Feels like the genre of "ARPG" is starting to mean a lot of different things. Much like "Souls-like" and "Rogue-like", I wonder if we could normalize "Exile-like" for ARPGs that follow the Path of Exile formula...

"An unexpected disconnection occured." Still having more fun than in D4

Nice game. 2 ez tho. I'm playing on hardcore, got a level 62 staff, everything's maxed out and now I can access maps with 4 things. If there's a way to get higher difficulty, I don't know what it is.

10/10 Pros: - Fast intro screen. - Easily readable fonts. - Nice drop down menus Cons: - No access to the actual game. Conclusion: Still better than Diablo 4

I can't even get into the game but the login screen is already better than diablo IV

Before diving into my review, I want to say that I absolutely loved Path of Exile 1 and have spent countless hours enjoying it. Naturally, I was excited to dive into Path of Exile 2, and after investing over 300 hours, I initially enjoyed the game as well. Unfortunately, my perspective shifted drastically after just one day. Here’s what happened: When I logged into my main character (Infernalist), which I had painstakingly leveled to 94 and invested most of my playtime in, I discovered my account had been hacked. Nearly all of my valuable gear and items were stolen. I immediately reported the issue to support via email and forums, hoping for swift action. While investigating, I managed to track down the hacker myself by searching for my missing items in the trade market. They were openly selling my entire setup. I provided this information to support and even posted about it on the forums, asking the moderators to block the hacker from selling the stolen items. To my shock, my forum posts were removed, and I was put on probation for requesting action against the hacker. Not only was I robbed of the time and effort I’d invested in the game, but I also felt silenced by the very team I turned to for help. The email response from support was even more frustrating. After receiving a generic, copy-paste reply, my account was locked—effectively punishing me for being the victim of a hack. As I browsed the forums, I found that many other players had experienced similar situations: accounts compromised, reports filed, and then locked out by support. This entire experience has been deeply disappointing. It feels like being kicked while already down. Instead of offering meaningful support, GGG’s response added insult to injury. Until there’s a significant change in how these situations are handled, I cannot recommend Path of Exile 2 in its current state. Edit: I am still locked out of my account, with no response from support despite multiple follow-ups. To make matters worse, players on the forums are reporting being locked out for weeks without any resolution or updates. This lack of communication only adds to the frustration and leaves me questioning GGG’s commitment to resolving such critical issues. Edit2: It’s the start of a new year, and I’m still locked out of my account with no response from support. The wait continues. Edit3: For those seeking more details about similar account-related issues, I recommend checking the "Help and Information" section on GGG's Path of Exile forum. Many players are sharing their experiences there, which might provide additional context regarding the current situation. Edit4: My account has been locked since December 27, 2024, and I have not received any response from support. The situation surrounding account breaches remains as unclear as ever. Numerous players, including myself, have reported taking extensive security precautions, yet accounts are still being compromised without any evident cause or pattern. Efforts to get information about the account recovery process, including inquiries made by locked-out players on the forum, have provided no clear details or timelines. Meanwhile, the number of compromised accounts seems to be increasing daily, a situation that can be followed on the forums, further adding to the growing frustration and concern among the community. It’s particularly disheartening to note that the hacker I identified—who had taken my gear and items—still has access to the game and appears to be actively trading an even wider range of gear and items. Until these issues are resolved, it might be safer to avoid engaging with the game to protect your account. I do not place blame on GGG, but the growing reports of account compromises and the lack of understanding about how they occur are deeply unsettling. Edit5: 10.01.2025 - Still no response from support and still locked out of my account. Reports of compromised accounts continue to increase. Edit6: 11.01.2025 - Support responded. The recovery process was completed within 3 hours and I got access to my account again. Edit7: 15.01.2025 - Final Update GGG has issued an official statement confirming that the account compromises were caused by a malicious actor gaining access to a PoE admin account through social engineering. This admin account allowed the attacker to access private information and even change passwords on 66 accounts, although no passwords or password hashes were exposed. While GGG has now secured their admin accounts and taken steps to prevent similar incidents, the vulnerabilities exposed during this event caused significant damage to player trust. In my case, the weeks-long silence during the investigation and the need to verify ownership of my account after the compromise only added to the frustration. While GGG has apologized and acknowledged these issues, the lack of earlier communication and transparency remains a sore point. Path of Exile 2 is a game I had high hopes for, but this entire experience has made it hard to fully enjoy or recommend. For any live service game, robust account security and responsive customer support are essential, and I hope GGG continues to improve on both fronts.

