Path of Exile 2 News

We've just released the Dawn of the Hunt Mystery Box in Path of Exile 2, a new mystery box without duplicate microtransactions! Each of the cosmetic effects in this mystery box has visual behaviour that interacts with your gameplay. Check out the contents of the box in the video below!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

There are 55 microtransactions (including variations) that you can find in the Dawn of the Hunt Mystery Box. Each of these microtransactions has a varying number of thematic variations, and you'll never receive a duplicate copy of a variation that you have already opened. For example, if you open one variant of a microtransaction, you may later receive another variant, but you'll never get a duplicate! Check out the full details at pathofexile2.com/mystery-box

Please note that currently the Dawn of the Hunt Mystery Box is available only in Path of Exile 2.

Today we are continuing to work on changes based on player feedback and this is a list of the updates that we have finished internally. We will be deploying the following changes over the next few days.

This is just a list of the changes that have been made so far. These are not the only changes we are investigating and they do not represent a full list of what players are reporting to us.

[h3]Player Balance Changes[/h3]

Now that we have a lot of the nerfs out of the way, we can concentrate on buffing things that are not performing well.

Sorceress Specific Changes

• Arc now does a lightning explosion when it hits a shocked enemy but can no longer shock. It does not consume the shock.
  
• Eye of Winter now gains bonus elemental damage when passing through other elemental orbs like Solar Orb, Orb of Storms or Frost Bomb.
  
• Incinerate's exposure duration has been increased to 8 seconds from 2 seconds.
  
• Mana Tempest can now be used with all spells, and has been changed to cause empowered spells to split to additional targets instead of chaining or forking.
  
• Frostbolt explosion radius has been increased by 50%.
  
• Ice Nova's freeze buildup has been increased significantly.
  
• Frost Bomb exposure duration has been increased to 8 seconds from 5 seconds.
  
• Mana remnants has been changed to work with other elemental ailments than just shock.
  
• We are lowering the delay for Ignites spreading from sources such as the Wildfire support to 1 second from 2 seconds, but the radius has been decreased slightly.
  

Chaos Innoculation

• Chaos Innoculation now prevents bleeding.
  
• The passive clusters that grant you additional stun threshold based on your maximum energy shield now also increase your ailment threshold so you will no longer be ignited/chilled/frozen/shocked as often while using CI if you take these passives.
  

Huntress Specific Changes

• Parried enemies can no longer evade your attacks.
  
• Energy Shield no longer prevents bleeding from being applied.
  
• The spear stuck in enemies by Rapid Assault now always bleeds on hit when you detonate it, the AoE has been increased by 20% and the detonate does 67% more damage.
  
• Spearfield's spear duration has been increased to 10 seconds from 6 and had it's damage growth increased, dealing 30% more damage by level 20.
  
• Herald of Blood no longer deletes the corpses of Rares or Uniques, allowing you to use Ritual Sacrifice on the rares.
  

Warrior Specific Changes

• Temper Weapon on Smith of Kitava now adds 3 empowerments per strike of your weapon, and is 25% faster. The damage might need to come down a little.
  
• Shield Wall is now detonatable with Warcries.
  
• Armour break being applied to players by monsters no longer has the 20% extra physical damage modifier that was intended to only be a buff to players, and we have also reduced its duration to 4 seconds from 12. In addition, there was a bug where partial armour breaks were never removed on the player.
  

Ranger Specific Changes

• Stormcaller arrow now proliferates shocks to nearby enemies in a small radius and has had its AoE radius increased by 50%.
  
• Lightning Rod damage has been increased by 30%, and their duration has been increased to 20 seconds.
  
• Lightning Arrow has had the radius at which it arcs to targets increased by 50%.
  
• Tornado Shots maximum duration has been increased to 15 seconds
  

[h3]New Support Gem[/h3]

We have added a support gem called Inhibitor that prevents charges being consumed but increases the damage of the supported skill by 4% for each type of charge you have.


[h3]Delirium Changes[/h3]

Delirium encounters now last approximately 2.5x longer.


[h3]Crafting[/h3]

We've added several Artificers Orb's to fixed locations throughout the campaign allowing you to craft with them more often.

We have also added runes for attributes allowing you to fix early game requirement issues.

We are also updating all runes to also apply to Wands and Staves. This work will require adding specific mods for these items. We are unsure if Soul Cores and Talismans will be able to be added at the same time, but it is our intention to attempt to make this change.

