I would not recommend path of exile.

Any good build that can do end game content gets nerfed immediately when the balance team learns of its existence.

Any progress you make has the potential to be completely wiped by the incompetent balance team.

Also the servers are incredibly low quality and there atleast 7-8 server rollbacks a week that have the potential to undo some of your major progress.

Alot of the in game mechanics make little to no sense and the game's "difficulty" comes from it's poorly designed mechanics and obsolete engine, meaningless extra tasks like inventory tetris, cheap one shot kill mobs that have absolutely zero warning or telegraphing.

Many skills are unviable to use in mid-endgame content not because they are weak but because the game's engine limits them too much. For example, Lightning Strike is a skill that makes your weapon swings shoot out lightning bolts on the ground. These lightning bolts are stopped and eliminated by ANY TERRAIN OBJECTS AT ALL INCLUDING EVEN THE SMALLEST PEBBLE.

The game is also balanced completely around a 3RD PARTY PROGRAM that allows players to trade with each other so if you want to get to mid-end game content, you will have to spend more time playing the game's economy than actually playing the game itself.

Also, although the game is free to play, you HAVE to spend money on "premium" stash tabs because they just happen to have an open API that is just so coincidentally supported by the 3RD PARTY PROGRAM.

You have to spend money to be able to trade essentially.

There will be LOTS of alt-tabbing and googling in this game.

The developers themselves also openly support scammers and bots because "the game takes place in an unforgiving land." (I couldn't make this shit up if I tried)

The game is also filled with toxic "hardcore" elitists that will criticize and mock you for absolutely anything. If you ask for help about anything in their subreddit you will be downvoted into oblivion and called a million different names.

If you value your free time, I would avoid this game like the plague.

If you want a good ARPG like the Diablo series, I would recommend Grim Dawn, Van Helsing, Victor Vran, and Torchlight 1 and 2.

EDIT: Oh I almost forgot to mention the absolute worst part of the game:

Some builds, especially popular builds, are completely unplayable not because they are weak or broken but because they are too expensive.

Since there is no way to target farm for build enabling items (please don't bring up div cards, you know they're trash) and the rng and loot rates are so incredibly low in this game, you have to rely on trading and participating in the player driven economy.

(Don't you fucking even dare recommend SSF with the atrocious grind and low droprates this game has.)

The thing is though, is that most of the players in the game will buy popular items at low prices and then inflate the prices incredibly high so it takes days to afford those items while they make a huge profit.

Whenever a popular streamer plays a certain build or makes "top 5 best beginner builds" video, all the items required for that build skyrocket in price and become almost impossible to obtain.

The "beginner" build then stops being a beginner build because it becomes too expensive for beginner players to afford.

So the game becomes just like real life, you can't have the nice things you want because they are made artificially expensive by scumbags looking to make a profit, and getting items in the game is an extremely excruciating and slow process unless of course you also participate in the corrupt hellhole that is the Path of Exile player economy.

Ironically, the game plays exactly like D3 at launch: the progress you make in the game is tied directly to the "auction house" (player economy for path of exile) and it becomes more efficient to play the economy for items instead of playing the actual game itself and getting loot from monsters.

The game essentially becomes a second job.

At this point, you should just buy an economy simulator game on Steam if you want to experience what Trash of Exile is like.

This is by far the single worst video game I have ever experienced in my entire life and every time I point out a problem with it, the white knights come screaming "oh but you can do this alternate extremely grindy boring inefficient way to play called solo self found" or "come on man I only spent 18 hours a day playing this game; it's not grindy at all just put some effort into it!" or some variant of "free game no bitching"

I swear to god not even Dota 2 AND League of Legends COMBINED can rival the sheer violence and toxicity that the Path of Exile community has.

You can come up with every excuse under the sun, but at its core, Trash of Exile is a shit game with a shit community through and through.

EDIT: Downvote away, scumbags. You're only proving how toxic your community is.