Well, if you didn’t see the news, Path of Exile 2 put out a post earlier today addressing early access post-launch feedback. Some things in the game are going to be getting changed, namely dodge rolls, checkpoints, itemization, currency changes, and a couple of other things. And in this video, I want to go through what’s changing to the game and what has changed already.
Path of Exile 2 PATCH - Dodge Rolls and Checkpoints
So the first thing that’s going to be changed is dodge rolls. The player character is going to have its size reduced to zero from one when dodge rolling. This won’t make it so that you can phase through monsters, but will make it easier to roll around them because your character won’t be taking up as much space.
And they’re also making it so that some smaller monsters will now be pushed when you dodge roll so that you’re not trapped as easily by swarms of small enemies. I can say having played through the entire campaign as a ranger, which is a class that really relies on dodge roll to get out of sticky situations, that the vast majority of my deaths that were not in a boss fight were simply when I was surrounded and I could not roll away.
So I think this is probably a good change. We’ll have to see how it’s implemented to make sure that it’s not too much because I did find that even though I was outnumbered and surrounded quite often when I died, it wasn’t all that often. I played a lot more cautiously and I prevented myself from dying. So it’s not impossible to avoid, but this should make it a little bit better. Hopefully, this is a good change.
The next major change coming is to checkpoints. They’re basically making it now so that you may teleport to other checkpoints from other checkpoints that you’ve unlocked, that there is a checkpoint added to all entrances and exits of zones, so you can teleport to the entrances and exits.
And they’ve also added a checkpoint to the midpoint of the first dreadnought area in Act 2. These are all interesting changes in my opinion. I mentioned in our review that it felt kind of tedious after you die to run through areas of the map again and again. It seems like the community tends to agree with that.
These are some significant changes to that though. I don’t know if this is going too far and it might erase some of the challenge the game has or too much of that challenge. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. But the dreadnought area in Act 2, I died so many times in there from just getting absolutely surrounded and there was very few checkpoints. So I think adding a checkpoint there is a must.
Path of Exile 2 PATCH Incoming - Loots and Drops
Another change they’re making to the game is with item changes. One of the problems noted by people is that they didn’t feel like they were getting enough rewarding loot from the way the game is designed now. I think it’s probably on the minimum end. Like I feel satisfied with it, but if it was any less I wouldn’t, and having a little bit more would probably be satisfying.
But they’re tweaking some of the adjustments to improve player experience. They didn’t really elaborate exactly on what they were doing, but they did say that they’re wary of increasing the drop rate too much because then if they have to put it back down again players will be upset by that, obviously.
So they’re probably gonna tweak it up a little bit and see how players experience that and if it needs to go up more I would imagine they’ll probably set it up a little bit more. But I think they’re gonna err on the side of caution and not try and give too much loot.
They’re making some changes to rare monsters by improving the drop pool based on the bonuses that the rare mobs have and that should make rare mobs more rewarding to defeat as it stands right now. They generally don’t give you much and I think this change was made more for endgame systems than it is for the campaign because in the campaign they have lots of bosses that you’re able to fight in between rare mobs.
But this should make the endgame, which I haven’t really played, even better than what it is currently.
They’ve also made some adjustments to currency changes for different items that you can use in the game. It looks like these were made to give you more of them early on which it felt like certain ones you weren’t getting a lot of which is good and also to make endgame more viable in order to add more map mods.
So this seems like it’s going to be a good change overall. It also looks like map mods for the endgame are gonna be improved giving you better rewards for higher difficulty. Again, one of the biggest complaints in the game at the moment is that a lot of people don’t feel like they’re getting enough loot or rewarding enough loot for their challenge.
So this looks like a way to patch up endgame to give more rewards for having higher difficulty.
Path of Exile 2 PATCH Incoming - Gold Caps and Guaranteed Drops
The next change I think is gonna be absolutely fascinating to see in practice. I think a lot of people are gonna be happy with it. We’ll see how it pans out. But essentially what they’re gonna be doing is they’re gonna make it so that no more than 50% of unique monsters drops can be gold to increase their loot pool and also that act bosses and map bosses will always drop at least one rare.
So this should make farming rares a lot easier for players in order to get good equipment in order to progress the game. One of the things that I mentioned in our beginner guide is that it’s very easy to get stuck in this game, particularly in the campaign, because you’re just not getting the loot that you need and yet you will have to go farm.
This should make farming easier and more rewarding.
There are also a couple of other issues being addressed. Apparently, there was an issue with click to move that was name locking resulting in characters doing unexpected actions when holding this down. I haven’t experienced this much. I’ve been playing on controller. That hasn’t really bothered me, but that sounds like something that shouldn’t be happening. So that should be fixed as well in an upcoming patch.
Additionally, it seems like rare mobs in the endgame maps were not spawning as much as they should or not spawning at all. So that’s gonna be increased to make the endgame more rewarding and challenging.
Now one final note on this is that it says over the upcoming weeks they’ll continue to work on map layouts and monster density issues in maps. I think one of my biggest complaints about the game, I didn’t have many and I still don’t, but one of my biggest complaints was the map layouts, just the way that they are, they kind of feel very large and very empty a lot of the time. So we’ll see how that pans out, but I’m glad to see that’s being addressed.
It’s really interesting to see that Grinding Gear Games is already taking player feedback on board after just four days of early access to the game. This is incredible. They’re definitely listening to the community.
Final Thoughts
I think most of these changes are gonna be good. Again, a lot on paper may not work out in practice. We’ll have to see how that goes, but this is what early access is for. This is exactly why this game has early access so they can tweak these things, dial it in, and get it into the best place possible.
These changes will result in making the game easier predominantly because of the dodge roll changes, the checkpoint changes, getting more rare items more regularly and more currency more regularly with better drops from rare unique monsters. All of these things are gonna make the game a bit easier.
And I really like the challenge of the game so far. I hope it doesn’t change it too much because I do find it really rewarding when I down bosses and get through tough areas of the game, but it does need a little something. So let’s hope that this does it.
You know, some of these changes are changes that I was expecting and there were quite a number of changes during the period of time that we played before early access went live, like a staggering amount. I think the game download size at that time was 112 gigabytes and I think we had over 80 gigabytes of patches in a 10 or 11 day span.
So some of this was I was anticipating which is why I tried to stay away from guides from the pre-release version of the game because I just figured too much it was going to change, but we do have more content coming.
I saw a lot of people asking for class guides. I’m gonna be working on those over the coming weeks through the holidays and taking my time trying to make sure these are as good as possible and incorporate some of these changes that are gonna be added.
But if there are other guides and other content you guys want to see on the channel, let me know. But I want to know what you guys think of these changes. Are they too knee-jerky? Are they good changes? Are these things you’ve been clamoring for? What do you make of the changes so fast? Let me know in the comments below.
