Path of Exile 2 Steam Charts & Stats

the game was okay at first but after the new update it just went straight to a shit hole.. Watching the new update trailer i thought maybe it'll be a little bit more exciting but after hours of playing, everything is just boring now SMH... 1. Bosses and fighting rare monster feel more difficult. 2. sometimes you die from something you don't even know where it came from like wtf. 3. doing damage to enemies just seem a bit more weaker now 4. Currency is a pain in the ass if you don't have good gears to sell 5. The trade store in this game is dumb af, mostly every item is sold for a high price 6. First time seeing this but i guess when a new season starts you start over everything like currency and stuff 7. THE WORST THING ABOUT THIS GAME --LOOTING-- every loot i have come across has never reach the minimum requirement that i need and that is the problem with getting currency also, is that if you don't have anything good to sell you ain't getting shit and you'll be stuck at that same Level because all your doing is dying left to right.. I have seen streamers getting some good loot every time and yet i'm here getting a +1 level to minions (wand) and here i am a level 90 witch like how is that gotten help me out. i get this game is to grind and but my god at least give me something decent..

Trial of Chaos is a nightmare currently. Low visibility on ground elements that kill you, lack of information on what ongoing ailments are active, and no real clarity on what is actually killing you. I like most of the game but this is not user friendly at all and it actively makes me hate the game

I have recommended this game. 3 of my friends came into this game with huge aspirations. Being D2 players in the day. None of them are here to play it anymore. The moment this game began relentlessly shitting on you with no respect to the players or their time, they all walked away. And I doubt they return I now, after 700 hours, cannot earnestly recommend this game. I have heard time and time again, it's intuitive compared to POE1. If you're comparing games, sure. If you're a new player entirely, not at all. They hold you hand for the simplest, most obvious of basic things. (ie: 1 to Heal, 2 for Mana, Equip Items, Portal to town - Inventory Full). But fail to give you the simplest explanation over crafting and upgrading, utilizing Resistances, stat usage. Using the Currency Market or Trading. FFS, not even a menu or some kind of journal or context to explain this stuff. To be quite frank, in contrast, the game is very unintuitive. Despite having this HUMONGOUS skill tree. You do not have freedom within it. Every character is inevitably locked into a few meta builds (literally 3-4 buiilds) that will yield forward progress late campaign through mapping. This is becoming quite stale. The new Map/Tower system....Let's disrespect the players time even more! Didn't like losing the map, loot and 10% exp with one death? Well now you can die multiple times and lose 10% PER death. But you keep the map and loot! Yeah, we went from losing A map, the unclaimed loot, and ONLY 10% of your experience with a death. To now you can die as many times as allowed per Waystone. The map and loot hang out til then. Buuuttt........you also loose 10% exp EACH time you die. Gimme the old system back. I've seen GGG game directors constantly take interviews from streamers and the hardest of core players that are vets from POE1, going over issues with the game. Here's an idea. Do an interview with a panel of legit new Poe players. How about you learn why most of your new players have failed to stay here and keep playing? I'll revise this as I go. But if you don't want to have your time wasted on so many levels. Please go find another game. I am personally on the brink of walking away myself. For how long, who knows?

Before early access launched the developers said EA would last 6-12 months and at release there would be 36 Ascendancy classes and 6 acts. We're now 6 months into EA and all the developers have done is basic game balance and they've added 2 new Ascendancy classes. We still only have 3/6 acts and 17/36 Ascendancy classes. PoE 2 is currently in a state where the developers should pay people to beta test it rather than charge money from people. And despite that they're monetizing the game like it's a fully released f2p game. They just added new stash tabs which are arguably p2w to the store and they're introducing and advertising new lootboxes. A few years ago GGG also promised that all applicable micro transactions from the original poe will be usable in poe 2 and that they would continue releasing new leagues in poe 1 even after poe 2 launched. I'm sure they have intentionally said these things so people keep spending money in poe 1. The reality now is that the vast majority of mtx that people spent money on in the past is still unavailable in poe 2 and poe 1 development has almost completely halted with no new leage in close to a year. So people who bought mtx a year or two ago with the expectation to use it now got borderline scammed by GGG. And to add insult to injury they're introducing new micro transactions rather than prioritising to imlement the old mtx. If the game was great I could view past all that because things change and I don't necessarily think GGG intentionally mislead people at the time. But the game is mid at best and development is going at a snails pace so I can't recommend playing poe 2 at the moment. To be honest I kinda lost hope for GGG. Many of the people who made poe 1 a great game have left the company recently and the remaining team seems to struggle finding a direction for poe 2. Meanwhile Tencent who GGG sold out to is squeezing for money.

Too punishing, no balance, no loot, bad crafting, only meta builds mater, boring end game!

