Path of Exile II Rant Thread

Good Morning Folks! At least I hope it is still morning by the time I get this blog post out there. This thread is a bit out of ordinary for my normal post, and you are essentially getting a stream of consciousness rant about things that I think need to be improved in the game. Generally speaking I take more effort to shape my arguments, but this is pretty much just raw snippets of feelings. It might lead you to believe that I hate Path of Exile II. I would not have spent the last two hours randomly jotting things down if I hated the game. In fact I think that depending upon the path it takes… Path of Exile II could be the best ARPG in another few years eclipsing the greatness that has been the original Path of Exile. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on here. I think the game has “good bones” to borrow a term used by home renovators. However in its current state there are a lot of things that are just not working.

I feel like I also have to preface this statement, that at this point I have spent almost 200 hours playing Path of Exile II since its launch. I have leveled a Titan to level 78 and have since shifted to an Infernalist which I have taken to 88 and continue pushing it forward. I have played the worst class and one of the absolute best classes, and the experiences were wildly different. A lot of my early complaints about Path of Exile II just do not exist when you are playing a well designed class. I also feel like it is important to state that I have around 4000 hours played in Path of Exile 1, and started seriously playing in the Sentinel league and have made it to the endgame in every league since then. I’ve built a bunch of different viable characters even though I fell in love with Righteous Fire and keep playing those each league as well.

I’m also not really expressing a lot of radical opinions that I have not seen bandied about in the Redditsphere. However I felt like it was time to unburden my soul with a good rant. I am not even going to make the pretense of trying to break up the block of text with images. You are warned… big damned wall of text forum post mode has engaged.

One Portal Softcore Is Bad

Okay, this is probably the thing that annoys me the most about Path of Exile II. I was fully on board with the concept of the bosses resetting their health back to full after failing to kill them. What I was not on board with was still spawning six portals, but removing your map after dying once. This just feels awful and even now that I have finished unlocking all of the atlas points… and whether or not I complete a map no longer matters at all… it still feels atrocious. For those not indoctrinated to Path of Exile, there is already a game mode called hardcore that is an optional challenge where you effectively lose your character… or at least it transfers to another league… when you take a death. I do not play in that game mode for a reason.

Runes Are Bad

In Path of Exile II, we lost access to the crafting bench and instead got the rune system where we can socket in an item and gain some additional stats on an item. This is bad for a few reasons. Firstly this choice is permanent, and unlike the crafting bench, you cannot change your mind and put on something more useful when you no longer need that 12% resistance to a single stat. Additionally, 12% just feels like it isn’t enough to matter in some cases.

What I would like to see is a few things. Firstly I would make it so you could socket over top of an existing rune destroying the first rune and replacing its stats. Second I would really like to see multiple tiers of runes just like we had multiple tiers of bench crafts. The game has the reforging bench and should be used more often. I envision three tiers of runes, and each one requires you to reforge three of the previous tiers to make it.

Gold Feels Meaningless

Right now there is not a reasonable gold sink. I feel like lowering the respec costs was the right thing to do, and it should be almost free to change your character. This is something that was unnecessarily punishing players at low levels. Even in Path of Exile 1, you eventually reached a point in progression where you had more Regret Orbs than you knew what to do with, and respecs were effectively free. What gold lacks is something fun to do with it, that you actually care about. Right now the only real option is gambling, and gambling is a mistake… a massive mistake.

What we are really missing is Kingsmarch, because that was the piece that made gold feel good in the Settlers of Kalguur league. Maybe this is eventually something that is going to be implemented, but for now, it feels just as useless as gold felt in Diablo III, where it was just a number that constantly went up and that you had nothing really to do with it. What I would love to see is some additional vendors added to the game that sell a limited stock of items for gold. For example what if you had someone similar to POE1 Tujen that sold random currencies and you could haggle with them trying to get the price of gold down? There just needs to be something fun to do with it.

Most Maps are Not Well Designed

One of the hallmarks of Path of Exile 1 mapping was that it had a lot of really great maps. While everyone pretty much universally loved some of them, there were various niche maps that other folks loved and were perfect for specific builds. For example, I love Toxic Sewers, but that map is going to suck for any build with a lot of damage projection. The problem that Path of Exile II has is that almost universally they are filled with super tight corridors with way too much collision forcing you to get hung up on things constantly. The maps themselves are also massive in scale and take way too long to complete. There are a handful that are great, but because of the meandering nature of the endgame… you are constantly stuck choosing the lesser of two evils while figuring out how to path around. Vaal Factory can die in a fire.

