Path of Exile

[lemekim]

I found the ambiance and starting story very reminiscent of Age of Conan. Very visceral. More like Diablo 1 than any other game to come after it. With skills being socketable, and everyone sharing the same passive tree, I'm rather concerned about the cookie-cutter effect, and eventually everyone using the same skills and passives. The economy is decent, and I promise you after level 10 or so, RTM, you never have to worry about purchasing or using an item again, even with trying to stay in tip-top gear in HC, the drops become plentiful enough, it's only an issue if you're playing too cautious the first levels. I think they have a good product, and I'd like to test it more. What they have here is a very decent middle ground between D1/D2, where there are a LOT of traps. It's very easy to make a sub-optimal play experience for yourself, and things are not obvious at all.

I think in the end, the heavier action of D3, as well as the community, is more appealing. We shall see.

I have played this game quite a bit since I am still apparently not cool enough to be in the D3 Beta, and I think I have to agree with most of your points. Before I mention some of my thoughts, I should yell out a disclaimer that this is a beta and there are a lot of other things coming. The company also seems to be willing to listen to user feedback, so I am pretty optimistic there.

That out of the way, I think the beginning of the game is decently balanced - you can sort of muddle through the passive skill tree with any class even without a clear goal and pick whatever skills seem coolest to you, and still beat the story part. The drops are decent enough to provide you with gear along the way, and for things that you don't find, there are Orbs that allow you to roll some rare items to fit in that particular slot. The skills are fun to play around with once you start getting support gems, and the game play is pretty fluid and entertaining, with the flask mechanic to keep your health/mana up rather than having to hunt for potions.

If you choose to play through to the end-game, which currently consists of series of randomly-generated zones a la Shadow Vault in Torchlight, things get much tougher - and this is where some of the weaknesses come through. Because this is one giant skill tree, and because by the end game, most characters can easily spec in a completely different portion of the skill tree, instead of having 1-2 cookie cutter builds for each class, instead you get maybe 2-3 cookie cutter builds that EVERYONE would spec into (Avatar of Fire/Weapon Elemental Damage builds, Ice caster builds and probably Summoner builds). Essentially, you decide on the build first, and then pick a class that would give you the best choice of passive skill points. There needs to be either more significant passives that really make a difference in a build to add more viable builds (which I believe is planned), or the classes need to be a bit more distinct. As an example, a Templar currently is probably a better bow user than a Ranger, which doesn't make much sense to a first time user.

I think another issue that I am not too happy about is that getting even a decent end-game gear can be frustrating - the most common way is to craft the gear yourself, but because the difficulty of getting higher quality gear (more sockets, more links between sockets, better damage prefixes) is pretty much exponential, you may need to spend a lot of currency to get the gear that you want - or sometimes run out completely of currency without getting what you need. I don't think there are any plans to change that; but rather than hooking you in much like farming for that desired unique can do, this seems to frustrate instead.

Well, those are probably my main two gripes with the game right now. I think the base is very solid, and the game should give people a pretty good way to fill that Diablo void for a bit, but I think Diablo 3 will have it beat in the longevity department, which is troublesome for Path of Exile, since it's supposed to be free and make money in the micro-transactions.

P.S. Check your PM.