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

I don't really want to lavish over what I find positive in the game, because pretty much everything I don't bring up as a complaint is going to be a positive. The graphics and art direction are the most striking (take that as you will, oceans of blood with corpses writhing in them) I've seen in the ARPG genre, the story is intriguing and told in a way that makes me actually want to discover what it is, and the mechanics of the game are some of the most in depth I've ever seen, bearing in mind that at the beginning I was perfectly able to play the game with my limited knowledge. Additionally, it thankfully hasn't succumbed to the dreaded pay to win virus going around. All in all, in my opinion, this is easily the best ARPG on the market.

1. Gameplay

There are some things that strike me as just very odd decisions when I'm playing this game, especially considering how "hardcore" it's supposed to be. For instance, and this is me admitting to my own lethargy, Dominus was easy as hell for me to beat. SURE, I died like 50 or so times before I actually killed him, but as long as I level before I waste that 90% XP bar that I just spent one to two hours building, I'm fine. I could just spam revive and hold down the left mouse button on him and BAM, I WIN!
Seriously, this is my biggest complaint that I have of this game because it almost ruins every mechanic in it for me.
Even if I'm not playing with a hardcore character, why is my experience the only incentive to not die? As long as I level on efficient content, I have no incentive to actually try being good at anything. I can just keep dying and chipping away at their health one notch at a time. I understand there's a bit of personal responsibility and self-respect involved in that, but I'm going to be honest, at this stage in my life, I really just don't care. At all. I want my hand held. I want it held hard and to be yanked around and for a game to slap me in the face and tell me "GET BETTER OR YOU'RE NOT GETTING PAST THIS", because when it comes to a game, of all things, I'm not going to cry in self pity when I have to cheat the mechanics to get past a certain point. It's a game, the most trivial of things, and when there's an exploit I can find to progress, I'm going to exploit it more than a third world country.

I'm also left scratching my head at how inconsistent the difficulty seems to be at certain stages. On equal footings, I think I've had more frustration from Catarina's mummy revive, kill and revive missions than I've ever had from Dominus, Piety, or Merveil. It may just be that it's a counter to my build, but those Mummies can really take a beating (at least when put in comparison to other mobs of their level). What seems to be a minor sidequest winds up being a bigger challenge than major bosses, which again, just seems inconsistent. I don't care about the game being unfair at points. To an extent, I feel like most players, including myself, should attempt to study their opponents, prepare accordingly, and strike, instead of running in wildly while spamming multi-strike double-strike on a mob with Corrupting Blood and then cry when they die 30 times in a row because they didn't have a staunching flask. The problem, as I see it, is that it cheapens the experience. It makes major content seem trivial and unsatisfying when I can get my faced wrecked in half the time by a rare mob with a nemesis mod or a minor sidequest, which has happened countless times, in too many ways with too many mobs that I could possibly list.

2. Currency

The vendor recipe system is easily the worst mechanic in this game when it comes to transparency. If I hadn't looked at the wiki and youtube guides, I seriously think I would have played the entire game through without knowing how valuable 5 or 6 link items are, how valuable 6 slot items can be, how worthwhile it is to pick up tri-color 3 linked items, or the chaos for a set of rares recipe. I don't think to actually experiment with what items give more bang for their buck because I don't assume there's secret underlying rules to turn all of the assumed garbage you're picking up into something worthwhile. How am I supposed to figure out that a vaal map fragment and 6 vaal skill gems are going to get me a vaal orb? I wouldn't even think to sell stuff like that to a vendor because I'm going to immediately assume he's just going to offer me a couple scraps of scroll.

3. The Bane of ARPGs...

I hate replaying old content over and over. I seriously do. It's acceptable in most RPGs because I'm typically fully leveled and ready to retire the character. By that point, I can replay in a different mindset with new skills and a new plan of attack... Having to play the same story through and through with the same build, the same character... I stop caring. I stopped caring. It's why I don't play Torchlight 2 anymore. It's why I stopped playing this game for about a year. I only picked it back up again because I saw the Forsaken Masters content, and now I play exclusively for the mechanics. They're what separate this game from its competition. I could give less of a toss about the story because I know there's really not much to be had.

