Over 400,000 people are clicking monsters and picking up loot in Path of Exile 2 right now, according to Steam’s most played list. That also means that there are thousands of people getting torn apart by those monsters and wondering how they found themselves playing the Dark Souls of loot-based action RPGs. Developer Grinding Gear Games doesn’t seem bothered by the number of people surprised by the difficulty, but it wants to make their lives a little less miserable in its final patch of the year.
The first thing you learn in PoE 2 is that everything can and will kill you. Skeletons hit you like their last gig was a boss in another game, and fighting three wolves at once should reward you a Medal of Honor. The first 20 hours is a survival game where the trees punch back, and all you get for finishing the campaign is another difficulty spike.
The pain won’t end in PoE 2’s upcoming patch, but it should be a little more fair, according to a forum post by the developer. Skills that are struggling to carry players through the game are getting big improvements, including bow attacks, bone and chaos spells, and shield abilities. As a witch player forced to pose as a sorceress because all the thematically-fitting skills were bad, this is great news.
Almost everything in the Trial of Sekhemas, a roguelike dungeon you have to survive to unlock one of your subclasses, will be considerably easier. Fighting monsters up close was simply worse than fighting them from afar due to the way the trial’s unique Honour resource worked. Think of it like a secondary health bar: lose your Honour, lose the trial. The upcoming patch will significantly reduce the amount of Honour damage you take near enemies as well as fix two bugs that were draining it way faster than intended. Warrior players might finally see what it’s like to have a subclass.
PoE 2’s hardest dungeons, or maps, won’t be as punishing as before either. Monsters that leave behind explosions and other devastating effects shouldn’t wipe you out in a single hit. And high-tier maps won’t exclusively make your character’s elemental resistances worse. The number one complaint among endgame players is how easy it is to get popped out of nowhere in a crowd of enemies, which would kick you out of the dungeon empty-handed. You still only have one life, but deaths will hopefully feel considerably less random.
As the second major patch for the game, the changes help set expectations for how GGG plans to approach balancing PoE 2’s six classes. Last week, it dropped a patch that destroyed characters focused on freezing enemies with no warning or explanation, forcing them to spend copious amounts of gold reworking their builds. The cost to move your skill points around will go way down in the next patch to help compensate, and GGG says it’s trying its best not to leave characters gutted.
“Since launch we’ve unfortunately had to nerf a few skills that were far too overpowered. How do we define overpowered? Basically it’s a situation in which a certain skill is so powerful that players feel no other method of playing the game is viable,” it says. “Generally speaking we are trying to do this in a way that doesn’t make a build bad (but we can make mistakes!).”
GGG says full patch notes are coming “soon” and the few weeks following its release will be quiet as many of its members will be taking time off.
Path of Exile 2 early access is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC.