Path of Exile

There's a lot of good and bad from what I've seen so far.

I like the idea of leagues, in theory. Especially the attrition league they used as an example. Cut-throat seems a tad silly and Hardcore cut-throat would just be absurd or unplayable for anyone not loading up with 20 friends. I'm eager to see how attrition and duration leagues get received.

The party system is a little wonky from what I've used of it. Trying to party to kill the Act1 boss showed two pretty extreme reasons why it needs work. Pacing and loot get fuzzy when using public parties. If you join a party to kill the boss, it's entirely possible for the party to have already killed the boss and all but one guy left, he's the new leader, but he's still running through Caverns of Anger because there were no tps. Meanwhile the originals already killed Meil. When he reaches her chamber there's a smattering of whites, and he's walked the cleared cavern for nothing. But other people have joined party already, so he leaves and now someone else is party leader and the chain will continue with a dead boss. It's also possible to kill the boss, go back to town with loot, leave party, join a different one, and immediately kill it again because you're now part of that leaders instance.

The loot system is awkward too. In the case of the person running to catch the tail end of the bossfight, he may have loot drop off the boss, but not know it since he has, I think 3 or 4 seconds to loot his uniques before they become free for everyone to loot. I vastly prefered instance looting.

The timed rolling zone resets are nice/annoying. I tend to get up and do other shit constantly like make food, or talk to people, so I portal to town and will be afk for 10 minutes. Then the zone is reset, losing any loot I hadn't picked up, or more often forcing me to explore the zone again. I plan around it now. Does it reset every 15-18 minutes from the time you left the zone, or every X minutes it's flagged for reset, so once you portal out it'll pop? I'm assuming the first. I've just decided to only go back to town when I find waypoints, and if I have to port back, I dump everything in my inventory into stash and come right back to pick up more shit, then continue till the next waypoint.

I like materia for the power it gives you over your spells. I don't think stockpiling gems is the best implementation of spell controls, but it's not awful. Not as original as some people seem to think, but it's different for the genre, I guess. It's really the support gems that make it a fun system since you can make a totem summon skeletons that all attack with a chance to make enemies flee, and about 20 other effects. Pretty neat. Also heard you can give spectres a sort of splitshot and then give them chaining for funny amounts of projectile spam. I'm not sure how many links you can have at once, but if those 6 socket items link everything together, the variety could get pretty silly. I've only had 3 linked sockets so far.

The node map also has good and bads. It simplifies and complicates progression at the same time forcing people to go to their website to use the mapper since the ingame variant lacks a shortest path or planning feature. Both of these additions along with a flag for nodes you want to visit would be immensely useful. Flagging specific nodes around the map, then have the game generate a couple routes. Their accumulated respec points are kind of a built-in, "we know it's convoluted" points. Especially since there's no confirmation when you want to skill a point. A misclick has to be unspent with those points. Not a bad system, just isn't supported well enough with game features yet. If they implement a planner, and an option to confirm point spends, it's pretty good. And for simplifying, you don't choose stat allocation like d2, where you'd sit on XX free stat points for 20 levels, instead they're pathways to more specific nodes on the map. Reasonable trade, I think.

I haven't used the Endurance/Power/etc charges yet.

I've only got an act1 deulist and an act2 witch so far, so if there are options/workarounds I'm not aware of, feel free to share.