How good was Path of Exile in 2023?

something Moves In The Mists something sinister [Applause] Thor with 2023 closing its door we're going to make yet another year in review video that you guys likeed so much last year and talk about all the stuff that we've done this year we are going to include Affliction League even though it's just starting it's got pretty solid start so far and been having a lot of fun but yeah even though it's just in December it will be in this got I remember most of it is still ahead of us and maybe we'll see some even more like updates or uh changes to the league but let's start off talking about sanctum I left her from 2022 sanctum L started with a strong reception and became even better as time went on for the first time ever we saw mid League editions and that made the league mechanic deeper and gave us a really amazing Chase and unique relics gave us access to challenge runs new ways to test your character and incites you to create specialized characters we got new amazing unique items that break the game by giving us new builds Sandstorm massage Eternal domination the balance of Terror and original sin all gave us potent upgrades especially with original sin being a new tier zero Chase unique that is insanely powerful but extremely hard to get and Sanctified relics brought an entirely New Gear slot a permanent boost to your character's power and another thing that was never seen before is that they were soulbound you can't trade these with other people and that's generally not something we see in path of Exel that means that if you wanted a specific statline or a passive tree Keystone for your character you had to farm it out in sanctum that was a very polarizing change that a lot of people like me loved but a lot of people didn't and it was a very experimental addition we've not really seen account Bond items ever since now I particularly love that myself because that's sort of how I play the game in general where I let what I find find dictate what I'm going to play so I absolutely love this and when something is soulbound and can't be traded freely they can be even more powerful than if they can we see that a little bit now with the charms where the Sanctified relics ended up being more powerful sanctum also introduced an entirely new alternative end game although with the downside that you could only store a fourth of a full run so you couldn't spend all your time running sanctum with a dedicated character this league mechanic was so different from the way we usually play Path of Exile that it became very polarizing presence in the game a lot of people loved it but a lot of other people didn't and a big reason for that was that your character basically needed to be able to do sanctum or it felt like a waste and because Exiles have to play the game in an extremely different matter that confused some new players and alienated those who like to passively defend against enemies the defense built on your character largely didn't matter and it's all about how well you navigate and position in gameplay and that made it really hard for some players especially slower ones to do builds like bone shatter Etc now very importantly the old iteration of arch nemesis rares was removed in this patch or at least made a lot better where a lot of people felt like they were gone marking the introduction of the current rares we have in the game right now for me sanctum was an absolute blast honestly it probably gets a n out of 10 I played Bros SF which we're doing this thing again with steel Mage and honestly it is a very big part just to everything that happens during the league everything you find Etc but I just had such a blast during sanum looking back on it back on it it was one of my favorite leagues it probably was my favorite League N9 out of 10 Crucible oh boy Crucible was a absolute mess at the start there was a lot of like un clunky or clunky things a lot of I didn't like how you interact with the league mechanic the monsters were insanely overtuned oh well at least that was funny in these forges that spawned in every area you could add small passive trees on your weapon and shield to add crazy new and old modifiers that gave was access to never seen before power on weapons and build that had the potential to break the game and it did using The Crucible felt extremely random and even though later we came up with strategies for trying to deterministically do this it was pretty painful and that led to people chasing after extremely specific modifiers on specific base types literally spending dozens and dozens of clicks to transorb their items into uniques sorry Captain L Crucible didn't bring a great deal of change into path XL and while we did have some unique had new builds spawning from the mechanic we also didn't see any huge meaningful content to test those builds against it also spawned one of the most degenerate builds ever the totem explode build just absolutely insane particularly not so much because of what he could do but for how cheap it was to do it some streamers even refused to play this build because it felt like cheating not me though I was one-shotting Ubers in the same patch tdd also introduced The Atlas gateways to the atlas tree giving us even more customizability for the end game breach abyss and Pathfinder sabator all of these were reworked into their current state I was particularly surprised with Pathfinder cuz we thought that was getting nerfed not buffed two other greatly criticized changes were the fact that we got an official boss kill race and ruthless as opposed to for the normal game modes and P notes that on top of being very slim was a lot of Nerfs to player power and defense as well as other changes that made leveling more difficult like removing flat damage to spells and one recipe and this was made a lot because of the exilecon race which felt a little bit crazy to changed the game for so few people overall it wasn't super popular or an amazing time for the game and gdd kind of needed to Pivot in hindsight I did still enjoy Crucible quite a lot and I think I have enjoyed the base game quite a lot since colandra it's just been getting better and