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Comment by Espionage724 | Hacker News Reader

I've heard Path of Exile suggested plenty of times, and personally I just couldn't get into it.

Notably back when Diablo III was still fresh, lots of people suggested PoE. To me, D3 felt more of an arcade-like game that I can quickly jump into and have fun, whereas PoE is more of an efficiency and numbers game. Like it's fun, but I just don't have that sense of being "powerful". I gradually progressed up until Act 5 in PoE (before they added Acts beyond that) and never really felt like I was all that powerful. There were some challenges here and there, but most things just died in some boring manner.

However with Diablo II as I recall, that's pretty much the same ordeal up until a certain point.

I may re-visit PoE at some point this year before D2:R to see if or how things have changed.

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PoE is good, but there are three things that annoy me about it.

First, the non-traditional currency system. There's no gold; instead you have different types of "orbs" of varying rarity. Vendors have different exchange rates for some of them, but the system is generally difficult to grok, especially for a newcomer. To make matters even more confusing, orbs themselves are useful, e.g. they can enhance item stats, upgrade items to higher quality, etc. and you need to be careful to not accidentally continue using orbs yourself when you'd be much better off trading them.

Which brings me to trade. There's no centralized auction house - instead you need to rely on a third-party website where items are listed by other players. The process of listing them is done via an in-game API I think - but then once you find an item you want, you need to whisper that player, then go meet them at their hideout and manually do a trade. Just an absolutely atrocious system overall.

The third one is the zoom level. The game feels like it plays at 800p, or maybe 1024p, and there's no way to zoom out further. Unacceptable for a game that is two decades more recent than Diablo 2, imo.

They also didn't have colorblind-friendly options for the longest time.

I used to joke GGG was so hardcore even their accessibility feature had a difficulty level.

Some people like to call it Path of Excel.

I am the type of player who starts a new RPG, gets to character creation, and spends 2 hours on the wiki looking at all the classes and races and other options to make the "right" choice. So, obviously PoE appealed to me a lot.

If you want to give it another go my suggestion is always to just slavishly follow a fun looking build guide (from the current league! things change fast) you found online. It'll cut a lot of the complexity right out so you can learn to deal with the huge amount that's still left, then slowly add it back in as you customise later.

Now now. We _used_ to call it Path of Excel.

Now we've got Path of Building (https://pathofbuilding.community/) for all your deeps needs.

I have spent many hours in that thing, it's ridiculously comprehensive. It's great the community was able to fork it when the original author went to work for them.

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