So here we go!
The Passive Skill Tree:
One of the selling points for the game in my opinion, the passive skill tree is quite impressive.https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree
The sheer magnitude of this is quite daunting. There are 1200+ nodes, and you'll get access to ~110 of them in your character's lifetime. You start in one of seven locations based on your class, and spiral out from there in a web of awesomeness, gaining access to various bonuses as you go.
Things you need to know about it:
"More" is a multiplicative bonus.
"Increased" bonuses are added together, and then get multiplied, so a statement like "5% more health" are all added together and multiplied by your base health.
The +stat point nodes are basically filler. You take them because you have to to get from point A to point B.
You're often going to value bonuses that are NOT your primary stat, just because you're going to have so many (semi-useless) points in your primary stat, while you'll need quite a bit of secondary stat to level up gems, equip items, etc.
The Good:
The sheer number of possibilities.
The different ways to get to the same place.
The huge circles (Keystones) that change the way the base game works. You can often "drive by" these build defining abilities, not spending a single point to take them, or you can go 10+ points out of your way to pick one up, and that's' interesting design space. "Hiding" some stuff behind keystones is also quite interesting, because those bonuses often further amplify the power of that ability, or mitigate some of the downsides.
The bonuses to certain things are often distributed to different areas of the tree, sometimes with mini-caches of good stuff. This means you need to get from point A to point B of the web, and there tend to be a ton of ways to do that. It's good to have the caches, and it's good that they're separated.
Jewels are a fantastic riff on the talent tree. You go a little out of your way, and as a first-level result, you get to put in the gems you find/craft, which are basically super-points, which is already great. The second level of this is the various unique jewels, which do
Paragon points are great. They further differentiate the various starting classes, they give cool, flashy abilities (sometimes), and they are a reward from a cool different interesting encounter (which I'll talk about later).
What I'd Do To Improve It:
Pretty much the first question anyone would ask after spending n points on
I want to be able to see the whole tree at one time, and that is basically not enabled. This is especially important when searching for other similar nodes. Just let me zoom out more.
When searching for "similar nodes", the game assumes you mean identical nodes. +8% armor +4% life, is not a similar node to +4% life. +5% life is not similar to 5% life, 8% armor. Perhaps we need two levels of highlighting, where you get your exact match, and your proximate match, but something like that should be implemented.
The unique jewels are pretty terrible I think socketing a gem for +100 int -80 strength is not something I can really get excited about, but it's the cost of doing business apparently. (the same for +100 int -80 dex). I had a jewel socketed for +1 melee range (and 8% increased damage), when I had no idea what my melee range was to start with. I've found perhaps 40 unique jewels. 1 was interesting (the range one), 30 or so of them were absolutely terrible, and 10 might be interesting for some other character, since I don't necessarily know what is good for them.
I want to be able to craft my yellow jewels. This seems like a clear extension of the existing crafting system, so just open it up for jewels.
I want to see the effect of a talent point in micro-text before I take it. This doesn't seem that hard. 5% increased health (+181 HP) that would help me decide to take it or not based on what it does, because what it doesn't do is add 5% more hit points. The same for armor (+armor amount, +physical DR estimate), OR +8% melee physical damage (1.3% damage), etc, etc. Just more transparency is a feature I'd want to see implemented. Even just changing your numbers while the points are assigned and the menu is open would be something. (just ensure they don't actually take effect until they are applied)
You get some "rerolls" while leveling, which is generous of them, but I want more freedom here. I want to pay n points to reroll the whole tree. Or some other resource. Or just do it for free (Diablo 3). I feel like there are some huge decision points that the player is put into, and you just are not sure how well it will work out until after you've spent 30-100 points, and the real solution at that point is to just make another character. That's a solution, but a clunky one to me, and it doesn't solve the 3rd, 4th, 5th idea (without spending a bunch of playtime again just to experiment)
Make paragon points easier to respec. 10 respec points per point? And only after the labyrinth? Does it really need to be that punishing? I want to try some stuff out, but I feel like I have to make the one right decision the first time.
Initial Leveling/Questing/Plot:
What you need to know about it:Use this to figure out what your abilities do, it's easy to get the first few levels of abilities, and you can often tell if you like the style of them without terrible investment.
