Portals are made by portal scrolls, which you find while playing (ie: killing things and taking their stuff).
The vast majority of microtransactions are purely cosmetic, weapon effects, pets, footprints, etc. There are a few things you can buy that expand your stash, and while they are pretty useful, they’re not necessary.
The passive skill tree is freakin huge, and there are truckloads of builds out there. Refunds letting you reallocate this setup are common quest rewards.
The name of the company is ‘Grinding Gear Games’. Guess what you’re going to be doing?
Again, literally nothing you buy affects gameplay in anything other than cosmetic ways (including portals). They actually advertise based on this fact – that you can’t pay to win. As for the gender/race thing, the classes overlap enormously. For each of the three main “paths”, there are three different classes that have that path as a primary ability, at least one of each gender.
Without meaning to snark: are you sure you’re remembering the right game? Because PoE doesn’t actually have the faults you’re remembering.
Mind you, it’s not a perfect game: the roguelike random drops thing is not very well balanced against the difficulty curve (difficulty is wildly variable – even for a roguelike, based on what you get); they’ve got a bad case of hockey-stick difficulty with their bosses; and much of the “fun stuff” (maps, in particular) can’t be accessed at all except by the extreme hardcore folks who have slogged through every difficulty by playing the game three (four?) times all the way through on increasingly impossible difficulty settings.
Very certain because every time there was new major patch (except the last or maybe the last two) I would fire it back and stop playing it again pretty quickly. My experience with the game was what it was. Your experience may differ but that’s what makes it all subjective. For me, I loved the skill tree, gameplay was pretty solid, but I wasn’t have fun. With Diablo III, I play it every 2nd season and sometimes every season and I have fun right up until the point that I’m grinding out the smallest of gear upgrades. And then I stop, for a season or two.
I like grinding for gear, my problem with PoE was that all that grinding never gave me anything worth mentioning. Everybody playing it more seriously than me were talking about trading for stuff and that sort of thing has never interested me much. I did have quite a bit of fun and it’s hard to argue with the price but I’ve played D3 and Grim Dawn a lot more than PoE.
Stash tabs. They can be pretty important, or at least they are if you’re a dirty, dirty hoarder like me, who filled up five stash tabs within a week of starting the league. In particular, having at least one premium stash tab is absolutely invaluable if you want to take part in trading in-game.
That’s actually the biggest recent improvement in my opinion. The ability to make stash tabs public, plus the addition of the website poe.trade, means you can easily list things for sale by just putting them in a public stash tab, and then poe.trade vacuums them all up, and allows you to easily search for what you want to buy. It’s really, really nice, and you can get some pretty crazy bargains. Divinarius used to go for around an Exalt, I got mine for a few chaos. Saves a lot of time that used to be spent maintaining a trade forum thread, and makes finding upgrades super easy.
But of course, you have to have a premium stash tab to list items there…
Also extra character slots, but it’s not like the original 18 isn’t reasonably generous.
Obviously I’m a bit late to the party, but I recently downloaded Path of Exile for the Xbox One and I’m having a good Diablo-ish time with my archer character.
A few thoughts:
I’m level 25 and I’m constantly picking up new equipment, but I’m still mainly using the same handful of gems I was using at level 5 (Galvanic Arrow, Raise Zombies, Shrapnel Ballista).
The normal difficulty level might be a bit too easy for me. Currently I’m spamming Galvanic Arrow and the enemies just melt (bosses melt a bit slower); I can’t remember the last time I used my basic attack. The only time I use my healing flask is if I happen to notice I’ve been standing in a damage-over-time effect for a while (which is pretty rare).
Having the ability to raise your skill gems to a level where you can’t use them anymore (with your base stats) seems like an odd choice to me, but whatever. I just turn off auto-leveling for Int and Str gems.
The graphics don’t look that much more amazing than Diablo 3, yet my Xbox One has some lag issues with PoE and Diablo 3 ran just fine on an Xbox 360.
The user interface is a little bit cryptic. For instance, I wanted to drop an optional quest so that it doesn’t show on my screen, but for the life of me I couldn’t find a “Journal” tab (like every other game has).
Note that I tend to play these games very casually. I go through the campaign from beginning to end with whatever equipment I find, and then I start again with a new character. The idea of grinding for a specific piece of equipment or trading with other players has no interest for me.
I was getting a little bored of my archer, so I thought I’d try again with a magic-using character. I tried the Templar, but I wasn’t into melee combat so I tried the Witch instead and I’m finding it more interesting than my first character. There just seems to be more variety in blue skill gems than in green skill gems (IMO).
I finished the campaign with the Witch (using lightning spells, mostly). The difficulty level definitely started getting harder towards the end, but the boss fights were strangely easy because there is so little penalty when you die; you just jump right back into the fight and the boss is at exactly the same health level as when you died so it’s easy enough to whittle them down even if you die.
I might take a stab at trying it with a high-Strength melee character; I’m not sure how well that’ll work for my play style, though.
In particular, having at least one premium stash tab is absolutely invaluable if you want to take part in trading in-game.