map a million times to get it as I want it, toss in shards or scarabs or switch sides in the mines to delve wherever looks good. The possibilities and new discoveries kept me interested in coming back and pushing my own gamer limits.

The Labyrinth, I love and hate this thing but more than enough love to put it under the good list. It's fun and challenging and when you get your Ascendancy points, you almost spill your coffee in excitement. This is a very well done mechanic.

Overall, I really loved so much about this game... Until, I hit a wall that I should not have hit and it took my fun factor from 100 to -100.

The Bad:

As a user I cannot fully control my gaming experience. I am stuck waiting for some mythical RNG deity to bless my progress. This has become a source of profound frustration, enough that today I scared the heck out of my cat when I started screaming.

I love delving, hanging out in the mines and seeing how far down the rabbit hole goes has been relaxing and interesting. Yet, I have been stuck now for several days because Niko will not show up for maps and he only generates 1 white tier mission a day. At depth 88, that barely pays for 10 minutes of delve time.

I would be happy to see Niko (or all masters) no longer be randomized and limited in the Atlas. Let them be free to run as many times and at as high a map tier as I can make it. This way I can enjoy the parts of the game I want to play in.

If I want to spend my Sunday doing nothing but map, map, map, delve, delve, delve, map, map, map, and repeat. There is no reason why I should not be allowed to do that. That is my enjoyment of the game, that is how I want to play and the game's RNG of Doom is stopping me from that.

Speaking of the RNG, a storyline that is dependent on it is also obnoxious. Maybe I'll see a conqueror, maybe I won't. I gave up after a while because there was no clear path for me to advance and enjoy the content and the chase. I don't mind grinding, but I need to know that the grind is actually working towards something.

The RNG approach here isn't keeping me playing the game longer, it's giving me a headache and making me want to quit. I just want to play the end game content, my way which is not based around Lady Luck.

Also, any new mechanic added to the game that requires 2 hours of watching videos and reading forum posts to understand, is in trouble and you need to find a better UX Designer. There should have been a clearer in-game tutorial and explanation over how the atlas changes work. There was nothing and when you have to go outside of a game or application to get a basic tutorial, fire your UX person.

So that is my long first impression and current frustrations. Overall this is a great game but it needs to get off the RNG a little and let the player choose their own fun.

Hey Bitchy, that was a fun read, welcome to the POE community.

Was nice to see that the new mechanics not only throw off veteran players but fairly newbies to the game. Appreciate it, hope you will conquer the walls of RNG and have a more relaxing ride ;) GL HF in Wraeclast.

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zipitzip wrote:

Hey Bitchy, that was a fun read, welcome to the POE community.

Was nice to see that the new mechanics not only throw off veteran players but fairly newbies to the game. Appreciate it, hope you will conquer the walls of RNG and have a more relaxing ride ;) GL HF in Wraeclast.

Thank you, I appreciate the welcome.

I'm rather new to this game, but not a new gamer, and I feel like there are some real onboarding issues with this game. The learning curve is really very steep.

Builds. I made some mistakes while making my first build, because I just went into the game blind and the Ascendancy classes didn't support what I was doing. There really should be a refund skill points option if you're level 50 or under.

What would be even better, would be a complete "on the rails" tutorial mode. One for each of the six classes. (You need to be experienced for Scion anyway so we can ignore her). The "on the rails" mode would lock you in to picking certain skill gems, equipment and Ascendancy class. You'd still be free to make your own choices but it will always highlight the right choices to make for your build. The idea is to teach new players how to make a build rather than letting them figure out what to do.

Mechanics. The game has really far too many mechanics for its own good. I understand its part of the appeal of the game, but again, it's hard to grasp for new players. I just got up to mapping and there's the option to do Beastcrafting, Delving, Incursions, Betrayal, Prophecies, and there's also the random Abyss, Legion, Breach and Blight encounters. I wouldn't suggest to remove them, but it should be made clear that they're optional and also state what rewards you're able to ultimately get from them. I really still have no idea what is available from doing well in Betrayal and Incursions.
It may even be worthwhile to turn some of these mechanics off during a particular league. (Keep everything on in Standard)

Elemental things. I had a Tier 7 Map which was Twinned with Elemental Equilibirum and my character dealt 3 kinds of elemental damage with normal attacks. The twinned boss had elemental resistance. I spent somewhere around 5 - 10 minutes running around barely surviving just trying to beat that boss.
I also encountered this 30% elemental damage reflected map. The first few mobs I killed reflected the damage and killed me instantly. I could not do that map at all. I guess this is more of a damage reflect thing, which really doesn't make sense to have it at 30% when my damage is somewhere around 10x the value of my life!

