In Path of Exile 2, you can defeat enemies together with your friends in cooperative mode, but currently, players prefer to do otherwise.
How does cooperative mode work in Path of Exile 2? In PoE2, you can embark on adventures as a group of up to six gamers. Not only is the campaign available, but the entire game can be played in cooperative mode. To prevent players from easily defeating every boss, the strength of enemies on the map increases depending on the number of group members.
The loot found by the group also scales with the number of members. While cooperative mode sounds well thought out, there are weaknesses that can detract from the experience for gamers.
Here you can see the cinematic intro:
Burning Eyes
Where are the problems in cooperative mode? At the beginning, cooperative mode works relatively well because adventurers do not have many abilities yet. On the “easy” difficulty level during the campaign, everything goes as the developers intended. However, as players progress further in the ARPG, especially in the maps, many recognize the issue: You can’t see anything anymore.
In Path of Exile 2, there are many abilities that deal damage to enemies with colorful effects, massive explosions, or clouds of gas. This is problematic in cooperative mode because all the effects take up the entire screen and leave no room for recognizing important enemy attacks and abilities.
This is well illustrated by silentkillerd3 in a video on Reddit:
In this case, he is playing PoE2 with just two players, not with six gamers all using abilities simultaneously. The extent of the effects with a higher number of players would likely be even more intense.
What do the players think? What may look fun at first glance quickly leads to frustration among adventurers, as the comments on Reddit show.
The user billybaked shares on Reddit how it went for him: “My friend and I played together at the start and had a great time playing through the campaign, but when we got to the maps and started working on our builds, we decided to continue alone. The FPS drops, the lack of clarity, and the eye-burning effects were just too much. And it’s annoying.”
Noother10 felt similarly. He writes on Reddit: “My friend was a melee fighter, I was a minion summoner with arsonists, the screen was constantly on fire, he couldn’t see anything and was randomly hit by stupid invisible/hidden ground effects. Then he lost 10% XP and had to drop out and wait for me to finish the map, which took even more time. He barely made any progress, it’s a stupid system that isn’t worth investing time in.”
Psych0enigma had a similar experience on Reddit: “[…] Just like with me and a buddy, he played Poison Pathfinder and I was a Invoker. Before the patch, we kept dying because we couldn’t see the death effects due to the clouds of poison everywhere. After that, he just didn’t come back to play after the patch, and he said the game feels like it was meant to be played solo because we couldn’t see what was killing us and took our gained experience away.”
Whoever dies in Path of Exile 2 can no longer return to the same map to their teammates outside of the campaign and must wait until they finish. Additionally, you lose 10% of the experience points of your current level per death, making it even more frustrating when you are defeated due to a lack of clarity.
There are also other problems with cooperative mode in Path of Exile 2. Gamers have previously criticized that too many of the game’s features can only be executed by the host. Once the host is finished, much of the gameplay becomes unavailable. You can read more about that here: Players criticize the cooperative mode of Path of Exile 2 because too much relies on one person