In a way this is great, because it means the gameplay is so good I don't need anything but, however, it's not enough to keep me interested for more than a half an hour to an hour at a time at most. This isn't the sort of game I sit back with on a weekend for about four hours and really enjoy and immerse myself in. I know most ARPGs aren't, because typically they're so mind numbingly repetitive and basic that it's hard to find yourself immersed in anything. Yet this game totally did. I remember my first five to ten hours of gameplay were some of the best I've ever had. This is such a beautifully realized and horrific world, it's hard to not pay attention. The caverns of Merveil were so well done I almost had chills up my spine when I first saw her ghost. That was an amazing feat of in-game story telling. And it fell flat the second and third times and just became background noise. That makes me sad beyond reason.

4. Microtransactions

I know it's been said and I won't be the last, but it is a criticism I have of this game, so I'm going to make it.

I'm putting this in spoilers because I know how volatile this subject is around here, and I'm not looking to get people whining, this is just my outlook. I'm not discussing it beyond this initial post.

Let me start out by saying that these are just ideas. I feel like they would work, but I have no evidence, so if it turns out I'm just stupid, by all means, see me as such.

1. Block progress by resetting an area when an Exile dies.

We don't need to wipe a character when someone screws up and underestimates an area. It's okay, we all make mistakes, and people shouldn't be penalized hundreds of hours of game time for one mistake. However, I should not be able to brute force my way through Dominus with infinite lives! I completely and irrevocably ruined the end of this game for myself by doing that. It was completely unsatisfying because of my way of doing it. Is that my fault? Hell yes! But it's also the games fault for being so easy to manipulate. I shouldn't be able to cheese my way through a game without opening up a console command or entering up down left right A B A B. At least then I get a sense of my cheating. I shouldn't be able to get through content by exploiting game mechanics. It's a simple solution that's been implemented in countless games, and I think it would make fights in Path of Exile SO much more satisfying to have them reset should I screw up. If I get Dominus down to a sliver of life and he kills me at the end of it, guess what? I should have to do that entire fight over again. If people get stuck, tough cookies, look at your build, fix what you need to, level past the content, get better gear, do what you need to, if you want that victory, then earn it, otherwise it just feels like grinding in an MMORPG, and I HATE that feeling.

2. Keep working on balance.

I understand this is just going to be part of the game for the rest of it's foreseeable life. It's just the way of it. All I can say is that the sweet spot hasn't quite been hit and to keep tweaking. Particularly on the Forsaken Masters Content. A lot of that feels overly difficult when put in comparison to the primary storyline (Except Haku, his content feels laughably easy).

3. Offer better visuals for Nemesis mod spawned mobs

This is more of a minor complaint than anything else. I just feel like if a monster is going to possibly smash my face in, there should be something a little more threatening besides some highlighted text under their name when I hover over them. Immersion and all that.

Or you can take satisfaction in the pain it brings me to die almost instantly due to my carelessness, you sadists.

4. Clearly elaborate on currency and other gaming mechanics in an intuitive, yet interactive way that does not involve going to a wiki page.

Pretty self explanatory. Tutorials. In-game manuals. Forbidden Knowledge side-quests where one must go and seek the knowledge. Anything would be better than the current trial and error or visit the wiki system. This goes for all game mechanics. There really shouldn't be any secrets to the game that people aren't made aware of in-game. It doesn't make the game mysterious. It just makes it frustrating when I have to alt-tab to look something up.

Speaking of which, I know it's the nature of the F2P beast, but an offline mode so that I can play when a storm knocks out the cable... Just saying. Brownie points.

5. MOAR STORY!!!

I want to be immersed as I'm leveling the way I was when I first picked this game up. The way I pick it up with each new character. Plain and simple.
This would be one of the only ARPGs that I know of to do such a thing.
There's so much good in this games storyline, but it gets so lost in each replay and I hate that because I respect this games story telling more than 90% of every game I've ever played.

I can't help but feel like in some way each replay belittles the storytelling of this game and that, to me, is a crying shame.