Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?

Path of Exile 2 has been a polarizing game right from the beginning. Those of us who have sunk an impossible number of hours in the original were used to a certain pace, one that's familiar to players of isometric ARPGs more broadly—blast monsters, collect loot, blast monsters faster.

PoE2's guiding vision has been to slow things down and make combat more engaging, which sounds great in theory, but the disastrous response to its Dawn of the Hunt update reveals that Grinding Gear Games hasn't quite solved this fundamental tension yet.

It's a vision worth chasing—it would be a true shame if Path of Exile 2 ended up just being a carbon copy of the original with nothing to differentiate it. I love the idea of more engaging, more technical combat that pushes boundaries in the genre and gives us more to do than optimizing our map clear speed and divines per hour. But the changes in 0.2 don't get us there, leaving most of the playerbase unhappy and frustrated with a game that many are saying just isn't much fun.

Why the patch is such a misstep

When PoE2 entered early access last December, everyone I knew was raving about the campaign experience. It was tense, difficult, and engaging in all the ways that had been promised. I crept through the acts, bashing my head against bosses multiple times and digging deep in my stash for any resources I could muster as I learned mechanics and got my ass kicked. It was great. This pace, this feeling of achieving mastery through repeated challenges, brought about a familiar comparison—that it felt like the Dark Souls of isometric ARPGs.

Once a few weeks passed though, and we got deeper into the endgame, something new emerged. Builds got tuned, broken mechanics were exploited, and people started blasting. It's inevitable that some things will fall through the cracks, but after a few nerfs to the really absurd stuff (Magnetic Salvo, trigger gems, etc) the dev team took its hands off the wheel. They let us grind away to our heart's content with all the powerful broken stuff and focused instead on the new update.

It makes sense, then, that with the new update would come massive nerfs. In an interview just before the patch dropped, game director Jonathan Rogers said that "making sure combat is engaging is ultimately our goal" and instantly teleporting around maps with 20k mana spamming Spark wasn't exactly that.

I think the community underestimated just how hard Grinding Gear was going to go, though. In addition to nerfing just about everything we were using in 0.1, it made the monsters faster, tougher, and grindier to chew through—leaving players frustrated, quitting, and leaving poor reviews in record numbers.

The good stuff in 0.2.0

My experience was a little different. I cleared the campaign in about 16 hours, which while it's about double what I would spend doing the same thing in PoE1, it didn't feel completely absurd. I think part of this was that I found a really good build—I leveled with a Glacial Bolt/Artillery Ballista Amazon. I knew I wanted to try the new class, and after looking at the patch notes it seemed like crossbows were about the only thing that actually got better instead of being bashed by the nerfhammer.

I did get a window into what other players were experiencing, though. You can't skill Artillery Ballista until level 31, so I initially leveled with Lightning Arrow, something I'd done before in 0.1 to great success. This time around, however, it was miserable. Act 2 alone took me over four hours as I pecked away at packs of white mobs that felt like overtuned Destiny bullet sponges. I think if my entire campaign experience had been this way, I'd have been ready to flip my desk.

It's a shame, too, because Dawn of the Hunt does a lot of stuff right. I quite like the new mini league mechanic, Azmeri Wisps. You start running into them right at the beginning of the game, and they float along the map buffing monsters and pulling you into trouble. Eventually they find a rare mob and turbocharge it with animal spirits, making them more challenging but more rewarding.

I like the tension Azmeri Wisps bring by forcing the pace a bit (if you let them get too far away, they disappear) and the fights with the buffed rares are a nice bit of spice to liven things up. I especially like fighting the Spirit of the Ox, even though it does make me worry I'll end up like Mufasa after it summons its herd of phantom buffalo.

Rogue Exiles are another great addition to the game. These are fellow exiles with actual classes, abilities, and crucially gear that you fight periodically starting in the later acts. I've always hated them in Path of Exile, but their implementation here strikes me as exactly the kind of thing that Grinding Gear needs to continue to do to bring its vision of meaningful combat to life. Fighting them feels like being invaded by a red spirit in a Souls game, and the fact that they can be equipped with Uniques (that they actually use in combat!) is just extremely cool.

Changes to the endgame are largely good as well. I love the changes made to towers, where there are fewer of them but we can socket multiple tablets. I was worried this would prevent us from juicing as well, but there are still areas with multiple towers that overlap. The new corruption/cleanse mechanic adds a bit of needed complexity to the mix, and changing the progression quests from simply 'do X tier 1 waystones' to chasing down the corrupted nexuses feels like an improvement. Instead of just grinding maps, the quest asks you to do what you actually want to be doing, which is branching out and exploring the Atlas.

All these changes are steps in the right direction, and the campaign will feel a lot less grindy once they introduce acts 4-6 and we don't have to do everything twice. And combat with my Amazon feels exactly the way I imagine they're trying to get things to be—against white mobs I just blast packs, but in a Ritual or against an Azmeri possessed rare and his minions, I have to carefully manage the battlefield, be ready to reposition, choose my shots, and manage distance precisely.

Getting back on track

Clearly, GGG still has a lot of work to do. Balance is a mess, minions are basically unplayable (although now that I'm looking, they've pushed an update to help with damage, so maybe it's better now), and overall player power is too low.

Some ascendancies don't have good options to spend their initial points on, tons of notables and keystones on the passive tree have such heinous downsides that it feels more like a homework problem than a reward for leveling up, and we still need a lot more currency to drop if we're going to be doing any meaningful crafting or tinkering with gear in the campaign.

The thing is, Dark Souls style combat becomes a hurdle when the main gate on your progress is the rate at which you're able to kill thousands of enemies for their goodies. Dark Souls is what it is because you have time—when I run into some horrible new threat, I can case out the terrain, block and roll, throw out some testing blows and learn patterns. If I die, I can respawn and try again. And again. And again. I gain mastery through practice, I feel the frustration of defeat, and eventually the thrill of victory.

Fighting the act bosses in Path of Exile 2 feels this way, and you get the same thing from beating them as you do from beating a big Souls boss—you get to go somewhere new. It's great, but you only get to fight map bosses or pinnacle bosses a couple times, and sometimes it takes dozens of hours to farm up the materials for an attempt. And I certainly shouldn't feel as though I'm fighting a Dark Souls boss when I'm just trying to clear out packs of trash mobs.

Ultimately, what we're dealing with here is a game in early access. We only have half the acts, we're still missing five whole classes as well as a ton of ascendancies and skills, and clearly the endgame is underbaked. GGG is racing to finish the game at the same time as it's trying to give current players a decent experience, not to mention develop leagues for Path of Exile 1. The studio is spinning more plates than it can handle smoothly at the moment.

If it can be brought into balance and find some compromise with player expectations, Path of Exile 2 is going to be a very special game. I've gotten glimpses of it playing my Amazon this update, and I'm having a blast. If the other 10 billion skills were in line with what I've been playing, I think the reception would be very different. Combat is engaging, I make meaningful choices between risk and reward, and there are flashes of truly inspired battles with rogue exiles, juiced rares, and map bosses. Unfortunately, that just hasn't been the case for most players.