Path of Exile is better than Diablo

I like Diablo 3. I can't remember my exact paragon level off the top of my head, but it was something over 250. That's nowhere near as high as some of the more dedicated players get, but I've spent more than a few hours on there. I like how certain items can completely change the way characters' abilities and and skills work and open up whole new ways to play. What I don't like is how each playable class usually sports only one or two really viable builds per season - check out the leaderboards and you'll see mostly identical gear and setups across the board. Laaaaame!

Sure, you can be a renegade and deviate from the popular cookie cutter setups, but if you want to get as far as everyone around you, it's always "farm item set X", "pick skill Y", do the exact same thing everyone else is doing. The game just isn't super complex. It doesn't have to be in order to be fun, of course. The very first Diablo is the very opposite of complex and is still a ton of fun to play today, especially when you up the visuals a notch:

Lots of people play Diablo 3 all night and day and they don't mind how Blizzard's way of "balancing" characters basically means making them so samey. Remember when agile characters still received higher evasion instead of armor? I don't like how they scrapped all that. Sure, it's easier to balance stuff when every class uses the same mechanics, but it's also lazy. I'm not saying that playing a Demon Hunter feels exactly like playing as a Barbarian, but at the end of the day I still just collect packs of monsters, spam some AoE, rinse, repeat. And the overall look and atmosphere... well, the expansion is alright, but I'm not a huge fan of that typical modern Blizzard look. Everything is soft and cartoony and stuff simply doesn't look anything like the previous games.

They went from gritty, tits out gore...

...to soft, candy-coloured and fluffy.

And since you've probably read this entry's headline, you'll already know that this is where I'll move swiftly on to Path of Exile (PoE), which is just as nice, gritty and complex as I wanted Diablo 3 to be:

Tits, giant eyeballs, rivers of blood - home at last!

PoE's new expansion, The Awakening, went live fairly recently and added the final chapter to the Free2Play ARPG's story. It adds tons upon tons of gore, tentacles, giant, floaty eyeballs and other such fun organs and a whole lot of horror to the game. I haven't touched the game for a while, so there were a few other additions to the game, which were new to me, such as player hideouts. Being able to choose and decorate my personal home is pretty sweet. Right now I'm working towards unlocking my own fortress of sorts, but hanging out on a graveyard will do for the time being.

Each class has a different affinity towards one or two of the three attributes.

What makes this game so fun to me (and will ultimately turn off those, who love Diablo 3 for its relative simplicity), is how insanely deep the customization system for characters and their abilities is on PoE. While each class starts with a certain affinity towards one playstyle or another (i.e. the Witch starting closer to intelligence and magic-based passives on the skill chart, while the brawny Marauder leans towards strength and melee), it's entirely possible to specialize them in weird and unusual ways or turn them into hybrid characters, who get to be so much more than simple spellcasters or warriors.

I don't usually play casty types. I tend to choose a sword over a staff, some heavy plate armor over a robe. But when I saw PoE's class system, I considered it a challenge. I didn't go for the Duelist or the Marauder and just started clubbing things. I chose the Witch. Ha!
My original plan was to steer her growth towards dexterity, hoping to ultimately unlock claws and some bonuses for dual-wielding them. I figured there probably weren't an awful lot of Witches out there going full wolverine.

Then I looted a skill gem, which turned my slain enemies into zombies. This changed everything. You see, you don't unlock new spells and skills by leveling up - you loot them. Skills are coloured gems, which go into slots on your weapons and armor. Found a fireball gem? Go put it in a matching socket on one of your worn items and now you get to throw fireballs! Whether you're any good at it depends on the passive skills you choose to unlock as you level up. Skills also require certain base stats - if your hero is dumber than a brick, his intelligence stat may prohibit him from using the fireball gem at all. A smart character may not be able to use that sneaky backstab skill gem aimed towards dextrous heroes. You get the idea.

It all began with a single zombie. Now look what I did!

So I started turning dead baddies into undead servants. And then I looted another gem - 'summon skeleton'. Yeah, I think it took the game about 30 minutes to change my plans from playing a hacky, slashy character to going full necromancer. By now I get to reanimate fallen bad guys as ghosts, I have a pet golem and I can animate random weapons and armor and have them fight for me - which is awesome! Even shitty, non-enchanted loot becomes useful, because I can turn it into a pet! On top of all my skeletons and zombies. I usually just sit back and enjoy the show when my pets go to work.

Of course it's always more fun to do some of the killing in person, so I slotted a spell, which rains fire on my enemies for as long as I channel it. Which is nice and everything, but it also drains mana like fuck and forces you to stand still, channel your magic and do absolutely nothing else in the meanwhile. That's where support gems come in! These little bad boys change the way certain spells and skills work. So I went and turned my rain of fire into a totem. I just fart it out and it'll burn all my enemies for me, so I can move around, concentrate on other abilities and stop wasting mana.

