Diablo 3 vs Path of Exile

Prelude

For this post i want to get into the main differences and pros + cons of the two most popular ARPG games of this moment. I will go over different aspects of both games and try to compare where they stand and show you some examples. Bear in mind that everything in this post comes from my personal opinion of both games.

Developer

Diablo 3

You will probably know that the entire Diablo series has been made by Blizzard. This is the same studio that brought us World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Overwatch and Hearthstone. I am sure you know at least 1 of those games just mentioned. Blizzard has a huge budget when it comes to making games and you will see this in action when playing Diablo 3. The game feels and looks really polished and optimized mostly, it has great cutscenes and decent voice acting.

Path of Exile

POE has been made by GGG, short for Grinding Gear Games. Started in November 2006 in Auckland, New Zealand. The only game they currently have is POE. So they won't be making money from other projects at this moment, unlike Blizzard of course. So they are a small studio but that is not necessarily a bad thing here. Their only game is POE, so that means their only focus is POE. They will keep coming with new content and updates to this game, where Diablo 3 is pretty much the same now, as it were since the release of the Reaper of Souls expansion, give or take a few minor updates and of course the necromancer pack. But still ...

Business model

Diablo 3

This is a buy to play game where your only "upgrade" options are buying the deluxe or collector edition and you will need the Reaper of Souls expansion and if you want to play the Necromancer class, you will have to buy that also. The rest of the content can be played in total freedom. In the US and EU version there are no cosmetics you can buy with microtransactions, everything can be unlocked by playing the game.

Path of Exile

POE is a free to play game with the option to use microtransactions to get cosmetic items and things like stash tabs to store items. It is for sure NOT a pay to win game. There are no items that would give you gameplay benefits over others. You can play this game totaly for free if you want to, without ever spending money. However.... When you put more hours into this game, you probably will want to buy some cosmetic items or a few stash tabs. Ill explain why, in Diablo you have all those nice transmog items from gear that drops from monsters. In POE there also drops gear from monsters, but those won't look super cool like in some in Diablo. To look cool, you will have to buy some items in the store. But you don't have to of course, but iam sure you will want to.

Overpriced cash shop

And that brings us to 1 issue i and many others have with this game. The in game store, is the most expensive one i have seen ever in any game out there. Don't get me wrong, i understand f2p games will have to make money somehow, but these prices are ridiculous for real. If you thought games like Black Desert had a expensive cash shop, where you would spend 20 euro/dollar for a costume? Well think again, because in this game it would cost you roughly 45 dollar for 1 costume. They also offer some special "Supporter Packs" which is a bundle of items like a full costume, pet, weapon skin and they pretty much start from 60 dollar and up. The most expensive one you can buy is around 480 dollar! That is the most expensive item i ever seen in a cash shop. And why do i feel this is way to expensive? Because you would have to play the price of a full triple A game just for 1 costume or some pack with in game items.

Graphics

Diablo 3

Of course the game is becoming a bit dated right now, since it has been out for several years, but the graphics are still pretty nice either way. There are lots of people however that do not like the colorful flashy graphic style of this Diablo at all though. They prefer the more grim and dark style of Diablo 2. Still i think the graphics are still kinda dark and cool. I do have one thing to say regarding this topic, and that is the low quality textures on some of the armour models, especially when you zoom in.

Path of Exile

The graphic style of POE is way more it is like in Diablo 2, this is one of the reasons hardcore veteran players prefer POE over the new Diablo. When you compare the two games, there is no clear winner to be honest. The quality of the graphics are kinda the same, but i believe the texture quality of the armour in POE is way better then in Diablo 3. One other thing to note here is that you are more zoomed in when playing POE compared to Diablo, where your character is more zoomed out on the screen.

Controlling your character

Diablo 3

The gameplay and movement of Diablo 3 feels really smooth and the combat feels super rewarding. It just feels good to destroy groups upon groups of monsters in a few blows. You can really see Blizzard put a lot of attention to this aspect of the game. What i also think is a strong aspect of Diablo 3 is its grouping system. You can choose to either play solo or go in to a public group, which is pretty much instant and you can go play rifts together in a matter of seconds. Because it is so fast, its just great for people like me who hate waiting to form a group in any game really. You can just start up the game and instantly start killing monsters. So if you only have like 20 min to play before you have to go to school, Diablo is a great game for that, you can just hop in and hop out.

Path of Exile

If you first played Diablo before playing POE, you will feel the difference in the smoothness of controls right away. Compared to Diablo 3, POE can feel a bit cluncky at times. It is not super bad, but sometimes it does have its flaws. When i first tried POE after coming from Diablo, this was one of the reasons why i rage quit after just starting the game. But rest assured, everything about POE will get better when you progress, and thats coming from a person who absolutly hated everything about POE in the past and is now hardcore playing it leaving Diablo 3 uninstalled on my PC.

Gear Skills and Progression

Diablo 3

As you level up in Diablo you will unlock more and new skills you can use to fight your enemies. You can just select the skills you want and assign them to your hotbar. There are also some passive skills you can slot and kinda make a leveling build that way. It is pretty straightforward to be honest.

