In this latest PoE expansion, a few things change, a few are added and much is left as-is. It's still a good occasion to come back and play some more Path of Exile and I'm having a good time with it, but PoE:A doesn't solve all my problems with this game. In the crowded realm of action RPGs, it's very hard to strike a good balance between complexity and fun and I feel that PoE is leaning too much on complexity while keeping the game a bit too obtuse and difficult to fully enjoy.
I'm not sure how I feel about gems being sold by most vendors now, especially as it is. One of the defying factor of 'making builds' before this was finding gems, you needed them to use the skills you wanted and it added some randomness, now some - but not all - gems can be bought to vendors in exchange for currency items. This adds maybe a little too much choice and too many options and it's tough to know what's good and what isn't. You should also be able to buy all the gems that are available from all NPCs, without needing to visit each town in each act to find the one you want. And even then, I'm confused as to how the choice is made between what gems you can buy and which ones you can't.
Another new things are jewels, I don't like them. They're items with special effects - some you can't find anywhere else - that you have to socket inside your skill tree. This means you have to make a build around using gems - because skill points aren't entirely refundable - and you also need to find gems that fit with the character you're using. If they were usable passively by your character, they would be neat, but now I have to go out of my way to pick skills that might be useful. That being said, I might make an all-jewels character, see how that goes.
Divination cards are a new thing too, they're cards you find to exchange for specific items when you find enough of them. This just adds a new layer of random odds to find good stuff, so I'm all for it. Itemization in PoE is still a weird black box to me, however. Even after playing this game for hundreds of hours, it's near impossible for me to compare two items without swapping my gear around and looking at my DPS value. Now that you can buy gems, sockets are more needed than ever, too. But that's not too bad, that's the game PoE wants you to play.
Finally, I don't enjoy act 4 very much. End acts of ARPGs are usually pretty bad and this one is no exception, the hellish diablo-inspired landscape and the endless stream of boss fights where you'd lose all of your experience on higher difficulties, from 'arena'-style fights where you have to run around forever to spawn all enemies to special foes that just one-shot you with barrages of projectiles, it's not that great. I can't say that I like the new league too, it ramps up the difficulty even more by adding strong enemies randomly to some maps. I might have an issue with the difficulty in PoE overall, losing experience on death is still dumb and I fear that if you're not putting 100% of your skill points in defense-related skills - which is boring - you're going to die constantly.
But don't be fooled by the negative tone overall, I still enjoy PoE very much, it's a great action RPG and while I'm not thrilled by most of the changes, it still got me playing again and I'm having half of a good time. If I didn't die constantly on the same boss, losing all of the experience I'd got, the other half would be pretty happy too.
