We’re continuing to work on improvements for Path of Exile 2. Patch 0.2.1 is in active development and we're aiming to deploy it at the end of next week. Find out more about the improvements this patch contains below!
Endgame Rewards
When setting up the frequency of encounters and rewards for Path of Exile 2, we have to decide how many maps players will have to do in order to get them. After extensive playtesting we now believe that we overshot this number pretty substantially.
In 0.2.0g we improved the base-line experience of getting rewards from monsters and chests but we still feel you don't get enough of those exciting spike moments when something very powerful or valuable drops. There actually are some very cool items to find, but you won't ever find them because they are incredibly rare.
One of the major focuses of 0.2.1 is making chase items more common, but also adding more chase items to find.
Unique Items
In 0.2.1 we are going to be significantly improving both the drop rates of the incredibly rare unique items we already have as well as adding a bunch of new exciting and chase uniques that will take your builds to new heights. We are also buffing some of the rarer uniques that were intended to be chase, but didn't live up to that standard. You should see significantly more chase uniques than before and we'll be doing a post showing some of the new uniques next week!
Crafting Socketables
One of the issues that we have with the socketable crafting system at the moment is that by the time you get to the endgame there isn't really anything new or exciting to find to socket in your gear. Resists and attributes are great to help with solving problems in the early game, but in the endgame, ideally you should be swapping all of these out for more interesting and powerful mods.
In 0.2.1 we are adding 22 new Runes, 14 new Soul Cores and 7 new Talismans. These cover a full spectrum from being powerful to insane, but are rare to find. You will certainly want to use them over the normal base set of socketables.
Ritual
Ritual also suffered from us pitching the chase rewards too rare as well.
We're making the rarer Omens from Ritual more common. You'll see the same number of Omens, but they have a significantly higher probability of being the rarer, more exciting ones.
Corrupted Essences
While we're at it, we'll also be increasing the commonality of getting Corrupted Essences when using Vaal Orbs on monsters trapped in Essences, by approximately six times.
Rogue Exiles
Rogue Exiles just didn't have enough Unique Items so we are increasing the frequency that Rogue Exiles have, and thus drop, Unique Items by approximately three times.
Twisted Domain
The boss in the Twisted Domain was pretty valuable, but as an endgame area, the rest of it was pretty underwhelming compared to the other content you are doing at the time. Pinnacle content shouldn't be giving less rewards than the dozens of maps required to gain access to it.
To start with we have substantially increased the number of Rare monsters that spawn during the Domain. Previously there would often be no Rare monsters at all. In addition, we have changed the balance of Quantity and Rarity that monsters in the Domain have. This will mean that the large drop of items that occurs right before the boss fight should now be way more valuable than before.
We now also guarantee some rare Breach Rings in the resulting drop, so you should come away with at least a decent chance of some powerful items.
Expedition Logbooks
One thing that makes Logbooks unrewarding is the fact that at very high levels they have so few monsters spawning that they often end up yielding significantly less items than just a regular Endgame Map. This is reflected in the fact that at low level 90s you could do an entire Level 80 (the highest possible level) Logbook and not even gain 1% of a level of experience. We're doing a pass on the amount of monsters spawning to intensify the combat but focusing on very high level ones to better match the consistency of other Endgame content.
The first change is that we're increasing the distance between explosives and the radius of explosives, this will allow you to ultimately uncover more monsters and rewards. On top of this we're also increasing the number of monsters spawned to be more reflective of what an Endgame map has in it.
Additionally we're also making changes to the specific features found in each of the different Logbook areas.
The Lush Isle area currently has Karui Totem Remnants that cause the monsters to give substantially increased experience. It also has fenced off areas where you can explode the fence and gain access to totems that drop a lot of currency items and on the beaches there are small corruption pustules that drop Uncut Skill Gems.
In order to improve this area we are increasing the number of Remnants, especially the experience ones. Additionally we will generate more of the fenced off sections, and a larger change to the pustules will be made where destroying any of them will cause all monsters unearthed afterwards to spawn Corruption monsters on death, similar to those in the Corrupted areas on the Atlas. Combined with the base changes to drastically increase the number of base monsters spawned during Logbooks, it is intended that Lush Isle provides a very good source of experience.
The Frigid Bluffs Logbook area is an Icy Tundra with Vaal architecture and many Vaal monsters and Vaal Remnants frozen in time. Aside from the traditional Expedition monsters and Chests you can also explode these Vaal objects free. The problem is these are relatively underwhelming. There are few monsters and they are not any more rewarding than normal Expedition monsters, and on top of that the remnants just cause the monsters' drops to be corrupted, which is more arguably a downside than otherwise.
We're making a couple changes here! On top of the Vaal monsters, we're now going to have some Vaal bosses frozen in time too. These are standalone Map bosses that can be broken out and fought, all the Remnant modifiers will apply to them as normal. The Vaal Remnants that caused items to drop corrupted are being reworked. Now they will generate with one to three upsides, and one to three downsides that normal Remnants have, think of them just as a super-remnant.