Things to do before playing Path of Exile 2: -Go grocery shopping -Block friend and family from texting/phoning you -Take your weekly shower -Make sure you have enough time for your 16 hour long sessions 1000+ hours later and it will be worth it.

Staring at a login screen for the past 30 minutes and still more fun than Diablo 4.

I really want to like the game, but after 12-15 hours I'm just not having fun. It's slow, there's no loot, bosses are painful slogs. I don't feel like I'm getting more powerful or progressing, I just feel like I'm on a treadmill sweating to just not fall off. I have to use multiple skills to kill trash mobs, everything respawns if you die, and it all feels unrewarding. There's just no joy in the game right now.

>Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. Hello again old friend. The day one experience I have come to know and love.

"An unexpected disconnection occurred." Clearly we can gather 2 things from this: 1. Diablo 4 bad 2. This is the greatest game of all time.

They made a game mode for Path of Exile 1 called "Ruthless" that was extremely slow and boring with very few item drops. They said it was a "side project" that wouldn't affect the game. Nobody played Ruthless mode in PoE 1 because it wasn't fun to play. Ruthless was the beta test for PoE 2. Path of Exile 2 is their vision for Ruthless as a stand-alone game. Not playing Ruthless 2.0 - sorry, it's just not fun!

Nerfing builds during EA is understandable. Nerfing them to the ground without enabling us to respec for a fraction of the cost is NOT understandable. Respect my time, devs.

Every time I start doing good in the endgame the game reminds me that I'm trash, that my build is trash, that I'm a garbage player, failed husband and father, and that I should be fired from my day job. 10 out of 10, would recommend

I deliberately chose Lich in a hope it won't suck so much. Instead, I'm running around a boss for 10 mins, waiting for him to die from covid. Truly a chinese game

Path of Exile has been my favorite game for over ten years now, saying that I was hyped for Path of Exile 2 would've been an enormous understatement. The game is graphically stunning, the sound design and music are top notch and the performance is great. However, I am happy this is an Early Access, as the game has some issues that need to be addressed: 1. The concept of using your currency during the campaign to make your items better is perfect, but to do so you need the aformentioned currency, which barely drops. There is no deterministic crafting during the campaign, so you pick up an item, make it magic, if it's a good mod you upgrade it, and you continue this cycle for a few times until you have the item you want. There is no guaranteed way of getting upgrades, Path of Exile had this and it made the campaign quite a lot better. 2. The reason why the currency drop rate is lowered is because of the new loot system, supposedly dropping more useful items at the cost of not having entire screens of loot. Again, this is perfect in a vacuum, but the items you can use are rare, I've gotten halfway through Act 2 and I am still using mostly Act 1 items. 3. The new gem system is intuitive and takes away a lot of the frustration that was present in the old system. What is not fine is dropping 25 Uncut Skill Gems every 1 Uncut Support Gem. Every choice you make regarding your build feels almost permanent; people always hated this, and for a good reason, Path of Exile is a franchise built on experimenting, you simply don't have enough freedom to do so right now. 4. Gold is now an integral part of the game, being the main currency to buy items and refund passive points. This system had already been tested in Path of Exile and received a lot of praise... with one complaint. The amount of gold that drops is too scarce, if I want to buy a random ring (that isn't even guaranteed to be rare) I have to spend THOUSANDS of gold, which (at the start of the game) equals to hours of playing. The same applies to refunding skill points, we have an entirely new passive skill tree, new weapons, new skills, etc. and we are still half-locked into tentative choices. 5. This is probably only an issue because of the previous complaints but, the balance feels quite off. It takes really long to kill any enemy, especially some bosses that take 15 minutes of perfect dodging and continuous damage uptime. I think the balancing is based on having decent rare items that are appropriate to your level, but since this is not the case currently (see points 1 and 4), every fight is an unfun struggle. I won't complain about server issues and the likes because this is the exact reason why we have an Early Access, to iron out things before the full release. This review is to be taken as just feedback from a quite experience player, both in Path of Exile and ARPGs in general. I believe the game has the potential to become the best ARPG ever made, it's just not there yet.

