Some passing thoughts as the Metamorph league winds down. Having been away for quite some time, I came back to PoE largely because my wife got hooked on it. My previous stints in the game were mostly in Hardcore; I have a stable of low-level (highest being like 48) HC characters, a few standard mode characters who started life as HC characters but died horribly, and now two or three Metamorph characters, the highest of which is like 58 in standard.
While I used to play almost entirely hardcore, I don’t think I will be putting in that much more time in that mode. I’ll probably dally with it a bit, but the game has gotten so damn full of gotchas, spike damage, random death blossoms, and what not that I don’t know if HC is viable for me, at my skill level, any more. On the plus side, I’m really enjoying standard mode, as it allows me for the first time to both get towards the end game stuff and do crazy things without fear of utter disaster. Much less stressful, too, and there’s simply so much to do that I don’t really miss the excitement of HC.
The difficulty spikes are wild, though. There’s this one boss fight in Act 6 I think, the Brine King, that I must have died like five times on. Probably mostly my own fault–my Scourge Arrow Ranger is a bit finicky in tight quarters–as my wife was able to ace it easily on her Arc Witch, but damn, I definitely would not want to hit that fight in hardcore mode. And of course the Metamorphs, which are deliciously random, are also deliciously risky. Some of those bastages are brutal.
What I like about the game at this point? Love the complexity, as long as you find a good build guide. Love the intricate “stuff” to get and do. Every iteration of the game makes the combat feel a little bit tighter, and more enjoyable. There is a play style for everyone, and anyone. The F2P path that GGG has chosen is transparent and inoffensive (I’ve purchased some stash tabs, that’s pretty much it). The leagues are really interesting, even if they don’t always work as well as one might hope.
What don’t I like? Two things mainly, control issues and the effin’ inventory management. Number one peeve: having to go back to town every major encounter to unload all the crap that crams into the inadequate inventory space. Even with loot filters being fairly aggressive, the fact that damn near everything is or can become a valuable currency means it’s hard to ignore the drops, and there’s always something you “might” need later, etc. Another part of inventory management I hate is that, unless I’ve totally missed it somewhere, there is no easy way to dump stuff from your inventory to the stash. It’s piece by piece, carpal-tunnel inducing tedium. It’d be great to even be able to, I dunno, right-click or right shift-click or something to auto transfer an item. I bought some stash tabs for currency, uniques, and cards, but while the uniques and cards allow you to just drag an item anywhere in the window pretty much, the currency one makes you find the little grayed-out icons to put your orb or shard or whatever. Overall, it’s a freakin’ pain in the ass.
As for controls, my main beef is the absence of an assignable “move to” key separate from the action bars. In Diablo 3, I use the space bar as my move key, so I can tap it and not have to be clicking all the time. In PoE, AFAIK, this is not possible. You can sacrifice one of your eight action bars to move only, but usually this is sub-optimal. I end up using the left mouse button as my move key, sometimes also as an attack key. There are tricks like activating auras then taking them off the action bars (they keep running until you die) and replacing them with other user-activated skills, but overall the flexibility of the control system is lacking IMO. There are ctr+ combos too, but I find them rather awkward. I’m not sure there is a real solution to much of this, but I still find one of the biggest challenges with many builds is managing how to activate abilities.
Things that are sometimes part of the fun, and sometimes part of the pain: Comparing gear is tough, as there are a lot of modifiers and variables. Figuring out linkages without guides and extensive research is often frustrating, but also kind of cool. The arbitrary slashing of your resistances sucks, but is probably necessary for balance, and does cause you to do some interesting trade offs.
Overall, it remains I think one of the best ARPGs out there, and for free to play, a stellar example of how to do that right.
