Playing Path of Exile for the first time

This is a strange game. It is so easy, at least on standard, but I've died several times. Why? I play a witch, who is a ranged character, so I'm killing stuff on the other side of the screen and forget to look back at my gal every once in a while to make sure nothing is chewing on her

It is also very quick to level which is probably good because the skill chart looks like our solar system. Everything is passive on the skill chart and your active skills are gems, both found and purchased. You are what you wear. To be honest, I could probably socket just three gems and make it through the content. There is a meteor-strike type of spell that just kills everything; even if it is fire resistant.

I've only played for two days, but I'm 26th level and through the 2nd act. I almost feel like Maylander now

Even though I rarely play through a game more than once, I may tackle the next level just to see if there is ever a challenge. Maybe the game is only supposed to be challenging in PVP, but I have zero interest in that.

Ditch the gal.

It'll get harder at the final difficulty, especially if you have a bad build or bad gear to counter the resistance penalties. It's a breeze before that though.

I probably have a horrible build. I'm not really focused on anything, but it doesn't matter in the first playthrough and I'll probably never make the 3rd level one. I'm mostly a flame witch with dabbling in minions.

The meteor shower thing does physical as well as fire damage IIRC.

The first difficulty is the equivalent of playing any game on the easy setting. The middle difficulty is equivalent to normal and the third is equivalent to hard. The game isn't really meant to played just on easy, though I've no doubt some do, the general idea is to go through the three difficulties and then get access to end-game maps and start trading. But I've said all this to you before when you last mentioned giving it a try sometime from 6 months to a year ago(?)

Yeah, I have zero interest in interacting with anyone. I'll play it as a pure solo game and shelve it. I probably will play through at least twice, because as you pointed out, the game is extremely easy the first time through. As of now, I'm having enough fun to maybe play 3 or 4 witches focusing on the various passive paths. With the new jewel socketing, it might be fun to convert a bunch of my passives to my minions and let them fight for me while I walk around picking up loot.

I assume the maps starting at level 66 is where you start needing to trade gear to handle the uptick in difficulty. I'll just start a new build at that point; if it still holds my interest. I do want to get all the traders up to level 8 so that may take several characters to do.

But but…
MMOs are supposed to be Tinder2! Start interacting!

I interact with my minions. Wash the car, mow my grass, kill the monsters, etc. Be wary of upgrading a minion to the wife level. It totally changes their AI

The game does seem complicated, but that will give me a reason to go back and try different witches. I always play a mage type, but with all the passives it looks like you could build at least half a dozen witches easily and I'm guessing it's more like 20+ legitimate builds. My gal is using the fireball and bouncing flame orb looking spell, but lightning and cold both look to have better lingering status effects than fire. Time will tell. You level quickly in this game it seems, so it shouldn't take too long to do two or three characters. I may level several at the same time, just swapping characters as I go along. Play a fire witch to 10, then switch to cold, then lightning, then chaos. I'll have to see what feels the most fun.

I'm enjoying this quite a bit though. I like swapping out gems and upgrading gear all the time. It seems like every level, I've changed something. It is weird that the skill trees are all passive and you design your character with items instead of skills/traits. It works pretty well though. I can see how most people would enjoy trading all the stuff that you don't need, but I just can't get into trading vs. playing.