Path of Exile 2 devs agree that its endgame ‘is a bit too severe’

Even though Path of Exile 2 will be a little more forgiving in a patch coming later this week, the developers at Grinding Gear Games aren’t sure how easy to make its post-campaign dungeons.

The most common complaints are being addressed in patch 0.1.1 this week: Monsters will leave behind fewer deadly explosions and endgame bosses can be attempted more than once. Item quality will also be improved, which should help players survive the campaign and create more powerful character builds as they reach the game’s most difficult dungeons.

But the punishment for dying in an endgame dungeon, or map, isn’t changing yet. Maps will still kick you out after one death, forfeiting all the time and materials you invested into them as well as some of your experience toward the next level up. Hours of progress can disappear in a flash, and anyone not interested in that will have to wait a big longer for a solution.

Grinding Gear Games’ Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts were asked in a follow-up interview on Sunday by streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV if players will ever get to retry a map after dying. “To me, I feel like to be a game you have to have some level of failure [that’s] possible,” Rogers said. The experience penalty, he explained, is to communicate to players that they may not be ready to tackle harder maps. “But I mean maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it, I’m not sure.”

“There’s a few axis and I think they’re just a bit too severe when all combined together,” Roberts added. He thinks the transition from the game’s directed campaign into the create-a-dungeon endgame is too hard for most people and needs to be smoothed out. “But I need to think about it certainly a lot more and get a little bit more analytics on it as well and actually see what the actual problems are.”

The developers said plenty of things contribute to the problem and that the team is having regular discussions on how to tackle it. In the meantime, however, they want to see how the new patch plays out and focus on the major class balance changes coming afterward. The studio plans to start a new league (read: season) while the game is still in early access, giving players the opportunity to make new characters and test new features. The first league, which is expected to be on its way soon, will come alongside a substantial update to the game and maybe a few of its unreleased classes too.