TBH it feels like doing chores. It's a completely professional, well put-together game, but it actively pushes you away from combat half the time because of the XP disparity between combat in the wild and running boring quests. It undermines its Action-MMO genre claim by consistently incentivizing non-action behaviors. It takes almost 20 minutes to get out of the second tutorial (after the real tutorial, which you can skip - surprise, there's still a tutorial) sending you on all sorts of annoying chores to introduce a number of game systems. By the time I was finally in the field doing something, I was already bored.
Beautiful game, tech seems solid, art theme is strong and consistent, and there are flashes of interesting gameplay... But the core game design is a more banal variation on every other MMORPG since WOW broke the market and eliminated alternative game-design models from MMOs.
Edit: And as an aficionado of Diablo-clones, it only vaguely feels like Diablo-style ARPGs. It almost hits the combat-style correctly, although the way it forces you to cycle your skills is less Diablo than traditional MMO, but a lot of abilities don't feel all that impactful. It also misses the big rewards of Diablo-style games: massive piles of skinner-box loot and combat-XP. Getting piddling XP from wiping out a pack of monsters is depressing as fuck.
They came in pretty hard on damage numbers two leagues back. Just generally lowering the damage curve and increasing mana costs for damage-oriented support gems.
TBH it feels like doing chores. It's a completely professional, well put-together game, but it actively pushes you away from combat half the time because of the XP disparity between combat in the wild and running boring quests. It undermines its Action-MMO genre claim by consistently incentivizing non-action behaviors. It takes almost 20 minutes to get out of the second tutorial (after the real tutorial, which you can skip - surprise, there's still a tutorial) sending you on all sorts of annoying chores to introduce a number of game systems. By the time I was finally in the field doing something, I was already bored.
Beautiful game, tech seems solid, art theme is strong and consistent, and there are flashes of interesting gameplay... But the core game design is a more banal variation on every other MMORPG since WOW broke the market and eliminated alternative game-design models from MMOs.
Edit: And as an aficionado of Diablo-clones, it only vaguely feels like Diablo-style ARPGs. It almost hits the combat-style correctly, although the way it forces you to cycle your skills is less Diablo than traditional MMO, but a lot of abilities don't feel all that impactful. It also misses the big rewards of Diablo-style games: massive piles of skinner-box loot and combat-XP. Getting piddling XP from wiping out a pack of monsters is depressing as fuck.
Honestly I think PoE is prolly the peak of action rpgs and it's also free if you don't mind the cash shop shit
I'm still salty about the hard nerf a couple of patches back, but yeah, PoE is the best we've had.
What was the hard nerf? I have friends who play but I've never tried it
They came in pretty hard on damage numbers two leagues back. Just generally lowering the damage curve and increasing mana costs for damage-oriented support gems.