Path of Exile 2 wanted to provide players with a tougher experience, but gamers are not very enthusiastic about the current game mechanics.
How is death punished? In Path of Exile 2, the death of a character is not without consequences. Each time your character is killed in the endgame of Path of Exile 2, it loses 10% of the experience points of the current level. Depending on the character’s level, this can result in several hours of grinding.
Additionally, players also lose all items that were dropped but not picked up yet, as well as all items that could have potentially dropped. This is because after the character’s death, you are no longer allowed to enter the map, except for boss fights against the toughest boss in the game, Arbiter of Ash.
This system does not create excitement among players, as a new post in the community shows.
Here you can see the cinematic intro of Path of Exile 2:
Just Grinding
What bothers gamers? Players of Path of Exile 2 apparently just want to grind and are not interested in the challenging obstacles. This is shown in a new post on Reddit by user Dawgin420.
He criticizes the endgame of PoE2, which with its penalties for the death of your character prevents anyone from daring to face challenges. Instead, players would prefer to run risk-free maps where they can just slay monsters without the danger of getting killed.
This is further fueled by the fact that players can sell maps like Breachstones for good money, instead of risking being killed on the map and losing the content in the form of items and currency.
In practice, this means that adventurers often set aside content with higher difficulty and gamers just opt for mindless and safe grinding. Thus, the developers’ goal to make Path of Exile 2 more difficult seems to not be achieved, as players apparently do not like to play these contents.
Is this just a single opinion? No, under the post on Reddit, many other players also share similar views. User lazypanda1 adds to the post on Reddit with his experience:
That’s true. The current system creates a conflict between challenge and risk/reward.
Regarding the challenge, it is most enjoyable when your build is just strong enough to take on the content. Not too weak that you get killed right away, but not too strong that you trivialize the content. […]The loss of the reward almost always leads to a negative experience. The lower the risk, the more fun is expected, leading to a linear curve that progresses from negative to positive. […] This means that if you want to maximize the fun of the reward, you have to minimize the risk, which means you trivialize the content and thereby eliminate any semblance of challenge.
lazypanda1 on Reddit
User Flying_Mage also does not find this good on Reddit: “That is pretty much the main reason why the punishment for death is bad. It encourages you to create easy and diluted content instead of juicy and dangerous. And that is boring. And the absolutely last thing a developer wants to do is make their game boring. […]”
User BigSmols, however, sees it differently on Reddit: “I honestly feel like there isn’t much ‘challenging’ endgame content. I either get randomly one-shotted or nuke the enemies. Don’t get me wrong, this game is technically much more challenging than most other ARPGs, but the endgame and the campaign feel like two different games.”
In the campaign, there are fewer penalties for death because you can simply re-enter the map. Path of Exile 2 is still in Early Access, so the developers can adjust and improve the mechanics at this point. Another mechanic also needs to change according to the players: If a mechanic stays in Path of Exile 2, there will be a big problem at release, the community believes
