When comparing League of Legends vs Path of Exile, the Slant community recommends Path of Exile for most people. In the question“What are the best free PC games?” Path of Exile is ranked 7th while League of Legends is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose Path of Exile is:
There's a staggering amount of builds and skills you can try out in Path of Exile. There are 7 classes, 19 subclasses, 194 active skill gems, 107 support gems, and over 1000 skill nodes on the expansive skill tree. As a result, there are hundreds of possible combinations, allowing you to spend hours theory-crafting just to create the perfect build. Even if you don't feel like planning out a build from scratch, you can just look up one of the many guides online and get straight into the action.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free to play
It's free to play without being pay to win.
Pro Frequently updated
LoL has frequent patches pushed to the game client. However, with every patch new bugs appear.
Pro The world's biggest e-sports title
League of Legends is the worlds top e-sport title. It raises e-sports to a completely new level, making it real sport, no compromise.
It's funny that people still think of "biggest e-sports" as of "highest prize pool", playing other games, they are accustomed that there is nothing except Worlds championship and another couple of big events. On the contrary. League of Legends is a constant big event. Although it's not the first in highest prize pool on Worlds, its e-sports competition is not limited by rare championships here and there. That's why it is the biggest.
Since 2010, there have been several professional leagues, with four major: LEC (Europe), LCS (N. America), LCK (S. Korea), LPL (China) and more than 10 "not major" in Russia, Turkey, Latin America North, Latin America South, Brazil, Vietnam, South-East Asia, Australia and Oceania, Japan, Taiwan and more.
It has big "physical" infrastructure, studios and "stadiums" (usually one per region, but they have more than one in S. Korea and China) are built to take regular championship events. Each region has large "TV"-teams, a large number of analysts and casters. Major regions have more than one caster teams, one of which is English-speaking. Overall, several days a week they produce about 6 hours of an expensive TV show.
They have two seasons a year (splits). In each, 10 teams are competing. Each team plays 2-3 games each week, so the total number of games is around 10-15 a week.
Teams have large infrastructure. Each has several coaches (strategic, analyst, etc.), sports psychologists, cooks, etc.
In major and some other regions, each organization has 10 or more players, who also play in challenger league (as the second team) and/or are raised to play in the main team somewhen and/or for substitutions in the main team.
So, LoL is a real sport and the biggest of e-sports ever.
Pro The most popular MOBA by a huge margin
More than 27 million players log in each day to play the game and more than 67 million players log in to play each month. It has peaked at 7.5 million concurrent players.
Pro Largest diversity of champions with unique play styles
Having 144 champions League of Legends ought to offer the greatest diversity, and it delivers.
Many champions have long combos that need precision in positioning and timings on par with fighting games, while others can be effective without combos at all.
Also, many champions feel really unique (not necessarily complicated) in play style, unseen in other MOBAs.
Pro New Champion every 3 - 4 months
It may sound not much (and it was much more frequent), if you don't realize there are ~150 champions already.
Pro Constant champion reworks and visual updates
They are updating champions that have "outdated" gameplay/visuals on a regular basis. And usually, they hit bull's eye, giving those champions new life and making them feel "right" to the player (there are much more praises than complaints from the community).
Pro League of Legends Championship Series
League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) is a weekly 10-team league.
Pro 14 free champions in weekly rotations
Pro Offers free skins
Pro 3 different maps
There are three different maps that users can play on, which offers a bit of a change up of play and familiarity as well as allows for the player to not get burnt out on a singular stage played over and over again.
Also, there are game modes with new experimental maps.
Pro Balanced game - requires skills
The game is quite balanced and second its skill(requires) dependent.
Pro Fun mode every weekend! New fun mode every second weekend
There are a number of fun modes that are switched on Friday evening and switched off Monday evening, rotating every two weeks.
This include always highly awaited URF (Ultra Rapid Fire), AR URF (all-random URF), Nexus Siege, Hunt of the Blood Moon, Legend of the Poro King, Doom Bots of Doom, Hexakill, Ascension etc.
Pro Hundreds of possible character builds
There's a staggering amount of builds and skills you can try out in Path of Exile. There are 7 classes, 19 subclasses, 194 active skill gems, 107 support gems, and over 1000 skill nodes on the expansive skill tree. As a result, there are hundreds of possible combinations, allowing you to spend hours theory-crafting just to create the perfect build. Even if you don't feel like planning out a build from scratch, you can just look up one of the many guides online and get straight into the action.
Pro Completely free without pay to win mechanics
You can just download and install the game without any purchases. On top of that, there are no pay-to-win mechanics and the only things locked behind paywalls are cosmetic effects, pets, and additional storage space. You can easily play the game for hundreds of hours without spending a dime.
Pro Regularly updated
Every 4 months or so, Path of Exile has major updates, adding new interesting mechanics, skills, items, and various other content. As a result, every time you come back to Path of Exile after taking a break, it feels like a new game.
Pro Great setting
Path of Exile is set in a dark fantasy world where everything is gradually becoming worse. At the foreground, you have the massive continent of Wraeclast that once was the home to a flourishing empire, but now is a place filled with the undead, evil spirits, ruins, and echoes of the past. To make matters worse, malicious entities from another dimension seek to corrupt the world and its inhabitants, giving birth to disfigured monstrosities that seek to end you. The end result is an immersive setting with dark motifs, body horror, loads of gore, and a very tense atmosphere, which is refreshing in an era dominated by family friendly content.
