Last week saw a major patch for Path of Exile 2 that made a bewildering range of alterations to the game, with the headline message being that almost everything got nerfed. The goal was to improve the endgame experience by making it more challenging for players: but after a few days in the wild, it looks like all Grinding Gear Games has done is hack people off.
I'll highlight some individual reactions but by far the most common complaint is about the pace of the game post-patch, with most players saying the game now feels way too slow: a combination of increased monster life, decreased player damage and the large maps making even low-level fights feel like a slog.
This did at least have one amusing side-effect. Known Path of Exile 2 account booster Elon Musk streamed the game live from his private jet, died to one of the first bosses, restarted and then promptly disconnected. To which one can only say "lol" and, indeed, "lmfao".
"I removed my vacation I had put in," says FreshMeatOW on the game's subreddit. "I'd rather just go into work than play this game right now. The Combat is supposed to feel good. This doesn't feel good. At all. I don't think even the people who want 'slow and meaningful combat' like this. This is soulless."
"Saying you'd rather go to work than play a video game is the most negative critique I can think of," adds SeanXJohnson, which I'm inclined to agree with.
There are memes about the new checkpoints, the stunned faces of POE2 enjoyers, and of course a few with the classic Drake template.
This has been accompanied by something of a review bombing on Steam, which has tanked the game's rating down to "Mixed." You know the kind of thing: "Game design team has carrots in their ears."
GGG has now responded with a post under the heading "What we're working on" in which it acknowledges the major complaints, outlines some quick changes it has already deployed, and some upcoming ones.
Players don't like that the Huntress class is dependent on mastering the parry mechanic, so there's going to be a new skill allowing players to build up frenzy charges patched in "over the next few days." The parry itself is also getting a rework of timings, with some players feeling it's not as tight as it should be, and GGG says it's "investigating improvements" here.
White mobs, i.e. low-level enemies, have been annoying players by proving much tougher since the patch, after major buffs to their life and damage. "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."
Monster health in general has been nerfed by 25% "through most of the campaign and this change has been deployed already." Rare minions were also spawning with huge health pools and have received a whopping 60% nerf (already deployed) which certainly suggests that the players were right about that one.
GGG is less convinced there's an issue with large area sizes, but says it's going to investigate anyway, and accepts that some areas didn't have sufficient checkpoints so will soon have more.
As for the widely reported crashes, GGG says it fixed a major crash bug on the same day the patch was deployed, and most of the rest are down to server side crashes "and we believe that we should be able to resolve most of these within the next few days."
That's your lot for now though, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's nowhere near enough for some.
"As someone that's been playing PoE for 10+ years, this is the most disconnected GGG have ever felt," says player GuyInUniverse. "After reading the 'what we're working on' post I actually can't believe how far off they are on solving the problems players are complaining about. I mean usually these somewhat hit the mark if not entirely. But this felt like reading a Blizzard post on fixing Diablo 4."
That criticism is as brutal as it gets: the POE2 enjoyers by-and-large scorn Diablo. GGG has at least responded quickly to community concerns, though some of the angry reactions should be taken with a pinch of salt. These changes were intended to be major, and address a problem with POE2's endgame that most players would agree with (it's too easy). It certainly seems to have over-corrected in some areas, but players expecting GGG to walk it back entirely are living in dreamland: the vast majority of the nerfs seem to be here to stay, like it or lump it.
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