If an item looks strange, you might want to save it, because it's possible that there isn't really a way to get it other than that quest. (and selling items is mostly worthless)
The Good:
It's relatively fast, I was to the end of the content in a few days of playing. I feel like I could level up additional characters, and it wouldn't be _too_ high of a cost.
Dialogs are skewed slightly to your character's class, which is a good feeling. They kept telling my barbarian he was a big dumb idiot, and I kept agreeing.
It sort of tells you which zone to go to in the quest menu.
It's cool that there are some quests where you have to make a decision between great results, but can only pick one. This sort of thing makes your decisions relevant, etc.
What I'd Do To Improve It:
D3 shares paragon points across characters (which I didn't realize until a friend told me), which is a superior mechanic, and lets you play alts without feeling like you're wasting your time.
There were a lot of very strange words in the plot, names, places, gods, etc, and I only started to understand what might be happening on the third play-through. My friend summarized it astutely, saying "In D3 I knew the plot: Diablo Bad." I did like it to some extent (the third time through), but it didn't have much impact on anything to actually understand it.
If they don't tell you what the quest rewards are on the bandit quests, they should tell you that up front. I don't recall. This is one of the coolest parts of the quest system, but it's also hard to know what to do.
I want to say make it easier to change your choices, but I haven't felt like I've needed to do that yet, and I do like that _some_ things are a decision you've made and so on. (and you can change it in theory, I haven't looked into how to do that)
That the underground zones are the same zone on the mini map as the above ground zones is a bit confusing, especially when you have a quest, or need to find a way point, in "that" zone. The zones themselves are also quite large, branching, etc, so it takes some time to fully clear them, to be sure you haven't missed a way point (and then the game crashes, which happened to me several times while leveling, but not much since)
Crafting/Masters/Items:
What you need to know about it:
Don't just invite the second guy you talk to after you unlock your hideout (your new level 3 has to be one of the options to get things rolling), to your hideout. Your hideout can only hold so many masters. Make sure you leave room for the map lady once you encounter her, since she's the best one, and hardest to level.
The master you create the hideout with is the one that sets the tileset you are using.
Equip a switch weapon, debind the hotkey to switch your weapon (so you don't hit it by accident, disabling critical abilities and remapping your hotkeys typically), and put a bunch of gems there, so you can level them up, either for vael-ing, secondary auras, or the like.
Don't save up non-quality stuff, and expect it to be worth anything. I had a page of jewels, and they vendored for something like 5 scrolls of wisdom.
Pick up scrolls of wisdom, they are probably the single loot item you will loot the most of in your career.
The Good:
You have your own hideout, and it has great customization, and it gets bigger, and you can buy stuff for it, cool!
You get daily quests from your masters, cool! (I didn't know about this until a friend told me about it though)
The masters show up while you're mapping, and give you mini quests there, always feels like a nice bonus (especially the map quest lady)
Being able to specify some mods to your stuff is super-critical to allow their crafting system to work at all, so this is good. I can't imagine trying to find a good item as-is without the ability to at least add one good thing to an item.
I do like that uniques CAN BE good, and that rare items are the very best (if this was the case, it's actually not for a lot of slots for a lot of builds). This is a methodology that leads to people continuing to play/farm, rather than get lucky on one unique drop to be "done", with relatively fixed stats. (and no ability to enchant)
I like that you can pay a bunch of resources to ignore luck. I like that there is some stuff in your control. I just want this to be much, much, much more of the system.
I like sockets, I like linked sockets. I don't mind the system of your skills being your gems, rather than your talent points or whatnot.
What I'd Do To Improve It:
Make your hideout hold all your masters. Or at the least, don't penalize you for making a mistake here, since there's really no way to know that you are making a mistake. Make switching them easier, etc. Just having them all there, but only being able to do quests from some of them, would be an improvement, or only being able to do n quests, and you could choose each day which you do.
I don't really know how I'm earning "favor" to buy things. I'd just like to know.