Cannot recommend in its current state. - Your build got too popular? Its nerfed - Want to optimize your gear? You are too poor - Want to not be poor? Use gear with magic find - Want usable gear with magic find? You are too poor - Want to play endgame? Farm this map 150 times for a single upgrade - You dont have magic find? Farm the map 1500 times

I love GGG. I think they're an amazing company and I've thoroughly enjoyed PoE1. I absolutely realize this is an early access but, I'm terrified of the direction PoE is going. So far, PoE2 feels like playing PoE1 on ruthless, but worse. The movement is insanely slow and sluggish and everything feels extremely punishing without giving much reward. I simply can't imagine trudging through the campaign as it stands every league. The game feels far too much like Dark Souls and not enough like PoE. If you're on the fence about wanting to participate in early access, I'd wait and give them some time. I'm sure GGG will figure out the balancing and it will eventually be an amazing game. But, as it stands right now, it's just not that much fun. It's exhausting and tedious.

Game is Fun. Roses are blue. My face turns red while doing Trials part 2.

The game hard crashes taking the OS with it, requiring manual shutdown by using the power button. GGG has been silent about this issue except a single post in known issues which misdiagnoses the problem as a "Win 11 24H2 issue". GGG requested DxDiags and did not access them. GGG does not mention this issue in the patch notes. Currently on the Path of Exile 2 Early Access Bug Reports Forum has two main threads: 1) Hard crashing PC locks up: 248 Pages, 2471 Replies, 146069 Views. Created at 7th of December, 2024. 2) POE 2 Complete PC Freeze while loading screen: 216 Pages, 2159 Replies, 204635 Views. Created at 7th of December, 2024. In comparison the entire " Bugs" thread has 138 Pages, 1370 Replies, 29196 Views. In terms of ratio, more than half of the replies and views to the forum belong to these two threads. There are no bugs that are more important than this. This is not "I cannot use X skill bug". This is "improper usage of system APIs by the application" causing "100% CPU utilization" leading to a crash, resulting in "shortened component lifespan and possibly bricking PC". There are people who have lost their PSUs, SSDs, GPUs, CPUs, Bluetooths, USBs... Any part you can put in a PC, there is someone on the forum that have lost it due to this "bug". This happens on every kind of OS and hardware. OS: Happens on Linux, Win10, Win11. Hardware: AMD and Intel CPUs, AMD and Nvidia GPUs in all types of combination. If a hardware can run it, there is a person with that hardware on those 400 page threads with this crashing bug.

Review after 7hrs: Stick with POE1, this game's pacing is slow and the skills are both extremely limited and boring to use. The skill tree is pretty meh as well and really kills the joy of leveling up since the passives are meh. Overall at current the game pretty much pales in comparison to most other ARPGs on the market. The entire playtime I've been waiting for the enjoyment factor to scale up, but it's been boring enough that I've uninstalled and will probably just reinstall some other ARPG like Last Epoch or Grim Dawn and play that instead Original Review: Pay for a game and they can't even keep their auth servers online to play it... FFS it's a damn ARPG... Give me a offline single player mode... Never have even played the first game in a non-solo fashion. I don't want to deal with people, I want to play a game and forget they exist in the first damn place...

