I’ve thrown in the towel on my level 88 Ranger and am working on my now level 45 Monk as I continue to dive deep into Path of Exile 2 Early Access. After spending a lot of time in the endgame getting quite strong and speed-clearing T15s as of late, I hit a few points where I just said “well, this needs work, I’ll come back later.”
And what needs work? Here are the major pain points I’d say still exist, both in terms of what I’ve experienced and at least some of these seem to reflect larger community sentiment, from what I’ve seen.
One Death Maps – Everything in the endgame is you die, you lose, but this often pairs poorly with just how punishing it feels on almost every level. There should be consequences for death, sure, but here you lose 1) all progress on that map, 2) your Waystone, 3) your map modifiers, 4) a percent of your XP above a certain level. It’s too much, and is not challenging as much as it is annoying. Something has to ease up here.
Types of Deaths – GGG did improve on some of the more annoying ways to die, but many situations in maps still do not feel especially fair, like in-map events that mass spawn enemies on you that can often insta-kill you due to elite modifiers you don’t even have time to read and map geometry. And, paired with the one-portal death mechanic, it’s frustrating that some of the tougher bosses, including pinnacle ones, often have “one wrong move” insta-kill mechanics that result in the sort of huge losses seen above.
Waystone Management – This is just not a terribly fun part of the game. Even with all the correct Atlas tree upgrades, managing Waystones can be a chore, and you should not have to resort to hyper-specific strategies like saving good ones for boss maps only, lest you spend them elsewhere and only have a 25% chance of getting the right tier of Waystone. At T15, for instance, you never want to get anything below that again, yet this “300% increased Waystone chance” is often dropping 7s, 8s, 11s, and so on. You can get more through trading but as someone who would like to play this game without any trading, that leaves limited options.
Magic Find – The current meta of the game is not necessarily only one specific class and build, but it’s stacking as much Magic Find gear as you can in order to produce farming results orders of magnitude above everything else. It doesn’t matter how fast you can speed clear a tough map if someone else is doing the same thing, and because of Magic Find, is getting 500% the rewards. MF systems are always notoriously hard to manage (Diablo previously had these same problems) but PoE2 has not implemented some of the ideas PoE1 had to make this work. Right now it’s simply mandatory.
The Trials – I’m not sure I’ve played a more annoying activity in a game than the second pair of Ascendancy Trials for your final skill points. They’re absurdly long, overly punishing with stacking negative modifiers and like everything else, you die once and it’s done, though in this case, you are losing way, way more time per attempt. These are so impenetrable I’m not coming back to them until something changes, as I’m not going to lose another hour to these.
Despite all this, I’ve certainly had fun! I would not have taken my Ranger this high and played this much if I hadn’t, nor would I be taking my Monk back to the maps now. But I think these are pretty clear issues that need to be faced if this is working its way through early access. There is a difference between a challenging endgame and one that is just flat-out annoying for its own sake in terms of its punishment and looting. And I think there’s work to be done.
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