But no matter how many pets you have - sometimes an enemy will get through them and hit you. And I really didn't want to be one of those fragile, robed spellcasters, who swing a little pixie stick for self-defense. So I branched out into strength, got myself some decent armor, a nice melee weapon and a shield. You can get pretty strong with melee weapons if you focus on the right passives. It helps when you find skill gems like 'lightning strike', which add elemental damage to your melee attack. Helps even more if you find a support gem, which causes the ability to strike three times with every attack. So now I was running around punching things alongside my army of pets and my toasty totem.

And I so love punching things with lightning!

And this lead me to my next problem - I was now great at summoning and punching stuff, but I was also rather fragile. Most of my future points would go into extra health, armor and resistances, but until then, attacking enemies head-on wasn't always the most desirable option. And I wasn't exactly specced into dexterity, so bows weren't really the way to go, either. So I did the next best thing and slotted 'spectral throw'. Basically, this ability turns your equipped melee weapon into a ranged weapon - you just throw dat shit and it comes flying back to you. Doesn't matter if you suck at ranged combat, because this ability uses most of your melee stats as you throw your weapon at the bad guys. Add a support gem for added projectiles and suddenly you're throwing five weapons instead of one. Sweet!

PoE offers an insane amount of flexibility when it comes to spells and skills. Don't like having to interrupt fighting in order to use a curse spell on an enemy? Put a 'Curse on Hit' on your spectral throw, fire a whole barrage of cursed weapons at the enemy hordes and mass-curse them whilst attacking them at the same time! Ran outta corpses to zombify during a boss battle? There's a spell that summons a bunch of dead bodies, I shit you not. Is your army of bone-boys too weak? Slap a melee bonus damage gem on them!

One of these players has been to the cash shop. Can you guess who?

My character has so many crazy abilities, I don't even know what she is. She's a necromancer, but she's also a warrior, headed for a tanky direction. She's a fire-based spellcaster. She's also a ranged-DPS curse machine. Meanwhile, my Barbarian on Diablo 3 spins around a lot. Sometimes he jumps.

PoE also has the best, fairest, most satisfying Free2Play-model of any game, ever. You absolutely cannot spend money on anything other than decorative fluff. You can buy a cat. You can buy an alternative spell effect for your favourite ability. Buy a dance, a fiery particle effect for your weapon or even a whole set of decorative armor. None of that stuff makes you any stronger, better or otherwise more powerful. It just looks cool. The one tiny exception here is stash expansions, in case being able to store roughly half a million items isn't good enough for you and you need more space. Everything else in the shop is purely cosmetic. Though you can totally pay to win, if you so desire. Behold:

I love this game. I love joining random parties, watching people with their "Olol!1 MLG full crit pro builds" die over and over while my unorthodox build just gets shit done. It's cool how you have to put some actual thought into how to specialize your character and it's even better to watch it all come together and work out in the end. I do, however, have two complaints with this game. The first one is this:

"Skill tree"

Seriously, what the fuck? I'm all for deep and complex game mechanics if they add to the overall experience, but don't make shit complex just for the sake of it. I had not touched this game in over a year and then I came back to a level 50 character, who had to re-spend every single skill point due to a global reset, brought on by the latest expansion and its skill tree overhaul. Imagine spending 50something points on that monstrosity up there.

I know there are free character planners out there and you only get so many viable options per class, but come on. This is not user friendly. This isn't fun. I don't want this game to be as primitive and dumbed down as certain mainstream titles tend to get nowadays, but I don't need my video games to require special college courses, either.

My other complaint lies with some lousy boss battles in the two final acts of the game. Look, I get it. Path of Exile is hard. It's not meant to be casual-friendly. It's supposed to appeal to core gamers and that's a good thing. But bosses, which fill up the entire screen with comically oversized, super-fast AoE attacks, turning the entire battle into some kind of bullet hell, aren't fun. That's not clever game design, this isn't challenging and it doesn't require any sort of skill. It's just cheap. My screen fills up with a ton of shit, which cannot possibly be dodged half of the time and kills me in one or two hits. People usually group up for these fights and hope they're not one of the poor suckers who end up dying. Because doing so removes 5 or even 10 percent of your experience towards the next level-up on the higher difficulty settings. If you can't find people to team up with, you may as well kiss all your experience points goodbye and cheese it by respawning and throwing yourself at the boss over and over again. And that sucks.

Oh, look! A portal full of tentacles! Glowy red things! A giant, moving circle of death! And everything can insta-kill me! Yaaaay!

On the plus side, you don't really have to go back there and ever fight them again once they're dead, unless you're after their loot drops. There are treasure maps, daily quests and other such fun activities to keep you entertained, so it's not like you're forced to suffer through some of these battles again and again if you don't want to.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a graveyard to decorate. Oh and here's how my witch plays:

-Cat