As for leveling... You kinda just want to be level 70 asap, because that is where the game pretty much begins. Personally i dont find anything fun in the leveling to 70 in Diablo at all, and i am sure lots of people would agree with me. It is just something you have to do to get started with the fun stuff. So when you reach level 70 (which can be done in a few hours solo) you can start working on your build. For every class there are maybe 2 to 4 viable builds, and those builds work through armour sets that drop. When you just hit 70, you will want to farm the set you need and from there you just go run higher rifts, to put it in a nutshell.

To go a bit deeper into the gear of Diablo. There are different types of quality when it comes to gear:

• Common (white)
• Magic (blue)
• Rare (yellow)
• Set(Green)
• Legendary (orange)

At level 70 the first three rarities are pretty much useless and you will just break those down for materials. Your build will mostly use Set and Legendary items. So when you finaly have your build complete, you will want to keep farming the same items that have better stats and could drop as a even better rarity. Set and Legendary items could also drop as ancient and primal which will have improved stats but also have a way worse droprate. You can also improve your gear by augmenting it with high level gems, and that will improve your base stat.

Gems are items you can slot in your gear that will give you most of the time a kind of special boost or extra effect to one of your skills or to your character in general. You will level up these gems by running Greater Rifts.

I also forgot to mention that in Diablo you will keep leveling up your character itself by a system called Paragon Points. So after lvl 70 you will still get XP and you will gain paragon points and levels. You can use these points to improve stats and things like movement speeds. Some of the passives here are capped at 50.

So in short, you get to level 70, farm up your needed set and legendary items for your build, run rifts and greater rifts for gear with better stats, improve your gems and gain paragon points. From there you just keep running higher level greater rifts and try to beat other players in the leaderboards. I know it might not sound as fun at all when i say it like this, but its still fun ;)

Path of Exile

Now you will start to see the real differences in both games. As in POE you do not just get your skills by just selecting them from a list. In POE you have skill gems that you slot in your gear. There are 3 types of gem colors:

-Green (Agility)
-Red (Strenght)
-Blue (Intellegence)

These gems must be sockened in the designated color on your gear. Every character is able to use all skill gems as long as they meet the stat requirements. Next to the skill gems, there are also support gems, which support a active skill to make it stronger or give a special effect to it. As you level up you gain passive skill points every level that you can put in the passive skill tree. This is basicly how you create a build, and of course there are some meta builds in this game just like there is in Diablo, but in POE you will have more control over the outcome. While this system is a great addition to the game, it could be a a bit of a turnoff for new players due to its complexity.

Now lets take a look at the leveling aspect of POE since its way different from Diablo. In POE you will level up your character mainly by doing the story mode which as of today consist of 10 acts. Each act has its bosses just like there are in Diablo, but the main difference in my opinion is that leveling up through the storyline is not so boring as it is in Diablo for me. I find it pretty damn fun in POE. Although i do have to say, that the start of the game from 1 to about 20 is kinda slow and not that impressive to be honest. So unlike Diablo where you just level up to 70 and start farming paragon and gear, in POE you level up slower and the "endgame" pretty much starts when you are able to do "maps". The max level you can reach in POE is level 100, but most players set their goal to around 90 since the last 10 levels would take you a insane amount of time.

It is also worth mentioning that there is no "Adventure Mode" like in Diablo 3. There is however something similar to rifts in POE which are called Maps. Once you hit a certain level and progressed through the first few acts, you will be able to use a map device that lets you start a instanced dungeon which acts kinda similar to rifts. You can upgrade those maps that will give you more rewards but also have increased difficulty.

As for gear quality, you will have different levels of quality in POE just like there is in Diablo. In POE you have:

• Normal (white)
• Magic (blue)
• Rare (yellow)
• Unique (orange)

Normal items are base items that do not have any extra modifiers to them. Magic items have the same stats as the base items but also have 1 extra prefix and 1 extra suffix modifiers. Rare items can have up to 3 extra prefix and 3 suffix modifiers. Unique items are similar to how legendaries in Diablo work, they will have special modifiers that could increase effects of skills for example. All these items can be upgraded or have their modifiers rerolled by using special currency.

Currency

Diablo 3

The main currency in Diablo 3 is of course gold which can be used for lots of things. Next to that there are plenty of crafting materials you can get from deconstructing gear, from drops or by doing bounties and key wardens. You can use these materials do upgrade gear, reroll stats and extract legendary powers. I won't go too deep into this, since i assume most readers would already know this anyway. As of right now, there is no way to trade with other players in Diablo 3 anymore.

