I keep trying examples because it's such a strange (and popular) hole in my tastes.
Games I've tried:
- Diablo
- Diablo II
- Nox
- Dungeon Siege
- Divinity
- A few others I'm probably forgetting.
Path of Exile fundamentally changed my view on the genre and enabled me to retrospectively re-evaluate many of the ARPGs I had played to this point.
The granular level of control you have over your playstyle and strategy is incredible; it is insane how rewarding it is to be the first person to create a new approach to playing a character and have this build succeed in combat.
I highly recommend giving it a shot if you at all enjoy the cerebral, long term planning aspects of gaming.
That is, until you reach the end game and you realize how much you have to grind because of their completely random crafting system.
PoE is the game that weaned me off "but the microtransactions are cosmetic". It's simply designed to keep you ingame for so long that you get bored and buy a few hideout skins and character skins.
If you mean the skill tree, most people just follow a guide.
At the beginning? Sure. Eventually though a boredom does set it and a player seeks their own fun be it lore, own builds or something else like gauntlet. I am saying this as a person, who spent too much time on it already.
It's just like lootboxes but you farm them ingame. Still boring.
Analogy: You don't try to brute force passwords as it takes far too long, you look for smarter options. Same in PoE - you NEVER roll your gear with chaos orbs, you look for vectors to increase your chances.
The whole game is one optimization simulator and it tingles that part of my brain.
The only difference is you don't use the relatively common chaos orbs but the much less common <whatever orbs>. Time spent grinding is the same.
Still a nope.
I dislike the entire Genre EXCEPT Torchlight 1&2
And I've never really been able to put my finger on why
Diablo 3 (after all the changes of its first year) also plays very smoothly and is much easier to get into D2.
There are other titles too but they're mostly similar to the ones you've already disliked. Maybe it's just not your genre? No biggie
But I get what you mean; I've tried PoE and didn't get very far at all, just lost interest. I've spent a bit more time with Grim Dawn, but that game seems to just drag on, I've tried two playthroughs and didn't get behond the second chapter/act I think. I don't know what it's missing, I'm sure it's a great game if people are into that kind of game.
For me that's when i get bored and lose interest. The problem with D3 is that you can skip pretty much all the boring prep and just hit max. lvl in minutes and then play a couple hours to get the needed items.
Reason I say this is because if the parent comment is looking for something to try, it is important to keep in mind that PoE is really difficult for beginners to get into and play casually.
But yeah it gets immensely complicated in the endgame. I've been playing for about a year now and am barely just starting to understand it.
That said, it's still a lot of fun. It took me a while to get over the frustration but once I did, it became one of my all time favorite ARPGs... and games, period.
It's totally free too. You only pay for cosmetics and optional extra bank (stash) space. A really fair monetization model that doesn't sacrifice the player experience, so on that front I totally support what they're hilding. (They are, however, owned by Tencent now sadly.)