better as a league I I actually think it might be the worst like interaction with a league mechanic like rewards as side just sitting there clicking the button and channeling that was absolutely awful I might give the league a five or a six but obviously the game is still in a base base state of being really high it's a it's a hard one to rate pretty pretty bad league but I did have a lot of fun playing it next up after Crucible they really had to come out with a banger league and we got TOA which is a very polarizing league but for me was probably my second or third favorite League ever just an absolute blast and wow tattoos were so cool so my first impressional League was actually terrible I remember posting that Inception meme of saying wow this this little maneuver is going to set us back 50 years and that's because I tried doing the Ling mechanic while I was in act two and it wasn't really scaled for that so I had no damage I was dying repeatedly I was getting spawn camped and I think it ended up doing two rounds took me like 15 to 20 minutes so while I was in act two all my friends were sudden in act four and I was like wow that really set me back I hate this Z mechanic now I quickly started noticing that the more I was doing it and later on in maps I was like ooh this this is fun ooh I'm rank one in the entire league and yeah in TOA you literally die and then reincarnate into an alternative game mode where you build a team so this is based on games like team fight tactics Etc you have barely functioning idiots and they attack the opposing Elite Gaming Warlords that will shatter your skull into pieces almost oh the good thing it's um softcore L mechanic Jokes Aside the frustrations of the Toto game were immediately apparent and it took a while for a lot of people to warm up to it there ended up being a lot of cheese builds and stuff like that and the first build I played was kind of chasing it because it was explosive Arrow champion and the taunt made the enemies just run towards your totems Toto was really really fascinating though you couldn't die making it very chill and relaxing and I really appreciate that it's something RuneScape does really well that even if you're playing RuneScape on Hardcore if you don't want to die you don't have to there are safe things in RuneScape you can do that there is absolutely zero risk of your you dying and TOA is the same thing in of Exile this also very powerful currency and exclusive item farming and they did tune the rewards a lot but eventually just made it really good and the most insane thing of Toto was the tattoos which honestly might have been my second favorite addition to the game only the combinators were better which we had last year and Tattoos gave you so much customizability over your characters where you could choose exactly what you wanted to do and I just loved it giving a large amount of agency and there were defensive tattoos offensive tattoos build enabling tattoos just utility ones and so much more and it was a great build to make new builds upgrade existing builds and just break the game in general some insinc could give you things like permanent Onslaught plus one gems turn you to 90 Max easily just so much to do the toad game mode itself though was very polarizing a lot of people enjoyed the laidback chill grind some people felt like it was invalidating getting high level on Hardcore because you could do it and get like high level pretty safe however it was very slow I thought that was a bit of a silly argument cuz it was so slow to level if you get level 95 in TOA you deserve it speaking of builds though we had yet another game mode to make build for sanctum is now back in full effect and you can buy them off other players now they did remove the Sanctified relics because they are doing quite a lot of borrowed power which is probably healthy for the game but this introduces a new way of farming currency and enjoying the game in a different matter and we got to keep a lot of the cool uniques and one of the coolest things for me this letters actually tried doing original syan which in santim leag I'd failed on because we were playing brf and I didn't get that many tries on it however now I could make it even more powerful build and actually try and after a very unfair death I managed it oh my God I did it oh my God I did it and I did three or four no hit runs and I was doing service runs for other players and on Hardcore it's kind of sketchy to make this Rippy a character because if you do get one shot in sanum you still die and lose your character so going the absolute insane glass cannons in softare isn't as real reasonable other notable changes to this patch were continuous additions to the atlas passive tree which remains one of the best if not the best addition to the game and we got returning projectiles which gave a lot of easy projectile builds even though we basically had an anoint that did that before another important thing to talk about was the lack of changes in patch notes and overall game balance all of it got really overshadowed by the amount of customizability and viability that Toto offered but we did we did struggle this year by having very boring League starters where there wasn't that much choice and I do think that the end game ended up being quite different but for both like short-term racing and League starters it was pretty stale Guardian got reworked into the PowerHouse that it currently is and Chie and got reworked into Poor Man's melding of Flesh and not doing another ruthless race GD ran an official hardcore as F BOS so thanks for listening to all our crying TOA was just an absolute blast it was really really hard to decide for me like I instantly knew that it was top three for me and I had so much fun it was really fun playing hardcore trade and I ended up talking to an and doing stuff with really cool people and just it was so nice honestly like TOA might even be tied for first for me because it has sanctum in it um I did really like the Sanctified relics but the um the agency we got from tattoos was so nice I played I think it was 700 hours uh 700 or 800 hours which is pretty much Peak for me lately I'm getting