Path of Exile

In POE, there is no gold at all. The only currency you will have are in the form of orbs. These orbs can be used to upgrade gear, reroll stats, change rarity, create sockets and socket links among some other things. To briefly go over them:

Common

• Portal Scroll (used to teleport to the act town)
• Scroll of Wisdom (used to identify items)

Improve quality of a item

• Blacksmith's Whetstone (imrpoves quality of a weapon)
• Armourer's Scrap (improves quality of armour)
• Glassblower Baubble (improves quality of flasks)
• Cartographer's Chisel (improve quality of maps)
• Gemcutter's Prism (improve quality of a gem)

Magic item crafting

• Orb of transmutation (upgrades a normal item to a magic item)
• Orb of alteration (reforges a magic item with new random properties)
• Orb of augmentation (enchants a magic item with a new random property)

Rare item crafting

• Orb of alchemy (upgrades a normal item to a rare item)
• Regal orb (upgrades a magic item to a rare item)
• Orb of chaos (reforges a rare item with new random properties)
• Exalted orb (enchants a rare item with a new random property)

Socket crafing

• Jewellers orb (reforges the number of sockets on an item)
• Orb of fusing (reforges the links between sockets of an item)
• Chromatic orb (reforges the colour of the sockets on an item)

Special

• Orb of regret (grants a passive skill refund point)
• Vaal orb (corrputs an item modifying it unpredictably)
• Mirror of Kalandra (creates a mirrored copy of an item)

**Other **

• Orb of chance (upgrades a normal item to a random rarity)
• Orb or scouring (removes all properties from an item)
• Blessed orb (randomizes the numeric values of the implicit properties of an item)
• Divine orb (randomizes the numeric values of the random properties of an item)

Trading

You can play POE without ever trading with other players if you want to. There is even a option for that when you create a new character to play "Solo Self Found" (SSF) which removes the option to trade or group with others. POE does not have a build-in auction house however. All trading goes through the website POE.TRADE where you can find pretty much every item that exists in the game. You can trade items mainly by using the above orbs mentioned. Popular currencies are Chromatic, alchemy and chaos orbs for example. These orbs (with the exeption of chaos) can be found even at very low level when you just started the game! Also worth to note is that lower level unique and rare items are not even that expensive. Most gear and weapons would cost you around 1 or 2 orbs of any kind (mostly Chromatic at low level).

Replayability

Diablo 3

Personaly i think the replayability of Diablo 3 is good but not great. Every season you can start from scratch where there might be some changes in the builds you can play and of course you can push leaderboards all over again and there will be new cosmetics that you can unlock. But other then that, seasons do not bring much else to the game. Personaly i get bored a few weeks into a new season already. Most of the time i have one or maybe two characters geared for greater rifts around level 90-100 plus i have all the new cosmetics unlcocked so at that point iam pretty much done for the season.

I also think there is not enough variety when it comes to the skills and builds you can use. For me the game lacks a bit in the RPG section of the game, where i don't feel i have enough control to make my own charater the way i want to.

Path of Exile

Once you played through several seasons in Diablo 3 you will be wanting something fresh and new. You probably played every class and build there is, seen every skill, so when you start playing POE, everything is new again. And as there are also seasons in POE that will also add new content and have a different theme each season, it might still be the same game you are playing but at least some aspects of it will feel fresh and new again.

I also like the skill gem system and the passive skill tree in POE since it will give you way more control over your build. And of course there are META builds in POE just like there are in Diablo 3, and it might be an illusion how many possibilties there are for creating a build that actually works in POE, i do feel it is a way better system then the one Diablo 3 uses. Thats why i feel like POE has way more replayability then Diablo 3 has right now.

Playerbase

Diablo 3

During seasons the playerbase of Diablo 3 is pretty active. When you start a public game you will most of the times be put in a group instantly. Overall it does feel like a active game. Of course Blizzard is not releasing any information on the total player count, if i would have to guess, i would say that during seasons there are around 5000 players and in between seasons maybe 2500 or less. I do also have to mention that i think the Diablo 3 community consist of mostly nice people, i dont really come across many toxic players.

Path of Exile

It would come to no suprise that POE has way more active players than Diablo 3 has right now. And since it is a Steam game, we can look at the Steam charts to see how active it really is. And sure we don't know for sure how many players Diablo 3 has, but i really doubt they have anything even near the numbers POE has. I do feel i have to mention that i find the POE community "different" than in Diablo 3. As a new player i find some of the other players acting a bit elitist. But that's just my opinion.

Verdict

Overall for me POE is a clear winner on almost every front compared to Diablo 3. However i do think the graphics and movement are a bit more polished in Diablo 3. Also for a new player to the ARPG genre, i do not think POE is the best game to start with due to its complexity. Diablo 3 is way more straightforward and should be played first by new players to just learn the basic mechanics like movement, combat and builds, so they would get a better understanding to how ARPG games generaly work.

I also feel like Diablo might even have a better business model being it buy to play and give you access to every part of the game including cosmetics. POE is a free to play game, but the prices of in-game items are the most expensive ones i ever seen in any f2p game. And before you say "F2P games also have to make money", sure they do, but these prices are just insane to be honest since you can buy Diablo 3 with the Reaper of Souls expansion included, plus the Necromancer pack for the same price as 1 costume in POE.

It would be hard to say what game is better than the other though, since there are may factors involved and both games are different in a sense. I also feel that POE is more aimed at older adult players than Diablo is. If you are a casual player i think Diablo 3 is the better game. But if you are in it for the long run and you are a more hardcore grinder then i think POE is the better game.

Based on everything we talked about you should of course see for yourself which one of the games you like more. You can start playing POE right away for free of course or just get Diablo 3 when its on discount.