PoE 2 has an identity crisis (and a quick word about respeccing Ascendancies)

I have about 160 hours in the early access so far. I thoroughly enjoyed what we’ve seen of the campaign and the new gameplay flow, despite the gigantic map sizes making progress feel very sluggish throughout most of Act 3. Combat feels great, and it's probably the biggest aspect that carries PoE2, next to the boss fights. I’ve enjoyed mapping significantly less so; other players’ reactions seem to be mixed-to-negative. I could go on about map sustain, the Atlas layout, and other design choices that deserve discussion in their own threads. But there’s one overarching reason that might explain why mapping feels so unpleasant: Path of Exile 2 is two games in one. It has an identity crisis.

I’m far from the first person to point this out. But I felt this observation deserves another thread, because it really is that serious of an issue. Let’s take a look at the two games currently coexisting within Path of Exile 2.


The campaign is slow, methodical, and challenging - at least on your first playthrough. Zones and boss fights are more like what you’d find in a Souls or Ys game than a traditional ARPG, where you plan out a route ahead of time. You’re meant to die to bosses a few times (or many), learn from your mistakes, adjust your build to shore up your weaknesses, sneak in some clutch revives in co-op, and triumph. Your victory is the result of careful planning and encounter mastery. When you’re just starting out, each victory feels earned. More importantly, it’s well-suited for co-op. Recall how Jonathan and other GGG devs have stated repeatedly that PoE2 has made many accommodations to the co-op experience, like the revive system. This is very important. Keep it in mind.

Endgame maps, meanwhile, are completely different. Your focus is no longer on overcoming specific challenges, but on fast clears, optimizing your currency per hour, and taking educated gambles on risky maps. You’re meant to treat them like PoE1 maps. At the same time, maps are FAR riskier than in PoE1 due to the one-death limit. Die once, and all of the currency you invested into it (plus whatever was left in the map) is gone. Map sustain is more difficult because even 200-300% waystone drop rates will give you one or maybe two red maps and a bunch of trash maps. It’s the PoE1 map meta, except with PoE2 rules grafted onto it. This runs completely counter to the “try and try again” ethic that the campaign teaches you.
Even worse, one person dying in a co-op map means they can’t hop back into help their friends with the juiced-up mobs. It’s especially bad if a buddy dies to nonstop volatile plants orbs hidden under foliage or corpses, or proximal tangibility or mana drain bricking their builds because you can’t ignore dangerous rares anymore if you don’t think they’re worth the risk. You HAVE to fight the rares to complete the map. Even worse, most maps don't have bosses - one of PoE2's biggest selling points! The campaign conditions you to expect epic boss fights, but the majority of Atlas maps just don't have any at all. The poor visual clarity, harsh enemy scaling, and lack of mobility in this game make mapping exhausting. Maps want you to apply the PoE1 mindset to PoE2’s punishing gameplay. It’s a chore. It feels like a rug pull at the endgame, and I can see a lot of the newcomers who loved the campaign turning away entirely once they hit maps and start to comprehend what’s in store for them up ahead.

Now, we can sit on our high horses and scoff at the plebeians who give up when they reach maps. “The game just isn’t for you,” we say. But such sophistry ignores the fundamental problem that PoE2 is trying to cater to two audiences at once, with two different gaming experiences. It’s creating a lot of friction between PoE1 veterans and newcomers… though to be honest, even a lot of PoE1 veterans are frustrated with PoE2’s endgame. The only people who seem to be satisfied are those who make 150ex an hour in t15s. That is not the norm. For the rest of the players who are new to the game, don’t have as much time to play, or are running off-meta, the inflated market seems insurmountable. Or, at the very least, a very tedious mountain to climb when even a juiced red map may not even refund you the currency you used to juice it in the first place, let alone give you another map at that tier. And if you brick a map while crafting it, you can’t just reroll it due to Chance orbs being rare and Scourings being completely gone. You will get boatloads of low tier maps, though! Maybe GGG wants us to use Doryani as a gold sink to bulk purchase T1 maps, then reforge them into T14s. That’s awful if so. All of that, and we haven’t even discussed how strong rarity stats on gear are, which is another discussion entirely…

That said, I do not want zoom zoom to come back. Zoom zoom should die in PoE1. I highly respect GGG’s decision to make PoE2 a slower-paced, more deliberate game. The campaign does a good job of accomplishing this. The endgame, however, does not mesh with this design philosophy at all. Instead of taking the campaign’s gameplay to the next level, the Atlas just becomes another market hustler game like PoE1 with stricter restrictions and harsher punishments. Ironically, a lot of the people who defend the game’s current state and say they don’t want PoE1 ARE getting PoE1. It’s just slower than before.

