I started playing Path of Exile during the Open Beta and continued playing it a bit past its official launch. This game wonderfully reminds me of Diablo II, and is a lot like what Diablo III could've been if made better.
Pros
- Free to play! There are microtransactions, but anything you buy is only cosmetic and doesn't bolster your ability in the game (which is how microtransactions should work for most games; that way, you can't win just by throwing money at the game).
- Very fast-paced and challenging, just like Diablo II. There are no experience handouts here, and challenge is enforced. Potions refill as you kill enemies, so if you're in an area too high for your level, you can't just stack up on healing potions to get you through.
- The skill tree is massive and varied, and you can cross over into other classes as much as you want, creating tons of possibilities for different builds.
- Little to no spam in the chat window.
- The fact that there's a chat window to begin with. It's a lot less littered than D3's and reminds me ever so slightly of the chat lobby in the original Battle.net.
- Grinding Gear Games is nice enough to not wipe your characters once the game is officially released in September (it's currently in a fully-functional open beta).
Minor annoyances:
Cons
- The startup time for PoE can be pretty abysmal, and the patches are often as frequent as every other day, causing you to almost never be able to just click the icon and play when you want. However, the game is still in open beta and won't even be officially released until September, so this is largely to be expected.
- The global chat resets per room. This is especially irritating when you're having a discussion and have to purposefully not move to the next area to keep it going...at the expense of continued gameplay, of course. (Update: As of 6/28/13 this is no longer the case; the global chat is now fairly persistent! :D)
- Small items don't always stack very well automatically in your inventory, requiring minor reorganization most often when you have recently sold and/or bought items at a merchant.
All-in-all, PoE is a fantastic game that I absolutely recommend if you like hack-n-slash games or RPG's.