The Barren Atoll Logbook is an atoll that sea-travellers and fisherman have used to store their treasure and supplies. The area currently has crates filled with gold, strongboxes and Ezomyte runes. The issue is that the crates drop far too little gold and there are far too few strongboxes and runes.
After our changes the crates are going to drop a significant amount more Gold, and we're going to generate a lot more Strongboxes (and by a lot, I mean over ten-times as many), of which could be unique strongboxes too. The Ezomyte runes, aside from already adding Rarity to all subsequently unearthed monsters, will also now drop 2-4 additional Runes instead of the existing 1. Given we're adding some new chase Rune drops, this may prove to be a good source to get them.
All of these special features found in the specific Logbook areas are also being added to the Minimap so you can see where they are and plan well before starting to place your chain of explosives.
Endgame Content and Variety Improvements
A second main focus is that we're going to increase the variety of running Endgame Maps. Right now did you know that if you were to generate 400,000 Maps, that 150,000 of them would be Hidden Grotto? We are certainly sick of running that area and fighting that same boss on repeat! The intention here is to normalize the frequency that different maps, and thus boss fights, appear on the Atlas. This will make things feel far less repetitive when playing the Endgame, especially for many many hours.
Citadel spawning has been adjusted. Now whenever a Citadel is generated on the Altas, it also ensures that it generates the other two types of Citadels near it. This will prevent cases we have been seeing where players would, due to the whims of random generation, get many many of the same Citadel one after another and never be able to fight the Arbiter of Ash, especially when not in a trade league.
Both these changes to Atlas layouts won't apply to areas of the Atlas that you have already revealed. In order to get the improvements, you will need to explore further away into parts of the Atlas that haven't been generated yet.
Additionally you can expect some other Endgame improvements, such as reducing the danger of two of the Ritual types that were just a ruckus of purple chaos explosions and reducing the danger and increasing the telegraphing of the Volatile Plants monster modifier. Combined, these were responsible for over half of all player deaths in the endgame!
We are also lowering some of the more dangerous map modifiers, like Elemental Penetration to be more in line with others, improving the rewards and visibility of Omens in the Viridian Wildwood unique map, increasing the radius to open Clasped Hands in Breaches, reducing the pack size of the Bats that shotgun you with projectiles in the Twisted Domain and reworking the Curse Map Mods to have counterplay. These are just some of the more isolated improvements coming.
Trial of the Sekhemas
In Trial of the Sekhemas we've adjusted the Affliction that caused you to have no Energy Shield to instead halve your Energy Shield. This is for Chaos Inoculation builds so that when they randomly get this Affliction, the run isn't effectively over.
On top of this we discovered a mistake with the chances of getting certain Afflictions and Boons. Specifically there was 1 Affliction, 2 Minor Boons, 1 Major Boon and 1 Pact that had one-hundred times the commonality they should have. This would have caused players to constantly be getting them as the first randomly generated outcome and as these boons were in particular the weaker and more boring ones, it often would have made the runs less rewarding and interesting.
Quality of Life and User Experience Changes
We did some notable quality of life improvements in 0.2.0h but there are more coming. We have a huge improvement to searching on the Passive Tree when using Keyboard & Mouse. Now when you search for passives by typing in the text field, you can press Enter to automatically find and go to that passive, if there are multiple passives found in your search then continuing to press enter will cycle through them. It also darkens the rest of the passive tree to help bring the searched nodes to the foreground making them much easier to see.
A huge request has been that we invert the display of "Tier X" on items when using advanced item display. This is so that you can immediately identify if a modifier is the best it can be on an item. This is more for advanced and Endgame players, but is very important to being able to quickly assess the true power of an item or if it's an appropriate crafting base. We are swapping this back to work the same way as Path of Exile 1.
On the Atlas, when you hover a Map it will separate the categories of Modifiers displayed, so you can more easily see where those modifiers are coming from. Specifically you can now determine if they're from Corrupted or Cleansed Influence in one category, and if they're from Towers in another category. This will help make it clearer when looking for specific modifiers like +1 Level in Corrupted influenced areas.
There is also a performance improvement coming. We're optimizing the physics on monsters and NPCs across the game, this is making them significantly cheaper and will cause less CPU bound bottlenecks on performance. This issue isn't prevalent everywhere but is common in areas with lots of humans, such as the Faridun in Act two, or in Freythorn in Act one. We'll continue to optimize these incrementally in every patch as we find all the suboptimal cases.
We've also added some improvements to the Shop and Cosmetics panel, including an Equip-Now button when purchasing Microtransactions and added a new Skin Slot on the Cosmetics page, for some future Microtransactions that will replace your base character skin or model.
Conclusion
That summarizes our 0.2.1 patch that we're hoping to deploy at the end of next week but are keeping flexible as it might fall into the week afterwards. We will keep you updated with further changes and post some specifics on Uniques and Socketables between now and then! Thank you very much.
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