Feedback for 0.3/0.4 Gems, Act 3, Currency sink

Path of Exile 2 Early access testing feedback

TLDR—Certain support gems have awful downsides, and some of the lineage gems have bad trade-offs to be useful. Act 3 needs work for pacing, and the bosses are to easy in the campaign and endgame. There needs to be a currency sink to add more purpose to the divine orb, chaos orb and exalted orb due to tiered currency existing. I have good ideas about how to incorporate this into the recombinator.

This is my feedback from the 0.3 and 0.4 patches. I've previously given feedback for 0.1 and 0.2 and think it's the right time to weigh in again on the pros and cons of PoE 2 in its current state. Let's begin.



Skill and Support gems.

New additions of skills and supports have really opened more build variety from what we have seen in the past. The addition of chase supports in the form of lineage supports was an excellent addition and a good upgrade from the awakened versions in the original game. However, the regular supports and lineage supports still have some glaring issues in terms of payoff. There are a fair amount of level 3 or even level 4 regular support gems that have too large of a downside to ever warrant using in a build. Let's take rapid attacks three, for example. The current version offers 35% attack speed, a 10% increase from the level two version, but it has the downside of 50% less damage. This halves your damage for 10% attack speed, which you could gain from many other sources. Or just use level two for 10% less attack speed with no damage penalty. This is borderline unusable on any skill you plan to deal damage with, which you would hope would be all of them.

This is also true of some of the lineage supports as well. Morganas tempest is new to this league and would work perfectly with tornado and future storm skills, but the downsides are so debilitating it's just not worth it. When gems like Rakiatas Flow exist with zero downside (I understand this is a chase item), it begs the question: how can something like Morganas, which could enable cool builds, exist in its current state?



A tuning pass is needed for sure on the lineage supports; I would be reasonably generous. I would rather these gems be specific to certain biomes on the atlas or map bosses and drop at a lower rate but be build enabling with lesser downsides than be common and average. The kiss/curse effects need to be reined in, not to accentuate power creep but to enable more unique play styles. When items are really absurd, players will understand when things get nerfed after they have been busted for a league. Sometimes it is better to overshoot than undershoot.


For the regular support gems, I feel like tiers 1, 2, and 3 should be accessible frequently as the regular support gems. It would be cool to have support tiers 4 and 5 be stronger variants, like awakened gems from PoE 1. They would be much rarer and only drop from aspirational content. Level 82 maps, tier 3/uber versions of the current bosses, t16 citadels.



Difficulty and pacing

This one is not all people will agree with, but I believe it's important to the integrity of what Path of Exile was supposed to be about. Challenging boss fights and methodical combat. While I think the latter exists until your character gets closer to a full build, which is fine, the former has fallen far from the 0.1 release. On my first campaign playthrough in 0.1, as promised, I was dying to the campaign bosses 1-2 times on average. While this was my first time seeing them, and now I know what they all do, so naturally they would be easier; they are significantly easier. I feel like this hurts the integrity of what was PoE 2 set out to do very differently than PoE 1.

I would say this is a side effect of giving the very casual players access through the campaign, as people were getting stuck. This feeds into another issue I'll discuss next with how much power is tied to gear, especially your weapon, regardless a middle ground needs to be formed, or the same issues people have with the campaign being boring in PoE1 will arrive sooner than later in PoE 2.

Personally, I think that this also feeds into the size of some of the campaign zones and some that seem unnecessary, mainly in Act 3. There are 2 zones here that don't need to exist. Jiqani’s Sanctum/Machinarium and the Matlan waterways. Combining the Jiqanis areas into one would be a very good change; it's the same tile-set and the first zone only exists really for the permanent buff you get from there. Merge them into one, does if matter there are two bosses in one area? The Matlan waterways should be an area inside the infested barrens, a much smaller area to get to the lever that stops the water so you can access the drowned city. I would also have that waterways part of the map connect to the Azak bog.

This would speed up act 3 a reasonable amount without compromising any of the work that went into making these areas. It's seeming like the average player will have to spend almost 30 hours at the current pace once acts 5 and 6 are in just in the campaign. For seasonal players who want to get to endgame every 3-4 months, this is excessive in my opinion. To be clear, I love the campaign, but the lack of challenging boss fights and these areas that seem meaningless for sure make it feel sluggish and non-engaging.



The power of gear vs Passive Tree

As it stands, most of your power comes from gear. This can define how challenging the campaign is in the first 3 acts. Personally, I don't mind this if there are enough ways to tackle the problems. The rewards that have been added to quests are a good start, but I really feel like there needs to be more weapon bases in the shop per level or the gambling costs need to be cheaper for weapon bases. Sometimes there will only be one weapon in the shop that's magic and has two mods on it already. So unless you get a regal early, you are at a disadvantage unless you hit with your starting weapon when you transmute and augment. More access to bases or being able to roll them easier from the gambler earlier on would go a long way.

In the endgame I feel like the crafting options are there for sure, but as you get further through your levels the tree feels like it falls off in terms of scaling options. Most builds I have seen that can scale their damage up extremely high are all crit-based. At the moment this is fine, but if we begin to get aspirational content, some of the lower to mid-tier builds that seem fine now because the endgame bosses are so easy will be opted out of that content unless they can crit swap or are able to acquire very insane gear.

Personally, I feel like some support gem level of notable nodes needs to be added to the tree to assist with this. Not just scaling the numbers up but making that pathing worth it because currently, it feels like you're just going for the largest scaling percentage numbers to assist the flat damage/defense from your items. There are examples of this on the tree, like Tribal Fury, which allows your strike skills to cleave; Bone Chains, which allows your physical spells to interact with pin without using support or more nodes; and Feathered Fletching, which allows projectile speed to increase damage as well. They do exist, but not to the extent that they should.

Without reasonable assistance from the tree, you are really at the mercy of RNG early, and sometimes that can be demoralizing if you get unlucky. Less reliance on gear, more power in the tree.



Currencies and currency sink

I would argue that the divine orb as a premium currency needs to hold more weight. While it is useful to use on rare items or unique items that you want to score highest possible rolls on them they need more purpose. Currently I see expedition as the least useful mechanic as the omen crafting and tier currency really hurts the recombinator. But what if you could use the recombinator deterministically? At a cost. I think having exalted orbs, chaos and divine orbs be used here to guarantee a result would be amazing. This is where I would introduce rerolling implicit modifiers, resistance swapping, attribute swapping, flat damage swapping, and defense swapping. Basically, a way to fix items outside of using a chaos orb, plus omen, plus pray. This is powerful, so naturally I would add specific expedition currencies that would enable the recombinator to be used in this way as well as the use of the currency type itself. There should be other interesting uses for these currencies, in my opinion, other than just jamming them on items or omen crafting.

This league we saw our first influence type in the way of vaal items. I loved the way this was implemented with the Unique's. Brilliant. I'm hoping to see influence types for the endgame bosses like Arbiter and whoever comes after.



I was going to talk about endgame, but as it hasn’t changed drastically, I'll wait for 0.5 to see what you all at GGG have been cooking up. Keep up the great work. The temple has been my favorite mechanic in terms of depth and customisation that you have ever done, and if there are more leagues like this coming out, that makes me super excited.