Path of Exile 2 Early Access Reveal Stream Q&A

As is tradition after a Path of Exile announcement stream, the community got to listen to ZiggyD and members of the Path of Exile development team going over questions coming from the community to the previewed content. Here is a list of all questions and answers for the Path of Exile 2 Early Access Reveal Stream Q&A.

Questions & Answers

GGG wants Early Access to feel complete and like a full game, not like a barebones placeholder experience. The team aimed for a significant amount of content for the Early Access launch, focusing on showcasing an extensive Endgame experience to appeal to players.

The development team realized the importance of providing an extensive Endgame experience to be able to meet the expectations of the ARPG playerbase and therefore shifted the focus from finalizing Act 4, 5 and 6 to designing engaging endgame systems, knowing that the campaign alone does not retain players.

Shifting from working on the campaign for over five years to transitioning to endgame design was a challenge but the team understood the importance for the shift in development priorities and its importance for the overall player experience.

Competing against themselves made the team feel pressured, particularly the size of the endgame. Launching Path of Exile 2's Early Access with seven different endgame systems makes the team confident in moving forward while competing with its predecessor.

Path of Exile 2 started out as an idea to "just update some character rigs". The project expanded into a full blown sequel with a completely new campaign, new monsters, new unique bosses, and a multitude of new endgame activities.

Path of Exile 2 features highly memorable, well-designed bosses in every area of the campaign. This resulted in significantly more development time but elevated the game's quality.

The development team feels both excitement and nerves, given the scale of Path of Exile 2's systems and features. Parts of the team also release their first game with Path of Exile 2.

Due to the initial scope of Path of Exile 2's Early Access it is expected that the players need months to go through the content available on launch. The team believes that players invest significantly more time than they would in a typical league in Path of Exile 1.

There are periodic resets tied to significant beta updates. Characters from Early Access league move into a historical league for players who wish to continue playing them after full release.

GGG monitors feedback and iterates on difficulty as they see fit. Adjustments address any overpowered or bugged builds that emerge due to unforeseen interactions between the plethora of available items, gems, and systems.

Flasks have been streamlined to reduce the good, old "Flask Piano" from Path of Exile 1. This new 2 flask system permanently provides one Life and one Mana flask, while charms take over the previously known utility flasks. These charms can be crafted and manipulated like flasks in the past and become active when a certain circumstance occurs. For example the "Thawing Charm" grants immunity against freeze for a couple of seconds when frozen.

The topic of "Which stat does Dexterity provide?" has sparked multiple hour long discussion in the development team without reaching a consensus. After countless hours spent on this topic, the easiest solution was "to just return to Accuracy."

Early Access phase is key for player feedback. The community can help the developers refine mechanics, overall difficulty and endgame systems. These feedback loops enable iteration and adjustment to align with player expectations.

Developers are committed to dynamic problem solving. If a feature or system does not work, then they are open to redesign it entirely. Player feedback is the core of their balancing philosophy.

The team aims to introduce significant content updates regularly. Classes like the Druid and Huntress are close to being introduced to the game. This approach allows them to react dynamically to player needs while steadily expanding Path of Exile 2.

Path of Exile 1 continues to receive updates with a league planned for late February. Some resources were temporarily pulled from Path of Exile 1 to complete critical tasks in Path of Exile 2. Once Path of Exile 2 stabilizes post Early Access release, these resources get allocated back to Path of Exile 1.

Post release the team expects to spend their first time "putting out fires", adressing bugs, exploits and balancing issues. The goal is to stabilize quickly, adjust priorities and establish a longterm plan based on initial player feedback.

Path of Exile 2 focuses on immersive storytelling with a cinematic intro, motion-graphics between acts and lore delivery throughout its campaign. The goal is to make players know what is going on, which has not really been the case in Path of Exile 1. At the same time the playthroughs avoid disrupting gameplay by minimizing intrusive cutscenes, allowing players to skip unnecessary dialogue once they know whats going on.

