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The Action RPG Genre

Action RPGs (or ARPGs) are usually played in the isometric view, where you move your character with the mouse, instead of with WASD. Players familiar with the Diablo series will recognize the control scheme. Action RPGs involve killing vast hordes of enemies with a variety of different attacks or spells. Enemies are small and weak, which the player usually kills very quickly. Of course, there are also boss enemies, with special attack patterns/attributes.

ARPGs are based around the progression of your character. As you continue through ARPGs, you gain new items and abilities as you level up and build your character. The campaign/story progression is generally divided up into quests, acts, and difficulties.

 

Path of Exile itself

In Path of Exile you get to build your own unique characters as you go through the game. Path of Exile is set in a fantasy world, and your character is an Exile, sent to the grim continent of Wraeclast. I won't spoil anything past that, because the lore of Path of Exile is actually quite interesting. The game is broken up into 3 Acts and 3 Difficulties. An Act is a series of quests, and you go through them sequentially on a character. As Acts progress, enemies get harder. There's also a big difficulty gap as difficulty progresses. Each difficulty level, you will go through Acts 1, 2, and 3 again, but:

  • the enemies are higher level
  • you will receive penalties
  • the items are better
  • and you get different quest rewards

You keep your character/items/etc going into the next difficulty. It goes like this:

Normal Act 1, N Act 2, N Act 3 -> Cruel Act 1, C Act 2, C Act 3 -> Merciless Act 1, M Act 2, M Act 3. After that, you can start doing maps, which are purely endgame and would require a whole new post to explain. Also, the layout of most zones is randomly generated.

 

Instancing and Party Play

In Path of Exile, everything except for towns is instanced. You will otherwise only encounter other players if they are in your party. There is no content in the game that technically requires you to play in a party (you can even play solo in party leveling race events, if you are so inclined). The max party size is 6. New players may not notice that you can also find or create public party through the Noticeboard in each town.

In story mode players can not fight each other. The exceptions are PvP instances (you join these, they are not part of the normal game world) and a quest in Act 2, where if other players in your party decide to kill or help certain NPCs and you make the opposite choice, you will have to fight each other. As such, don't do this quest with players that you don't trust.

There is an arena-style PvP area, accessible through an NPC once you finished the game in normal difficulty. PvP is rather un-balanced, as the developers stated they are  toning the strenghts of the builds around PvE.

 

Leagues

Path of Exile has multiple Leagues, which work kind of like "realms" in MMO's. There are Standard and Hardcore Leagues. You can not play with characters in a different League. Some Leagues are permanent, some are temporary, lasting anywhere from 4 months to even a minutes (in extreme cases).

Standard has no special properties. It is a permanent League, and the most popular.

In Hardcore Leagues, if you die once, your character is converted to the Standard League.

A note about death in Path of Exile: When you die past normal difficulty, you lose experience (up to 10%) from your current level (it will not de-level you, though. It just removes experience from your current experience bar. If you have 0% experience for that level, it does nothing).

There have been several temporary leagues with their respective challenge levels. Each league also has an own economy, so past wealths will not transfer to a new temporary league.

  • A character that dies in any Hardcore League will be moved to the Standard League. Any character that dies in a Standard League stays in that League.

  • If you survive the duration of a temporary Hardcore League, you will be moved to the permanent-duration Hardcore League.

  • If you die in the softcore variant of a temporary league, for example, you will stay there until it ends, and then you will be moved to Standard.

The shorter Leagues are called "races". Players compete within a certain amount of time to gain as many experience points as possible, even if they are not in a party. You compete with everyone else in the race (though rewards are given out per class, not over all classes). If you die in a Hardcore race, you will be moved to Standard.

Remember, Leagues are by character, not by account/player. You don't have to commit your account to Standard or Hardcore, for example. When you create a character, you choose the League that they will start in.

