PoE used to be mostly just another Diablo 2 clone, but it adapted and expanded that sort of end-game style of gameplay to such an extreme that it has become its own unique experience.
It's hard to actually describe that sort of experience in text, you are better off watching some build showcases to see what i mean, but it is the reason why i played this for so long, more than any other game of this genre, and why i recommend it despite the many flaws that it has. And it's free to play so you can always just give it a try yourself.
As an example, in most other arpgs, a ranged build that reliably shoots something like 10 projectiles with every press, with extra explosions and effects would be considered to be around the endgame point of that build. In PoE i am covering the screen with 100+ arrows per second, and thats not even close to the endgame, that's just a build ive quickly thrown together just to get through the campaign a bit faster. Creating a slam so large it covers the entire screen and more, projectiles and lightning chaining through an entire horde of enemies in a single cast, teleporting and slicing everything across half the map in merely a few seconds with flicker strike, having all the monsters explode by just standing near them. PoE took various old skills and concepts to an extreme that i have not seen before and this is what i love about it.
Technically the gameplay itself is nothing complicated, in fact the goal of most builds is automating and simplifying as many of their skills, buffs and effects as possible, so it often ends up being kind of braindead. The real complexity lies within the process of building up to that point, balancing all the different scaling vectors, all the possible interactions, conversions, etc to maximise damage, clear potential, speed and defenses, and there are a lot of ways to go about it.
To support all that, there is a ludicrous number of skills, supports, item bases, mods and mod types, a giant passive skill tree, customisable passives in the form of jewels and many other things, this game goes all out on quantity over quality, but without completely dropping quality either.
As for the bad parts:
-Crafting
Technically the crafting system is almost as complex as the builds themselves, there a lot of ways to go about it too. However, realistically, it is an incredibly frustrating system driven almost entirely by RNG. There are a myriad of generally pointless mods, especially the many uselessly low tier mods that can always appear regardless of item levels and almost every crafting session involves at least one case of spamming whatever currency you need by the hundreds until you finally get the right mod. The chances of getting something good is always low and usually accompanied by a chance to undo some steps or completely brick the item and having to start over, if even possible, and that applies to nearly every single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ step in the crafting process.
Even after learning how to optimise it and even crafting for profit, i have to say this is by far the worst crafting system of all rpgs that i have ever played. And i am counting those that don't even have item crafting, it is THAT frustrating and i am neither a masochist nor a gambling addict to enjoy this.
-Visual clarity
Non-existent, with the kind of crazy builds you can get in the endgame. (and they still somehow managed to make this even worse in poe2)
-Player trade / economy
The player market isn't exactly a bad thing by itself, it allows players to trade for various items while focusing on the content they prefer and helps ease out the issues with random loot systems. That's the theory at least, in practice the PoE economy is focused entirely on the market, with the loot being balanced around it instead. Which results in the next part:
-Loot
Extremely random, too scarce, the vast majority of drops are nothing but trash. This is caused both by balancing around the marked and the ludicrous item mod pool that doesn't properly reward or account higher level itemisation. Only in very recent leagues has this been improved and even so, it doesn't feel like it's anywhere near enough still.
This also leads to the worst SSF experience of all games in the genre that i have played.
-Overall balancing
I have mentioned the variety of skills and items already and while most are viable, there are still a lot that do not work outside of extremely specific niche setups, or with prohibitively expensive gear, or some that simply aren't viable at all. All due to bad balancing and power creep
-Lack of QoL in certain aspects
No inventory sorting, no automatic pick ups, no automatic tranfers, a billion clicks to do anything through your stash even after all the hotkeys they added, always spawn in town when logging in instead of your hideout, not enough inventory filters.
-Others
No way of disabling cosmetics on your end. Lots of players going around with loud, flashy and obnoxious cosmetics so all the town areas end up feeling awful because of it.
Adding poe2 enemies to existing poe1 systems without always properly rebalancing them
Servers aren't always stable and this is an always online game.
No offline game mode.
Regarding the price of the game, on paper it is free but if you do get into it you will eventually need to buy some stash tabs. I have managed to touch the endgame the first time i played without any of the fancy tabs and it was fine, but you will definitely need at least the basic stuff like a currency and trade tab should you go any further than that. Consider the "free to play" aspect to be more of an unlimited trial version.
