Once I embraced Path of Exile's sprawling complexity, the dominos of my apprehension began to fall. I wanted to learn more about the game because I understood that its complexity is actually a virtue. The other day I spent an hour on the wiki finding out where I can get the rest of the skill POE Items I need to complete my build, and there's a few dozen other long term goals I'm beginning to work towards. Like a good MMO, I'm excited about the journey instead of the destination. And that's another reason why Diablo 3's Necromancer, despite being a lot of fun to play, never hooked me for longer than a few days. Within an hour or two, I had power levelled him to 70, but I didn't feel any connection with the progress I had made.

Now that I've learned to enjoy Path of Exile's core game, I'm also beginning to appreciate Path of Oriath. As I mentioned, it introduces six new acts for a total of ten. This replaces the genre-standard difficulty system, where I'd normally play through the same content again and again at higher difficulties. Instead, Path of Exile is now one massive adventure. Technically four of the new acts are a retread through familiar zones, but there's constant detours to new areas and dramatic changes to the scenery to keep things interesting. Beyond that, there's a whole endgame to look forward to, but I'm not sure if I'll even get there. I've already been reading other build guides and I'm itching to try something new, to experience that slow transformation from weakling to god-like but with a new playstyle.

Path of Exile is a huge game to try and comprehend. There's still dozens of systems I don't understand and an inventory full of poe items for trade I don't quite know how to use. But it has rekindled the power fantasy that ARPGs have always fundamentally been about. One that, for me, has largely remained dormant since those sleepless nights playing Diablo 2.