EPTReasons You Should Play Path of Exile
Economy
The economy in Path of Exile is truly inspiring, and I realize that Economy is not the place a person generally starts describing a hack-and-slash type of game, but the way they’ve handled it is so elegant that it needed to come first.
Most games have two major economic problems. The first is inflation. When you play the game, you earn currency. The more you play, the more you earn. The more you earn, the more you have to buy things with. However, in a market economy, when everyone has more – the price of things becomes unstable. At one point, an item might be worth 1 million gold. Within months, it might be worth 10 million gold. This doesn’t mean it’s any more prized (it’s likely less prized, since there are more copies in the system and likely fewer players), but people have so much money that 1 million gold suddenly isn’t that much. This concept can make market-based games very hard on casual players – as rapidly inflating economies can often see situations where people log on, earn money towards a spending goal of theirs – only to find out that the price of the item they were interested in has increased by more than the amount they earned that day.
The second problem is dullness. People don’t like grinding for money. Grinding for drops is often fun – even addictive, but something about turning it into a grind for money makes it feel less rewarding.
GGG bypasses both of these problems with their token currency system. First of all, every form of currency can be used for a non-market function – meaning that effectively, every form of currency has a floor for how much it is worth, beyond which it can no longer be devalued. A token that produces a rare item, for instance, can never be worth less than a random rare item (since that’s what it produces). When currency has real inherent value, inflation is stifled.
Secondly, the currency in Path of Exile is actually interesting. Why? Because unlike real currency, it allows you to create. A little while ago, I found a high item level weapon on my melee character with 1 socket on it and turned it into a solid rare item with 3 linked sockets. Partially, this was good luck. But also partially, this was enabled because I had saved these items for this purpose and cashed in on a new weapon. There’s a good feeling that goes into making something that you don’t get from buying something.
Thirdly, it gives a person a reason to pick up every type of item. In many games (lookin at you, Diablo 3), certain rarities of item exist solely to be vendor trash. In Path of Exile, you overlook this phenomenon because you can always take a good white item and turn it into a random rare, add sockets, change linkings, etc. You can take a white item that drops, and through use of sufficiently high quantities of currency, make it into the item you wanted to drop.
Customization
If you’re new to path of exile, probably the first intimidating thing you encountered about the game was its massive, massive passive skill tree. There is a lot of customization in Path of Exile. You don’t make a generic Marauder – there’s no such thing. You make a bow Marauder, or a 2-handed mace Marauder, or a sword and board Marauder. Different weapons and different passives work differently (or in some cases, not at all) with different skills. You obviously can just log in, play some with whatever drops – but there is far more design space for customizing a character in Path of Exile than there is in other similar games. In terms of areas for customizations, there is:
1. Passive Skills – You start with 2 branches of the skill tree you can spend in and the options increase drastically from there. Over the life of a character, you end up with a ton of passive choices, meaning that your Marauder can get Ranger or Witch passives if he really wants them, or he can just get a ton of Marauder passives.
2. Gems – Gems provide you with active skills, but they also do much, much more than that, primarily due to the existence of support gems. Support gems amplify skills in very specific ways. So first, you can decide what active skills you want to use (e.g. a Duelist who likes using Burning Arrow), and then you can decide how you want to make it better (e.g. a Burning Arrow using Duelist chooses whether he wants Burning arrow to shoot multiple projectiles, or to have his arrows deal cold damage instead of fire, or to have his arrows just deal more fire damage, etc.). There is a TON of design space here. Yes, you might decide you like ground slam – but a ground slam which returns life on hit plays differently than one which hits a larger area, which plays differently than one that has a higher likelihood to stun, etc. Oh, and of course, you can link multiple support gems to each ability. Like I said – there’s a TON of design space here. It’s also worthwhile to note that they’ve put a lot of abilities in PoE which are actually interesting to use (like the Split arrow that splits wider when you click closer to your character and narrower when you click further away) and you can see why PoE is receiving so much attention.
3. Gear – Just like in every other action RPG, you can choose what gear you want to use. Color/number of sockets here matters substantially, but obviously stat selection is where you’ll be doing most of your customizing here. Useful to note here, too, that a number of unique properties are present on exceedingly rare items, which makes them not only good… it makes them good in an interesting way – the type of way you could base a character around, in some cases. But it isn’t just the unique mods that make the itemization interesting. There are a ton of stats in PoE. Some of them might do amazing things for your character (e.g. amplifying certain damage types, adding health/mana return on hit, amplifying defenses), but some might also do nothing (e.g. accuracy rating on a character with Resolute Technique, faster projectiles on a melee character, etc.). At the end of the day, each stat feels like it has its uses, and no stat seems so overwhelmingly necessary that you can’t play without having a ton of it on each item (e.g. Resist All in D3).
