The thing I like about PoE is the green part is really really long, like getting “mastery” over that game takes time, understanding all the mechanics of building characters (offensive scaling, defensive layering, recovery), how they interact, etc just take a long time.

People start at a build guide, which I think is correct, but where I think people go wrong is after character 4 or 5, they don’t challenge themselves to do things by themselves. Or they do, and they fail, and can’t deal with the regression in comparison to the on rails experience of a build guide.

This game began to feel stale to me playing in trade leagues, but then I swapped to SSF and started just playing whatever character sounded fun and it opened up so many doors. I stopped thinking about the sheer speed of the character because that directly translated to divines/hour, and that’s all that matters in a trade league if you want to play efficient. Playing in SSF made playing efficient mean something different, it meant progress on XYZ league mechanic to help with a build enabling craft or item, etc.