old so I'm not playing 12200 hours a league like I used to honestly totem maybe deserves a 10 out of 10 I had so much fun but yeah League mechanic was kind of whatever it's just a base State being so good it's a it's a tough one to rate because it's so hard to separate the league mechanic and the base game uh and I still did enjoy TOA just you know not as much as sanctum and this leag had sanum in it so it's it's a tough one it might actually be my favorite League it's just I don't even know anymore but it's definitely between this and [Music] sanctum something Moves In The Mists and that leaves us at the current league Affliction which we got so many sweeping changes to the game it's insane and the base game is still in an insane state which is really good and to be quite Frank Diablo 4 did make me enjoy path of XL more while I still do enjoy D4 and I will continue to have fun with that for some hours per reset just the amount of things we get in path of exol is staggering by comparison and how many updates they do with a smaller team and a smaller budget first let's talk about the transfigure gems we got so many new builds choices and so many new things that we can do it's absolutely insane and we even had a lot of experimental League starters and so many of the T gems are being used and we're seeing crazy builds some that are completely broken but we haven't seen any Nerfs so far I wouldn't be surprised if some are coming but either way it does seem like they're pretty content with to let us play around with things we're only a couple of weeks into 323 but so far it's been a very successful League every time I ask my chat to rate it I see so many people raing it anywhere from a 7 to 10 it does have a big downside of not including an endgame expansion as we've been with Siege of the atlas for 2 years now obviously we did have the Ubers around a year ago however getting so many new tools but no actual nothing to grind our teeth on so to speak has been a little sad for me in spite of that though Affliction has been a source of Endless Possibilities when it comes to new builds we see so many streamers and myself just constantly feeling like oh let's pivot some people are calling it pivot League it's like we see something else we're like I really want to try that and there's so many reasons to play different builds new strategies new ways to die and it's been really nice to see that it's not all detonate dead life before even though that will still probably be the case for some races we do have um really strong things like Ark most likely beating anything else right now it's also been such a lot of fun with the charms and honestly like the Warlock is maybe a little underused even though it is very strong for things like Arc Etc but both the primalist and the whatever the other one the Maji is called are super strong and both of them are really used primalist feels especially rewarding when you can actually get really good um charms that being said I absolutely hate being in the Wildwood the Le mechanic itself I get stuck on things I hate running into dead ends there's no mini map which honestly is one of my least favorite things and part of the reason I don't like Diablo I is the lack of a mini map um it's just like how I like to navigate so I really hate the Wildwood part obviously the uh I'm doing magic finding with my friend steel Mage right now and it feels incredible with the amount of like magic find and quantity and everything it's adding and so good reward for the league but I absolutely despise the league mechanic itself and it was crazy overtuned I would probably give being inside the Wildwood a three out of 10 and everything else about the league a 10 out of 10 like the rewards and everything like that and there are fun aspects to it but I get so frustrated and I have constant PTSD that I'm like running past the um I don't know what to call him the the dark sear or whatever he's called that gives you the crazy rewards has his chance to sell you Mage blood Etc but you have to find him and actually hover over him to see him then there's there's no real notification that you found him so I'm always worried that I'm running past him probably some people are watching this and being like I didn't even know that was the thing and on top of that farming the king even when you are using strategies to try to help find him easier it's still a pain and very random but while the uh Affliction mechanic itself has some frustrating pain points for me still an amazing League I'm having so much fun I'm playing bosf with steel Mage once again on Hardcore and just so good I see myself playing this quite a lot I also don't have any variety planned that I really want to do so quite a lot of Poe I would probably give it a seven or eight out of 10 a really really strong League having a lot of fun and again the base game is just in such a such a good state that even if a league was straight up bad and terrible I think I would still enjoy the game in the current state 2023 was a very strong year for Poe and we had an exile con we have a bright future good leagues and I think the only thing thing that I really would have lik to see more of in the current year would have been new bosses and things like that I do hope that in 24 pretty early ideally in the first League we get um a new boss set like something like the conquerors Etc that is the number one thing missing for the game but either way if this is the kind of stuff we're going to be getting path of XL has a bright future I hope you like my year and review thank you so much for watching thanks you for being part of our content and everything we do SUB if you like the video but more importantly try to die less than I do

Channel: Zizaran

Views: 32,112

Keywords: Zizaran, Ziz, Poe, poe reaction, path of exile new league, POE Expansion, path of exile 3.23, poe 3.23, affliction league, ziz affliction, 3.23 best builds, poe 3.23 build guides, 3.23 league starters, path of exile, poe 2023, path of exile 2023, path of exile is it worth playing, path of exile review, poe review, review, gaming review

Id: C8DFkLO5U3w

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023