Everyone was sitting in front of their PCs, ready to hop into the new league that promised a hundred of new uniques (with half of them situationally being garbage), another hundred of the support gems (with another half here being useless), and the new mechanic copy-pasted from the original PoE: little fireflies that empower monsters.
And so we fought our way through the queues as the update kicked off, started our classes with well-thought-out starting builds… And struggled with it.
Since the launch of Path of Exile 2: Dawn of the Hunt, we’ve been monitoring your feedback and have planned some changes based on it. In this post we’ll talk about some of the things we’ve already done, and more of the changes we are planning on making.https://t.co/LwLDXEzbIb pic.twitter.com/HFORG4v62U
— Path of Exile (@pathofexile) April 7, 2025
What is the start of a new league? It’s a literal start anew, from scratch. You have nothing. You get a white weapon at the start, your very first skill gem and fight on. New economy, new fresh server, new opportunities and challenges. And only your skill and RNG against the game world. Players created starting builds capable of clearing the maps – that is, passing through all 6 acts – and reaching the atlas, all the while competing in the speed of completion and implementation of builds and skill sets.
And now, in the best example of Expectations vs. Reality, players compete to see who can quickly score an auto attack kill on the location boss. The LOCATION boss, not the entire act. Only a select few manage to pass the Act boss, because you have to play a class that hasn’t been nerfed yet. You know, Act Bosses used to be a test of your build. Whether you were able to pass it depended on your hands and the effectiveness of the build. Now on the sites with the purchase of game currencies there are lots for HELP to kill Act bosses. And THEY ARE BOUGHT! Does this tell you anything?
In their “brilliant” manner, GGG nerfed everything and everyone that was considered meta all the while apparently forgetting to add skills that could turn the meta upside down and add something new to the gameplay. You enjoyed Spark? Spark is gone now. Did you love the Stacker Attribute? Dead, forget about it. Did you love the Broom Monk? It’s done and dusted as well (well, not really – but you’ll need a ton of currency to make it work).
So what do we have left? The new Lich class that doesn’t work without a ton of currency, a new Huntress character? Okay. I killed bosses with spear’s auto attacks FASTER than using skills. Just insert an attack acceleration gem into your auto attack – and it’s your strongest attack of all possible skills. At the beginning of the game, you have a limited number of skill gems. And there are not so many of them that you could try and test the build in the hot conditions of the league start.
Well, GGG has already (at the time of writing) released a hotfix, in which they began to increase the damage of skills, reduce the HP of minions and bosses … just a minute – from 400% HP to 94%. Reading their “fixes” I want to ask, did they make a mistake with the decimals in the formula for calculating damage in skills or something of the sort? For more of the promised changes, check out the blog post on Steam.
Before getting to the atlas, I like to start with minions, both in the original PoE and in PoE2. You know, minions are always a comfortable pack, not extremely fast, not featuring overpowered damage, just the sheer convenience of use. Minions and curses can lead even not the most skillful player through acts, serve as a start for atlas and a way to get enough currency and spheres for a new build, more thorough and demanding in the approach to it.
In the new league, the start through the minions turned out to be a disaster. They were dying from a single boss attack, got re-summoned only to die again while I kept running around in circles while the minions were getting respawned. Respawned, only to attack once if I’m lucky and… you guessed it, die again, while the enemies stayed alive.
The restart using the new character, the Huntress, also was not the most pleasant one.
Killing bosses became many times faster, indeed. Instead of spending 10 minutes on a boss, I spent 3-4. Progress! But through the entire process, I only really hit them with auto-attacks, not skills. Despite their spectacle, skills did less damage than a stupid Spear Throw. Having grown annoyed for the second time, and dropping a character in Act 2, I re-started yet again, this time using the good old Ranger. And things went better. I spent a minute or two on bosses and even managed to complete 3 acts. And get into the strengthened Act 1.
At the moment, I do NOT recommend playing POE2. Before the league, completing acts was a test of the performance of your build, now you feel like you are actively fighting against the game design. Against the blanket nerfs of GGG, which changed everything too much. Against the strength of monsters and bosses. GGG managed to raise the stats of WHITE monsters so that you would also suffer between battles with bosses. Frankly, the developers cut everything, even weak skills that were almost never used. Dawn of the Hunt is more of a simulator of suffering a competition of wallets than a game where you face difficulties and overcome them.
Even taking up the new character and the new weapon – Huntress with a Spear – that were slated to be the next level gameplay…amounted to poking the boss with the auto-attack, Spear Throw, until it was no longer moving.
Players have started to lower the rating of the game on Steam after the latest update. I sincerely hope that developers will fix and correct all of those “nerfs” made without proper research and bring back Fun to the game.
The very idea of nerfing everything at the start of the new league is understandable, so that people try out new classes, new ascensions, try to get new uniques and or attempt new skill combinations. But none of this works well. Why does an archer with a crossbow, or poison arrows still work and can pass through the acts, but a summoner with skeletons cannot? Before, I could take a skill that I like visually, tune it up with support gems and AT LEAST complete acts with it. Now, all that interest and fun had been taken out of the game. Even knowing all the intricacies and having experience in the game, the process loses any kind of entertainment as you fight against a tide of nerfs.
It is absurd that players are FORCED to play something meta, or something that has not yet been nerfed, everything else is simply broken as far as completing the game goes. Why am I forced to play on a Huntress and instead of throwing a lightning spear at enemies, I throw auto-attacks? After all, the lightning spear in Act 2 knocks off… 10% of the WHITE mob’s HP. And an auto-attack kills it with 1-2 pokes? Even the streamers have moved onto something else, including Souls-like – at least there, you suffer and overcome the difficulties with skill and knowledge vs PoE2 where you suffer through the nerfs for the sake of even greater suffering. One of the streamers said a smart thought, “People choose the action RPG genre to feel strong, to have fun.”
And I agree to that thought in the context of games such as Last Epoch, Torchlight Infinity, PoE1, Undecember, and even Diablo 4. These games let you feel the power fantasy, going from a local murderhobo who kills boars and little demons for copper to a superhero, exploding packs of mobs and bosses in a second.
With the Dawn of the Hunt league, it feels like PoE2 does not offer the same kind of character development or hero’s journey experience. From the beginning to the end, you are forced to struggle. The developers want you to combine skills: freeze a mob with one, set the ground on fire with another, and then use main damage dealing skills to actually deal damage while using endless rolls (which, surprisingly, weren’t nerfed to require some sort of stamina).
And you know, this type of combination can work and even be sort of fun… as long as you’re facing one enemy. But not a horde of mobs followed by a boss bombarding you from the back and summoning a horde of minions that are impossible to kill due to a tiny error in the HP increase.
With the changes brought by GGG, PoE2 simply doesn’t work. The developers want the gameplay to be slow and deliberate, but it doesn’t mesh well with the presence of numerous white mobs on the map. Sure, things will be quite different once you enter the endgame and can blow up packs of mobs in seconds and destroy bosses in a couple of minutes.
But does the game start at level one or at level 70? I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to suffer for 30-40 hours, struggling against random mobs because that’s the way GGG sees the game now. I’d rather launch any other game than feel like I’m working overtime when I’m supposed to be relaxing.
Having massively spoiled the impression from PoE2 overall, Grinding Gear Games will have to try hard to restore players’ trust in the game.
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