I love Path of Exile…or so I thought. But it’s a game that can be utterly frustration because of how the design is clearly and constantly a moving target. I suppose part of the positive nature in how GGG works is that they are responsive to the community at large. However, at the same time, they are sometimes too responsive to the community at large that can adversely affect the game with no real reason.
I really had high hopes with Path of Exile patch 3.5. But I knew it was going to be problematic. Partly in that the master rework was the biggest unknown. I talked briefly before on how the master rework was annoying in that a lot of it was tied into RNG on top of connecting it with dailies. When it came to the previous masters, the basic dailies was more of a grind for reputation. While not doing them per league made it terrible, you could theoretically avoid them and not feel too bad.
But the new master rework is pretty shit to say the least. I’m not a fan of placing them in later acts. I think each of them should appear in every area as before. They should be made optional content where players can choose to give the thing a try.
Even with both Einhar and the Syndicate aspect, it really should be made optional. Instead of having these interruptions in game play randomly, why not just provide a quest breadcrumb to allow players to enter a specific area that players can perform the content? Allow the players to judge whether or not they want to handle the content.
What really sucks about the current method is that if you fuck up or miss an area, you have to do too much unnecessary backtracking. It’s really annoying. I suppose the intent is to try and kill the player while they’re doing normal stuff but that’s a really autistic design. You can still do something like a lab event and handle the situation in a similar manner.
The other thing that’s driving me crazy is the whole Incursion thing. I’m really bummed out about it. As a sunder character, Incursion is god awful. First, they made sunder into an absolute shit ability. Second, 2 handed weapons are in an awful state. You just can’t get enough damage from them. Third, as a solo player using sunder in Incursions, it’s virtually impossible to finish them. Mobs have too high health and you don’t get enough time to finish the event. Worse yet, the layouts for the rooms are pretty hideous, even when you have a near maxed out movement ability. I’m utterly convinced to going back to Arc Totems even though I ended up swapping last league.
But I want to blame a lot of the community on how this turned out. I find it not so ironic and pathetic even how people are reacting to the way stat sticks became shit and rendered melee into a worse place. It’s the same when people complained how sunder was too strong and when arc traps was too strong. They never were too strong; there’s just some stupid loudmouths on reddit without any brain cells shouting into a black hole and GGG dumbly listening to these morons.
I rarely agree with what Alkaizer says but I think he’s spot on in his assessment of numerous people on reddit. Most people there just spout off shit without thinking and then those that try to make helpful comments get shot down for no good reason. Yet GGG seem to worship all these upvoted threads and comments a bit too much it seems.
Right now, Path of Exile is in a good state in terms of sheer volume of content. However, the two main weaknesses are the presentation and leaning on the community too much for making poor decisions on abilities. I think some of the initial gut instinct ideas GGG has on abilities are in the right direction. It’s either the abuse by certain players or idiots complaining that their skill isn’t at the top that have the ability to kill the game.