Game won't launch on first day. Diablo 4 and NoX perfect launch, showing the true kings of the genre.

Dawn of the hunt update, everything feels like a total slog. Every boss fight is incredibly longer than it needs to be. Most of the skills do little to no damage. I understand they said they wanted to slow game play down, but I don't think I will even make it more than 1 week in this league at this point. It just feels incredibly awful right now, IF you can even get the game to run and be stable. That is a HUGE if.

*** revised after dawn of the hunt (on the fence)Your movement and actions are more deliberate than other ARPGs, almost Dark Souls like. (on the fence) Many hard hitting set up require 2-4 skills to pay off. (con)There is a lot of bullet hell elements where the whole screen is filled with projectiles and you have to either tank or dodge them. (con) some of the rewards for killing a boss are laughable - at least in DS you get an upgrade lots of xp and / or a recipe The devs smeem to be slowing the game down even more and imo making it less fun. There was a happy medium we were in on release now it almost feel slugging ; this can be further emphesised by your character class. This period right now reminds me of D4 nerfing most of the skills and buffing monster in one of the patches - they did apologise (in a corporate way) and gave players more options to have fun eventually. Still on my hard drive, as I hope it gets better one day.

tldr: wait for at least few patches and balancing imo tldr2: post-act burnout, worth it only if you really want to check out what devs have prepared so far and/or support them, but I'm not sane enought to stay for mapping Grinded to about level 40 and it doesn't feel that good here in EA. Overall, the game looks beautiful, the ideas are cool, and some boss fights feel genuinely enjoyable—if you're lucky enough to face them on even terms. Now for the downsides: progression is terrible. The new skill system is more restrictive: it’s divided into "only maces" or "only staves" instead of the broader categories like "blunt," "sharp," or "melee." Experimentation is less encouraged. For instance, in PoE1, testing a different skill or skill combo cost a negligible amount of currency, which was easy to acquire. In PoE2, skills and their modifiers are rare and random loot. A failed attempt at improving your character’s power essentially punishes you until the RNG gods decide to give you another chance. The same goes for gear. Now, even blue items can't be freely re-rolled: you get just one shot at crafting. If you end up with garbage, tough luck—sell it to a vendor for peanuts. Crafting currency has become rarer, and there are fewer opportunities to deliberately improve your setup. Gear drops have also become less frequent, and it’s all too common to kill a boss, a rare mob, or open a golden chest only to receive absolutely nothing useful or valuable. And this happens over and over. At state of mid-third act, the game feels like a casino simulator, where players have even less control over the outcomes. This trend aligns with the direction of recent updates and leagues in PoE1. The gameplay is occasionally unpolished, but mostly just tedious. Maps have become larger, movement is slower, and when you die, trash mobs respawn, forcing you to clear them all over again. With the slower pace, it sometimes feels like certain mobs were designed for the old zoom-zoom gameplay, where you “clear from off-screen or die.” They leap, teleport, or rush at you with absurd speed, leaving no option but to roll away and spam AoE beneath your feet until everything around you is dead. At least, that’s how it feels playing as a ranged character with a crossbow. The old PoE problems like lack of visual clarity and clear telegraphing of attacks haven’t gone anywhere. The only improvement is that these issues seem slightly less frequent in a few rare cases. I hope that balancing and loot issues will be fixed by letting devs cook, at the moment it just doesn't feel good Post act: Well, I’ve skill-issued myself through all the acts, so here’s the update. The main points have remained the same, and I see the developers are already carefully working on changes, so there will be improvements. You can see how long it took me (45 hours at the time of writing this review). Most of that time was spent walking. My guess is that it could be optimized to around 25 hours (in the best-case scenario) with higher movement speed, a more meta build, proper gear, and efficient pathing. However, even that feels like a lot if you consider having to re-run it for every character in every