Recent reviews by Xalthiel

Edits Galore; A lot of the below thoughts are kind of fueled by salt in the passion of the moment. After playing some more I find myself getting more PoE-pilled. Really just think that part of the issue was melee. It feels absolutely terrible to play while leveling. It was an absurd struggle through Act I as a new player and I didn't even finish Act II before I canned the character (was playing monk). Restarted as a Witch and just blazed through Act I and am probably gonna catch up to / exceed where my original character was in almost no time at all. Monk supposedly gets really spicy at later levels but early on is miserable, and I'd still really like to pick him up again but I think at current he's sort of bricked with all the first character/new player mistakes and traps I fell into. Would love it if they added like a true fist weapon so I could play him as a punch mage rather than some ice/lightning slinger.

I wish that Steam had a 'neutral' review because that's kind of where I feel about the state of EA now. There's some objectively ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ design choices but I'm starting to see the light and having fun with embracing the game. Think it just boiled down to Monk and its current design aren't what I wanted from a Monk and a little change of pace made it a lot more fun. I'll be burning things as a witch in the immediate future and looking forward to what comes next.

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I know it's still super early in, but this game feels like a tedium simulator where there's a great vast area of potential that is stuck on the horizon beyond a chasm of absolutely mind-numbingly dull things. It feels like the difficulty of the game was cranked just for the sake of being hard without ever feeling rewarding after overcoming challenges. It's just straight up punishing and a brutal new player experience. I keep trying to like this game but every play session is ending with me hating it more and more. I never really got into the original PoE and was excited to give this a whirl with some friends but even just going through the story is such a massive pain in the ass. Playing a melee might as well be putting your balls in a vice that tightens every time you want to actually, y'know play the game. If you aren't able to instantly and consistently stagger even just trash mobs you get absolutely thrashed. Bosses become this endurance battle where if you can stagger them you'll actually move their health bar but barring that you're maybe fitting in 1-3 auto attacks before you have to roll simulator their attack chains. And then when you kill a boss that you struggled with it that feeling of accomplishment gets gutted by seeing a bunch of garbage slide out of its corpse. 10/10 kms
= ^)

Game needs some massive tuning or at least let me have a weenie hut jr mode while I just get through the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ story. It's interesting and I hate having to drop it but I just cant stand this game at present anymore.

act II spoilerinos below;

I think what finally broke me was the trial of strength where you have an honor bar that acts as a 2nd health bar and if it depletes you 'die' and have to restart the trial all over again. Getting to the boss in there only to get gotted by some stray bullet because I'd always wind up in the room with sub 100 honor cause lmao melee in this game is ass.