[h3]Finding Rares in Endgame[/h3]

During endgame a common issue is missing a Rare in the corner of the map that you didn't happen to explore. In order to mitigate this issue, we have changed rares to show up on the minimap at all times.

[h3]Matlan Waterways[/h3]

We have made a change to Matlan Waterways to merge some sections of water together, reducing the average number of levers that you will encounter while playing it by 6 levers.

[h3]Monster Speed[/h3]

One of the issues that is often reported is getting swarmed by monsters. We are currently doing a pass to investigate this issue and can probably talk about specific changes tomorrow, but the changes are likely to be targeted at specific monsters that are too difficult, especially in zones that have a lot of fast monsters.

[h3]A Note About The Ritual Exploit[/h3]

Recently there was an exploit involving reducing the deferral cost of Ritual items in combination with using a Unique Tablet that allows for unlimited rerolls. This occurred during the middle of the night and unfortunately due to an internal miscommunication, we didn't fix the exploit until around 8 hours after. We have banned 301 accounts that were clearly exploiting this, and they will remain banned until the end of the current league. Thankfully, the economic impact outside of the banned accounts is relatively small.

And that's all the changes that we have finished today. The changes in this post will be deployed over the next few days, but we should have more to report tomorrow.

In our update post yesterday we said we would be checking to see if there were any outliers in the area clear times during the campaign. Now that we have done the first pass of our assessment, we can talk about some of the changes that we are making to improve things.

Our focus this time is on Act 3 areas since this act has a somewhat overall longer completion time.

[h2]The Drowned City[/h2]

This area had a very large dead end that was intended to contain an entrance to an area that was temporarily cut to ship Early Access. Unfortunately this means that in the live version, this leads up to an inaccessible door with no checkpoint. We are removing that part of the level and the part that leads up to it which will reduce the overall size of the area quite a lot, but more importantly prevent the frustrating situation where you go the wrong way and have to backtrack.

[h2]Utzaal[/h2]

This area has exactly the same problem as the Drowned City and we are doing exactly the same fix, but in addition has a second dead end where the entrance to the Treasure Vault is located in the Present version of this area. We have removed that dead end as well.

[h2]The Apex Of Filth[/h2]

This area is shaped like a large spiral which was originally done because the boss arena had to be in the center to maintain continuity with the Past version. We are breaking that continuity to make the area smaller, which will make the area better overall.

[h2]The Azak Bog[/h2]

This area is a large square that has extremely high variance in how long it takes to find the boss because the location of that boss is highly variable. We have changed this area to be more rectangular with the boss at the other end from where you start which means that you can get to the boss more quickly without needing to explore the entire area as well as making it somewhat smaller.

[h2]Infested Barrens[/h2]

This area primarily trips people up because it requires you to find a waypoint to the Waterways before you can continue on to the Chimeral Wetlands if you want to be able to come back easily after finishing Jiquani's Sanctum. We are modifying the area to have a bottleneck requiring you to go past the entrance to the Waterways near the start meaning that there are less things you need to try to find in this area and cutting down the size slightly.

[h2]Jungle Ruins[/h2]

This area had a problem where it was often hard to identify the exit to the Infested Barrens from far enough away. We have made the entrance more clear and moved the checkpoint further so that you are more likely to see it. This area has also been made slightly smaller.

[h2]Chimeral Wetlands[/h2]

This area has some random variations that put the entrance to the Temple of the Chaos very far away from the entrance to the Machinarium requiring a lot of backtracking. We are moving these two entrances closer together.

[h2]Jiquani's Machinarium[/h2]

This area primarily takes extra time due to searching for Soul Cores. We have added an extra Soul Core to reduce the average amount of time it takes to find them.

[h2]Jiquani's Sanctum[/h2]

This area suffers from the same problem as Machinarium. We have added an extra Soul Core to this area as well to reduce the amount of time you need to search.

[h2]General Changes[/h2]

We have also noticed that a common issue is doing a side area and then coming back to the main area and finding that it has been reset, making you need to clear it a second time. We have a more permanent solution in mind for this, issue but as a temporary improvement we have increased the timeout time for areas with side-areas off them. This should reduce how often you run into this issue.

These changes should be deployed within the next few days. Of course, we will continue to monitor things and see if further changes are needed.

Many people are reporting that gameplay is feeling too slow. Sometimes this comes in the form of people saying that monster life is too high, or player damage is too low, or areas are taking too long. In this post we will talk about some of the things we have already done, and more of the changes we are planning on making.