Mapping is KinDA Boring

Right now Path of Exile II mapping suffers from the same problem as the Last Epoch monolith. There just isn’t enough interesting stuff going on in the maps. Partially this is due to the fact that we do not have over a decade’s worth of league content infused randomly into the maps. However, it is more than that. Right now it feels like the only mobs in the entire map that matter are the half-dozen rare spawns. Once you have killed those, there is little to no reason to keep clearing the map. They are legitimately the only mobs that have a reasonable chance of dropping anything worth picking up. Occasionally you can get maps dropped from white packs, but nine times out of ten these will be a map that is at least 10 tiers too low for you to actually care about.

Rarity is Mandatory for Fun

Related to this last point… right now it feels like Item Rarity is a mandatory stat for you to stack to make mapping feel interesting. This means EVERYONE is magic finding 100% of the time, or feeling like they are making no progress. I feel like this stat needs to be removed from the game entirely and come up with a more creative way to add it back in. Maybe rarity is a sliding scale, which can solve the one multiple portals thing. Maybe maps start out with a high base rarity and that drops each time you lose a portal. Rarity exists on the Atlas tree and I feel like if they buffed that slightly they could remove it entirely from gear and the game would be better for it.

Item Drops Don’t Matter

One of the points that Jonathan stated repeatedly in interviews is that they wanted to make it so that loot on the ground mattered again. This is a goal that they have entirely failed at. Loot for the most part is just as bad as it ever was in Path of Exile 1, the main difference is we are getting way less of it and as a result have a way lower chance of ever seeing anything that is worth picking up. I thought maybe the Tiered loot system that they introduced would be something similar to the “well-rolled” concept that some of the league mechanics in Path of Exile 1 awarded. For example in the Settlers mechanic, you wound up getting some extremely solid drops with decent resists and stats that you might actually care about. I’ve seen a bunch of Tier 5 drops in maps, which is the highest tier in the new system of drops, and almost all of them were worthless. Most of the pieces of gear had zero resistances, which is effectively a requirement in this game since resists in general feel so much harder to get. The best loot in the game appears to be on the vendors because they seem to actually be generating loot with that well-rolled formula.

Crafting is Not Crafting

Right now it feels like we have the Duplo version of the crafting system from Path of Exile. I was by far not a crafting genius, nor did I think it was great that you were effectively required to use Craft of Exile to figure out how to make anything. What we got instead is a total crapshoot where quite honestly… if you don’t end up with the two best stats you can possibly get while it is still a magic item, it is not worth progressing at all. Crafting is effectively picking up a bunch of bases, throwing a transmute and an aug at it… and if you did not hit the jackpot you throw it back on the ground or vendor it. For the average player I do not feel like it is really a system worth even engaging with unless you are being masochistic and rolling the Solo-Self-Found lifestyle.

Greater Essences are Unobtanium

We were sold this vision of being able to use essences to guarantee two stats on an item, and that this was going to be part of the common crafting routine for players. Essences spawn fairly infrequently in maps and the campaign, and when they do… you are very unlikely to get anything but lesser essences which require the item to be white before you start. In my entire time playing Path of Exile II I have seen a single greater essence. I polled my friends who are also playing and they have each gotten one a piece.

There are a few things I would like to see changed with the system. Firstly I would like to see Lesser essences changed so that they can be used in place of either a Transmute or an Augment, aka they will add a single stat to either a Normal or Magic item. Similarly, I would like to see Greaters changed so that they will make a magic item a rare and add an affix, or work like an exalt and add it to an existing rare item. This is going to make the guaranteed stat that an Essence can provide way more valuable because you can use them on an item that already has some potential. Next similar to my suggestions about Runes, I would like to see it so that you can reforge 3 Lesser Essences into 1 Greater Essence of the same type. This means that players can actually work their way up to crafting with Greater Essences rather than hoping on the one-in-a-million drop.

Six Links are Harder to Get than they were in Path of Exile

Another thing that we were told repeatedly, is that the design of Path of Exile II should make it much easier for folks to reach their goal of having multiple abilities as six-links. This is a lie. Greater and Perfect Jewelers orbs just don’t really exist. I’ve not seen a single Five Link, and I sure as hell have never seen a Six Link. Similarly, I have seen streamers who can seemingly get Perfects but have not seen a Greater and therefore still are using Four Links on everything. It would be amazing if you had a system already in the game that was built around combining things… and getting higher-tier things. You guessed it… I would once again love to see them use the damned Reforge Bench to let us combine 3 Lessers into a Greater, and 3 Greaters into a Perfect.

