Path of Exile 2 developer Grinding Gear Games has issued more emergency changes to the action role-playing game amid a backlash to the nerf-heavy Dawn of the Hunt update that has caused recent Steam user reviews to plummet to ‘mostly negative.’
Dawn of the Hunt launched earlier this month and quickly sparked a backlash among the Path of Exile community. The expansion added the new Huntress class, a Spear and Buckler user specialising in hybrid melee and ranged combat. Elsewhere, there are five new ascension classes: the Ritualist, Amazon, Smith of Kitava, Tactician, and Lich. And along with all that are mechanical overhauls, over one hundred new unique items as well as significantly expanded crafting options.
What should have been a hugely positive moment for Path of Exile 2, its developers and its players became something else entirely, however, as the community complained that GGG had slowed the pace of the game down to the point where it became a “total slog.”
The ‘most helpful’ review of the last 30 days on Steam is a negative one that outlines the current problems with the game:
Every boss fight is incredibly longer than it needs to be. Most of the skills do little to no damage. I understand they said they wanted to slow gameplay down, but I don’t think I will even make it more than one week in this league at this point. It just feels incredibly awful right now, IF you can even get the game to run and be stable. That is a HUGE if.
“If you’re a masochist who enjoys being punished for little to no reward, this game is for you,” reads another negative review. “If you’re not, it’s likely that you won’t enjoy the game.
“The release version (0.1) already had a lot of issues in relation to the size of the areas (too large), the slow movement (which makes those large areas feel even worse) and forced combo gameplay (which was optional thanks to some “unintended” build options found by players).
“However, in this new version (0.2 – Dawn of the Hunt), just as many other reviewers have mentioned, the game was slowed down considerably.
“The loot, which wasn’t too common in 0.1, but acceptable, was nerfed by quite a lot, to the point where you kill a rare monster or boss and get no rare items or crafting currencies.
“The forced combo gameplay is back in full force, with the developers wanting to pigeonhole us into this type of gameplay, which is in direct contrast to what an ARPG of this kind is supposed to be. You’re supposed to have freedom to make your build how you like to play it and not be forced to play only the way the developers have intended.
“Players keep complaining about the map size and slow movement and the developers largely ignored these comments until the community backlash was too much to keep ignoring.
“I have 5k hours in PoE 1 and it’s my favorite game of all time. I love GGG but honestly, I cannot recommend this game to almost anyone as it is now.
“Hopefully they will be able to fix these issues in the future and make the game more enjoyable.”
In response, GGG had already outlined a list of changes, but it has now revealed more coming as part of the 0.2.0e due out tomorrow, April 11.
The question for Path of Exile 2 players now is, are these changes meaningful enough to stem the tide of complaints and get the game back into a positive setting? It’s worth noting that Path of Exile 2 has been a hugely successful release for GGG, to the point where it struggled to cope with the sheer number of players at launch. But this success has brought with it additional problems that have even impacted the development of Path of Exile 1, which retains a sizeable and loyal audience.
Path of Exile 2 update 0.2.0e patch notes:
Monster Speed Changes
Many players have been reported being overwhelmed by monsters. The cause of this is a variety of factors and we are addressing them on a case by case basis. We have listed monster changes act by act below, but we also made the following changes more generally.
Many human monsters including the Cultists in Freythorn, the Faridun and the Tribal Humans in Act Three have behaviour where they can interrupt their melee attacks if the player moves too far out of range during the attack, especially for attacks that have multiple hits like a swipe left into swipe right. These interrupt events have been primarily removed especially on things that were attacking very fast as it caused the monsters to be relentlessly able to pursue and attack you giving you no time to engage or use skills between their attacks.
The Haste Aura monster modifier no longer appears on monsters that are already fast.
Act 1
Werewolf Prowlers and Tendril Prowlers now will enter a walking stance (as opposed to running) after performing a melee action, they will only begin running again if you get a certain distance away from them. This behaviour has been applied to many faster monsters.
Hungering Stalkers now have 12% less Life and Damage, they were already relatively weak but we have lowered it a bit further to account for their high movement speed and attack speed. They are intended to engage and attack quickly, but be weak and die fast.
Reduced the number of Bloom Serpents in The Red Vale.
Halved the number of Venomous Crabs in the Hunting Grounds.
The Cultists in Freythorn no longer have interrupt events on their attacks as described above.
The Cultists in Freythorn wielding Axes and Maces in Freythorn now walk after performing a Melee Action, only running again once you exit a certain distance.
Blood Cretins on death Blood Pools have had their duration decreased from 6 seconds to 4 seconds, and fixed the area of effect to match the visual more closely.
Reduced the overall density of more challenging monsters in Ogham Manor.
Act 2
The Boulder Ants in Titan Valley have been replaced by Risen Maraketh, as the area had too many monsters that had irritating movement.
The Faridun have all been modified to remove the interrupt events on their attacks as described above..