 

Itemization

Path of Exile's items, as I said before, are randomly generated. Besides traditional stats like many people are used to (something like "+10 life"), items in Path of Exile have sockets and links. You put Skill Gems (your character has no innate abilities besides Default Attack) into your gear, and modify them with Support Gems. Sometimes Support Gems make Skills functionally different, some increase or decrease properties of a skill. You can only put a Gem in a socket of the matching color, and you can only support Skill Gems if the sockets are linked together. Certain items, indicated by their stat requirements, have a bias towards certain socket colors.

 

Crafting

 

Path of Exile uses a sophisticated, but RNG-driven system for crafting. There are set "recipes" you complete to receive a determined exchange for. Then there's the real crafting, where you apply various Orbs on yourself or your items. 

 

Currency

There is no Auction House or Market Board in Path of Exile. Instead, you use the forums, web tools, and trade channels for buying and selling items. There is no "gold" or "credits" either. In Path of Exile, there are currency items which you can trade with players in exchange for items or different currencies. All currency items have a use as well. For example, the Chromatic Orb re-randomizes the socket colors of an item. Trading can be a bit of a hassle, but you get the opportunity to interact with the player you're trading with, and you can also barter and haggle. Some players are more receptive to this than others, of course.

 

Builds and Mechanics

This is "the big one," and in my opinion, Path of Exile's main attraction. Path of Exile has a massive passive skill tree with tons of different stats to put points into. Gear has tons of different kinds of stats, and there are a huge amount of Skill Gems and Support Gems to play with. You can make your character completely unique, if you want to.

However, I think that this is also the most intimidating aspect for a new Path of Exile player. It's very likely that your first character/build will be pretty terrible, and if you're on Hardcore, it may die very early on.

There are 7 classes to chose from! Each character is associated with one or more of the 3 main stats (Strength, Intelligence or Dexterity).

  • Marauder (Strength)
  • Templar (Strength + Intelligence hybrid)
  • Witch (Intelligence)
  • Shadow (Intelligence + Dexterity hybrid)
  • Ranger (Dexterity)
  • Duelist (Dexterity + Strength hybrid)
  • Scion, the new class, unlockable upon completing Normal difficulty. (Strength + Dexterity + Intelligence hybrid)

The difference between classes is their starting area on the passive tree, as well as their quest rewards, and starting stats. You get passive skill points every time you level up, and as rewards from certain quests. Each class is on the same passive tree though. Provided that you have enough passive skill points, any specific passive skill tree node is possible to attain as any class. I highly recommend that new players get to know the passive tree.

The passive skill tree also has "keystones" which are special nodes which tend to come with significant advantages and disadvantages. You can tell if something is a Keystone passive node because it's a lot bigger. There are also "notable" passive nodes, which tend to have bigger bonuses than normal nodes. They're slightly bigger than normal nodes.

So, a build is made up of your class/passive tree, items, and Gems. You might want to start simple, but there are a ton of build guides out there. Seeing as the Passive Skill Tree just changed with release, you may need to wait for guides to be updated, though.

For example, if you want a really simple build, you could make a Marauder which primarily uses a 2-handed weapon and Ground Slam, who stacks Life, Armor, and 2-handed weapon damage increases.

The general methodology behind making a build is to choose a few skills, and scale their power as best as possible using a combination of strategic choices based on class, passive skills, gems, and items. As such, many people will end up creating a lot of alts in this game, especially because resetting all/most of your passives is difficult. (Cont'd in Comments)

You can get a glimpse at it here.

 

News / actual state of the game

The game has undergone several expansions and temporary leagues up to now. In a few week's time, a new act will be released. With the new act come new skills, new items, new bossfights and a major update to the netcode / lag issues. It's called The Awakening and is in closed Beta to test and iterate all the new things coming. Have a look here.

 

P2Win vs Free2Play

A big positive in my opinion: all the game content is accessible, free and unlimited. Only things you get by supporting the developers is cosmetic effects or storage space. Storage space is a convenience, and you can wait to get it at a time the developers run discounts on them. 

 

Guilding

There is the possiblity to be in a guild. Sadly, there are no guild-specific contents yet. Guilds have a separate stash and act as a small community of helpers and friends. I hope they will add something to guilds soon.

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