This lake has no bottoms.

A long-standing challenge with Path of Exile is that seasons build upon themselves. Most mechanics in a given season become baseline, so you have an ever growing list of balls to juggle the more seasons take place. Most games tend to put this in the DLC space, Grim Dawn certainly fits this bills. Others repackage content, like Diablo.

PoE2 released 0.5 recently and brought the Runes mechanic to the game. It’s a sort of RNG system where you get a choice of outcomes, fight some baddies, and get rewards. It also includes a Runic mechanic that gives access to a subset of different skills. Cool. It also keeps the Abyss, Vaal Temple, 2x Trials, Rogue Exiles, Breach, Expeditions, Rituals, Delirium, Shrines, Lockboxes, Pinnacle Bosses, and then of course the Atlas Map proper.

The Atlas is a gateway to all this content, an infinite set of procedurally generated map for you to clear. Each map can have one or more of the pieces of content present. You ‘juice’ these maps with a set of currency (Tributes & Tokens) to make them harder and more rewarding, and to potentially focus on a specific set of activities. You like running Abyss? You can narrow down that activity if you want.

As with everything PoE2, there’s a ton to unpack here and it will take a while. Credit though, GGG has figured out a way to more naturally direct you towards progress with clearer map markers and passive boosts. Make a choice as to what content you want to take on has no real bad answer, as all of them have their own rewards. This is so drastically different than say Diablo 4, where there’s zero reason to run the Pit once you have gems sorted out, or the wildly unbalanced Inferno runs. The further you get in D4, the less actual content there is to run and the harder it becomes to unlock said content. That is less the case with PoE2 as each activity drives the larger meta content forward.

Now, this doesn’t diminish at all the core challenges with PoE2. You still need a stupidly strong beating stick (with a specific set of stats) to be relevant, movement speed on boots is king, and it’s relatively easy to get lost in the skills + skill tree. On your own, building a viable character build, that’s gonna be quite tricky. The difference between viable and not is a friggin’ steep curve, if not a wall.

My major gripe with D4 is around War Plans, which is a sort of simplified Atlas passive tree. It takes quite a few hours to progress in War Plans, which is restricted per character and cannot be shared across groups. I still think this is such a weird decision. I do enjoy D4’s general lack of friction, a sort of fast-food of ARPGs. War Plans break that. PoE2, as with the original, doesn’t follow that mindset and your Atlas is shared across all characters. Kinda makes a big overall actually, as the leveling phase in this game is much longer than in D4.

0.5 Changes

I won’t go full hyperbole and say that everything has changed, but I will say enough has changed that the end game has general purpose and direction. The map has an interesting flow to it, where cardinal directions push you into specific types of content. There are quest markers that push you along those directions so that you get a general feel for what you enjoy. While the content is available pretty much anywhere, the randomness favors certain directions. And those directions provide more intrinsic rewards, primarily through points you can invest in the Atlas tree.

Now, PoE doing PoE things, very few systems are actually described with enough detail to make sense of it. While the direction and visual incentives make it sort of easier to navigate, the actual mechanics haven’t really been tweaked and remain somewhat obtuse. Breach for example, it seems straightforward to just kill as much as you can, but the reality is that passive points and targeting hands is the actual goal. Waystone ‘juicing’ has no real instructions, you just hope for the best while crafting. 0.5 is certainly better than before as it isn’t a blind buffet of options. It can still use some tweaks though, as it truly feels like its bursting at the seams with content in a small framework. Best example is that every 20 maps or so seems to have all possible content spawn within, which is a half dozen trips back to base to manage the drops.

The final point I do want to make for 0.5 is that there is substantially too many items that drop and no simple way to manage it. I have 2 tabs that are just for crafting things, and both are full. This is a QoL thing for sure, and frankly a massive barrier for new players to digest. There really isn’t a solution here as many of these items are specifically related to rolling a given modifier on a specific item (e.g. +cold dmg on gloves). On the one hand, great that you can sort of customize gear, but less great when you come to realize the amount of possible permutations on gear + mods and therefore the amount of crafting materials to cover the broader pieces.

The end game in PoE2 is the best it’s ever been, and the changes so far have filled in a lot of the confusing holes that were present before. It’s quite obvious people can spend a lot of time here trying to put all the pieces together and no two sessions ever feel the same. There’s still ample room for improvement here without necessarily simplifying any particular component, as the depth is the real selling feature. And aside from the final 2 story acts, this feels mechanically ‘complete’ as compared to other games in the genre. Still a good 6+ months before it truly launches, and if you haven’t already dived in, I would personally wait until the F2P launch actually occurs. And I say that solely because if you are not already playing, that learning all these systems likely would benefit from a couple QoL reviews.