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

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silumit wrote:

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bd33 wrote:

all pc's ppl are using are well above system requirements

It' just the system requirements weren't updated since OB at least, and since that game become... let's just say, much more demanding.

The game has also become much more optimized. I can run PoE on my integrated graphics card which I couldn't do before.

Hi all
Two months after discovering PoE, and becoming quickly quite addicted, a few of my "first impression" feelings, in case anyone in GGG is bored enough to read through all that.

What I like:

- Skilltree. That's absolutely great. Gives incredibly high replay value, I don't think any other game, in any category, compares with it.
- Gems sockets / links system. Again, great system. Very original, and endless possibilities. Takes a while to get used to, but worth the effort!

- Atmosphere. Music, graphics, voice acting, are all quite good. Could be more lore texts/dialogues, but the few we have are fine.

- Character classes. Classic for the most part, but nicely balanced. Make me want to try all of them.

- Gameplay. Nothing too special there, typical diablo-like, but it is smooth and it works just fine. Just enough hotkeys to make things interesting and keep them easy to learn.


What I don't like:

- First and foremost: the trade system (or lack thereof). Seriously, guys, it's pathetic. You need something, anything, to improve it. What would already be a very poor system in any other game is made unbearable in this one due to the "leagues" architecture (sellers you try to contact are often in another league, and therefore unavailable). Thankfully, there is an easy solution to it coming soon: SSF. I know for sure all my new characters from next week on are going there.

- The Labyrinth. I simply hate it, to the point that I have decided to stop trying to ascend my characters more than once each, twice max. Won't even try the merciless lab. I know I will never see the high endgame content with unascended chars, but hey, I play to have fun, and I simply don't find anything enjoyable at all in the lab. Two main reasons for this: first, it is WAY too long. Give me a chance to save during my run and I might give it another go (just being able to log off and come back later at the same spot, doesn't have to refill my flasks or whatever). As it is I get bored to death halfway through, or have to leave for RL reasons. Second, it is completely independent of my level/gear/skills. I have exactly as much chances of dying there as a lvl 40 low-gear or as a fully equipped lvl 80. Doesn't make sense. While I don't want things to be TOO easy, there should be a point in a RPG where low level content becomes easy for my character.


What I am concerned about:

Not too sure what to think yet, big concern at the moment: the constant revamps between leagues.
Guess I will have to see how it goes next week, but the announcements got me worried. I don't play temporary guilds because I like to explore fully the universe and slowly develop a character. Just knowing that the world is going to end in three months is enough to keep me from starting in it.
If the skill tree is to be fully re-shaped every two three months as well, it is a major turn off for me, takes away all my motivation to keep progressing.
Evolution is good. If it means building up on what we have and expanding it. If it means wiping out everything and starting again (and again, and again), it is in my opinion bad.
Wait and see...


Bit of a wall of text, sorry.
Thanks for reading
Rastakwer

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Rastakwer wrote:

- The Labyrinth. I simply hate it, to the point that I have decided to stop trying to ascend my characters more than once each, twice max. Won't even try the merciless lab. I know I will never see the high endgame content with unascended chars, but hey, I play to have fun, and I simply don't find anything enjoyable at all in the lab. Two main reasons for this: first, it is WAY too long. Give me a chance to save during my run and I might give it another go (just being able to log off and come back later at the same spot, doesn't have to refill my flasks or whatever). As it is I get bored to death halfway through, or have to leave for RL reasons. Second, it is completely independent of my level/gear/skills. I have exactly as much chances of dying there as a lvl 40 low-gear or as a fully equipped lvl 80. Doesn't make sense. While I don't want things to be TOO easy, there should be a point in a RPG where low level content becomes easy for my character.

- You could tackle end game content with not fully ascended chars, you definitely could.
- The normal lab is getting shortened in 3.0.0 it seems ( maybe a bit cruel too ? who knows )
- For this piece of content, it seems that GGG did want to provide something that cannot completely be over-leveled. Having a lot of armour helps like a lot against spike traps ( and darts too I guess ), so many gauntlets become easier. Evasion works against darts also.

Thanks Fruz!
That was a very encouraging and comprehensive answer. Appreciated!
:-)

Here is my first impression upon returning after taking a ~1 years break from poe:

Pro:
-Still the same great game with the same great gameplay with a few new fun mechanics thrown in.

Con:
-Still the same terribad trade system. I just spent 2 hours PMing players to try and buy a (semi-common) build enabling unique (1-40c) and not 1 of them responded. I offered to pay the buyout %100 so it's not like I was asking to buy a 6L shavs for 1c. This trade system is so bad that I'm quitting again and taking my money to blizzard where casuals like me who don't live in their mom's basement can enjoy the gameplay without having to spend all day grinding/flipping for a semi-common unique item.

TL;DR
I came back after a year only to find the trade system still cripples what might have been the greatest game of all time. Now I'm gonna go make Blizzard slightly richer. Deuces.

Add the atlas Atziri and Uberatziri, 128% that was.

Hey, a short feedback from a noob here :)

A couple of years ago, I tested POE and I didn't really liked it and stopped after a short time.

10 Days ago I read about all those new things they will implement and thought, I could give the game a second chance. I had absoluteley no expactations to it, and my first impression was something like "same old shit".

I didn't know how wrong I was at this point.

For a beginner many things are really frustrating, cause you don't know anything and the game don't explain enough to learn it. Often there are such wtf moments like "Why I died now? My resistances are looking ok and I'm a onehit..."
Movement, feedback from fights etc all those things doesn't feel satisfying at the beginning.