I should be able to use other people's crafting benches. That I can't feels clunky. Just make it so that I don't have functionality at their bench that I don't have at mine. It's not like I don't have access to the bench (unless I don't have any hideout at all), just expose my functionality in whatever hideout I'm in! But no, I have to go back to my hideout to enchant my gear, create links, colors, buy maps from the map lady, etc, etc, etc. I suppose part of the reason is to disable people from overwriting your map bench, just lock the map bench though, and not the other stations.
When I craft something in a crafting station, put it in my inventory if I have room. I don't think there were more than a few times over my entire career where I actually remembered to take the item out of the crafting station (including trading in divination cards) when I closed it, and there was certainly no time where I actually wanted the item to stay in the bench when I closed it. I do want it to stay in there while it's open (because you often have to craft multiple times), but why keep it in there when I walk away?
Things really take for-freaking-ever to level up with the masters. Maybe add more levels, that don't take as long, or distribute some interesting rewards, etc. Do I have the same hideout/masters across my characters? If not, that feels like a SUPER punish. Also, show me the things that I will eventually earn, but grey them out, with a master level requirement, so I at least know what leveling guy x up does (in the game)
I must have spent four or five "columns" of Orbs of Alteration (perhaps 1200 materials) trying to make a weapon. I saw a "tier one" +%damage zero times, a tier 2 +%damage perhaps once (perhaps zero times), and a tier 3 +%damage once. Perhaps two other times I saw said buff along with some other useless buff, which made the item immediately unusable. The second step is to add another bonus to it randomly, and hope that it is also a tier 1 +physical, which is probably a 1/500. Since I haven't even been in that situation three times, it feels quite unlikely to me. I've started with some kind of +damage perhaps five times (and haste another 5 times, just out of boredom), and never yielded anything remotely resembling an item half as good as some legendary I equipped for a trivial cost from the AH or Pandaras chest (1000 coins, 1 chaos, etc). The entire result of everything I've saved up and crafted into this weapon is basically nothing, which is not a motivating factor. I'd like to try to make a armor piece, ring, or something along those lines, but I feel like I'm not even 1% of the way towards crafting a weapon, so what the heck is the point.
I have something like 9,000 pandaras coins, and no way to really spend them. In D3, the gambler guy is always in town, and you can gamble away to your heart's content....
I hate seeing the low level mods on the high level gear. It feels like it's just a waste of everyone's time. There are just so many terrible items, absolutely terrible. One item in a hundred, or a thousand, is worth looking at, and it's not like I have amazing gear by any stretch. You can kill a mirrored pack, have them drop like 12 rare primary weapons, and it is likely that no more than one or two of them has a bonus to physical damage, making those "good ones" about 1/4 as good as the weapon you have equipped. Given this, it's pretty hard to get excited about 99% of the item drops you see, and my friend and I have to have a mod, hide the 99% of "drops" that can't possibly be useful, just because they clutter up the screen, or you might pick them up by accident. (and thus have to manage your inventory)
I keep going back to D3, but their blood shards is a way better mechanism. Do stuff, get blood shards, spend blood shards, get items of that ilevel, of the type of your choice. You're not farming for an hour to get 10-20 shots at rerolling some dumb blue mod, without some other blue mod. D3 also let you up-level your items with a similar recipe system, that was just superior in every way. Since you get them so fast (you do NOT get alterations fast, and they are just the first step in a very, very, very long chain of low probabilities), you're always getting something with the potential to be actively good. All that said, my friend did get lucky and craft a very good bow in his first few hundred attempts, which is great.
I hate that sockets can be unlinked. It feels like a waste of everyone's time. It also feels bad that if a 5-link item drops, it's basically the same as a zero-link item, since every reroll you start from scratch on the linking. I also have in the neighborhood of 1500 material components (75 stacks) of creating sockets materials, and perhaps 50 (5 stacks) of creating links between sockets materials. Supply and demand problem there.
The hideout management feels pretty clunky. I don't even know how you'd do the things I have seen from other people's hideouts.
Let me pay something steep to remove a targetted mod from an item. It's not like this would make getting items easy, likely no easier than it is now (aka impossible), (especially since multi-mod requires you to go down to three innate mods, and the specific crafted mods are not up to the scale of a dropped mod), but it would be a feel-good, instead of a (random) feel-terrible. Limit it to one per item for power reasons, etc.