Pro Feels exhilarating to play
While the gameplay might feel a little slow and clunky in the beginning, it gradually picks up speed as you progress, allowing you to swiftly destroy large groups of monsters with any skills you choose. Whether you're shooting ice arrows with your bow, freezing and shattering every enemy on-screen, or if you're cleaving enemies with a massive axe, causing them to bleed and explode on death, it just feels incredibly satisfying.
Pro Greet Developer
Grinding Gear Games provide a lot of communication and community interaction
Cons
Con The community is very toxic
Your teammates will most likely be hostile towards you for every mistake.
Con Characters are unbalanced
There are heroes that are OP, and others that are completely unplayable.
Con Unbalanced
They release a new champion every 3 months which requires a series of patches every week for a year to balance properly. Too frequently changed.
Con Balanced around pros and not the average player
Riot keeps balancing the game around the professional players, disregarding the majority of the players, making the game unbalanced until you reach top 0,1%
Con Bad matchmaking
Con They want you to spend money
You will just buy RP and your accounts gonna be banned for calling someone a degenerate. Hard-worked money is gone. No refunds, exchanges, or skin transfers.
Con Support never cares about players
You can get banned just by spamming chat.
Con Takes a long time just to learn the game
If you want to get in the game as a new player, you'll have to play for at least a year, or put in hours and hours of studying just to be able to keep up with what characters do what, and what items to get for which character in any given situation. If you take a few months off from the game and return, you will probably have to relearn the whole game again. Almost every Champion is different, not just in stats, but in mechanics and gameplay altogether, from their original launch. The item shop is changing quite frequently, making you have to relearn it every so many months.
Con Player Support is useless
They can't speak English and they can never help you out. No exceptions, and no exaggerations here.
Con Not fair
Every match you will find someone who will give kills to enemy and you will loose almost every match because of that person, and then you will unninstall the game.
Con Can't get blue essence easy enough
Not even if you play the game 20 hours a day.
Con Only 14 heroes are free each week
There is a rotation of 14 heroes that are available each week for free. To unlock the rest they can be purchased for ingame currenency.
Con It's boring
It's repetitive, always the same, not challenging, gets boring very fast. You can feel that the game is made to get money in for Riot and not to make you happy or excited. Its not like that
Con Too many champions
141 champions are too much and too expensive, when you want to buy a better champ you need to play constantly for 1 or even 3 weeks to get that big amount of gold that is required.
Con Buggy engine
With every new patch, a wave of game breaking bugs are created yet the developers still refuse to update the game engine. Some bugs result in characters being removed from the game for up to a week.
Con Items are broken
Con Terrible graphics
Models of champions looks flat.
Con Long games (average 25-30 min) and leaver penalties
Long games aren't bad per se but when paired with leaver penalties (not just for ranked games but also normal games) it means once you start a game you are practically locked to your computer for a good amount of time.
Con Champions cost money
While in Dota 2 every hero is for free and you can catch up which characters you like, you have to buy them in LoL and spend a lot of time and hopefully (what they want you to do) spend real money.
Con Not complex enough
Very static game. You get pushed into a pattern you have to play, can't make your own decisions.
Con Anti-experimentation for new players
The game heavily punishes any experimentation for new players. Unless you have near perfect understanding of late game and the various viable build-options you are more or less unable to experiment your way into viable builds (and the options for correcting mistakes are limited at best). So, unless you are fine with having to scrap a bunch of characters for being sub-optimal, you are more or less forced into following player-made guides to learn the game rather than through engaging with the game itself. This may or may not be a problem for you.
Con Very high learning curve
There's quite a lot to learn when starting to play Path of Exile. There are the mechanics, the crafting system, and the skill gem system. However, the most intimidating factor is the massive skill tree with over 1000 skill nodes, 6 classes and 19 subclasses, allowing you to create hundreds of unique builds. Unfortunately, creating a functional build is really difficult, taking hours of theorycrafting, so it might be better to stick to guides as you're starting out, unless you're fine with possibly messing up.
Con Endgame can get really repetitive
It takes an exceptionally long time to get any wealth, useful items, or access to endgame bosses in this game. You endlessly farm the same maps, hoping you'll get lucky with a few good items, but that usually won't be the case, which can be really discouraging to keep playing. This is made worse by the fact that your character progression comes to a grinding halt near the upper 80s of character levels, requiring you to buy insanely expensive items to feel any progression at all. If you don't like grinding, you'll get quickly bored of Path of Exile.
Con Clunky trading system
The western PC version of Path of Exile currently requires using an external site to find deals or sifting through scam attempts in the trade chat. After you find an item you want to buy, you need to message the seller, and if they respond, enter the same area as them to make a direct trade. There is no auction house, no mail, no automated trading posts, and to sell stuff you have to buy a premium stash tab via a microtransaction.
Con One shot fest
This game has an extreme learning curve, meaning you'll invest 100 hours of just reading on the internet before understanding the basic game, plus the endgame is a one dimensional "spam all flasks and one shot everything or get one shot" style of gameplay.
Con Unrewarding
You fight 40 minutes with "uber uber boss" and he drops white items that can be found anywhere in barrels most of the time
whats worse, you have to "farm" "fragments" to start that boss battle, that will take a while too, if you decide to buy the fragments, you will drop nothing and you will lose a lot of currency.
Con Some aspects of the graphics look dated
While the graphics have received updates over time, a lot of the visuals still lack polish you'd see in most AAA games. Some textures are fairly low res, certain character models look weird when they have armor on, and the animations feel somewhat stiff and clunky. You probably won't notice this during active gameplay, but when you stop for a moment to look around it becomes painfully obvious.