Blizzard's Diablo series is what most people think of when they hear the term ARPG, but Path of Exile is without a doubt the closest runner-up. Itself directly and explicitly inspired by Diablo 2, Grinding Gear Games' free-to-play ARPG has an extremely dedicated and sizable player base all its own, and it's not hard to find genre enthusiasts who consider it their favorite for all sorts of reasons. The example we're here to talk about is Joe Ziegler, the game director best known for leading Riot's competitive shooter Valorant and later Bungie's extraction shooter Marathon, who says he has a staggering 3,437 logged in Path of Exile because of the unparalleled depth of buildcrafting it offers.

"ARPGs to me are [about the] buildcrafting and the cleverness of putting things together," Ziegler tells PC Gamer. "And I think Path of Exile is the most freeform version of that. The level of experimentation you can get in that game is so wide in terms of thinking about how you can make builds.

I play a variety of builds. I have a fondness for playing Totem builds, and then second to that is, when I'm feeling really lazy, I like one-button builds, like Whirlwind builds … that's the fun part of Path of Exile, to be honest, is that it's just such a Rube Goldberg machine of effects and things that you can make, and you're just trying to figure out how to deal the most damage and kill things the fastest."

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