Use the Reforge Bench for Almost Everything

Similarly, I would love to see this concept carried forward into pretty much any place where it would make sense. Do you have too many level 14 Uncut Gems but need a level 15? Bam through the magic of the reforge bench and the standards that have already been set out with way stones… combine 3 gems to get a gem of a higher level. If they add other tiered systems in the future… then bam… make them work through the reforge bench. Hell, I would even love it if they added in Recombinating Rares through the Reforge Bench. Was it too broken to make binary choices as to which stats got kept in the final product? Probably… but it would be way harder to game the system if you required three input products. It just gives players another thing to do with the rares that drop on the ground that are not good enough to actually use…. which are most of them.

Give us the Chinese Auction House

I know this is a big ask and one that will not be given… but trading feels worse in Path of Exile II than it was in Path of Exile. The currency exchange pretty much reset my expectations for how trading should work, and now I would like to see this carried forward into other aspects of the game. Buying things from players is awful. This morning I tried to buy a level 19 Uncut Spirit Gem because I had not found any yet and was getting tired of waiting. I had to message 30 people before I finally got one to respond. The Chinese server already has instant trading, where the item is pulled from the player’s stash and given to you. Make this a thing and make it cost gold… giving us another reason to earn gold. POE1 trade is something I am fond of… but it is a fucking mess and incomprehensible for anyone new to the game. All of my friends reach a point where they cannot seem to progress their builds because their gear sucks… but they refuse to cross the line into turning into a proper trading degen… but also have no problem using Auction Houses in MMORPGs. It is time to move away from this nonsense and just give us a system that actually works well.

Energy Shield Feels Mandatory

Right now the only defensive layer that actually feels good is Energy Shield, and this is in large part because it exists on the tree. Energy shield is different from all of the other defensive layers because it is effectively a replacement for player health. As such by removing health from the passive tree… and quite honestly watering down all of the other defensive layers… the only really viable way of playing in the endgame is to invest heavily in Energy Shield. The answer is not to nerf Energy Shield… though I know they are probably going to do precisely that as soon as they get back from holiday break… the answer instead is to buff the other defensive layers so that they actually feel like a reasonable option. Armor right now is royally fucked, and so is Health and Life Regen. Recoup works fine, but is not enough on its own… and Block while great is entirely too fucking cumbersome and requires picking up every single node on the tree to make it viable.

Build Diversity is Bad Because Classes Feel Bad

Playing as a Warrior felt reasonable enough… until I felt what it was like to play the game as Infernalist Minions. Similarly, yesterday I talked about Alkaiser’s change in religion once he stopped playing Warrior and switched over to Invoker. Essentially there are four builds right now that feel good, and as a result, the players who are sticking around are migrating to them. This is not that these are wildly overpowered builds, but instead just the type of gameplay that people want to play. I fear that they are all going to be nerfed into the ground, when the opposite approach should be taken. Look at what these classes are doing and what makes them fun to play, and then start reworking and buffing the other classes until they can do the same thing. Stampede Explode actually felt pretty good, but was due to a bugged interaction… maybe you should have made that bugged interaction actually a thing instead of fixing it.

Give us Old Ambush

The current state of stongboxes is awful. Instead of popping the box and getting a bunch of spawns that you can clear in a few minutes… it starts this annoying timer causing waves of mobs to spawn in the vicinity eventually leading to a rather anemic amount of loot. They are just not worth doing in their current state because they both take too long, and are way the hell too unrewarding. Strongboxes in Path of Exile 1 are something people actually try their best to add into most Atlas strategies because they feel like this tight little dose of dopamine and are actually fairly rewarding. I have no clue who dreamt up this change, but it needs to be reworked entirely.

Decouple Trials from Ascendancy

I feel like Trial of the Sehkemas and Trial of Chaos are perfectly fine optional content. However I feel like they should not be required to ascend your character. Sanctum was deeply polarizing and favored specific types of builds, and I feel like Sehkemas suffers from all of these problems. Similarly asking a player to do four floors to get that last ascendacy is asking them to commit to potentially a multi-hour gamble instead of what felt like 10-15 minutes to get through a Labyrinth. Trial of Chaos just needs to be deleted honestly… but I can see how some players and some builds might like it. It similarly feels miserable to do. The Ascendancy is a big part of the player identity and I feel like it should almost be free. Right now the Trials feel like the Dungeons in Last Epoch, something you do exactly once before moving on with your life and realizing there are far better uses of your time.

Dodge Needs Phasing

So the changes to dodge roll are better, but I still feel like dodge rolls need phasing. Mob collision is not fun, and especially awful given how claustophobic a lot of the areas are. Ritual for example always seems to spawn in the worst possible places giving you a tiny corridor to fight in. I took a death this morning just because I had no way of getting through the wall of mobs around me, and my minions were being blocked by geometry. It just feels super bad and at least having phasing on dodge roll would help a bit in these scenarios. In a perfect world I would remove all mob, player, and minion collision because none of that is enjoyable in the least.

