A big new patch is live for Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile 2, currently in early access for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5. It offers quality-of-life changes, including the ability to fast-travel between checkpoints in an area. Areas also have more checkpoints near their entrances and exits, which helps with backtracking.
The update also brings multiple changes to the endgame difficulty, including 40 less bonus damage dealt by monsters’ critical strikes, less aggressive scaling of chaos damage, and the Siphon Flash Charges Modifier draining your flash charges ten times less per second. The Volatile Crystals Modifier is also disabled and will be “revised.”
Those who dislike Trial of the Sekhemas can also take heart as Honour damage will now scale based on enemy distance, so you lose 35 percent when up close. A bug that caused three times as much Honour depletion via damage over time is also fixed, and Rattlecage’s Volcanoes now last half as long.
Check out some of the patch notes below and full details here.
0.1.0e Patch Notes
General Improvements and Changes
- Added the capacity to fast-travel between Checkpoints within an area. You can now select checkpoints which will bring up your Map Overlay allowing you to select other Checkpoints you have discovered in the area to travel to them immediately. Many more checkpoints have been added to areas generally at all the entrances and exits to areas, meaning if you find those first, you are able to instantly travel to them if you choose to go back and explore an area.
- Passive Point Respeccing has been made cheaper especially at higher levels, it had a relatively aggressive curve getting more expensive with character level, we have flattened that curve so it doesn’t exponentially grow as much. For Example, this should generally result in an approximately 40-50% less Gold Cost for respeccing between the start and middle of Endgame progression.
- Added a shortcut to open a skills advanced information display by right-clicking the skill on your Skill Bar.
- You can now compare equipped Flasks when using a Gamepad.
- Added Chance Shards to the Currency Exchange.
- Added a button to travel to your Guild Hideout when interacting with the Waypoint.
Endgame and Monster Balance
- Maps no longer have additional elemental resistance penalties inherently applied at Tier 6 and Tier 11 or higher Maps. It is now consistent across all of the Endgame.
- Critical Strikes from Monsters now deal 40% less bonus Damage.
- Chaos Damage now scales less aggressively over the Endgame.
- The Ground Laser and Ground Lightning abilities used by the Runed Knight in Expedition Encounters now deal substantially less Damage.
- The Waystone Modifier that adds Burning Ground to your Maps no longer increases in coverage or area with higher Tier Waystones.
- The ‘Siphons Flask Charges Modifier’ on Monsters now drains ten-times less Flask Charges per second. (This was unintentional).
- Disabled the Volatile Crystals Modifier, to be revised in the future pending telegraphing improvements.
- The Trail of Fire monster Modifier now deals 30% less Damage and lasts for 3 seconds (from 5 seconds).
- The Trail of Lightning monster Modifier now lasts for 4 seconds (from 8 seconds).
- The Trail of Ice monster Modifier now lasts for 4 seconds (from 8 seconds).
- The Purple Explosives created by the Volatile Plants Modifier on Rare Monsters now deal significantly less Damage.
- Packs of Prowling Chimeral’s in Maps now contain less of the Prowling Chimerals and spawn alongside some Zombies.
- Lowered the baseline monster density of Breach Encounters, primarily by reducing the frequency of the “Elite” monsters appearing.
- Fixed an inconsistency in the different types of packs that could spawn during Breach Encounters, you should now see more different types of Monsters appearing on an area to area basis.
- The volatiles spawned by the Volatile Fiends Trial of Chaos Modifier now accelerate over time.
- The Stormcaller Runes Trial of Chaos Modifier are now smaller, take longer to charge up when standing inside and give more time to escape once triggered. The Runes now also get larger as the Modifier is upgraded.
- Improved the hitboxes on a number of abilities used by Blackjaw, the Remnant.
- The Crossbow variants of the Decrepit Mercenary monsters that dealt Fire damage now deal less damage.
Trial of the Sekhemas Improvements
- Honour Damage now scales down based on distance to enemies, you now take up to 35% less Honour Damage when in close range, tapering as you are further away from Monsters.
- Fixed a bug where Damage over Time was dealing three-times as much damage to Honour as intended in the Trial of the Sekhemas, and fixed a bug where Honour Resistance was only applying to two-thirds of that damage taken. (This got confusing for us too).
- Skitter Golems no longer use basic attacks and instead now just explode as their attacks were largely unavoidable when in Melee Range.
- Serpent Clan burrow and ambush attacks now have improved visual telegraphing and cannot be used from as far away.
- Volcanoes created by Rattlecage’s Fissure Slam now last half the duration.
- Added keyword hover for the Honour mechanic in the Trial of the Sekhemas.