There’s no point in writing an essay to talk about things that have already been mentioned by other players. But I'll just say what really broke me: This game is extremely dependent on gear in the late game, but the gear can only be obtained through gambling methods—whether through loot, "crafting," or vendors. Without exaggeration, 99.99% of all the gear you obtain is useless. And if that wasn't bad enough, the drop rates are a joke, and the tools you have for "crafting" are a joke too.

This game is a great representation of toxic relationships in life. It hurts you, but you keep going back to it because you can't find a better one...

Almost every game play decision is made to make it more annoying and tedious. -Locking talent points between challenges that take HOURS to even attempt (one requiring you to do the same hour long challenge 3+ times to even attempt), only for the boss to be 10x harder than the rest of the challenge you blazed through and kill you. -Dying and losing not only XP, but maps, modifiers, gears, time, etc. -One shots from regular mobs while overgeared and leveled while 90% of other mobs tickle you. Of course, no combat log to reveal the BS that went on for that to happen. -No drops, you need to rely almost entirely on the horrid trade mechanic where 95% of the time people wont reply. It is like the developers just think of any way to be annoying an inconsistent, and slam those ideas into the game. If you figure out a way to make your character OP enough to finish this content, it will be nerfed into the ground and unusable, forcing you to go broke respeccing and buying new gear (because, oh yeah, nothing good ever drops). Not recommended.

I'm a player that has reached T15s on day 2 of both leagues, gotten multiple 90s and multiple mirrors worth of currency and gear, so I've played this game a lot. I want it to improve and do well, and I believe it still has the potential to be great IF the developers get their shit together. HOWEVER, in its current state I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone. NO VISION AND DIRECTION: The developers don't seem to know what they want for this game. They want it to be "meaningful gameplay" that is different from POE 1, so they slow down character speed, but they took the steroid mobs and mechanics from POE 1 like breach and delirium that favor kill speed. Why would I use your slow ass combos that take a year to set up when I'm being swarmed by hordes of enemies that bum rush me at the speed of light? If you don't want it to be like POE 1 then stop copy pasting shit from it then. ILLUSION OF CHOICE/ LACK OF DIVERSITY: Their passives and supports have too many negatives and conditionals. Everything has a cost. On paper, there are a lot of builds and paths to explore, but in game there's actually not that many, unless you want to play very sub-optimally and struggle even harder. NO LOOT, NO CRAFTING: "Path of Exile 2 is an Action RPG which is all about making powerful characters and getting epic loot." What loot? There's no loot and no crafting. You just pick currency and buy gear from others. Crafting is nothing but gambling, there's no player agency. It feels incredibly unrewarding and unsatisfying. Not to mention trade league economy being ruined by bots and price fixers. Play SSF you say? Good luck gambling for your loot there. NO FUN End game just feels like such a slog. Mapping feels like a slog. Setting up their shitty precursor towers before mapping feels like such a slog. Games are supposed to be FUN not so fucking tedious and boring. I don't understand why they didn't seem to learn anything from their 10 years of running POE 1. It actually feels like they took a few steps back. TLDR: Tedious and confused mess with no idea what kind of game it wants to be. NOT FUN.

