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When Path of Exile 2 first hit early access last December, its endgame was a bit… sparse.
Despite delaying development on acts 4-6 to ship the game with more systems in place, the Atlas of Worlds felt like navigating an endless sea of stuff I didn’t really want to do in order to get to maps that were actually worth my time. Grinding Gear Games has made a ton of changes with its 0.2 update Dawn of the Hunt. On the whole, the update was not popular (an understatement), but it did make some necessary tweaks, especially to the endgame. The Atlas of Worlds still needs a lot of work, but it’s headed in the right direction.
For the uninitiated, Path of Exile 2 basically exists as two games: The campaign, and the Atlas of Worlds. The Atlas is a procedurally generated, essentially infinite web of nodes, each representing a map full of monsters to kill. Beat the map, and you can progress through the Atlas and discover more of its secrets. Maps get harder and harder, from tier 1 to tier 15, and for the truly devoted, you can start juicing your maps with all kinds of modifiers that will try to kill you in order to get more rewards.
Almost every change GGG made with 0.2 has made mapping more interesting.
As you progress, you’ll complete quests that give you Atlas passive points—essentially another skill tree, but instead of being for your character, it’s for your Atlas. These points are a huge boon, offering things like more monsters, rarer loot, and increased odds to find useful stuff like essences and strongboxes.
Almost every change GGG made with 0.2 has made mapping more interesting. On initial release, you had to do a set amount of maps at each tier to get your points, which was… well, it was boring. Now, you’ve got to traverse the Atlas and find areas of corruption. Corrupted areas offer more monsters, more loot, and at their center lies a nexus. Clear the nexus and the area will become cleansed and you’ll get a couple points for your Atlas tree.
This change gave us a reason to want to explore the edges of the Atlas. Instead of just grinding whatever map was closest as quickly as I could, on this patch I found myself scouring the edges of the Atlas for signs of corruption, little hints in the mist. It gave the experience a sense of purpose, and the areas of corruption themselves are more interesting—more monsters, better loot, and a miniboss to fight.
Map quality
Another huge gripe I had about PoE2 was that the maps were gigantic, and in order to clear them you had to kill all the rare monsters. That meant that if you missed some little jerkwad hiding in a bush at the start of the level, sometimes you had to backtrack and waste a bunch of time trying to find him. Now, they show all the rare monsters on your minimap right from the beginning. Technically, it hasn’t made the maps any smaller, but now they feel smaller because I don’t have to kick over every rock and wander back and forth as much.
All of this wandering and backtracking was made a lot worse by the fact that if you died in a map, you had to start the whole thing over again (without any of the fancy added content it may have had). This made dying feel awful, especially when the animation still popped up with our six portals like in PoE1. They were just sittin’ there, taunting us. In 0.2 we can respawn a few times per map without losing our progress or rewards, getting fewer and fewer tries the more we juice the map with explicits.
I can’t stress enough what an incredible change this is. It completely altered the feel of mapping for me. If your build wasn’t humming just yet, mapping before felt like agony—roaming through huge maps just hoping some random ground effect didn’t oneshot you while you tried to loot something and having to redo areas and whole maps over again for less loot. Now it feels much less punishing.
The way towers and tablets work has also been vastly improved. By reducing the number of towers and increasing their impact, it’s made them more special. I used to have to do a ton of busywork to set up good areas to farm in—beat maps to a cluster of towers, clear them, load tablets, then farm good stuff. I was running 10-15 maps of low reward to get to 5 or 6 I actually wanted to run. Now the areas covered by the towers are huge, and my Atlas looks nice and juicy basically all the time.
GGG has also introduced some new unique maps, which you’ll need to clear to get your final 10 points. These are pretty cool, and offer another interesting thing to go and find on the Atlas. I especially like the Silent Cave, which has a bunch of essence monsters. Kill them and the boss at the end gets their modifiers, which means the more loot you want the more you risk loading her up with the power to kill you.
Improving the pinnacle
Finally, they’ve made interacting with the pinnacle bosses much better. On initial release, farming enough material to go and challenge one of the big bosses took a huge amount of time, and you only got one shot to kill them. This left more points (each of the five pinnacle bosses also have their own skill trees that make their mechanics more rewarding) gated behind not only a savage grind, but a tough boss fight that you never really got to learn.
I’ve written before that if Path of Exile 2 wants us to have meaningful combat with challenging boss encounters, they need to give us time to do it. GGG has made big steps here by allowing us to try them as many times as we want, with fewer and fewer tries as we scale up the difficulty.
This solves one of my biggest problems with 0.1, because I would just never want to go and fight the bosses—risking a fortune in fragments to go and get oneshot by some ability I didn’t know they had felt awful. The only strategy that made any sense was to have enough damage to kill the boss before they did anything, which wasted all the potential fun of an interesting boss with cool mechanics.
All in all, the changes to the endgame mark a tremendous improvement. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but GGG has shown us again that it hears our feedback and is working to make things better. This is still a game in early access, we’re lacking half the campaign, and the Atlas still feels like it could use more interesting stuff to go find at the edges of madness. But we’re on the path.
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Kurt Indovina
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