Controls. I'm playing on PS4 and there's so much that could be fixed here.
1. There is no dedicated use button. This is the X button, but you can also assign a skill to it. So now you have the situation where you might want to pick up something, but use a skill instead, or want to use the skill, but end up picking up something instead. It should be dedicated only for actions.
2. There's no movable cursor in any inventory screens. Having a movable cursor would make things so much easier! It's especially hard to equip skill gems since the gem just goes all over the place when you try to move it to the right socket.
3. Using the R1 button to craft things is just weird. Again, give us a movable cursor instead of using the right stick to pick an item from that list. The right stick should still scroll the list, but you should pick things from it using the cursor. An even better solution would be to not show your inventory on the left side and leave it as a list of items. You pick the item with X and then your cursor is now in the second menu where you pick the crafting mod.
4. Assigning skills. This should be done from the SKILLS section in the menu ONLY. And use a movable cursor for that screen. That saves you having to redesign the UI and you won't need to use R3 for assigning skills. Then, you can free up the R3 button to have a separate function, like weapon swap. Instead of it being R3+R2, which is just weird.
5. Please take a look at Final Fantasy XIV for inspiration. It's a great example as they successfully migrated a PC MMO control scheme onto a controller.

There are other things like the skill gem system and some quirks with the item system, but I know they're changing all that for PoE 2 anyway, so no point commenting on it at the moment. :)

I actually think that there's a lot going on in the game that's good and it is fun for the most part. It does get pretty tense when the number of enemies start to increase. The artwork has been good, though a bit grotesque in places. The story is rather interesting as well, I didn't expect it to turn into slaying gods towards the end. They let you revisit the areas from Acts 1-5 again in Acts 6-10 and you get to see how things have changed, most of the time for the worse!

The complexity is really the game's best and worst selling point. I do think it's a good thing to be complex in an age where there aren't many complex games, just that there needs to be a fairly robust learning system in place as well to ensure that newer players aren't just overwhelmed and stop playing. It does look like they're on the right track with PoE 2, though.

I could go on about some other things, but I've probably wrote enough for now. 😅

I heave an idea for PoE 2<<< Ascendancy, bring a "Vampire Witch" plz full stuck off blood transform he to a sexy Vampire Princes with a whip ;)

whit bat skills and more ^^

Gave the game a pretty good go.
Supported to third level of support, though you do not count the league before even though it was the day before, I let this go, but make note, that's petty.
Game is very good, with the major drawback of very little guide, and a toxic community to attack anyone asking for guidance.
Also when I say the game is very good, i mean that in the sense of the skill gem system, and items etc, very much in line with dungeon seige of years past.
Where the game fails miserably and where I uninstalled is the crafting system, or possibly the un-ending lack of guidance in regards to alva, jun, cassia, or anything at all.
Check my time played, it was considerable, I started on numerous leagues trying to understand the rules and gameplay.
When I finally reached a level where I needed to get a 6link item, i had my 6 link chest. I spent 60 fuses and my chest was worse than when I started.
I won't be part of a gatcha game and call it an mmo, or whatever you want to call it, but I do not play gatcha games. That's just ridiculous the amount of time I put in to earn those fuses... sorry, it's a very differing opinion on how games should be run, and this type of behavior is unacceptable, and it's not something that's a design flaw, it's design intended, and you have the support I gave, but I'm actually sorry I gave it after experiencing this.
Game uninstalled.

ggg ? will learn to develop ....

The worst league ever made in POE !!! GO play other games !! quickly !!

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loloinfo wrote:

The worst league ever made in POE !!! GO play other games !! quickly !!

+9000