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I agree with most of what you said. Trading is not what I want to do with my time, but I don't HATE it like some players.
Having said that, you should not have to trade to progress. It's just bad when you know some folks hate it.

I like this part best:

"

Unfortunately for GGG, the majority of the money they can collect does not come from that 1%... Shame their financial guy doesn't bring them in on this little secret.

I was just thinking the exact same thing last night. Apart from the gaming aspects, this is some serious idiotic business decision making on their part.

Making the game frustrating for casual players is a terrible idea. If they want to pursue their destiny in that direction, that is in the direction of "serious" players that have little or nothing to do all day but play a game, they need to re-think their financing goals.

After such a long time spent on playing this game..i came to a very strong conclusion :
It's a complete garbage.

Forgot to add a comment in this post two years ago. I will today.

Flippers destroyed your game.

Just finished merciless Malakai with third character, so I will write some feedback.

I find Path of Exile through Diablo 3 forum and since I was getting more and more angry with grift trials, I tried PoE. I am softcore casual player, so far I spent 35 hours on dual flame totem witch, 25 hours on rt cyclone marauder a 25 hours on phys crit tornado ranger and probably next 10 hours to find WTF should I do. With every character I stop playing after reaching level 70 and killing merciless Malakai, because I was getting bored with every build.

Pros:
- fresh passive skill tree and linking skill gems is very interesting, never seen something like that
- amazing level design in Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 and first half of Act 4 (I hate Kaom part, Belly of Beast and Harvest)
- currency system
- smashing mobs is very satisfying
- loot filters!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- you can trade
- great community with guides and builds

Cons:
- difficulty is very "weird" - just blasting through content on every difficulty with no problems until Harvest in Act 4 and battle with Malakai is pain in the ass (like 20 deaths with my first char on normal Malakai before he was nerfed)
- geting better gear after level 60 feels too much grindy for me, getting 6L unique item is just fantasy for casual player like myself
- long learning curve
- desync

I will stop play for few weeks, I will probably come back to this game during winter to try endgame mapping and interesting cheap builds, SRS summoner and kinetic blast look very tempting).

After playing POE a helluva lot during my summer vacation and the release of awakening , here is my very mixed feedback on the game:

pros:
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+Passive tree is nice, I like the jewel sockets on the tree and the flexibility of scion.

+Jewels are cool, and i've spent quite a bit of currency on crafting my own. I have about 2 stash tabs of jewels now, kind of fun to collect (and vaal some!) even though I cant use them all.

+Strongboxes and being able to manipulate them is fun, I actually played for 2 weeks before realizing I could apply wisdom scrolls and currency to them to change them heh. Again, these are always a welcome thing to find in maps.

+Corrupted areas I like as well, I am a bit disappointed that these seem to be nearly nonexistent in some world map areas, and it would be nice to see these a bit more often.

+Warbands are kinda neat, they along with rogue exiles keep me on my toes. I have yet to get anything interesting from them though which is sad considering how many times I come across them now that I active hunt them in maps using /global 710.

+Divination cards. I like these, although could you tone down the number of Flora's Gift and Scholar Cards? Maybe up the drop rate on 'The Gambler' so people can finish that set and get a random divination card more often? People seem to enjoy 'guess what i'm going to get from the gambler' in global chat.

+Vaal Orbs. I love these, I want these to drop more often so I can vaal orb lots of things.

+The microtransaction stuff feels very fair, and overall my experience with the game is positive enough i've bought a supporter pack. Could you do more character helm effects like the phoenix and ice crown one? Also some more color variety in these things would be welcome.

Cons:
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***I am extremely frustrated with trying to obtain certain unique items***
A large amount of appeal to hunting loot/uniques in this game is getting the loot drop oneself while doing a map. Item like Alpha's Howl, Drillneck seem to be excruciatingly rare and much needed for my own character progression.
I have a couple exalts now to be able to buy these, HOWEVER it feels like a very hollow achievement to just trade for upgrades instead of hunting your own. This feels like the greatest flaw in the game, grinding maps for hours just for piles of fuse/chaos/etc to buy the loot you want isn't exciting.

**WHY AM I SEEING MULTIPLE COPIES OF THE SAME GARBAGE UNIQUES???***
I barely raise an eyebrow when I see an orange item drop because its probably another voidhome, lori's lantern, heatshiver, belt of the deciever, doomfletch, springleaf, relentless fury, titucius's span, bloodboil ring, or something other awful thing i've seen drop a half dozen times already.