Altering Customization
Path of Exile has a good balance of having meaningful decisions and later being able to change your mind about them. Every decision you make in Path of Exile can be unmade, but not for free. Passives can be removed by using respect points, which you get a limited quantity of during your playthrough, but can be purchased using currency items (one of the currency tokens gives you a passive respect point). Active skills placed in gear can be removed and replaced at any time, but due to their leveling system, doing so often replaces a very advanced skill with one that’ll take a lot of time to work up to its full potential. Gear, of course, is always replaceable, but new gear may have a number/color of sockets which don’t meet your current skill setup. It’s a great mix of allowing a person to change their mind, while not making the decision-making process something that has no consequences (and therefore, need involve no real thought).
Gameplay
Path of Exile is a hard game. That has come to be synonymous with “good” lately (to me, at least) and with this one, it’s no different. It has a number of enemies which have attacks which are dodgeable, but require a high degree of attention in order to dodge. Of course, some attacks are not dodgeable, and it’s how you handle these two different types of damage (damage you must take and damage you must try to avoid) that determines how your character will play out. I wanted to note a few exceptional items on the gameplay in path of exile, though.
Flasks
Diablo 2 had health potions. Diablo 3 had health globes. Every action RPG involves damage you’re going to take, one way or another – and therefore, also involves a means to counteract taking damage. Path of Exile has perhaps my favorite health/mana replenishment option of all the action RPGs I’ve ever played: Flasks. What’s a flask you might wonder? Essentially, flasks are health potions that refills as you kill guys. So in a way, they’re like health globes. But unlike health globes, you choose when you use them, and you don’t actually have to gather them up to use them (you just hit the button they’re assigned). And unlike any health/mana replenishment option in any action-RPG I’ve played, they’re customizable. Do you want a ton of health replenished slowly – or less health replenished quickly? Or maybe you want a moderate amount of health which replenishes quickly, but only on low life. Or maybe you want run speed, or health leech, or resistances. That’s right, in addition to (or in some cases, instead of) health or mana regeneration, your flasks can actually have an impact on how your character is played.
And from a design perspective – what could be more brilliant than to say “we don’t know if we want health to come back gradually or all at once – why don’t we let you pick, and while we’re at it, why don’t we let you customize it like you could any other piece of gear”?
Difficulty
I’ve already mentioned this partially, but Path of Exile is a hard game. I’m the type of person who can count on one hand the number of times he’s died in Diablo 3, despite playing it for hundreds of hours (and later, regretting the last hundred or more of those hours) – getting to Inferno Difficulty in Hardcore (back when packs had enrage timers). I’ve played through Torchlight II on a few different characters in whatever the next to hardest difficulty was. I don’t die easily in these types of games. And yet, the final boss of this game killed me on normal difficulty – three times. Cruel has proven even more challenging and I don’t even want to look at merciless (ok, I do, but I'm feeling how hard I can expect it to be). Kripparian, one of the best-known PoE players (who also played D3 at a high level in hardcore from the beginning), got one-shot by Brutus in merciless with a hard map. It suffices to say – the game is hard. And yet, it isn’t “hard” the wrong way. Large damage hits are avoidable. There are minimal extremely tiny rooms (maps are random, so YMMV) and you basically can always get away. Projectiles are fast but you can see them coming –and other spell effects are usually either localized or reasonably lenient in damage. And unlike Torchlight II, you don't have to have crazy low drop rates in order to see the higher difficulty content.
The difficulty feels a lot like Diablo 2. It’s hard, but manageable – and you’re probably going to die a lot while you learn to manage it.
The Hardcore Experience
I haven’t had it yet, but this game is beautiful for hardcore. Why? It’s hard – but doable. You’ll die early and often (this should be a staple in hardcore, unlike some from Diablo III might expect), and therefore your measure for success lies not in what gear you have – but how far you’ve been able to get in the game, which is as it should be. I died many, many, many times before I made it through Hardcore Diablo II the first time, and I expect the number will be much higher for PoE.
The biggest drawback of PoE hardcore is also shared in many similar games: lag – the always-online nature of PoE brings difficulty to hardcore experiences. But fortunately for the recently dead, you won’t have far to go before the game gets interesting again.
Areas for Improvement
Path of Exile is in beta right now, and while it’s already better than a lot of its predecessors (and current competition), it isn’t comfortable with just being “better”. So here are a bunch of things I think the developers need to look at improving within their game.
