Even before Christmas, the developers of Path of Exile 2 are gifting you a major update, with numerous improvements. MeinMMO has the German patch notes for you.
What is supposed to change? The developers of Path of Exile 2 are releasing the last patch of the year before the holidays. The focus of this massive update is on several aspects that have recently been heavily criticized within the community.
The PoE2 community has recently complained, for example, about the nerfs that prompted some players to change their builds. They demanded compensation from the developers, such as a free reset of all skill points or at least a discount on it. Here, the developers are now conceding.
With the new update, respecializing for players in the endgame is supposed to become 40 to 50 percent cheaper. Additionally, the so-called death effects will be adjusted. They are a common cause of death and are supposed to deal significantly less damage after the patch.
Also, during the Trial of the Sekhemas, the damage to your honor from damage-over-time effects has been significantly reduced. The normal damage to your honor now scales with the distance to your opponent, making it easier for melee characters.
In addition to many new balance changes, two new gems are being introduced. The “Tremors Support Gem” gives your abilities more aftershocks but comes with reduced damage. The “Bidding Support Gem” buffs the damage of your minions’ command skills.
The developers also announced that they will take a break over the holidays to rest. They will not resume work on Path of Exile 2 until the new year.
An NPC in Path of Exile 2 is particularly helpful:
Path of Exile 2 Patch Notes in German
The following changes will soon be introduced in the game with the massive update. However, there is currently no exact date for the patch. Here are the official patch notes in German:
Gameplay Features
As we mentioned last week, we will add the ability to travel quickly between checkpoints within an area, and also add many more checkpoints in areas, basically at all entrances and exits to areas. This means that if you find them first, you can immediately travel to them to continue your exploration.
We will also lower the costs for resetting passive points, especially at higher levels. The cost curve has increased relatively aggressively with character level; we have flattened this curve so that it no longer rises as exponentially. This should generally lead to around 40-50 % lower gold costs for resetting points between the beginning and the midpoint of endgame progression.
Trial of the Sekhemas
Players found Trial of the Sekhemas particularly frustrating in close range, so we have adjusted how honor damage scales in close range and also fixed a major bug that caused players to suffer far too much honor damage from damage-over-time.
- Honor damage now scales down based on distance to enemies. In close range, you take 35 % less honor damage, and the effect decreases the further you are from monsters.
- A bug was fixed where damage-over-time dealt three times as much damage to honor as intended, and another bug was fixed where honor resistance was only applied to two-thirds of that damage. (This was also confusing for us)
- Skitter Golems no longer use normal attacks and only explode instead.
- The Burrow and Ambush Attack of the Serpent Clans now has an improved visual announcement and can no longer be used from such a great distance.
- The volcanoes created by Rattlecage’s Fissure Slam now last only half as long.
Endgame and Monster Balance
Overall, the balance in endgame maps has been tougher than intended. Therefore, we have reduced damage in various ways and disabled a specific on-death effect where the visual announcement was not as clear as it should have been.
- Maps now have no more additional elemental resistance penalties that were automatically applied from Tier 6 and Tier 11 or higher. This is now consistent throughout the endgame.
- Chaos damage now scales less aggressively in the endgame.
- Critical hits from monsters now deal 40 % less bonus damage.
- The base monster density in Breach encounters has been reduced, mainly through a reduction in the frequency of elite monsters appearing.
- The Volatile Crystals Modifier has been disabled. We will revisit this in the future once the visual announcement has been improved.
- The purple explosions caused by the Volatile Plants Modifier on rare monsters now deal significantly less damage.
- The Siphons Flask Charges Modifier on monsters now drains ten times fewer flask charges per second. (This effect unintentionally drained too many charges)
These changes should lead to a significantly more survivable endgame overall. We will continue to address problematic cases as they arise.
Character and Item Balance
- We have made charm modifiers on belts significantly more common; they now appear at much lower levels. The “of Symbolism” modifier now appears from level 23, and the “of Inscription” modifier appears from level 64.
- Electrocute is now 25 % harder to build. (However, the damage penalty has been removed from the support gem.)
- A new cluster for lightning damage and Electrocute has been added to the passive skill tree, between the areas of the Rangers and Monks.
- It is now more difficult to freeze enemies continuously as the amount of frost buildup after an already applied freeze has been reduced.
- The Hunter’s Talisman Notable now grants +1 charm slot. The small passive skills leading to it now grant the stat it used to provide. The charm tooltip has been updated to indicate that you cannot unlock more than three charm slots, allowing us to add more sources for this in the future.
Skill and Support Gem Balance
Since launch, we have unfortunately had to nerf some skills that were far too overpowered. What do we define as overpowered? Basically, these are situations where a certain skill is so strong that players feel like no other playstyle is viable.
In general, we try to do this in such a way that a build does not become unplayable (but we also make mistakes sometimes!). Ideally, truly meta-changing adjustments are only made alongside a content patch and a new league.
However, this does not mean that we have not also addressed weaker skills and support gems. We have a number of adjustments planned that should improve some of these skills. The full list of changes will be in the patch notes, but here is an example of what to expect:
- Improvements to Rolling Slam and all shield skills in the mace area.
- Improvements to various bows skills, especially for generating frenzy charges.
- Improvements to bone spells and chaos damage-over-time spells in the occult area.
- Improvements to various crossbow skills, particularly those at higher levels.
- Improvements to some weaker quarterstaff skills.
In addition to these improvements to skill gems, we have also revised the support gems. We have added two new support gems and removed or reduced penalties on many others, especially for support gems for fire, lightning, and cold exposure.
- Tremors Support Gem added: Allows adding multiple additional aftershocks to abilities, but with a damage penalty.
- Bidding Support Gem added: Grants more damage to the command skills of supported minions.
- The Fire Exposure, Lightning Exposure and Cold Exposure Support Gems no longer penalize the damage of supported skills. They now have a mana cost multiplier of 120 %.
There are also some notable nerfs for a few of the remaining overly strong skills:
- The spirit costs of the Skeletal Arsonists now match those of the other two skeleton mages. This should lead to a slight reduction in the number of Arsonists at higher levels.
- A nerf to the damage-over-time component at very high levels of Tornado and Vine Arrow. These skills were never intended to deal damage themselves but were meant to serve as a method to spread the damage of other skills.
- Magnetic Salvo can now only use your own set lightning arrows and no longer those created by your group members.
As we slowly move towards the Christmas season, we want to thank you all for our most successful launch so far. We couldn’t have done it without your support. A large part of our team will be taking a well-deserved break in the coming weeks, but we look forward to returning refreshed in the new year and ushering in an exciting 2025 full of new developments.
A known bug that kicks players out of Path of Exile 2 when they perform their actions too quickly will probably not be fixed this year. This may still appear in the full patch notes, detailing every change. Recently, Elon Musk was also affected by the problem: Path of Exile 2 kicks out Elon Musk, but he denies all cheat accusations
