Path of Exile 2 Survival Guide

Welcome to the Path of Exile 2 survival guide.

Whether you are brand new to the franchise or a PoE 1 veteran who's confused about a sudden change in difficulty, there are many tools available to make your journey through the campaign a lot easier. You don't have to perfectly dodge each boss attack to reach the endgame as long as you come prepared!

Health and Defenses

First and foremost, the ability to take some hits without kissing the ground is crucial to prevent excessive deaths during your leveling journey. If you have a shield equipped, you can raise your Shield to block all frontal damage until your stagger meter depletes. You can acquire the stats mentioned below through a mix of regularly checking the vendors in town, and liberally using your dropped currency (Orb of Transmutation, Orb of Augmentation, Regal Orb, Exalted Orb) on promising items. You achieve an overall significantly tankier character by a mix between the following:

• +# to Maximum Life on your items
• +# to Strength on your items as well as your passive skill tree
• +#% to Fire, Cold and Lightning Resistance rolls on your items
  • The more resistances you have, the better (up until the 75% cap). Try to aim for at least 30% resistance of each type. The vendor that sells caster items in each town will sometimes offer Ruby Rings, Sapphire Rings and Topaz Rings. Use the currencies mentioned above to potentially upgrade them further.
• Items with strong inherent defensive stats. The types of Gear you can equip is dependent on what base attributes (Str, Dex, Int) you possess. For example, a Warrior naturally invests into Str in order to use his skills, so opting for items that provide Armour is reasonable.
  • Armour (Str): Reduce physical hit damage taken based on how much Armour you have. Consistent Defense.
  • Evasion (Dex): Increase your chance to evade hit damage entirely. More chance based.
  • Energy Shield (Int): Add Energy Shield. Is an automatically recharging secondary life pool.
• Blocking all frontal damage by using Raise Shield (Watch your stagger-meter as you get stunned when it's full)
• Allocating a more defensive node on your Class Ascendancy instead of opting for more damage
• Consider using defensive Spirit Gem instead of offensive ones

Life Sustain

Of course taking a hit with no means to recover the damage it dealt won't get you very far. So here are ways to fix that:

• Frequently (each time you level up) check the vendors in town for potential upgrades
• Remember that if you are playing in a setting where you can trade, use that to your advantage. It is often much cheaper to search for and buy an item directly from other players using PoE Trade than crafting them yourself. A good Weapon and Body Armour can carry you through the entire campaign.
• Buying or picking up higher level life flasks and using an Orb of Transmutation and Orb of Augmentation to add additional stats.
• More measured usage of your life flasks in order to get higher value from them
• Enhancing your life flasks with Charms, a system new to Path of Exile 2 that grant you certain effects automatically when certain conditions are met (such as being frozen, granting you a short period of freeze immunity afterward)
• +# Life Regenerated per second on your items as well as potential nodes on your passive skill tree should they be close by
• - +#% of Physical/Elemental/Cold/Fire/Lightning/Chaos/Attack/Spell damage leeched as life on your items and passive skill tree (beware to use the correct leech type depending on your damage type)
• Various sources of Energy Shield Recharge Speed in case you have a lot of Energy Shield
• Be more liberal with using your currency to upgrade gear

Optional Rewards

Though perhaps you've already exhausted all your resources to get your basic defenses going, or still find them lacking. In that case, the next step should be to simply check what you might have missed along the way. In Path of Exile 2 there is various side content in the form of weaker bosses and other quests that grant guaranteed rewards. These greatly help you in defeating that story boss you might be stuck on.

• Loot from optional Bosses that are guaranteed to grant useful gear and uncut gems the first time you slay them
• Optional Quest Rewards

Level Up

Another easy avenue of free power is simply revisiting an earlier zone by CTRL-clicking the area's Waypoint and creating a new instance. This allows you to freely farm up Experience by running the same zone over and over until you feel sufficiently powerful. Keep in mind the further the gap between your character's level and the zone level, the less XP you get.

• Level up by farming the same instance multiple times

Avoid Damage

Survival in Path of Exile 2 is not only about gear and stats as this guide shows. Its tactile combat is heavily supported by the ability for the player to freely utilize the newly added dodge roll to get out of scary situations. Of course, nobody can be expected to perfectly dodge every incoming attack but the more damage you avoid the less you have to recover.

While the necessity for dodging diminishes greatly when following this guide, it is still good practice to dodge the most lethal attacks. Once you are strong enough simply tanking anything but the most dangerous attacks causes your DPS uptime to be higher, while also reducing the amount of attacks you have to react to.

• Dodge the highest damaging attacks to reduce pressure on your recovery (and avoid one-shots which you cannot outgear)
• +#% to Movement Speed on your boots in order to make dodging easier
• Positioning that sets you up for successful reactive dodges (Anticipation)
• Die a few times (or sometimes a lot of times) to figure out what attacks you should dodge and pay close attention to their telegraph

Crowd Control

Crowd control is a far more emphasized toolkit in PoE 2 due to the nature of slower more methodical combat. Monsters have a "Stun-buildup meter" that slowly fills as you damage them. They are stunned and unable to act when the bar is full. Use Stuns to execute longer combos without having to worry about the monster moving, or attacking you. Freeze (Cold damage) and Electrocution (Lightning Damage) behave very similar to stuns and are very useful.

While player made terrain cannot block bosses it might still be useful for rare encounters. Get creative and play around with the various ways to create obstacles for the enemies, allowing you to more easily kite them and avoid taking damage.

• Crowd Control effects create openings and breathing room: Chill, Freeze, Slows, Stuns, Knockback, New Terrain

Mindset

Last but most certainly not least is more of a mental aspect. The whiplash in difficulty that you may experience, especially when coming from PoE 1, can be quite severe. Shifting your expectations from thinking you can breeze through every Boss encounter, to Bosses being something you may have to learn and get good at can be a huge factor.

Perhaps consider taking a step back to learn from your deaths. What kind of telegraph did the boss do right before you died? How can you play around said deadly attack next time? Is it better to greed for a little bit of extra damage, or should you rather take it slower and wait for safer openings?

• Shift your expectations about the difficulty of the encounter
• Watch and learn from the Boss telegraphs
• Wait for safer openings before using lengthy attacks
• Accept that dying to a boss before you understand his moveset is completely normal

Summary

Yes, the game is hard. The bosses are challenging, by design. It's okay to die to them. In the same way, you aren't expected to kill Margit on your first try in Elden Ring, you aren't expected to kill any of the PoE 2 bosses on your first (or sometimes 10th+) attempt. But by following the steps above you certainly can tilt the odds in your favor.

Thank you for reading the Path of Exile 2 Survival Guide. After you implement all the tips and techniques mentioned in the guide, your PoE 2 experience is guaranteed to improve substantially. See you in Wraeclast.

Credits

Written by: Cptn Garbage

Reviewed by: Tenkiei