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

I really like Path of Exile, I like that you hear real concerns about the game and not just doing your own things. This is also a reason why I play the game and support you GGG.

as well as that, I want more free stuff. :)

thank you and

kind regards
TecNoTree

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

I would like to see the possibility to see the character moving while charge up a slow attack, not just standing still.

well two weeks in league and here's some feedback:

nobody tested metamorphs. yes, u removed(or maybe im lucky?) most annoying volley skills but here's new one: blade vortex that is set for max stages in 0.1 seconds and kills you in following 0.1 seconds.
also some metamorphs seem to be hexproof without hexproof components, but it requires further investigation.

new guardians are boring and challenge just cause they have too much damage. for example even purifier and minotaur, hardest guardians in previous atlas could oneshot you, but their attack was predictable and gave some time to avoid. baran just throws his ~6k after mitigation projectiles(t16) at random moments.

give us back mana and life sustain for spellcasters pls.
add modifier like "leech rate divided by 10 for spell hits" for tree leech sources, but dont force us to use es or play flask piano. not everyone likes it.

ty for attention.

This account is several years old, but I didn't really start playing until Legion. I played an Ice Crash build, which wasn't super powerful or "meta," but I was able to get to T16 maps and felt like I made some good progress in the game.

I'm not sure if I've messed up the new atlas, or if there's been a reversal of design philosophy, but I'm now stuck with my mapping and can't really progress further in the game. This league, in lower-level mapping, map drops were plentiful and I was able to progress through yellow maps with no problem. Now, my character is capable of doing magic/rare T11/T12 maps, and maybe normal T13/T14 maps, but the map drops have completely dried up. Even running the chiseled/alched yellow maps doesn't net me enough additional yellow maps or red maps to keep progressing. I have no red maps, I'm about to run out of yellow maps, and the vendor might have just one T9 in stock when I check her (everything else being T1-T4).

It is my understanding that PoE used to be designed in a manner where trade was necessary to maintain maps, but I was under the impression that philosophy had changed around Legion. I seem to remember the new map-drop paradigm (in Legion) was almost universally praised by both casual and hardcore players alike. A few people complained that they couldn't sell maps well anymore, but they were a tiny minority, and I assume they found other ways to make currency.

In my humble opinion, one of the primary strengths of the ARPG genre is the ability to log in for short-yet-productive sessions. Unlike an MMORPG like Classic WoW, which requires the preparation of assembling a 5 to 40 person group before running content, an ARPG is typically structured so you can just just log in and go at it. You don't have to waste time with various preparation activities before running dungeons or other in-game pursuits.

If I'm now expected to make a series of trades before every session just so I can play content that is appropriate for my character, I think I'm done here. That completely undermines one of the core strengths of this genre, and I bet vets like Brevik and the Schaefer brothers would agree. There shouldn't be a barrier that prevents the player from accessing appropriately challenging action that needs to be overcome before the beginning of a gameplay session.

Of all the changes in this league, this is the one that I am not going to tolerate. I can put up with the new boss looking like a made-for-Twitch spectacle fight that's designed to keep players grinding away for successive attempts in an effort to promote greater "engagement." I can put up with the new atlas being inferior to the old one in almost every aspect. I can put up with metamorph encounter deadliness being completely incongruous with the other content on a given map. I am not going to commit to trading just to play the game, though. I understand why trading is the way it is, and that system is fine for gear/items, but not as a barrier to just playing.

Whether I bricked my atlas somehow or the game is actually supposed to be like this, it doesn't really matter. I'm not participating in it. I'm just glad I held off on buying this year's core packs. I'm not financially supporting this sort of design philosophy.

Addendum to my previous post:

Ironically, in a Reddit thread someone made to brag about their red map sustain, a commenter was nice enough to point out that you can unsocket and move your watchstones, and people who think they've permanently screwed their atlas and map acquisition should give that a go. I had no idea that moving your placed watchstones was possible until I read that post. This seems to have fixed my red map drop problem, potentially.

I still think the old atlas gave the player greater agency over their end-game mapping activities, and the art on the old atlas was much cooler. Maybe it wasn't a perfect system, but I liked it better than what we have now.

I quit the league days ago. The game literally felt like torture to me.

I can't play the builds I love. Instead I have to play a slow ass summoner just to kill bosses.

Can't progress the atlas. It seems to be completely stuck at this point. I don't mind too much because I don't see the point in grinding it anymore since it's zero fun.

Failed the Sirus fight once. Needless to say the storms got me five times and Sirus got me once with that beam barrage. What a shit show.

Metamorphs are a complete joke. Fighting them simply feels bad. Rewards are not worth it and some of their abilities are broken.

I really loved this game. I have been playing since Nemesis league and never before I had so bad time with it.

If these issues are not resolved I will never again touch this game.
Goodbye (for now at least)

"

I quit the league days ago. The game literally felt like torture to me.

I can't play the builds I love. Instead I have to play a slow ass summoner just to kill bosses.

Can't progress the atlas. It seems to be completely stuck at this point. I don't mind too much because I don't see the point in grinding it anymore since it's zero fun.

Failed the Sirus fight once. Needless to say the storms got me five times and Sirus got me once with that beam barrage. What a shit show.

Metamorphs are a complete joke. Fighting them simply feels bad. Rewards are not worth it and some of their abilities are broken.

I really loved this game. I have been playing since Nemesis league and never before I had so bad time with it.

If these issues are not resolved I will never again touch this game.
Goodbye (for now at least)

+1

Worst League so far!
Most good viable builds became unplayable. The league mechanic is broken af (Black gooble-dy-goo=no visibility). Hard wall in red tier maps.
~3 Meta builds are suitable for the endgame and the game turned into a frustrating clusterfuck where you die your way through the maps.

The only positive feature ,in my eyes is the new atlas mechanic. (Not the Bosses!!!)

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.