I’ve been playing PoE since early beta, back when all we had were the first two acts and when Ball Lightning dropped before it was ready to ship due to a mistake on GGG’s part. I played nearly every league up to Archnemesis, at which point I only played intermittently because I became tired of the rampant power creep and constant nerfs to defensive layers, leading to a game where low who zoom zoom is the only way to run content. I’ve gotten numerous characters to 95 and cleared pinnacle content with them - most of whom are melee, so I’m familiar with what suffering in PoE means. I’ve hustled for Headhunters, Bottled Faiths, and other chase uniques. I’ve even found a Mirror on the ground, in an unjuiced T14 blue map of all things (pic: https://imgur.com/6sHkDqf). I went to the Ascendancy media tour back in 2015, where I got to meet and chat with GGG devs about their vision for the game. I still use the flash drive I got at that press event. I’ve been through PoE through thick and thin, and I have the utmost respect for GGG’s vision - even if I may not agree with it at times. This is one of those times. More accurately, I think GGG’s vision for PoE2 is confused. Over the next few months, GGG needs to sit down and figure out how to marry PoE2’s new design philosophy with the Atlas of old. If they don’t, the newcomers currently praising the game are in for a rude surprise once they get past the campaign - especially so if they’re playing with friends.

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One final note: Please, please, please allow players to respect their ascendancies. This isn’t a “I would suggest…” or a “It might be better if…” No. This needs to happen for two reasons. One, so players don’t have to reroll a completely new character just to try a new ascendancy for their build. Two, so the devs can gather valuable feedback on the new ascendancies they’ll be adding in the coming months. I doubt many players will trudge through the entire campaign again once the current classes receive their third ascendancies. This means that the third ascendancies will probably get significantly less play than the current two for each class, which in turn means that the devs will receive significantly less gameplay data and tester feedback on the new ascendancies. The devs will be shooting themselves in the foot if they don’t allow players to swap ascendancies.

You're not the first to notice this contradiction of what PoE2 wants to be in the end. And it's going to be quite boring, with serious problems of artificial difficulty and horrible balancing in the endgame, because it tries to please both the audience you see in FromSoftware games (or even Ys, as you said) and the ARPG Looter audience coming from PoE1 and Diablo.

This gameplay loop of dying a thousand times to be able to beat a boss or stage in the endgame DOES NOT SUIT with ARPG Looter. And it's too slow to be applied to the ARPG Looter season system.

If they don't fix this in the next patch now, increasing XP, movement speed and reducing map size at least in the endgame, they'll start losing players in droves.

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Gwonam#5505 wrote:

Path of Exile 2 is two games in one. It has an identity crisis.

A well crafted souls-like and a number-stacking ARPG just don't work together. During the campaign it's not that apparent as you get little loot. But try the campaign on your second character after you had given yourself some items. Suddenly the campaign feels like mapping.

Keeping the souls-like feeling in endgame won't work. They'd have to make it even more extreme (everything instakills), which will hurt everyone but top 1% meta players.

Sorry but I disagree. This isn’t a conflict; it’s a natural progression that mirrors GGG’s philosophy of escalating challenge and player mastery. The campaign focuses on deliberate pacing and introducing mechanics, while the endgame pushes you to adapt and optimize for a more rewarding environment. This balance isn’t a flaw—it’s what makes the game engaging for players who embrace its depth.

Title:

Seems fine to me.

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N3vangel#0037 wrote:

Sorry but I disagree. This isn’t a conflict; it’s a natural progression that mirrors GGG’s philosophy of escalating challenge and player mastery. The campaign focuses on deliberate pacing and introducing mechanics, while the endgame pushes you to adapt and optimize for a more rewarding environment. This balance isn’t a flaw—it’s what makes the game engaging for players who embrace its depth.

Escalating challenge is great. The problem is that the challenge that endgame poses to players runs counter to the challenge from the campaign. The campaign teaches you to try and retry difficult areas and learn boss patterns to succeed; the atlas tells you to throw out everything you learned from the campaign and to blast maps that rarely have bosses in them at all. If you die once (to bad builds, to sloppy play, to multiple stacking rare affixes, to unstable servers or stuttering or desyncs), there's no trying again. You're done. Any league mechanics or bosses you had on the map are also gone. If you can't juice your magic find, you quickly fall behind because you can't sustain your maps in the first place - not because your fundamentals are lacking. If your build relies on the combat fundamentals you learned during campaign, you aren't clearing fast enough.

I look at it more like the campaign had training wheels and your training wheels come off in the endgame. But this dev team is, imo, is very focused on what they’re trying to achieve. If you really want to see what an identity crisis looks like, play some D4. It plays like 3 different teams are working on the game and one doesn’t know what the next is doing from season to season. As far as map sustain goes I think that’ll be in line for small buff in the near future and I think we’re gonna see some big improvements in the overall end game as well.