The opening cutscene reveals how a new Beast emerges after the events of Path of Exile 1, introducing important characters right at the start.

All ascendancies change NPC interactions in some way or another. For example the Sorceress has a personal narrative tied to her exile from the Maraketh culture, while the Warrior is connected to the NPCs in Act 1.

Path of Exile 2 includes ascendancy specific visual effects like glowing tattoos or Ascendancy Skills that can be linked with support gems.

The days of the Lord's Labyrinth, Izaro and his famous quotes are over in Path of Exile 2. Players ascend their characters through trials. There are 2 trials at the start of the Early Access with a third one added later. These trials are the "Trial of the Sekhemas" and "Trial of Chaos".

Trial of the Sekhemas is a Sanctum inspired trials that requires you to navigate and clear areas with certain traps and objectives while keeping your honour resource above 0. Honour scales with your total life and energy shield.

Trial of the Chaos God is an Ultimatum inspired trial that requires you to survive and traverse areas while killing waves of monsters. After 4 successful "layers" you can choose to ascend or continue your progression in each Trial for more rewards.

Apart from ascending the Trials offer the following rewards:

• Trial of the Sekhema offers powerful jewels that enhance your passive tree.
• Trial of Chaos introduces Soul Cores. Soul Cores are socketable items with modifiers that can be inserted into your gear.

Vaal Orbs now add modifiers without replacing existing implicits and players can risk bricking items but also gain unique benefits, such as +1 gear ocket slots or enhanced implicits.

Players can choose between retaining enchantments, adding sockets or modifying implicits. New systems also ensure mid-tier items can still be improved, reducing the amount of complete item failures during crafting.

Ascendancies are crafted to be diverse and creative with each class offering one predictable and one "out there" ascendancy. Avoiding weapon-specific restrictions and promoting experimentation and creative builds is at the forefront during Ascendancy design to ensure players can mix playstyles for unique combinations.

While some names and themes carry over (e.g. Deadeye), the ascendancies are re-designed to fit Path of Exile 2's mechanics. All of the ascendancies are built from the ground up with new systems like the revamped flask and charm system in mind.

The initial planned 8 class launch required immense work in terms of balancing and integration, resulting in a reduction to six initial classes on Early Access launch.

Players can seamlessly swap weapon sets mid-combat, opening a huge amount of possibilities for creating builds and hybrids. For this "Weapon Talent Tree" points are required which can be found by killing optional bosses scattered throughout the campaign.

Support gems no longer have levels making this system much more enjoyable when theorycrafting and trying out all possible combinations. The change of making support skills only socketable once resulted in the creation of a lot mroe support gems and more freedom during build creation.

Due to the integration of on the fly weapon swapping you can use a shield in your second weapon set to swap to, when you anticipate tons of blockable damage. There are tons of options opening up with the introduction of just this system alone.

Vaal skills and Transfigured Gems may return in future expansions as thematic additions but are not planned for Early Access. The current focus is on adding and refining new skills.

The game already includes more than 200 skills with just the 6 playable classes. This includes ascedancy specific abilities.

Ascendancy skills are fully supportable, allowing players to customize and enhance these skills like normal other skills. This can even create interesting combinations like adding "Accuracy Support" to "Herald of Ice" to create a custom aura.

The ultimate goal is to provide players all tools to create unique builds while maintaining builds. The new systems encourage players to include multiple skills in their builds without only offering just one optimal path.

The endgame has multiple systems to sink your time in:

• Trials: Scalable, rogue-lite dungeons with unique progression and rewards
• League mechanics: Endgame mechanics present in maps while exploring your Atlas.
• Boss hunting: A structured approach to fighting Uber bosses, lieutenants and a secret Uber Pinnacle boss that offers the highest difficulty in Path of Exile's history.