Atlas Progression Feels Bad

One of my favorite things to do in a Path of Exile League was to slowly work my way through unlocking the 115 out of 115 map nodes. Each time I cleared a new map with its bonus objective, I got what felt like an immediate jolt of possibility as I was granted points to shape my endgame Atlas. Right now the entire process of progressing through the Doryani tiered quests just feels bad. Like I see how you end up in this scenario… you had 115 maps to clear in Path of Exile one, so dividing this out into 10 per white map tier, 8 per yellow map tier, and 6 per red map tier for a total of 120 maps seems equivalent. The problem is the player agency and benefits of your effort… really are not felt at all until you reach red maps. At a minimum you have to slog through 10 completely unrewarding tier 1 maps before you get any points to spend, and then only have two to do anything with. I know they purposefully paired down the Atlas tree to 30 points, but right now it does not feel good in the least. I am not sure what the answer is, but this is not it.

Do Unique Maps Exist? What Biome is this Map?

I’ve cleared a bunch of maps at this point and have purposefully branched out into a bunch of directions looking for additional content and have not stumbled onto a single unique map yet. More than that I have only actually found one hideout thus far. On the other hand… I have seen over fifty copies of the Augury. I feel like maybe there needs to be some work on that randomizer. Additionally I would love it if it were easier to tell immediately by mousing over the node what biome it belonged to. Like if you find a Crypt in the middle of a grassland… is it part of the Grass biome? I have no clue. I should be able to know that information just like I was able to immediately tell what biome I was in during Delve. I mean they have this information, so it should just be a matter of presenting it to us.

Citadels are too rare and as a result valuable.

Honestly this is a problem that I had with Path of Exile 1, but I am seeing it play out again in Path of Exile II. Right now it is too hard to find the Citadels that are required to summon the pinnacle boss, and as a result… when I do find one… I am absolutely going to sell the token that it drops because it is not worth the risk of attempting the fight as compared to the potential value of the item on the trade market. I also sold invitations in Path of Exile 1, because it just was not worth my time to take the risk on the fight that might not even drop anything I can use… when I can just sell the item and get currency that I can in turn buy the item I wanted. I feel like this is not the calculus that GGG probably wants its player base to have, but by making invitations annoying to farm… this is the reality that they have created.

Boss Maps Need Reworked

So when GGG talked about boss maps and them being a bit rarer… I pictured that it would be a map that was just a boss arena, and then have a much harder version of a campaign boss that you fought that would then be more rewarding. That is not at all what they ended up being. Right now I would love to see these changed so you just spawned into the Boss Arena and that the Atlas tree buffed them significantly. Give them a new pool of loot that they can drop or have it so there is a guaranteed chance of getting a decent unique from them or something like that.

Give Normal Maps the Steamroll Bosses

Isolating the bosses in their current state to ONLY be on boss maps feels equally bad. I would like to see the current version of map bosses shifted to just appearing in every single map, and leaving them at their current power level. One of the things that POE2 lacks right now is the player agency that POE1 had, and I feel like further separating bossing from mapping is going to benefit everyone. Mapping should be a chill time, and bossing should be the more sweaty tryhard experience. The people who care about challenge and difficulty, are the folks who chase uber uber pinnacle bosses. Let the rest of us have reasonable chill and predictable mapping.

If We Can’t Have Custom Tabs… give us affinities.

The current state of the game and all of the various currencies that used to have custom tabs in Path of Exile 1, that no longer do… is a bit maddening. By far the worst of these offenders is the lack of a map tab. I know custom tabs require a lot of work, but in theory the affinities that you already had coded should require less work? If we can’t have the proper tabs yet, please at least give us the ability to set up tab affinities so that we can quickly shunt loot into the bank without flipping between a bunch of tabs. Right now loot management feels awful, and please GGG throw us a bone here.

Remove Tower Maps

Conceptually I like the idea of Towers, and honestly I have enjoyed using them to buff the maps in the vicinity. I don’t feel like they are the ideal replacement for scarabs but I am willing to roll with it. What I do find maddening however is constantly needing to waste a map on running the exact same tower layout over and over. In an ideal world you would remove the tower map entirely and just make it so that pathing to a Tower unlocks it and allows you to begin using it. There is nothing interesting about the process of running this same map over and over, but unlike a lot of the voices in the community I don’t necessarily hate the Towers themselves.