I want to like this game. I want so very, very badly to like this game. But I can't. This is easily the most complex ARPG I've ever played, and I've played a lot, and as a consequence of that and certain design decisions, this game is outrageously hostile to casual blind playthroughs. To clarify what I mean by this, I mean playthroughs where you pick up the game knowing little to nothing about it and do a quick playthrough of the campaign and maybe a little endgame. That's usually what I want out of ARPGs, as I usually find endgame content in ARPGs to be mind-numbingly boring and I'm not super fond of replaying ARPGs to try different classes. So I'm not here to judge POE's endgame, not that I've reached it anyway.
What I am here to judge is the campaign playthrough. The actual campaign, from what I've played, is honestly pretty solid. The issue is the mechanical density of actually playing the game. Everyone knows about the skill tree. The thing is ridiculous, far too large to truly be able to parse and craft a decent build out of without many, many hours of playtime fiddling with it. I would be okay with this, except respeccing without already having a good build to farm currency is sufficiently expensive to be basically impossible. Compare this with, say, Grim Dawn, where unless you're undoing every single skill point, it's viable to respec. Or, Diablo 3 and 4, where respeccing your skills is completely free and can be done at any time outside of combat. This gives a high level of flexibility to try out builds, and if they don't work, you can change them immediately. That just isn't really possible in POE.
Add on to that the relatively high level of difficulty, especially if you don't know about the need to stack resistances, and you can very easily build yourself into a corner where your only viable option to fix things is to start a new character. I hate starting new characters. There's no reason why the game has to make respeccing expensive, or even limited at all. Just let me fix my build without having to play the entire game again.
And this is just the passive skill tree. There are so many mechanics that you straight up are not going to be able to deal with if you don't spend half of your playtime in the wiki. League mechanics that have been added to the main game, item crafting (good luck figuring that out blind), etc etc etc. What it comes down to, again, is that POE is only suited for folks who are willing to play only with build guides or those who are willing to sink dozens upon dozens of hours replaying characters, even if you try to do research to plan out your build beforehand. And frankly, that's just a miserable experience from my perspective. If that sounds like fun to you, then yes, absolutely play POE. If not, avoid it like the plague.