Instead of locking players into their choice of specific content, the Atlas Tree in Path of Exile 2 focuses on scaling rewards and difficulty without locking you to your previous choices. This is achieved by splitting the big, singular Atlas Tree in Path of Exile 1 up into multiple in Path of Exile 2. All of these are active at the same time but require you to complete different activities to progress a specific one, mostly done via killing the Endgame activities Pinnacle boss.

Bosses may gain new mechanics like additional projectiles instead of just numerical scaling. Rewards also scale with difficulty, introducing better Uniques at higher difficulty tiers.

The game aims to allow any well-geared and skillfully played build to complete endgame content. Higher difficulty tiers may favor certain builds, encouraging iteration and optimization. Using the new Dodge Roll and skill-based combat are emphasized, but gear and your build remain crucial and can help you overcome certain difficulties.

The Atlas in Path of Exile 2 introduces a dynamic, horizontal and infinitely expanding 3D map system. Each league's Atlas layout is procedurally generated and unique for each player. Players can discover areas by uncovering towers and using Waystones, which reveals surrounding maps.

Players can target specific map biomes like a desert map while still experiencing variety. Once a map is completed, players must move onto discover new areas, avoiding stale, repetitive farming of the same map over and over. Some biomes or maps excel in specific league mechanics due to their layouts. Tablets allow players to further optimize their preferred gameplay style.

Towers are key exploration points. These allow players to clear the Fog of War on the Atlas map and discover desirable maps in the proximity. The Fog of War limits visibility but hints at significant map clusters to encourage pathing towards certain areas.

Boss maps appear roughly one in four maps and focus on challenging boss encounters. Non-boss maps emphasize clearing rare monsters and purging corruption. This design ensures boss fights remain challenging since they are skippable, while being meaningful and rewarding at the same time.

Waystones replace Path of Exile 1's maps as consumables for accessing areas.

Crafting is more accessible than before. Currency drops have been significantly increased to guarantee an early encounter with the crafting system. For example, Exalted Orbs already start dropping in Act 1.

The crafting bench was removed due to balancing challenges and player-designer conflicts. Its functionality is now split over the following systems:

• Crafting materials and Ezomyte Runes: For basic customization and problem-solving (e.g. Resistances).
• Soul Cores: For advanced item customization.
• Omens: For meta-crafting, allow deterministic late-game crafting.

Higher rarity increases item affix strength and currency quality. Boss drops prioritize quality over quantity, making kills feel rewarding. The ultimate goal for Boss loot is for the player to pick up all items after a kill.

The currency exchange system tested in Path of Exile 1 was a success and is being carried forward into Path of Exile 2. The increase in currency drop rate and crafting opportunities make solo-self-found more viable than ever before. Trading accelerates progression but is not mandatory for success.

During the campaign a death resets you to the most recently uncovered Checkpoint, eliminating the need of backtracking. In the Endgame Maps have six portals but a player's death ends the map, adding stakes to failure.

In multiplayer reviving a teammate becomes progressively slower the more often you have to revive. Endgame maps have no revive mechanic and death is final for that map. Player can also vote to restart and encounter from a checkpoint if needed.

Challenge rewards and private leagues are be introduced later but are not available at launch.

Cluster jewels are still socketable in the Passive Tree.

Video

Summary

Path of Exile 2's Early Access Q&A covered tons of new information but here are a few points which stood out to us:

• Atlas: Randomized, exploration focused. Towers reveal nearby maps. Boss maps ~25% of the time for meaningful fights.
• Crafting: Early game accessible, more currency drops, tools like Omens and Soul Cores replace crafting bench.
• Item Rarity: Improved mods and currency quality. Fewer, better drops.
• Economy: Trade system and Currency exchange from PoE1 continues. Solo self-found more viable with increased crafting opportunities.
• Death Mechanics: Checkpoint respawns in campaign. Death ends maps in Endgame.
• Multiplayer: Revive times increase per death. No revives in maps.
• Leagues & Content: Legacy mechanics integrated. Challenge rewards/private leagues coming post-launch.

Written by: Chronikz