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

First i like to say that i think the game is much improved compare to CB. I like it a lot and i think a3 is very well designed. Mobs are realy hard the higher i lvl and its fun to play.

But there are 2 things i dont like and i realy hope that the devs will look at:

1.
I play mostly shadow and i have a realy big problem with my mana pool. There are no support skills near my starting zone, (except the 2% mana leach) that i can easely take. So i am starting to lose the fun in playing at the moment (near lvl 50) becouse: You broke clarity imo (way to high manacost for the low regen) and i can only use one aura (same problem to high manacost). My main skill is doublestrike with a few supportgems: 28-mana. I can only attack a few times before i oom. I have mana regen and mana leach (6%) on my gear and neck/belt/rings. So this is a real let down for me..

I know the solution is to go near the witch: but this is stupid i think couse i am a claw user with acrobatics..those skills are mostly in another direction.

I hope the devs will understand that this mana problem limits the build variation in a big way. At least for me.

2.
The lag and rubberbanding. Often mobs are not where they are on screen and sometimes my chararacter is placed in the middle of a group mobs. This is way i dont like to play HC.

Nevermind.

I never ever post to forums but this game is so amazingly good i had to. Thank you so much for making this wonderful game. I've played through the 3 acts and i must say this is exactly the game i have been looking for, for many many years. Has everything i have been wanting that games have been lacking (and i play many over about every console); Customizable skill tree, wide range of skills for your choosing, great grip that pulls you into the game and wanting more, wonderful dark world, even darker dungeon crawling, great challenge (very important), amazing scenery specially in act 3 (<3 last place), wonderful storyline, wonderful quests, wonderful loot system, and wonderful replay ability (one of the important things to me). So from me to all of you, thank you so much for renewing my faith in the gaming industry for the first time in a very long time. Look forward to all you do with this game and please keep the important challenge and absolutely no pay to win, to a lot of us it means more than most things. =) Amazing game all around, well done.

As an old d2 player i welcomed this game as D3 became such a massive failure.

After running a couple of toons in closed and a few more now in open beta
i have bad feeling that this game at its current state is a group only
at higher level.

Going through normal is not a problem as damageoutput from mobs scales with
skills and the gear i have found so far.
The pain that follows is what makes me feel meh why bother.

The step between acts should be smoother and not the brickwall that you may run in to
in some zones.
Running solo should be much easier than it is now,after all,i don not benefit from group
auras or increased lootdrops.

Tweak this,and hope that will happen,and the game will great.

I've been playing some hours this week and this are my (bad) impressions at the moment : (I have too much good impressions to note them.)

- Removing gold is somewhat strange... I mean, why removing gold for some roleplay reason when all exiles can still farm infinite resources on the island ? I found it amusing until I wanted to buy advanced item at merchants and found out that I had to transform all wisdom scroll to portall scroll then to other things then to others things... etc... buying them one by one by clicking in the merchant page and then back in an open inventory slot... it's just a pain in the ass and a big loss of gameplay and there is no good point to balance it that I know of. (I don't know if I'm doing it wrong, but I found nothing in the game interface to help me. So even if there is, it need to be more visible).

- Comparing item is hard. I would like to know, when getting a new item that seems a good replacement for the one I wear. I spend to much time wondering if my stats will go up or down. Like trading evasion rating for armour, attack speed for attack damage, attibutes for sub stats etc...

I started playing during the open beta release and have reached the end area of chapter 3 with a currently lvl 39 Shadow.

To get it out of the way my build is melee and somewhat flawed but fixable with a few more levels to invest in the health nodes I branched to. That being said currently I am having a hard time of it with the 3rd level of Solaris Temple. I was able to overcome the Kole one hit kill situation several times so I know I can succeed with my flawed build all things being equal.

The main gripe I have is of course the desync situation since my current build relies on a guerilla tactic of using whirling blades to escape crowds. In certain areas, particularly multi tiered map zones, there are lots of large crowds which means getting desynced into the middle of a crowd for several seconds of helplessness happens most often in the hardest areas.

My main problem with this and why I am hesitant to even beat normal and open myself to forfeiting exp upon death is that not only in these areas do you get desync deaths but instances tied to the same multi level map area reset behind you. If I overcome my builds handicap to reach the third level of an area and die to desync I have to redo prior floors of the same overall dungeon. To be blunt cleared floors should remain clear and not reset behind you in my opinion. The instance timer should be tied to the overall area and not the floor of the area. It is strange that if you go back down the same stairs you came up after a period of time the prior floor has suddenly reinvented itself and all your old friends have decided to come back to life.