I would rather see a garbage vendor rare drop than another trash tier unique that noone will even pay 1 alch/fuse for. At least a dozen of the garbage uniques in this game should just be outright deleted or have their drop rate reduced.

***The map system and the loot rewards of lv 68-73 pool is garbage***
The highest map I have ever done was a 77, with a few 75/76s, and it wasnt that challenging to beat.
The loot was awful. yes it was alch'd and rolled.
I have almost 2 tabs of what I consider 'garbage' maps (level 73 and under) which I alch and spam through to hunt warbands, and again, the loot rewards break even for the time spent transmuting/alting/alching them so it just tedious.

***Xp progression past level 80 is tedious and unrewarding***
If I had higher maps more often, this would probably be less awful. Still, character growth in the passive tree feels like it stagnates around this level. My 2 highest character are 82 and 83, and I have very mixed feelings about continuing to play them because of the map problem and leveling speed coming to a crawl. The death penalty idgaf about that much, its just I didnt really expect the xp to crawl this slow until like level 90.

***Trading is poorly implemented***
trade chat is filled with several bots and flippers that just repeat list their overpriced junk 24/7.
having to deal with an external site to buy/sell things in a reasonable manner is better, but still feels tedious.

***Orb of regret drop rate***
I'd like to see this increased a bit, mainly from the perspective of someone that likes to experiment with character builds, its a bit painful to 'redo' a character that has progressed to about level 60ish and either becomes no longer fun to play, or has a crippling weakness in its build design that requires 30+ regrets to be playable at merciless difficulty (or able to do maps).
Characters in this scenario feel unsalvageable or prohibitively expensive enough to 'fix' that you feel that rerolling would just be the better option.

In summary:
I really like the game, and I could see myself playing it and spending $ supporting it if the highlevel mapping issue gets worked out, and you figure out how to make the unique drop rates+variety of what is dropping not so awful so it feels like I can self find a unique once a week that is worth more than just 1-2 chaos.

"***Orb of regret drop rate***
I'd like to see this increased a bit, mainly from the perspective of someone that likes to experiment with character builds, its a bit painful to 'redo' a character that has progressed to about level 60ish and either becomes no longer fun to play, or has a crippling weakness in its build design that requires 30+ regrets to be playable at merciless difficulty (or able to do maps). Characters in this scenario feel unsalvageable or prohibitively expensive enough to 'fix' that you feel that rerolling would just be the better option."


You forgot to mention when GGG releases a patch that nerfs your character into the ground. Maybe a little gift of regrets or a free respec should be granted.

"

Slimane13 wrote:

"***Orb of regret drop rate***
I'd like to see this increased a bit, mainly from the perspective of someone that likes to experiment with character builds, its a bit painful to 'redo' a character that has progressed to about level 60ish and either becomes no longer fun to play, or has a crippling weakness in its build design that requires 30+ regrets to be playable at merciless difficulty (or able to do maps). Characters in this scenario feel unsalvageable or prohibitively expensive enough to 'fix' that you feel that rerolling would just be the better option."


You forgot to mention when GGG releases a patch that nerfs your character into the ground. Maybe a little gift of regrets or a free respec should be granted.

You can level a character to 60-70 in a day. And I don't mean 24 hours. Good points throughout but rare uniques are rare for a reason, they are build changers. Don't play a build that relies solely on these items to work until you can afford it or find one yourself.

While I'm not new to the game, I have recently recruited a bunch of people to play. Some of these are Diablo players and "get it". A few others though had a bit of a learning curve and were finding the game difficult and annoying at first.

I suspect the overall "make the game harder" changes are the cause. For instance, my cousin was playing and kept dying in the Twilight Strand on normal because A) he doesn't know how to play but B) i think the monster damage is quite high for the simplest of areas.

My overall suggestion is to adjust some of the entry-level content difficulty since your ultimate goal is to increase customer base and you might scare a lot of them away by making things too difficult (on top of the fact that the game is already somewhat deep and math-intense).

I'm new, finished act 1 and played a bit into act 2 ... there still is much to discover, but I want to tell a bit about what I saw so far.

* The quality of the graphics is generally very good. I come from older games, and even if there might be better looking modern games, PoE looks very good to me.

* I don't quite understand why the starting area is so dark though. Later there are brighter areas in between the dark ones, and first I thought the whole game might be this dark.

