Noob Opinion: Median XL vs Path of Exile

Median XL is far superior and i've played a lot of POE. Median itemization is way more rewarding, it has nuance and customization without the needless complexity of POE.

Median has better game progression and more rewarding and challenging quests and better endgame.

POE is a grind for currency/crafting regents while Median is a grind for items/sets/crafting regents.

The D2 character classes have more soul and meaning than POE's characters too. Median all the way.

Both have their pros and cons. Path of Exile I feel has the better endgame gameplay loop. You are grinding, yes, but you are also advancing your Atlas towards a goal. MXL has more challenge though, and tackles bosses better I would say. In PoE, bossing costs money [for economy balance reasons], which I feel is the wrong way to go about it. Bosses [and their drops] should be gated by how hard they are, not by how expensive it is to buy a set to run them. From my experience, it is always more lucrative to sell a boss set, than run a boss, in Path of Exile. Unless you're bossing 24/7, which MAY edge things out in your favor in the long run.

That's why, despite having the better gameplay loop, PoE still kind of falls short and MXL edges it out. When I'm done gearing a character, I would have to grind more to tackle end game bosses? After grinding for tens of hours to gear my character with some decent to good gear, the last thing I want is to grind to buy boss sets. I'd rather grind towards my next build instead. Which is always what happens with me.

One thing that the recent Harvest League has improved is the addition of deterministic crafting. Now it feels worth it to craft your stuff, whereas it used to be that it was often cheaper and more reliable to just buy the item you needed, instead of crafting. Why spend currency crafting when I could just use that currency and buy the item outright, instead of gambling? Well, Harvest League fixed that. Who knows if it'll go core though. Until this league, MXL was the clear winner in crafting because it never felt like a waste of time and currency.

The big difference in crafting is that in PoE you have control over what you're crafting. The difficulty is in getting the ingredients (and the recipes you want to craft). In Median the difficulty is in getting a decent roll that you want to use.

I prefer the PoE approach because you do pretty much all of it actually playing the game, the crafting time is seconds. Also you really need more than one base in Median since the best way to craft seems to be to roll until you get something that's ok, then roll the other base until it's better... then back to the first until it's better and so on. All a bit frustrating - too much RNG.

I first played PoE when it first came out and I didn't like it, but when I tried it again a few months ago I was really impressed by how far it's come. The idea of having a league mechanic each season then if people like it, they build it into the core game for the future, means that the game is continually evolving in an additive way. Which also means it gets harder and harder to learn!

The new crafting system in POE is actually just an expansion on MXL shrines. Random rerolls of an item with 1 type of predetermined stat. And as mentioned above, you craft in the same way as MXL - get 2 bases, roll one until it's pretty good and then swap back and forth. They've added some more powerful crafts though that let you add/remove a single affix at a time which let you make some crazy items.