Another issue I am having trouble with is that there is no color blind support. The shades of green and red gems and their corresponding sockets are very difficult to tell apart for some of us who have red-green color blindness.

One more thing I would like to see is a way to barter without actively spending time engaging in trade chat. Specifically being able to set items for trade at a value to the open market and being able to search for items in the same manner. Not so much like D3 but more like KOL, perhaps through the noticeboard or something similar where you can set up a shop.

Other than that I am having an overall good time with the game. I would like to see some more variance with the gameplay. For the most part the standard hack slash loot element is above and beyond what I expected but I feel like the game could use some other element to break up the monotony. I tried PVP before reaching level 29 and did not have a single evenly matched fight, either I got stomped or I slaughtered the challenger in the first round and then they left.

I just play 1 day. The graphic is quite bad. Seems like all characters got same quests which is incredibly boring. Guess those 2 atm are for me the most noticable after few hours of gameplay. I welcome the lack of gold, i welcome the gems system, all seems kinda new and interesting. I lack some small things like, how hard i hit in numbers when i hit a monster. Toggle ALT button for being able to see stuff on ground all the time(ON / OFF).Some health bars on monsters. When i play a new game i should be a little bit more enthusiastic than i am at the moment. Maybe a bigger zoom out might help the graphics (2013 i would expect a bit more).

To start I'd like to share a little of my gaming background. The first computer game I ever played was the original Diablo, and I have been a fanatical fan of the genre ever since. Having played essentially everything that remotely resembles Diablo (and having enough hours logged on D2 to automatically certify me as insane), I've had a lot of experience with both the ups and downs of the genre.

With that said, I find Path of Exile to essentially be a more free-form evolution of Titan Quest, with Titan Quest being more focused on unique skills and skill synergy opposed to passive synergy.

At first glance a lot of skills and gear don't feel polished yet. Because of this there are extreme gear and level checks for a variety of builds/skills which is very off-putting.

Minions (specifically Zombies and Specters) feel terrible for most of the game. I have a Witch Summoner with max passive minion life nodes and a minion life support gem going through cruel, and all throughout normal and cruel zombies get absolutely massacred. Sure, they can do their part against the weakest peons, but those monsters aren't problematic anyways. When they get 1 shot by ranged mobs or melt to any sort of AoE skill, be it fire on the ground or lightning spells etc, they are basically useless even for suicide bomber purposes. They are also basically useless against every major boss. Corpses are a huge limitation, and for the most part these summons don't compare to Skeletons because of that. Despite being significantly weaker, Skeletons provide far more utility. Now I've seen streams and vids of high level summoners, who get carried in parties, do very well on end-game content, but that seems to defeat the purpose. The math for zombies feels pretty wonky to boot. The health increase upon leveling the skill is a tad absurd, which means you can be sitting for many levels with zombies at half effectiveness for what they should be relative to your level range (a lot of spells are like this, but it is even more noticeable in this particular case). A similar issue occurred in d2 and titan quest, where minions would be laughable on lower difficulties and immortal on Hell mode (except against bosses) because they implemented scaling minion health with difficulty levels.

Elemental damage is a somewhat bizarre mechanic. Connecting crits with elemental effects is very one note and adds a great deal to the effectiveness of elemental damage. It seems that, for the most part, elemental damage trumps physical. It is so much easier to get elemental damage on gear and to supplement your own damage with auras than it is to do just physical. I like the idea of having characters that do elemental damage. That's a cool concept, but I don't like that it is the obviously superior route with relatively limited gear options. It eventually boils down to the question of why wouldn't you use elemental damage? Maybe there is a theoretical super-gear character that doesn't necessarily benefit that much from it, but in general elemental damage seems to be king. Maybe I'm old fashion, but sometimes I just want my character to hack at things with a sword, not a cosmic energy weapon that crackles with elemental power. Sometimes I want my poisoned dagger not to be on fire. Having a weapon that does 1-2 fire damage doesn't bother me. Relying on that elemental damage, however, does in fact bother me, from a thematic point of view. Which leads me to my next point.

Auras seem silly. They do far too much and are far to accessible for what they offer. The elemental damage auras are amazing. Why wouldn't you take them, especially if you're close to the Templar area (which many builds seem to beeline it for regardless of where they start because it is simply that good)? The most powerful characters seem to be focused around how they can abuse having as many auras as possible, being literally unable to fit half of their skills on their own skillbar. I don't mind auras as a concept. It seems that the auras in this game had the best of intentions, as support skills (there are passive nodes that seem to suggest this, and some of the auras look like they were meant to help boost parties). However, they have been relegated to being mere supplementary raw stats, which I find to be exceedingly boring. In a game that boasts a 1350 point passive skill tree, you'd think generic skills that just add passive stats would be pointless.

