Path of Exile is my favorite ARPG. No other game in the genre offers the level of complexity and endgame variety that Grinding Gear Games has managed to create over the last decade. I find myself coming back to Wraeclast every three months to experience the new League and endgame systems. Yet every time I come back to PoE, I’m always met with the game’s biggest flaw: the campaign. Leveling a new character is an exercise in tedium with how poorly paced the campaign is, compounded by the massive difficulty spikes found in the first two Acts. When Path of Exile 2 was announced back in 2019, I was excited to see how GGG would go about creating a fresh campaign with replayability in mind. After playing a preview build of Path of Exile 2, I’m sad to say that I couldn’t bring myself to finish it even once.
This version of Path of Exile is far more unforgiving than its predecessor, and that was apparent before I even booted the game up. Anyone that played this build was informed that it is tuned to be quite difficult, tailored for experienced Path of Exile players. I have 1,500 hours in the first game and wrote a massive beginner's guide for it, so this forewarning didn’t faze me in the slightest. Worst case scenario, I figured this would be as tough as Ruthless—an opt-in ‘hard mode’ difficulty that was added to Path of Exile last year. Four characters were available in this build, each corresponding with an act. I started with the Monk.
Act one begins quite similar to the first game. My Monk woke up on a shoreline only to find themselves surrounded by a small army of undead. I picked up a quarterstaff and went to work on the shambling zombies. The improvements to animations and visuals were immediately apparent. Each strike from the quarterstaff flowed seamlessly as the undead recoiled from the vicious blows they were receiving. That might seem insignificant to non-PoE players, but these small visual improvements have been transformative to the enjoyment of combat. Most Path of Exile skills felt rigid, unresponsive, and relied on many damage multipliers to feel good. Path of Exile 2’s skills felt satisfying right out of the gate.
My Monk received a steady stream of new skill gems from quest rewards and monster drops throughout my playthrough, each of them expanding my options for slaying monsters. I became quite attached to Killing Palm, a melee skill that teleports to a weakened enemy and instantly kills them while under a specific health threshold. This gave me power charges to consume on Falling Thunder, releasing a fan of electric fissures that disintegrated my foes. I could then perform a backflip with Wave of Frost to freeze any survivors. Every skill I used either did great damage, helped set up a combo, or had some form of utility in the form of status debuffs or mobility. It’s a radical change from the ‘one size fits all’ design of its predecessor, but it's a change I gladly welcomed once I had a full bar of skills at my disposal.
As great as these skills feel, the whole combat dynamic starts to fall apart during a boss fight. Nearly every boss fight in Path of Exile 2 is designed similarly to the pinnacle bosses present in the first game. Most fights seem heavily inspired by From Software’s design ethos for the Souls games: short attack telegraphs followed by massive damage spikes. To help compensate for the increased boss difficulty, every class in Path of Exile 2 has a dodge roll to help players avoid incoming attacks. It’s a welcome addition for melee characters, but it doesn’t directly address the issue because it doesn’t work with area-of-effect attacks, something every boss uses frequently.
Halfway through act one, there’s a side quest that ends with a friendly NPC morphing into a grotesque boss. This boss repeatedly slams the ground with a series of massive AoE swings that would remove most of my HP. Later phases began covering the screen with spectral figures that would slow my character down, making it much harder to roll away from the occasional direct attack the boss would use. Despite my best efforts, it took multiple tries before I killed them. It was satisfying at first, but then the next boss I fought was the same thing but faster, except this time it had a health gate partway through the fight. Slaying this enemy was more fatiguing than it was exhilarating.
Acts two, three, and four not only suffer from the same problem, but actually get worse. The Prisoner boss fight in act four uses multiple AoE attacks, two of which can one-shot your character if you aren’t careful, Even worse, the Prisoner can also fully regenerate its health between phases if you don’t interact with its core mechanic fast enough. The Warrior build provided for the act four demo was terrible, but I tried to make the best out of a bad situation. I attempted that fight 20 times. Each time I died, I respawned at a Soulslike bonfire just outside the boss arena that required me to open three doors, wait for the boss to finish its spawn animation, just to then die to a sudden slam attack that cannot be dodged. That final death left me feeling hollow and mentally exhausted. I closed the game shortly thereafter and have zero interest in attempting that fight again.
In those 20 grueling boss attempts, I did everything in my power to improve my character. This build of Path of Exile 2 didn’t include the passive tree, Ascendancy prestige classes, or any sort of crafting bench, but I could improve my items. Path of Exile’s itemization system is notorious for its complexity and depth, allowing players to use dozens of unique crafting currencies to upgrade their items. It’s my favorite aspect of the first game. Unfortunately, crafting seems to have regressed in this version of Path of Exile 2.
Gear upgrades are almost exclusively done through PoE’s crafting orbs, rare currency drops that allow players to augment the properties of their items. In my six or so hours of playing the Exilecon build across four acts, I found two Alchemy Orbs and five Transmutation Orbs. I could upgrade two items to rare quality and five items to magic quality, respectively. That’s it. The affixes from those orbs are completely random, and due to PoE’s massive affix tables, items seldom roll with good modifiers without the use of Metamods from the crafting bench—a system that will not be returning in PoE 2. The end result is that all gear upgrades are acquired through random chance, either from vendors or monster drops. Other crafting mechanics like Delve Fossils and Essences will return in the full game, but the removal of the crafting bench is a massive step in the wrong direction that makes deterministic crafts much less accessible.
Nearly every change I’ve disliked isn’t technically new to Path of Exile 2. Grinding Gear Games added an optional Ruthless difficulty variant for PoE in late 2022. This mode greatly increased item scarcity, removed most crafting options, and made combat encounters far more dangerous. There’s a small group of players that adore Ruthless and play it every League, appreciating the brutal difficulty of the opening acts and the RNG progression of drops.
Path of Exile 2 is shaping up to be a sequel catered to fans of Ruthless, synthesizing the best elements of Path of Exile’s flexible buildcrafting systems with the white-knuckle combat present in Soulslikes. It’s a genre combination I never expected and one that I thoroughly enjoyed at times, but this wasn’t the sequel I was imagining back in 2019. My favorite moments in Path of Exile involve crafting perfect items or seeing how quickly I can clear T16 maps. My favorite moments in Path of Exile 2 are far more humble, learning new boss mechanics or finding fun skill combinations for my build. Those experiences were gratifying in their own way, but this game won’t be for everyone. It certainly wasn’t for me.