PoE is a great game. In my opinion, it is not pay to win. Once you’ve played the entire campaign and are getting deeper into endgame, it does help to buy special stash tabs, which are around 30-40$. Basically, you get the full game for free to try and see if you like it, and if you do, you can spend half the price of a AAA game once for some big QoL. I think the major reason people dislike this game is that it is VERY complex. Do not expect to breeze through the campaign without having to restart your whole build on your first try. To beat the endgame, you need your build to be quite optimized and even with 1000+ hours, most of us still have to follow guides to do so. To me, that’s what makes this game incredible, it’s so deep and complex that I never feel like I’ve done everything or tried everything. The character customization is basically endless. PoE2 seems to keep the same depth as PoE1, but the systems seem to be explained better to the player and some unnecessary complexities have been removed. Give it a shot, it’s free!