Having to scrub everything and start over is such a feel-bad with crafting, since the incidence of a good mod by itself is apparently super-rare.
Items of different sizes is a mechanic that benefits noone. I like tetris as much as anyone, but it's likely not even worth it to pick the items up at all at a high level of play, without the complexity of not being able to fit the items into your inventory. Automatically picking items that are 1x1 up with the same internal logic as items that are 4x2 is also quite silly.
One way items in this game are inferior to D3 is that you have no idea what a good item looks like for other classes. I don't know what items my friend might want, what items a caster might want, and so on, because I have no idea what stats would even matter. I assume from looking at the 100+ absolutely terrible unique items that some things that look bad to me must be good for someone, but I have no way of knowing what that might be.
Terrible uniques is a pretty bad letdown too. And this is apparently something like 99% of unique drops. It feels like a broken promise to me, and a betrayal of my excitement/expectations.
Experience Penalities/Highest Levels:
What you need to know about it:Don't die. Except ~half your deaths you cannot control, and the other half, you likely also don't have a ton of control over.
The Good:
I do like that fighting into the highest difficulties is not REQUIRED for your class working. (but I can't help wanting to do it, so I can't help running into the problems below)
I do like there is a nice reward for people who want to grind endlessly for L100.
The labyrinth is a very cool, very different zone, that tests you in different ways, and has a cool reward.
The unique maps feel different, and are a good experience.
What I'd Do To Improve It:
Eliminate the large majority of the effect of the experience penalty mechanic. I feel like it has no redeeming qualities, does nothing positive for the game play, and actively hurts multiplayer play. Penalize me in some other way for death, but it's just so time-expensive to die, you have to not risk it, and that is simply not possible at any high (or even medium) level of play.
EverQuest gave you a 10% experience penalty on death (in vanilla), but a priest could spend a good chunk of change, and give you 96% of it back. (or something). EverQuest is one of the most punishing game systems in memory, but it still gave you your stuff back if you jumped through the hoops. Make the experience penalty twice as large, but give you 80% of one death's worth of loss back when you overcome the encounter that caused the death. It's still a risk to go into that multi-piety room again, but it might be worth it if you can win, instead of just being some useless item drops on the + side, with 2-3 hours of your time on the downside.
A game with instant death mechanics that are semi-unavoidable should not have experience penalties. Reflect mobs off screen, corpse explosions, teleportation, debuffs with no warning other than a rapidly decreasing health bar, etc, etc, etc, are not good mechanics for a experience penalty game. Perhaps it's me getting old, perhaps me having naturally slow reactions, or this being the wrong type of game for me, but I'd much rather things (including myself) taking 10x longer to kill, and there being things I can do to recognize in real time what the heck is happening in the game. (and the experience scaling up to have the same leveling time) They have so many cool "bloodline" mods, moster abilities, and so on, but everything dies in a split-second, so it is all irrelevant. It took my friend and I a couple hundred hours of playtime to recognize the reflect mechanic, since it happens so infrequently, and kills you almost instantly when it appears (sometimes). The corpse explosion mechanic has basically no way to recognize it before you are dead. The melee guy that jumps on you and one hit kills you is not a super-avoidable mechanic, or the guy who shoots you for your full health when you are standing in melee range of him with no way to actually avoid the swing you didn't even see coming.
As a simple solution, just have more timed encounters (to steal more from D3), where if you die you've got a setback for sure, that you might be able to overcome, but two deaths is too much. They even have some timed stuff set up already, it's just a matter of using it more.
In general, I'm far more a fan of a positive reward, that you should play riskily/strive/rush for, than a negative, that you have to dread continuously for your entire playtime. I failed plenty in D3, but never felt as bad, for all of those actions, combined, as I did for any one stupid death I had in this game. The only encounter that approached the positive feelings of D3 was a timed treasure encounter, where I was ALSO constantly in fear of my own death, and the terrible map UI and monsters that hide/run away from you made it quite stressful to catch all of them. Still the best encounter by far I've seen in this game, and it's a shame there are not more like it.
The Auction House:
What you need to know about it:If you're interested in having the good gear on your guy, just use this, and probably don't even pick up the items that drop for you normally.