league. While I think movement speed in combat is fine, as there are ways to mitigate the slowdown from attacking and to increase general movement speed slightly, we really need something to boost our speed outside of combat. I doubt any developer will read this, but a good long-term solution would be to add mounts, or running, though that sounds less exciting. A mount would be cool, and the game already has some MTX for out-of-combat movement. Besides, there’s an abandoned Rhoa sitting somewhere in Deshar. We can’t just leave this poor creature all alone; maybe it could come with us? Dodge rolling is already being worked on, but I think each class should have its own way of improving it, whether through ascendancy, a passive tree node, or a gem. While there’s currently one spirit gem that changes how dodge works, I don’t think that’s an ideal solution. The best thing about the current gem system is the ability to create skill combos, and I’m excited to see how the developers expand on this idea. However, it feels a bit limited and, in some cases, too restrictive. For example, gas can only be ignited by burning enemies and skills with the “detonator” tag, but not by other explosions, burning oil on the ground, or a literal wall of fire, which doesn’t seem logical. There are also support gems that cause double status procs on enemies to trigger effects, but I’m particularly interested in seeing them expand on AoE or ground effect mix-ups. It feels incredibly satisfying to use them, and not continuing to develop this idea would be a huge missed opportunity. I also hope weapon restrictions on gems will be eased slightly. While weapon-specific skills are fine and can lead to interesting designs, it’s important to provide more general, all-around options like we’ve had in the past. Regarding the acts themselves, the best part is generally the bosses, god I hope they'll make pure bossing acts. Act 1 feels decent in this regard, Act 2 is a bit unpolished, and Act 3 is top-tier (though I’m a big fan of Vaal aesthetics, so I might be biased). The bosses I didn’t enjoy were the Kitava-imposter types. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but they feel like they need more work. In terms of telegraphing and enemy skill audio/visuals: please, for the love of god, ensure survivability isn’t tied to the physical ability to see things under layers of effects. Enemy skills should have visual priority over player skills, with more dangerous abilities having even higher priority, same for sound queues. If things are already hard to see now, we all know how bad it will get after more mechanics and a few leagues are piled on top. There’s a chance now to improve this and avoid the visual hell that PoE 1 became. The same goes for mobs that rush or offscreen you. This was frustrating in PoE 1 and remains so here. Rushing mobs should be rare packs designed to challenge and surprise you, not something spammed throughout a location. Trash mobs that offscreen you are even worse. Nobody, and this includes us, should be offscreening anyone. It encourages unengaging gameplay, which is, in my opinion, bad. If you want bigger mob engagement distances, just zoom out the camera a bit so we can see each other. And before anyone complains, I’m not referring to things tied to ranged mechanics—I’m talking about things that try to auto-attack you to death. As for crafting and currency, the absence of Alteration Orbs feels disappointing. No vendor recipes or crafting bench in is also a letdown. Alchemy Orbs don’t exist in the acts (at least not with my luck), and essences are nearly nonexistent. More common Exalts and new Chaos Orbs are fun, but most deterministic crafting methods seem locked away in maps, which I dislike. Omens for crafting appear to exist (based on what I saw on the currency exchange), but my guess is they won’t be common and will cost a fortune to obtain. The current passive tree is fine—a decent starting point—but it lacks any significant game-changing options. The Atlas passive tree concept, with its own points for each league, is good in my opinion. I haven’t checked upgrades it provides, but the idea is promising. If you’ve read this far, you’re not sane, exile, and neither am I. I don’t see myself continuing this journey into map grinding, as I see the same issues persisting there. My legs are weak and slow, and the maps are massive, offering only one chance to complete them for some loot—if you don’t perish first. It’s been interesting to see what the developers have prepared so far, and I’ll probably check back again sometime later. For now, though, I’m already burned out.