My review
I liked a few things:
-I loved the mechanic of creating my own skills by mixing gems. It really felt great when I thought out about linking Gain Life on Hit Gem with Vengeance and saw how radically it improved my character performance.
-Character building is complex and I am one of those autists that likes complexity, even if it doesn't work as is a case here.
- Liked the search option in passive skill tree.
But hated most:
- PoE takes a maxim “the best defense is a good offense” too literally. When I equipped Tabula Rasa my damage reduction went from something like 36% to 1%, but I started dying less often because my damage went up. You really only need high damage, high life, way to replenish life quickly and elemental resistance to have a good character in the game.
- Replenishing life is too easy. My character got more than 100 hp replenished per enemy hit, about 5% hp regeneration per second and some leach. Nearly all of my deaths were caused by being oneshot. It's because if you are somehow competent at character building the only way to kill you is to oneshot you, otherwise you will get you life back before enemies will finish you off. This illustrate why you should correct you design mistakes rather than design a game around them.
- When you get oneshot you usually don't know what has happened. You don't know which enemy has killed you. You can't react and it feels unfair. There is so much particles on screen that you don't always even know which enemies you are fighting. When you die game takes away 10% of you experience just to force you to grind more. Sometimes you get killed by lags.
- If you want to build you character you need to instal Path of Building because the game lies to you. It promises you that a new item will increase you damage by 20%, but in reality you get a 5% increase, the same applies to passive skill tree.
- Most of mechanics aren't explained in the game and you need to consult wiki if you want to know how most mechanics works. To add an insult to injury font on skill gems UI is not readable and it's not much fun to read what each gem does.
- I remember how in the early game I was using an AoE attack against mobs and single target attack against bosses. Quickly abandoned the idea of playing like this. If the game allowed me to use not AoE skills, it would be way better.
- Socket colors and links system sabotages the gem mixing system, which is the best part of the game. It's implemented as it is only to support online economy, not to make game more fun.
- This game has so much trash loot that you need to install a filter to get rid of it. At high level maps the filter breaks and you again have half of your screen covered in garbage. You need to instal a higher level of loot filter to deal with it.
- Don't even think about using flask strategically. When in trouble just drink them all, they will be replenished in seconds. You also need a flash which unfreezes you (I guess some builds have other ways of combating this effect), so roll a 100 currency items on a flask.
- Technically the game is free, but you need to buy extra stash space, otherwise managing inventory is a nightmare, especially when you don't know what to keep and what to throw away. At the start of the game I was collecting every card. Then I went to wiki to check which cards should I keep and which to throw away. I got seriously angry when I learned that there are like 300 of them.
- Game is highly addictive. Sadly it's addictive in the same way sugar and fat is. Most of time I spend feels wasted.
- Graphics are ugly and greish/brownish. Asset are of good quality, but they look like they were taken from an asset store and then someone put an ugly filter on them to make them all fit together.
- I know that a random generation of maps and encounters is a part of a genre, but I still didn't like it. Algorithm is trying to make maps feel different, but in reality you only have 3 types of maps: open maps, dungeon maps and dungeons with doors. Fuck dungeons with doors.