CONGRATS ! I love that you beat that really rude lady . Seriously , who does that ? If she wanted to talk to her friend , she shouldve gone back and stood beside them . <| sep |> The only advantage to the Steambased client is it autoupdates when you ' re not at your computer trying to launch the game immediately after a new patch . The disadvantage to that is unless you actively have the Steam client open when you try to launch Path of Exile and look at the Downloads section , you ' ll never know when a new patch was released because Steam doesn ' t notify you of such when you launch a game that ' s been updated since your last play . Now if you try to launch Path of Exile right when a new patch is released , Steam spends the usual time downloading the patch which isn ' t much different from the standalone client . but then Steam has to do all of the file arranging and updating , which takes significantly longer , up to 5 minutes depending on the size . Sure , I ' ve switched to a SSD since then , but it still takes a bit longer than the standalone client .