As I slice my way through wave after wave of cannibals, shit-spitting spiders, and your average skeletal archers, I levelled up and chuckled as my character quipped, "I'm impressed by how much this place wants me dead." 

For a game that's been around for a while now, Path of Exile is quite impressive, and I'm really enjoying my time, despite the nonsense way of playing a rogue-type character I've been doing. Like in every game that let you pick a character, I always want to play as assassin or any role closest to assassin. So I go with Shadow. 

How is it nonsensical is because my character's abilities that didn't feel like what an assassin would do. Here, let me list them for you... 

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Lightning Tendrils.
Channelling skill that create some sort of unstable lightning waves in front of me. A magic spell.

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Freezing Pulse.
Shoot a freezing projectile that has a chance to freeze enemies in its path. Magic you use when you have to tell someone to chill the eff out. 

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Animate Weapon.
Animate up to 50 melee weapons to fight for you and pretend you have friends. This is obviously magic too. 

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Summon Raging Spirit.
A spell that let me summon up to 20 of this flaming Avenged Sevenfold. Rad.

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Viper Strike.
A direct-hitting ability that deal more damage with a chance to apply poison. For a more convenient button-mashing experience. 

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Ethereal Knives.
Throw several blades in a cone in front of you. This was the only assassin-ish skill I had at the moment.

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Detonate Dead.
Make a dead body explode because why the fuck not.

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I was expecting something like dash, laying out traps, smoke bomb, incapacitation skills, maybe even the hallmark of an assassin; invisibility. But I did get mines and dash sometime after, along with other skills too. So it's just only at the beginning that I wore so many wrong shoes but I liked them anyway. Also, I heard the character's starting class will become a sub-class of the cooler class called Ascendancy class. The Shadow can either become a trickster, saboteur, or finally, assassin! I'm looking forward to that. 

If I remember correctly, this is the first time I've played a game with a skill tree this crazy. All of these perks are passive skills. For the active skills, Path of Exile uses purchasable (and obtainable) item instead in the form of gems, which then can be attached to your equipments to grant both active and passive abilities. 

Long story short, I cut my way through everything that lives only to kill me and met some of the quest givers that initially not around in the first town. One of them is Alva Valai, a treasure hunter who's been cast away from the nobility in her hometown.

The incursion itself has an interesting background story, involving a lost advanced civilization that we must find, by going to that lost civilization in the past in order to change its state in the present day.

We're to leap through time and space into the lost Temple of Atzoatl in the past, filled with enemies and two mini-bosses which, if killed will affect the temple differently for the better or worse. After doing this time-leap for 11 times, we can finally go into the temple in the present day based on our decision during the 11 temporal incursions. 

I did an embarrassingly sloppy work on my first incursion, as did my second incursion. And the third. And so on. Failed to kill most of the architects. Check. Didn't manage to open most of the doors with the Stone of Passage. Check. Earned so little loot. Check. F&@#!

Even so, Alva never stop telling me "Good job, exile." Look, lady, I don't know if you're genuinely that patient, but I know deep inside you're disappointed.

After each temporal incursion, we'll bump into Alva again in another map. But before I met her again, I met another quest giver on my way called Haku the Armourmaster. He looks like Terry Crews from isometric perspective, just don't sound like him.

For someone with such title, he doesn't seem to have any decent armour works he got for sale. But maybe he will show his actual cool stuff later as I progress. 

He told me to bring back a lost spirit of a warrior. Not sure what's the lore behind this and the extremely short dialogue with Haku really killed my curiosity. He basically only said "No spirit deserve to be abandoned. Find this warrior!" and then "Thanks, bruh." that's it. 

https://i.imgur.com/j1l9TRd.gif

The spirit was deep inside a cavern within, the cavern I was in. The enemies are of the same types, but their numbers making it satisfying to kill several of them at once with AoE abilities. When I found the lost spirit, as soon as I picked him up, I had a little treat with the loot. Then the cave suddenly falls to crumble. Not a single fucks was given.

I wonder if the lore behind this Armourmaster is as paper thin as it appeared to me, or I just missed something or haven't far enough to see his backstory, and this lost spirit's as well. I could be wrong, but at the moment I'm sure it's because of the latter, that he's not some empty NPC that's being put there for the sole purpose of adding more loot.

After a couple of encounters, a buttload of mobs to kill, tons of loot to sell in town, and even more mobs, I find myself in a creepy abandoned prison, with a big brute called Brutus that gave me quite a fun fight. The bosses' abilities, including Brutus', are easy to learn but if you play around underestimating them you'll be surprised when you see your HP suddenly down to 50%. 

Good thing I acquired Whirling Blades by the time I encountered him, a dashing ability that I preferred in most games because it also allows the user to dodge, since there's no dodging move in this game. Heh, dashing. 

The last boss of Act 1 was Merveil. Once a beautiful maiden turned into a slimy tentacle nightmare. Reading her lore I felt kinda sorry for her. A fine woman married a fine man, a famous swordsman named Daresso who gave Star of Wraeclast amulet that apparently evil. It's exactly like The One Ring, it corrupted Merveil the way The One Ring corrupted Andy Serkis until he became Gollum. 

Daresso left her, with a promise to come back with a cure to her condition. But he never did. Merveil then resides within the cavern where I killed her, along with hundreds of smaller tentacle nightmares that apparently her children.

Why I felt sorry is because I was thinking of my version of Merveil's story; what if she's not entirely crazy deep inside? What if there's still a tiny piece of sanity left in her screaming for help? Yep, I was overthinking and felt sorry for a non-existing story, of a non-existing thing. Well, doesn't matter anymore. What matter is... where is the amulet?! She didn't drop it as a boss loot. 

Merveil was the last boss of Act 1, and I now have reached the Forest Encampment, as I was told to in the quest. A slightly less grim safe area. I keep hearing about "personal hideout", "uber lab", and "red map", and other things I've yet to find out. Right now I the customizable personal hideout sounds interesting to me and that's what I'm going to look for. This is the end of my Act 1.
Thanks for stopping by, Steemian!

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--- Images credit: Ghost Story, and the mentioned authors. ---

^{DISCLAIMER: All artworks in this post (except for the cited ones) are belongs to me and I don't allow you, your partner, your cassowary, or your waifu to use them without my consent. Think I'm a smug? Fine by me. Happened before. Hate it if it happen again.}