Act 3
Diretusk Boar and Antlion Charger’s are now more likely to push you to the side instead of pushing you along with them when they charge you.
The Lost City monster pack composition has been adjusted to result in less ranged monsters
Massively adjusted the Azak Bog, firstly by the aforementioned changes to interrupt events, but also changed the monster composition of the area to have less Ranged and Elite monsters.
Fixed an issue where the Slitherspitter’s poison spray in Venom Crypts was dealing Chaos Damage instead of Physical Damage unintentionally.
We have also identified another issue that affects some areas in which potential monster spawn locations have inconsistent density in different rooms. This leads to situations where some rooms are much denser with monsters than others in an unintended way. We have a fix for this problem but it did not make it into this patch, and will be deployed in a later patch.
These are not the only changes that we will be making to monsters. Further changes will come in later updates. Some changes we didn’t get time to make today, and others require new animations that will take a little longer.
Boss Changes
Viper Napuatzi is one of the more challenging bosses for players, so we made the following change.
Lowered the amount and size of Chaos Rains (the purple ones) in the Viper Napuatzi fight, and cleaned up the visual left afterwards faster to make the following drop locations more obvious.
Uxmal had various quirks that made him somewhat annoying to fight. We have made a few changes.
Reduced the number of times Uxmal changes locations through the fight
Uxmal can no longer recharge Energy Shield while in the air.
Uxmal uses his Flame Breath less often
Xyclucian had some issues with visibility of his effects
The arena of Xyclucian has had its ground foliage removed in order to make his effects more visible
Player Minion Changes
We have changed the way that minion revive timers work. When your first minion dies, it sets the revive timer to 7.5 seconds as before, but each successive minion that dies increases it by less and less (still capped to a max of 7.5 seconds). This should heavily mitigate the situation where most of your minions are dead, but the revive timer keeps resetting to 7.5 seconds over and over.
Disenchanting a Bind Spectre or Tame Beast gem will unbind them, allowing you to use them again.
Tamed beasts can now fit through gaps of the same size that the player can.
Other Player Balance
We don’t have a lot of other player balance changes on top of the ones described yesterday, but we did manage to sneak in the following additional changes:
Rally support is no longer restricted to Strikes or Slams, and can now support any Melee Attack you use yourself.
Glory (Used by Hammer of the Gods and Spear of Solaris) is now no longer consumed if you are interrupted while using the skill.
Fixed a bug where Blood Boils from the Ritualist ascendancy didn’t propagate if the monster exploded on death, such as when using Herald of Blood.
Crafting Changes
We have now finished adding all of the mods to runes for caster weapons. Desert, Glacial, Storm, Iron, Body, Mind, Rebirth, Inspiration, Stone and Vision runes all now work on Wands and Staves, with their own set of modifiers.
Renly’s abandoned shop in the Burning Village now also has a Blank rune which Renly can forge into any elemental rune of your choosing in case you didn’t find any up to that point. As mentioned yesterday, 12 Artificers Orb’s now drop at fixed locations through the campaign in addition to the random drops and salvageable ones.
Performance Improvements
The ground foliage in many areas has had an optimisation pass to improve performance.
0.2.0E Deployment Timeline
And that’s all that made it for 0.2.0E. The patch will be deployed at around 10AM NZT. We have also made some more changes internally, but they didn’t make it in time for the patch.
The following lists the changes that will be deployed after the weekend. These are not the only changes that will be in that patch. These are just the changes that we already have.
Charm Changes
Charms are a system that we never adequately expanded on, and have had several problems that we will finally be addressing. Overall we want charms to be more useful, and for you to be more easily able to use more of them.
First, the changes to charm slots
Charm slots on belts are now granted by implicit mods that are added to belts depending on the level of the area that dropped them. The number of slots is random up to a cap depending on how high level the belt is. You can use a Divine Orb to reroll the number of slots.
Belts have 1 charm slot until level 32, up to 2 until level 64 and up to 3 from level 65 and onwards.
Unique Belts can always have up to 3 charm slots.
For now, Unique Belts with mods that increase the number of charms will still be capped to 3, later on we will remove the cap.
Then changes to the charms themselves.
Several charms were not protecting you from the hit that activated them, these cases have been fixed to work properly.
We have also done a pass on Charm mods to make them more powerful and rewarding.
Stash Tab Affinities
We are adding Stash Tab Affinities for the following categories of items
Socketables
Fragments [Which includes Tablets and Trial Keys]
Breach
Expedition
Ritual
We will also be allowing Charms to go in the Flask stash tab or any tab with the Flask affinity.
Atlas Bookmarks
We have added the ability to bookmark locations on your atlas to find them easily later.
Right clicking a node will allow you create a bookmark by picking an icon and optionally adding a label you can type in.
You can have up to 16 bookmarks at a time.
They will appear as icons around the outside of the screen with a direction allowing you to scroll to them easily, or you can click on them to instantly take you there
You can also view a list of bookmarks under the legend and click them to go there.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
