In Path of Exile 2, you can customize and enhance your gear with various items. However, until now, it was not possible to swap runes on your gear. Grinding Gear Games has now changed that – much to the delight of the community.
Which items are involved? In Path of Exile 2, you can use socketable items like runes to specifically enhance your character’s stats. Some runes, for example, increase your resistances against certain types of damage, while others boost health or mana points. Good defensive stats are important to progress through the content, which some compare to Dark Souls due to its difficulty level.
Once inserted into the gear, you could not remove or swap the runes previously. This meant that, in the worst case, you had to forgo important defensive stats, as you could only use suitable runes if you swapped out your gear.
Patch 0.1.1 finally lets you swap runes
What has changed now? With the latest patch 0.1.1, GGG (Grinding Gear Games) introduced a change to the socketable items in Path of Exile 2. The change in the patch notes states specifically: “Socketable items, such as runes, can now be overwritten with another socketable item in the socket.”
Now, when you insert a new rune into an item, you will be asked if you want to replace the existing rune with the new one. If you decide to do so and click “Accept,” the old rune disappears irreversibly. If you do not already have a large stock of runes, you should think carefully about which rune you insert into which item.
“Now we can finally start”
How the community reacts: As a post on Reddit shows, the small but important change is received very positively by the Path of Exile 2 community. Many players had hardly used their runes before because they regularly changed their gear and didn’t want to “ruin” or waste their high-quality gear.
In a comment, xisupaz_blackbird writes: “Very nice. All of us who have hundreds of runes can finally start clearing the stack.” And oxyscotty thinks: “This increases the value of many items that people had socketed with poor or useless [runes] for their build.”
Vorstar92 adds that it is nice to now be able to adjust gear more easily and swap runes for resistances. “I’m sure we all used runes to maximize resistances, only to then end up excessively capping one resistance,” he writes.
And Pokepunk710 writes: “Such a great change. I just left my sockets empty because I frequently switch gear and it would have messed up my resistances.” And Foray2x1 also says he can finally socket runes into his gear. “Before, I didn’t do it because I didn’t want to create problems for later,” he explains.
Runes drop from both monsters and bosses in the campaign of Path of Exile 2, as well as in the endgame. Additionally, there is the possibility to trade runes with other players. However, the trading system is increasingly under criticism, and more and more players complain about its poor implementation. You can learn more about it here: Fans of Path of Exile 2 demand an important feature, but the developers refuse it on principle.