This review is for those with experience playing Path of Exile 2; new players are encouraged to play the game to develop their own opinions. To be clear, Path of Exile 2 has the potential to evolve into something great… the greatest ARPG ever in fact. Even small design shifts like the introduction of a dodge roll have added substantial tactical depth to the gameplay. But despite these improvements, the game’s publicly stated design philosophy is increasingly at odds with the actual gameplay experience. GGG has repeatedly insisted that PoE2 is meant to be slower and more deliberate. That’s a fine vision; but in reality, endgame mapping and enemy speed blatantly contradict this claim. The pace remains just as frenetic as it was in PoE1 and there’s just as much onscreen effects which can make it exceedingly challenging at times to even know what’s going on. If the intent was to slow things down, then loot distribution should have been adjusted to match. It hasn't been. On the contrary, this current iteration has made currency even more scarce, doubling down on grind without commensurate reward. The trade system? Still a disaster, faithfully carried over from PoE1 with all its archaic inefficiencies. GGG seems unwilling to internalize a lesson that should be fundamental by now: punishing gameplay is not the same as challenging gameplay. Many systems are saturated with negative modifiers that drain momentum and morale rather than inspire mastery. Nowhere is this more obvious than in end game mapping, where stacking mods can paradoxically make a map less playable due to sheer mechanical overkill. Several mods outright mean that if you luck into the wrong map suffix you will automatically be throwing that map in the trash (I’m looking at you temporal chains). Yes, the game is in early access, but GGG seems to have misunderstood what early access is for. It’s supposed to be a testing ground, a sandbox for players to explore systems, theorycraft, and search for broken interactions. In a game that’s loot dependent, that requires access to resources. Instead, loot is miserly. I constantly run over 100% magic find and still see abysmal returns. Divines are rare. Exalts bizarrely drop more often than Chaos, Regals, or Alchemy orbs. Orbs of Annulment or Chance? Nearly mythical (I say this after playing for over 420+ hours). Crafting is nonexistent in any meaningful form as the entire system has been reduced to pure gambling. The tools are there and were shown to work in PoE1, but in PoE2 there’s no actual semi-deterministic crafting so experimentation dies on the vine. Defense stats in PoE2 remain deeply imbalanced. Armor is still underwhelming, scaling poorly in the face of high incoming damage. Evasion is serviceable. Meanwhile, energy shield continues to dominate across most content. This persistent asymmetry undermines build diversity and reinforces a stagnant meta. This is further exacerbated by the aforementioned lack of currency and crafting, which often leaves players stuck if they’re not wealthy enough to regear their characters in a different manner. The Trial of the Sekhema is one of the more baffling screwups in the game. The central mechanic, an “honor” meter that diminishes when you’re hit, actively punishes entire archetypes of play. Builds that rely on taking damage as part of their identity such as anything melee related, thorns-based, armor-heavy, or self-damage synergies, are effectively penalized for functioning as intended. The concept of "honor" in combat might make sense thematically, but from a gameplay perspective it's incoherent. “Oh but honor isn’t an issue if you stack honor resist”, ok, stacking “honor resist” is a lazy workaround, not a solution. “Well you can do the Trials of Chaos then”, sure, let’s talk about the ToC. The Trials of Chaos continue the trend of stacking punishment under the guise of difficulty. Layer upon layer of negative modifiers are applied to both the player and the environment, creating scenarios where success often feels less like a result of skill and more like surviving Jonathan’s spite. Once again, the issue isn’t that the trials are difficult, it’s that GGG confuses misery with difficulty. These trials don't challenge a player's decision-making or adaptability so much as test their tolerance for suffering. Some of the modifiers will 100% of the time be a death sentence, which is ridiculous for a game mode that demands you run a gauntlet. To reiterate: punishing gameplay is not the same as challenging gameplay. And until GGG takes that distinction seriously, much of the game's potential will remain unrealized beneath the weight of its own contradictions. And then there’s the death penalty: a flat 10% XP loss. It’s an outdated design relic that punishes players disproportionately, especially in a game this unstable. The optimization is rough; CPU usage spikes inexplicably, screens freeze, and enemies with invisible on-death effects can wipe you before you even register the threat. The game already limits player through currency scarcity and map restrictions, why stack another misery mechanic on top of it all? Literally nearly every one of my high level deaths has been due to the game freaking out and freezing for a split second at the most inopportune times. This is the mechanic that makes me rage quit. This is the mechanic that makes me put the game down and leave it for extended periods of time. This is the mechanic which makes me rethink spending money on stash tabs, cosmetics, mystery boxes, etc. Let me be absolutely clear here: the XP penalty is not just frustrating, it’s demoralizing. It actively discourages continued play and reveal a fundamental disrespect for player time. Once you hit the late 80s or early 90s in level, even fully juiced maps roll several levels below your character level, making XP grinding a slog. Combine that with PC performance issues and what you’re left with is a bad experience. And yes, I can already hear the diehard fanbase trotting out the same tired defense: “There have to be consequences, otherwise people will just spam content and they won’t learn how to get good.” Sorry, but no. That argument falls apart under the most basic scrutiny. Players can’t spam the same content; maps are gated behind RNG & limited runs. The system itself is already self-limiting. You don’t need an additional punitive XP penalty to “preserve challenge”; you need a well-balanced game that respects player time and rewards effort instead of eroding it in a hot instant. Things I would like to see: • Campaign Skip After Completion Once a player has completed the campaign, they should be allowed to skip it on subsequent characters. • Make the Remaining Campaign Choices Reversible In both Act 3’s, characters are forced to make two decisions regarding stats that are currently permanent. This design is incoherent, especially given that ascendancy choices can now be changed freely. Please allow these decisions to be changed as well (Let Doryani be the interface to make the changes). • League Character Imports The requirement to re-run the campaign for each new league or character is, again, tedious. A solution could involve importing characters back into a new league; either starting fresh at level 1 or with a baseline (e.g., level 60 with 500k gold and access to early maps). • PoE1 Atlas Skill Tree The Atlas passive tree in PoE1 was amazing. The current iteration in PoE2 is by comparison a poor imitation. Bring back that depth! • Boots: movespeed is necessary, so make it an implicit • An Actual Early Access Philosophy: Treat the current state as a live experiment, not a soft launch. Be generous with currency, unique’s, and loot bases (hell let Ketzuli have another few tabs that just sell white bases), focus on testing systems rather than preserving some arbitrary economy that can easily be reset or wiped.