* Act 1 already has very fast critters. Something I have troubles with. In Diablo II most critters took pasues after running stunts and I had no troubles with their speed up to hell difficulty, when some of the critters had the *bam* *surrounded* trait. In PoE some have this even in act1 - e.g. the cannibals. I'm a bit slow, and I figure this will be a major problem for me throughout the game. The only death I had to see so far counted on a suprise effect which I didn't understand till my character was dead - the water columns in Merveils lair. I was too busy with everything to regocnise their impact to my characters health. I took them for graphical effects only. Given the high speed of the enounter, for slowe people like me, unclear threats are very deadly - my charcater is dead till I understand what is going on. At the moment I am under the impression that the only characters which I can play in PoE are summoners, because the summons keep away some enemies and this give me time to think before I have to act. I feel very unclear how a pure caster build works in this game - teleport skills? or just tank swarms and use AoE spells? No idea at the momen ... I'll make my way with a summoner.

* The passive skill web has a problem - there is no easy way to learn it. Skills are only shown when hovered by the mouse, and I can't remeber this many locations to make a proper plan. Is there a printout version with all skills named, and their effects listed near the boxes? So I could study and plan offline, and not be afraid to miss something because I didn't hover that area yet. At the moment I am pretty sure I will miss-skill my first character because the web has nodes which I didn't inspect yet, don't know about, and therefore I'll make wrong choices where to go in the web. It's a problem that many games have, though, the fiurst caharcters are doomed to be lab rats, just for learning and without chance to survice for long. Dun like that, but it just seems to be unavoidable.

* I didn't see Piety when she spoke to my character. To me this was like green text out of nowhere, and if I had not read the wiki, I'd think a in-game god has spoken there, not a person. It happened twice, and I wonder if I am this blind, or if this is a common problem?

* There is no in-game explanation about vaal skill gems. I found one and it listed "corrupted" in red text. Left me puzzled - is this like a cursed item from roguelikes, which one better not touches? Will it have negative effects on my character, like corrupting it in unwanted ways? In the game there is no way to find that out. The wiki has some explanations, but I'm still confused what exactly the "corrupted" line on that items means.

* The corrupted side areas are fine. More interesting than the side areas in Diablo II. Some are easy, some surprisingly hard. I guess that's alright for this sort of trasure hunting offer.

* The swirling band effect while playing in such an area is distracting. I want to see the map, and be sure I don't miss stuff, and the movement on top confuses me. Is there a way to turn it off?


Now the biggest feature and my biggest wondering about PoE - the skill gems. First a question - are those the same as the infamous virtue gems from the lore, or are the skill gems something else?

But regardless of the answer, I find it a bit baffling that my witch is not a witch per se. She can't cast spells without gems. I haven't tried that yet, but since skills are items, skills are tradeable? Something which irks my mind, that a character can sell a skill and afterwards not being able to use it anymore.

The socket system is a fine expansion from Diablo IIs socket system, which was great already. Colored sockets and socket links add more variety, also more ways to ruin an otherwise good item. Find a "good" rare with wrong colored/linked sockets? Looks like a long time of re-rolling the sockets till one gets a good combination (if that even is possible with a rare item, I didn't try that yet).

First I thought the stash is really huge and was happy about that - coming from Diablo II, it looked amazingly big. But actually one needs all this space to keep item variants of diffent sockets? or maybe it's just my collection habits ... I figured that the space is good, and sicne I already found some "unusable" items in some tobs of the stash, I know a bigger one wouldn't help me, it's already very time coinsuming to keep it tidy.

Back to the sockets and skills - I think it would be possible to have a traditional system of skills being learned from NPCs/books or whatever, and then be intrinsic to the charcter and still make use of the advanced socket system to give PoE a unique feature over other action RPGs, without the strange fact that a character will lose a "skill" if losing a gem ...

I had read about Maligaro in the "History of Wreaclast" pages, and was very suprised when I cleared a side area last evening - the spiders den. There it dropped from the boss spider and I was like "Erm, really? An instrument this powerful drops so early in the game?". Felt strange to me, particularly that I did not expect anything but some extra exp from the side area.

Ah well. That's about how far I am into the game, and I'm looking forward to the things to come. Somehow PoE seems to be more about necromancy than Diablo II was, although there have been skeletons and undead all over D2's world, but it didn't feel so much like necromancy than in PoE. I guess this is what the designers had in mind, so I can say, it works :)

Felt like replaying poe after a very long pause. Updated to 2.0 . Launched game. Game took 10 minutes to load. I quited game. Uninstalled. Loled. Bye bye trash programming...