The end result of PoE's design is that you go to a website, find whatever the popular build is and then do exactly that.
only for the people that aren't capable of making their own build or dont wan't to, or that build looks very interesting to them. and how do you think the builds are made in the first place? the creators go through a lot of trial and error to make a top tier build (one worth copying) and even then there's so many builds that can do everything, the only ones that can't are just because the base skill itself is shit.
The "actual consequences" amount to pretty much nothing though.
they amount to a lot, getting to lv90 doesn't take that long and you can do it with deaths along the way, but past 90 if you die every once in a while, you will either completely stagnate or level extreeemely slowly. i was like lv 94 and 40% and felt like trying the end game boss, ended up at 0% and didnt even kill him lmao
Not even close. You can try as much as you want, but just throwing complexity into a game does not make it good.
complexity is not the only thing that makes PoE good, and it's really not THAT complex, it's just that there is a lot of things to learn, not that they're difficult to learn. the best part of the game to me it's just the sheer options that are available to you, there's so many ways to play and builds to play. i haven't played d3 since earlyish RoS and as far as im aware, not much has changed in regards to playing what the set bonuses allow you to play, and use mostly the same effect in the cube, then gain boring ass stats every time you level.
Blizzard did create a good game
d3 can definitely be a good game for certain people, but most fans of the diablo series started with d2 and i imagine were expecting some sort of progressions from that, whereas d3 is a completely different style to d2, and it's honestly laughable considering how much fucking money they made from vanilla sales and RoS, but the game still gets absolutely barebones updates. just the Atlas of Worlds and the new 6 acts alone is more content than D3 will ever see