As a side note, traps also seem to be far too effective for almost no investment.

And lastly, leveling skill gems is annoying. I don't see any real reason for this mechanic other than to be tedious. Gear as you level may not support all the gems you want to use and as I mentioned earlier, under-leveled skills, especially spells, can be exceedingly underwhelming. If you're not a decent planner (or god forbid you're new to the game) you may over level certain skills. And if you want to swap gems between characters the level difference can be very annoying. I really can't wrap my head around a reason as to why skills don't just scale with current level/requirements met (if customization is an issue than simply adding an option to de-level a gem you're using shouldn't be terribly difficult). It doesn't make a huge difference in game play. Most of the gems you'll want to be maxed out anyways. To me this option seems far more elegant than the arbitrary power gaps in 20 skill levels.

As far as actual game play goes it is fairly standard, but it has some issues. The AI is about as vanilla as most games of the genre. Some of the bosses are a little trickier which is cool, but most of the mobs are about as dumb as bricks and don't utilize their skill sets even close to proficiently. The desyncing and little lag spikes here and there are pretty bad, but I'll chalk that up to it being in beta. Zones resetting on their own are also exceedingly annoying for a variety of reasons.

As for things I like: I like the faster pace of late game; it's very d2-esque (Enigma+Fast Cast). I like skill modification via support gems, even though for most of the skills it is a tad one dimensional (there are some pleasantly clever and complex combinations out there, though). I also like the stat arrays when it comes to equipment and the corresponding equipment types (which is also part of the reason I don't like Auras as they are).

For the most part PoE looks somewhat promising. So far it's not amazingly innovative , but it is solid enough to sink some time in and have fun with friends on.

I hope this feedback is helpful and I wish the developer the best of luck.

Hi, ill post here my first impression/feedback too :P

i did play as a witch summoner and i have just finished the 3rd act at normal difficulty

the game overall is pretty enjoyable in particular i love the final fantasy skill tree that offers a lot of customization and meaningfull option rather than the nowaday dumbed down approach we see from other games

i also like the gem approach and the ability to link support gems to skill ones to buff and change the main skill/spell.

the lack of currency feels a bit strange at the start but i think is a good idea to link the "currency" to consumables and, hopefully, it will help the stability of game economy.

about the experience ingame, the difficulty felt ok, as a "necromancer" my minions where generally quite effective and is quite fun to run around with a small undead army.

about the summons in particular...

spectre seem to be pretty good with no scaling issues

skele feels "appropriate", it doesnt require corpse and can be summoned on the enemies

zombie on the other hand can probably get some tweaks, especially on aggro range, many time i had skeletons attacking enemies on the screen but my zombies where standing still near me, the situation seem to improve if my character attacks too, but if i move a bit they seem to ignore the enemies if they are not in close proximity... they also felt a bit weak, but it can be because of this aggro issue.

another problem with minions is that is veeeeeeeeeery difficult to target the enemies when they are surronded by my horde of undeads... it will be nice to have the ability to toggle and untoggle friendly targetting so during combat it will be easier to focus on the opponents or just to check their life/properties.


if game difficulty felt generally ok, i think some bosses where a bit too hard... in particular piety (first time in the incinerator dungeon) seemed way overdone... she was attacking me from outside the screen, had a chain lightning direct attack with good range that hit me even if i was behind walls/pillars and she was spamming orbs of doom that instapopped me and my minions :P... in this encounter in particular, i felt there was no real strategy to beat the encounter and i just kept spamming sparks or bolt from outside the screen hoping to hit her.


death penality... ofc i have not experienced it yet but in the past i have played games with xp penality on death and... i think is extremely annoying... imo it doesnt really add much to the game or the challenge is just a tedious tax to pay and that generally makes the game less fun as it kinda forces to play supersafe when you are near the level up.

personally i will prefer some veeery minor bonuses when you dont die, or the option to choose a league where thers no xp penality.


thats it, as said so far my impression is very positive, sorry for bad english and keep up with the good work :)

Well as a first impression it is nice; however, with that said unplayable. I have been trying for days now to continue on in the game, but either I am getting desync, disconnected, or crashes. I have been stuck trying to do Market Sewers for days now. And it's starting to become upsetting when all I want to do is play the game, but can't. I'm getting these ungodly MS problems for a connection that I know I usually only have about 20-70 MS usually in any other game. I know that there is a lot of people now that it has opened, but this is at any point in the game, at any time of the day I have tried.