Melee Classes
It is widely held that melee classes have various issues which make them more difficult to play than their ranged counterparts. While I believe that games like Torchlight II and Diablo 3 have gone a bit overboard in this regard (by making melee characters too tanky compared to their ranged counterparts), I think minimizing the issue as GGG has with Path of Exile is more than a bit short-sighted. The trouble is two-fold. First, melee characters take more melee damage than ranged characters, for the obvious reason that they are always in melee. Second, melee characters have more issue dodging projectile and spell effects, because they’re so much closer to the things casting them. The biggest trouble here is that we shouldn’t seek to simplify these classes by allowing them to take more hits than their ranged counterparts, but neither can we ignore that their ability to avoid damage is diminished. I think the best way to handle this is to take a more aggressive approach to granting mobility when melee abilities are used. A recent patch has put an ability called “Cyclone” into the game and while I haven’t played with the ability yet, this may come close (as it takes away the stationary aspect of swinging that both melee and ranged classes are currently bound by). My personal request is to add run speed abilities onto melee skills. As an example – take a look at Frenzy from Diablo II. Sure, it was capable of doing amazing amounts of damage, but what set Frenzy apart from the pack for me was the ability to suddenly scurry away when you saw large bursts of damage coming. Other abilities like Flicker Strike and Leap Slam also add mobility, and that likely helps a good amount of the time, too, but likely more is needed.
I wish I had a simple and concise solution here, but I’m guessing the solution will be skill-specific, maybe cycloning faster, having Heavy Strike have a super-short animation (without allowing another attack immediately). Or adding a run-speed buff gained by using Flicker Strike. Maybe a run speed passive that increases based on the number of endurance charges a player has (might work better than the 18% increased duration in the Duelist Tree). Or heck, if you’re willing to give new skills, just give me diablo 2’s frenzy. I loved that skill.
Health Nodes
It’s no secret that everyone is taking a ton of health nodes. And why not? Why would you ever spend a passive on 15% Lightning Resist when you could just get 12% more life? Having such large life bonuses is a problem – because challenging content will necessitate a player has them. Why? Let’s say one character has 1000 health – 25% more than the 800 he would normally have without passives (making that up), and another player has 2000 health – 150% more than he normally would. The difference of 125% is actually only 10-15 passive points, but where one player will be unable to receive an attack for 1000+ damage, the other player will. That either means that there is no enemy or pack capable of 2-shotting the player with 2000 health, or it means there is an enemy/pack capable of 1-shotting the play with 1000 health.
This would be nothing if the health nodes were an interesting decision – but from a gameplay perspective, it just makes your health number bigger – that isn’t so interesting. This is not an enormous problem, because of the rarity of health nodes present in the skill tree (it isn’t as though you can spend every point on health), but it’s in beta – so why not reconsider, lower the return of health passives and monster damage?
Hit Boxes
For some enemies, hit boxes are very small (and moving). There have been a number of times in my play that I have been trying to repeatedly single-target one enemy down, only to find myself clicking around the enemy instead of on it. This is quite obnoxious (though maybe I’m the only one having this problem). I wish the hit boxes on enemies could be larger to lessen the chance of Heavy Striking nothing in particular.
Or... maybe I just need better mouse accuracy....
Weapon-Type Specific Passives
To be blunt, these aren’t good enough. Why would I take a 12% damage bonus to axes when there are places I can get a 10% bonus to melee damage or a 12% damage bonus to one-handed weapons? It simply doesn’t offset the cost of greatly narrowing your weapon selection. There are some nodes which are 18% or more, but I honestly do think it needs to be more than that to justify using. How many people these days use gear-limiting passives that aren’t 1 or 2-handed weapons or bows (i.e. the overall playstyle of the character)?
Life On Hit
I've been playing a lower-level build that (I'll be honest) is probably broken. Basically, it involves taking the fastest mace of staff I can find and alternating between Ground Slam for groups and Heavy Strike for single targets. The point of doing this is that when you attack really, really fast - you also gain life really, really fast. At 2 attacks per second at level 43 (which seems good for a mace), I can gain 66 health per second heavy-striking something, and with 5.2% health regen per second, it's likely to be much higher (~135 health per second, about 10% of my health bar). With Ground Slam, I am limited only to the number of targets I can hit. If I hit 3 targets, I get 102 life per second. If 6, it jumps to 204 life per second. If 12... well, at some point, even packs of enemies which can drop me to half health in a second just can't do enough damage to finish the job.
Most likely, the best answer to this is to have Life on Hit scale down with a weapon's attack speed, so that a weapon which has a base speed of 1.7 doesn't get 1.7 times the health return (and similarly a weapon which has a base speed of .95 doesn't get about half the life return of the 1.7 speed weapon).
Final Thoughts
Path of Exile is one of the best diablo-clones I’ve played in a long time. It has better skill selection than Diablo 3, more innovative systems than Torchlight 2, a race mode to keep things fresh (never played it, but heard they’re fun), a ton of room to swap skills and support gems to make combinations of abilities, and best of all, it’s still being designed. They’re still adding to it. Here’s hoping that they keep improving it and release it in the next year or two (while the diablo-clone genre is still relevant, it won’t be forever). I think those who play it will find that it breathes new life into the genre in what otherwise has been a fairly disappointing last few years of diablo-clones.
If you’ve ever loved a diablo-clone (or diablo 2, for that matter), play Path of Exile. It’s a ton of fun, has almost infinite replay value, and is more or less designed for multiplayer.
Give it a few hours at least, and it'll grow on you - I mean for god's sake, it's free - what do you have to lose?
