More than 400,000 people click on monsters and pick up loot Way of exile 2 now, according to Steam’s most played list. That also means there are thousands of people being torn apart by those monsters and wondering how they got the game Dark souls of loot-based action RPGs. Developer Grinding Gear Games doesn’t seem concerned about the number of people surprised by the difficulty, but wants to make their lives a little less miserable in the last patch of the year.
The first thing you learn in PoE2 is that anything can and will kill you. Skeletons hit you like their last appearance was a boss in another game, and fighting three wolves at once should award you a Medal of Honor. The first 20 hours are a survival game where the trees strike back, and all you get for completing the campaign is another difficulty level.
The pain will not end PoE 2′The upcoming patch, but according to him it should be a little more fair a forum post by the developer. Skills that struggle to get players through the game are getting big buffs, including bow attacks, bone and chaos spells, and shield skills. As a witch player who has to pretend to be a sorceress because all the thematically appropriate skills sucked, this is great news.
Almost everything in the Trial of Sekhemas, a roguelike dungeon that you must survive to unlock one of your subclasses, will be significantly easier. Fighting monsters up close was simply worse than fighting monsters at a distance, due to the way the trial’s unique Honor resource worked. Think of it as a secondary health bar: lose your honor, lose the lawsuit. The upcoming patch will significantly reduce the amount of Honor damage you take near enemies and fix two bugs that drained it much faster than intended. Warrior players can finally see what it’s like to have a subclass.
PoE 2′The hardest dungeons or maps of the hardest dungeons will also not be as tough as before. Monsters that leave behind explosions and other devastating effects should not wipe you out in one fell swoop. And higher level cards won’t just worsen your character’s elemental resistance. The biggest complaint among endgame players is how easy it is to be dropped out of nowhere into a crowd of enemies, leaving you empty-handed from the dungeon. You still only have one life, but deaths will hopefully feel significantly less random.
As the second major patch for the game, the changes help set expectations for how GGG wants to approach balancing PoE2‘six classes. Last week, a patch came out that destroyed characters that focused on freezing enemies without warning or explanation, forcing them to spend large amounts of gold reworking their builds. The cost of moving your skill points will be much lower in the next patch to compensate for this, and GGG says it’s doing its best not to leave the characters gutted.
“Since launch, we have unfortunately had to develop a number of skills that have been far too overwhelming. How do we define overwhelmed? Basically, it’s a situation where a certain skill is so powerful that players think no other way to play the game is feasible,” it says. “In general, we try to do this in a way that doesn’t make a build bad (but we can make mistakes!).”
GGG says the full patch notes will be out “soon” and that the few weeks after release will be quiet as many of its members will be taking time off.
Way of exile 2 early access is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series