A New Player's Perspective on the Game, or Why I'm Done Playing One of the Best Games I've Tried Out
This is the third time I've tried playing Path of Exile, and this is the third time I've had to quit, because this game is just way too frustrating. I love the depth, and I love all of the innovative design that GGG have put into the game, but there are way too many moments where you just die out of nowhere, and there just isn't any feedback from the game as to what killed you or what you should do to fix it.
For reference, the first time I played, I played a raise zombie/summon skeleton necromancer in, I think, Prophecy league. Second time I played was Delirium league, and I played an Essence Drain/Contagion/Blight Trickster. The character I'm playing right now is a Ground Slam of Earthshaking Juggernaut.
The necromancer was fun, but I really just had no idea what I was doing, so I didn't get very far. The trickster I had a bit more of an idea, and I had a build planned out, but since it was evasion and dodge based, it did very well right up until something managed to hit me.
The juggernaut, I went with because I wanted to play something that's tanky, so that I could get a better idea of how things work. And it worked, I was super tanky! But I had no damage, and things would still randomly burst me down in an unreactable manner. On the advice of a better player, I dropped some of the tankiness for more damage, but now I just feel fragile. I'm putting out 1.7 Mdps, and I have 7k hp, 25k phys max hit, 64k ele max hit, 47k armour, 80% ele resists, 46% chaos resist, can easily maintain my max of 7 endurance charges and 26 fortification, good life regen and leech, and am immune to elemental ailments, curses, bleeding, corrupted blood, stuns, slows, maim, and hinder.
Based on the considerable amount of research I've done, this should be a functional build, and for the most part it is. I can comfortably handle just about any of the content I've tried so far. I'm running T16s, and I've killled several bosses already without any issues and collected 2 void stones. I'm careful to not run maps with mods that will screw my build over, which is surprisingly a lot of them.
Yet I'm still somehow squishy, and every so often, something will just burst me down out of nowhere, and it's literally impossible to react to it. Like I'm dead before I can even push a flask button or leap slam out of the way. And half the time, I'll have no idea what even happened, so I'll have no idea how to stop it from happening again. It's incredibly frustrating. And the salt on the wound is when this happens, I lose many hours worth of xp. It feels like I'm spending a lot of time running to go nowhere.
I'll probably keep playing for a bit longer this league, but I'm not sure if I see myself ever picking the game back up. The game is incredibly well made, and GGG are a great studio. Each time I've tried the game, though, it started out incredibly fun, but eventually devolves into hitting a maddening wall that sucks the joy out of it.
Here's the pob for anyone who wants to tell me how bad I am at the game: https://pobb.in/MFgp4bxnC_b5
(This is a throwaway account.)
TLDR: The game is amazing and starts off incredibly fun, but it always eventually becomes way too frustrating to play, because I just die to random bullshit.