Path of Exile

[vor_lord]

Ok, I've a few hours invested in an Anarchy bow ranger now (my initial idea after a minute of looking at the tree was to go with Point-Blank + Iron Reflexes, and picking up lots of +%evasion and +life nodes).

Onslaught melee was unpleasant from the very beginning. I'm much happier with this, though of course I've already screwed up my first build. It's a throwaway idea that probably sucks. Rain of Arrows is so good in the early going. I've been using mostly Rain, with Puncture+Poison on dangerous mobs (plink and run).

In particular in these games I've always wanted to make characters that slow/freeze (cold damage in this case). But I need to get a better handle on the game, and elemental damage seems trickier to wrap my head around. So hence the physical damage bow ranger.

The good:

• Passive skill tree is very flexible and interesting
  
• Many degrees of freedom in character design
  
• Combat continues to get more and more interesting
  

The bad:

• Inventory tetris (seriously?? one of the worst ideas to keep from diablo)
  
• Scrolls of wisdom (identify scrolls) -- ditto
  
• Crafting/currency -- this is confusing and distracting to a beginning player
  
• Terrible load times (I measured 3 minutes 47 seconds between clicking the icon and actually being able to log in). Something is messed up. Sometimes level load times are a bit long, but it's that initial startup of the game that is so annoying.
  

Overall I'm feeling myself starting to get sucked in. I really want the load time issue resolved -- is anyone else having this problem?