But this time I didn't uninstall the game like years before, I really wanted to know, why so many people are that enthusiastic about POE.
After some really frustrating hours I started to ask questions in the (german) global chat - and that what happend than was a huge surprise. It felt like the guys were really happy to help a noob. They explained everything, told me what to do next. Told me that links from socket so socket are a good thing (yea... lol).

They gave me some yellow gear to optimize my character ... All of a sudden I had a templar, which worked fine - nice movement, damage was okay, and I wasn't a one hit wonder to everyone anymore.

Compared to other communitys that was the greatest experience I had for a long time of playing h'n's games.

With all this support I managed to finish the merciless campaign almost solo. Just needed a little help (from the communiy of course!) with Malachai (merciless).

After that was done, I started with those rift things - ehm, I'm sorry - maps, and managed to clear tons of them.

Yesterday, close to the end of breach, one of the guys from the community said, hey let's try to complete 24 challenges for you. First I said, no way - not enough time left (At this time I had 12 challenges) ... he said, let's give it a try - at the end we finally did it. That was great :)

Of course there are a lot of things, which are really impractical in POE. Specially there could be more QOL features (like items not staying in a crafting bench when u close the crafting window...) The trading system should be possible without using external tools/websites. Give beginners the chance to respec once or twice - may limited to acts 1 and 2 at normal difficulty. And many more little things - but in total as a beginner I resume: It will need some time to understand things, but if you understood some basics it's getting better and better.

Legacy -> I'm in.

I'm a new player. I have a friend who adores POE and is constantly trying to get me to play it.

(For some reason my account here is not synced to my steam characters... no idea why but I'm not surprised because this game is badly designed).

My main character is around level 50 (can't remember actually).

There is a lot not to like about POE - I don't like 99% of the player character designs, the armor/gear, weapons... I really don't like the look. I'm a graphic designer myself and portraitist so having a nice looking character is a little too important to me so let me move on from that.

My main complaint so far is just how much garbage there is in the game. Endless piles of garbage gear, garbage abilities, garbage gems, garbage jewels, garbage passives and garbage keystones.

I chose duelist (big mistake) - its a garbage class whose tree is full of garbage - and he has a dumb red shirt and most armor doesn't have sleeves to cover that up. I took blood magic keystone because running out of mana seemed tiresome but yeah that is a huge trap of a keystone and is ultimately total garbage because of how powerful auras are. My friend tried to warn me but I wanted to explore these things on my own.

The game is all about finding and sifting through garbage, making-do with garbage, and (from an exploration standpoint) slogging through levels of garbage to get a cool looking keystone ability that turns out to be total garbage. I got the instant life leech keystone and it was clearly a huge nerf to my character's performance... passive life regen must be pretty damn potent after all.

When I find a marginally better piece of gear but all the sockets are wrong so I can either waste all my orbs (as a new player without a huge stockpile of currency) or you just make due with the trash I'm wearing but which can actually support the abilities I want to play with... garbage.

It's just so much about the garbage grind and not about exploration of the skill tree, you quickly learn that most the passives are traps, most of what I want for my character turned out to be a trap; trap choices everywhere. After grabbing a few keystones and seeing noticeable drops in character performance I start to look for player build guides and the magic and fun is utterly gone.

My friend constantly lectures me on what to build instead of what I'm doing and I just don't see the fun in following character build recipes to navigate obfuscated sub-mechanics of the game and ultimately be funneled towards a relatively narrow set of viable builds.

Why is physical damage such garbage?
Why is evasion such garbage?
Why is melee such garbage?
Why are so many cool-seeming keystones such garbage? <--- this one is really utterly disappointing.
Why should the duelist zone of the tree be such garbage?

These are just a few of the game design choices that the designers should really take a hard look at. POE, even when using a solid build is a pretty hard-core kind of game, but all these crappy trap garbage choices are a devastating minefield for a new player looking to explore what the game has to offer. Spoiler: it offers garbage.

For vets, I'm sure all these things seem clear, but if you look at the in-game text on gear, items, keystones, etc from a fresh perspective, you see how horribly misleading so many things are and how much new players are set-up for disappointment if they naively select say a melee, evasion based character like the duelist and then go on to grab some of the worst keystones WHICH ALL SOUND REALLY COOL but actually will cripple your character.

Thanks for your time.

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ravenconspiracy wrote:

For vets, I'm sure all these things seem clear, but if you look at the in-game text on gear, items, keystones, etc from a fresh perspective, you see how horribly misleading so many things are and how much new players are set-up for disappointment if they naively select say a melee, evasion based character like the duelist and then go on to grab some of the worst keystones WHICH ALL SOUND REALLY COOL but actually will cripple your character.

Well, your complaints have merit, the game is big on noobtraps which is a good way to know a veteran, he doesn't fall for them. It's a design point, the game has a steep learning curve and you need to learn what works and what doesn't (or copy, but there's no fun in that).

That said, the game has a simple threshold system, as long as you ticked the necessary boxes it leaves you a fair amount of freedom beyond that. Unfortunately, that also won't happen right away, until you know what you're doing you won't be able to get creative.

On the bright side, most of the game elements have some use, sometimes mainstream and sometimes niche but few are truly useless, you just have to learn to use them properly.

How unhelpful.

Noobtraps are bad design. They should be removed.

Also, please explain "simple threshold system" because I'm certain it is neither a system nor simple - and it certainly isn't forthrightly shown to the player via normal play.

Constantly going to the wiki to figure out that a skill or a passive or a keystone is actually garbage is incredibly clunky and disappointing.

The game is incredibly front-loaded with meta-baggage and if you want to call so much garbage and noobtrapping a learning curve I suppose that is accurate but I think it is far more accurate to call it unintuitive, clunky, imbalanced, and downright deceptive.