[h3]Huntress Specific Concerns[/h3]
One of the major concerns that we have seen for the Huntress is that a lot of the power of the class is locked behind the Parry mechanic, and some players do not wish to Parry. Getting Frenzy charges without Parry is an option available to the class later on, but there are no other early game options that don't involve Parrying.

We want to give early game players an option to get Frenzy charges without Parry, but we have to be very careful not to make this too easy and remove the rewards for doing the Parry combos.

In order to do this, we are adding a new Skill on the second row of the Spear skills called Cull the Weak. This skill is effectively the same as Killing Palm on the Monk, but for Frenzy charges. If a monster is in Culling Range, using Cull the Weak will charge towards the monster, kill it instantly, and give you a Frenzy charge. This skill should be patched in over the next few days.

We also want to improve the feeling of Parry more generally. Two issues we have identified are that in some cases it feels like you should Parry monsters but don't, and that in other cases you get Heavy Stunned in cases where you feel like you shouldn't. We are currently investigating improvements to these.

The other bit of feedback are players who don't want to enter melee range at all. While the primary role of the class is incentivising a ranged/melee hybrid playstyle, we do think we can improve on this type of gameplay somewhat while still incentivising using both types of attacks.

To make this type of gameplay feel better we are going to be buffing the speed of Spear throws generally, but especially Lightning Spear. The damage will remain the same, meaning that you will get approximately a 25% buff to DPS from using only Lightning Spear. Some other spear throws will receive slight speed increases too, but they generally have other mechanics that mean that attack speed on them is less relevant.

[h3]Player Minion Damage and Life[/h3]
One of the areas of major balance adjustment in 0.2.0 was the minion life and damage curves for players. In the 0.1.1 endgame, minion characters were getting very out of control values mostly due to being able to significantly increase gem level on these gems.

We previously significantly reduced the growth of minion life and damage as these gems gain levels, and the intention was to mostly hit the top of the endgame, but it seems that this had an unintended effect on campaign play as well.

We are making a change to increase the damage and life that minions get during the campaign to be more similar to before, while still keeping the scaling nerfs that were introduced to the higher minion gem levels for the endgame.

[h3]Monster Life Too High[/h3]
One of the first things we looked at when considering clearspeed concerns was the monster life curve. We found that monster life through most of the campaign after Act 1 was probably too high. We have made an adjustment to lower monster life by 25% through most of the campaign and this change has been deployed already.

A second issue we found was that the life bonus on Rare Minions was incredibly high. One of the reasons why this feels particularly bad is because these monsters are still White, but had more life than Blue monsters. This calibrates players' expectations incorrectly and makes Rare fights harder than they should be. This number has been set back to what it was in 0.1.0 which lowers rare minion life by about 60%. This change has also been deployed.

[h3]Large Area Sizes[/h3]
Many players are reporting that areas feel like they are too large. Normally when this is the case, the main reason is due to other concerns such as monster life or player damage being incorrect, or just a lack of entertaining content in the area. However, we are checking to see if there are any outliers that players are spending too long in to see if any changes to area size need to happen.

In the meantime, we did notice that there are some areas that don't have sufficient checkpoints, so we are doing a pass of adding some more of these.

[h3]Crashes and Disconnects[/h3]
On launch day we had a severe and common client crash in town. The "Failed to deserialise object" crash. This crash was fixed on the first day, but there are still other client and server crashes that remain.

Currently the number of client crashes is actually a bit lower than in 0.1.1 due to working around the somewhat common nVidia driver crash, but the rate of server side crashes is approximately 6 times higher, which results in you getting suddenly disconnected.

Thankfully, server side crashes are significantly easier for us to debug, and we believe that we should be able to resolve most of these within the next few days.

Of course, we will continue to work on client crashes as well, but as the primary crash we had in 0.1.1 is now resolved, we believe that we should be able to fix the remainder of these fairly quickly.

[h3]Quality of Life Features[/h3]
We are additionally working on a few extra features that should be released relatively soon.

The first one is adding a system for Bookmarking locations on your Atlas map. This system will allow you to save locations with a name on the Atlas so you can find them later.

Another is adding Stash Tab Affinities for more item types including Socketables and Tablets, and updating the Flask Affinity to include Charms.

And another is adding a way to rebind Spectres and Tamed Beasts so that you can experiment with these options more easily.