The Good:
Once you can find it (it's not exposed in any way by the game), it is a direct access to items far better than you will see in your characters entire lifetime, for resources that it will take on the order of hours to obtain.The cost/benefit of the AH is off the charts in the buyer's favor, to the point where I'd leave 500 rings on the ground unidentified, in favor of spending some chaos orbs to buy a reasonable one off the AH, and probably have a better one than any of the ones that dropped.
What I'd Do To Improve It:
Integrate it into the game itself. I imagine that it already has to be partially integrated from what I've heard from my friend with premium tabs, which is a good cash-flow-driver for them, which I can understand, but there's really no reason to have to go to a website outside the game to find the items in that game. You can still have all the real money features, with a in-game search tool.
Multiplayer:
What you need to know about it:Good luck.
The Good:
Your friend can kill monsters that are basically immune to you. Just try not to die too many times while they do it.
What I'd Do To Improve It:
A shared mini-map system.
Larger aura radius's, to let you feel like you're contributing to the team.
One curse per player should not translate into one curse per mob. This leads to unnecessary stress between party members priorities.
Either you or your friend will be dramatically more powerful than the other (in a particular situation), the other can enjoy the status of being a pack mule/experience drain on their friend.
You or your friend will be in different stages of immunity to experience drain (because you've just leveled, vs being halfway through a level (aka 12 hours away from leveling), meaning that one of you will be paranoid/panicked about death, and the other will be carefree, which is a very stressful situation, or a situation where one of you feels useless because you cannot risk positively contributing at the rate the other player can contribute. Since it takes on the order of 10-100 hours of playtime to gain a level at the high end, this adds a unnecessary level of stress to what should be a fun time with your buds.
If one poor fool dies, he feels terrible for the group, and worse for himself (experience penalty), because you use up portals, that the other guy could probably use to just win the encounter when they randomly die.
UI
What you need to know about it:Play a character/use abilities that are not dependent on where the monsters happen to be.
Have a teleportation skill to allow you to ignore mechanics.
The Good:
Pay for glitter is a good mechanic.
There are certainly some powerful AOE spells, AOE spells are very good in this game, since the sheer volume of stuff is high, and the ability to instant kill everything is also fairly straightforward even with aoes.
What I'd Do To Improve It:
Ground effects that cover up other deadly ground effects is not a good idea.
I had several boss fights where I could not tell where the boss was, this needs to be improved (either my eyes, or something)
There must be a setting somewhere to control the minimap, but it was very difficult to use by default. I couldn't tell where doors were, bridges looked like lava/impassible terrain to me, the map blocked out the ground effects, etc, etc, etc.
Be able to zoom out more. That a primary mechanic is firing ranged weapons off the screen is not a sign of a game where you can see far enough.
Some of the female character models are profoundly offensive to me.
Don't become stuck on ground objects when cycloning. Just create a path for the whirlwinding barbarian, and follow that path, instead of taking the desired input, and throwing it in the garbage can. The same for leaps, just put me anywhere that is the closest to that location, because if it doesn't do that, I am very likely to die. Often you cannot even see the ground effects that you are stuck on, which is also a UI "issue", which is hyper-magnified in certain maps, where it is just difficult to figure out how to move at all. (Especially with loot items covering the screen, until we got that mod to turn them off)
Overall
Best mechanics:The passive skill tree.
The labyrinth.
6-linked items. (having them, not getting them)
Crafting on to existing items. (Paying to avoid luck)
Jewels. (with radius or without)
The auction house (once you find it)
Free to play/what you pay for/monetary system.
Crafter quests, daily quests.
It feels like you could play this game for a long, long, time, and still have undiscovered plans, new ideas, new things to try, and so on. I think if just a few things were less terrible, this would be a game I could play for a while.
Worst Mechanics:
Experience penalties.
Everything related to multiplayer.
Unlinked sockets.
Terrible items (aka most items)
Pathing on cyclone.
Lack of high level maps.
Maps with a terrible layout. (exemplifying pathing problems, etc)
The crafting system is super terrible/low yield. Not being able to turn my resources I don't need into resources I desperately do at any kind of a reasonable rate. I really want the crafting system to work, it is so close to being good.
