POE 2 Dawn of the Hunt Q&A Summary

Following the POE 2 Dawn of the Hunt press presentation, Grinding Gear Games Game Director Jonathan Rogers addressed questions from the press about the new expansion and the overall state of Path of Exile 2. The full transcript of the Q&A is available below.

As a reminder, Dawn of the Hunt will launch simultaneously on April 4th across all platforms.

Path of Exile 2 has two radically different gameplay tempos: the slow, methodical campaign and the faster endgame, more similar to the first game. Do you aim to slow down the end game and provide players with more agency to use slow reactive skills like parry, blocks, and combo skills?

The answer to that is that it's not that in the endgame things suddenly change or anything. It's just that there are various meta builds that I would say were overpowered and have led to a situation where, in order to fight in the endgame effectively, people have tended to center around a few broken things. Now, this patch also contains a full rebalance that will improve a lot of the more broken things that have been going on, which means that we don't have as many people feeling like they're forced into some of that stuff, which should balance things out. The other thing is that we're changing the on-ramp to endgame quite a bit, especially with things like being able to die in the endgame. You should be in a scenario where people don't feel the need to use that staff and those builds are not so much available. We do want to make it so that you can still get very powerful as you go through, but it should be more earned than it is currently, where there's just a few broken things. It will take a while for us to get all that stuff fully resolved. It might take a few iterations before every single broken thing is ironed, but it's a constant goal and we'll get there in the end.

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Will unique bosses created by wisps drop increased loot?

Yep, absolutely. That's the whole point.

Are we going to face monsters as strong as we've seen in the first Path of Exile if we juice the wisps too hard?

We've obviously got a very different balance overall. One thing we want to try and avoid is having monsters that are just complete damage sponges. That being said, it is important that you have the ability to make mistakes, to go too far with this kind of stuff. If you add a lot of mechanics to maps, you can get to the point where content becomes very, very difficult, but obviously more rewarding as well.

Do you have any information about the development progress of the Druid class?

I don't have anything to announce right now. The plan is to announce it and release it as soon as we can. Classes do take a long time. There's a lot of work involved in them. One thing we've definitely learned is that it's hard to promise a specific release timeline for a class.

In the last season, there wasn't much of a balancing nerfing the class skills or items. Are you going to make balance changes during the season or continue the way you did in the last season?

When we went into early access with Path of Exile 2, we did believe that we'd be able to do a bunch of nerfing and that kind of stuff during leagues, which we don't normally do. We quickly found out that it's really just like a live game. You can't just nerf stuff mid-league because it breaks people's builds and they get very angry. We pretty much stopped doing that very quickly. This update will do a huge amount of balance and then anything really egregious we'll fix as it comes up, but generally speaking, we try to leave the balance mostly alone during the league. We now effectively bottle up all of those balance changes and then we release them when we're doing a season. As I said, it's a full game rebalance this time. A lot of the things that players are currently complaining about, like Herald Device and this kind of stuff, will definitely get nerfed this season.

Do Rogue exiles have preset items, or will it be completely random?

They do have random items, but I believe that different Rogue exiles have different sets. There are lots of different ones that they can have. There's actually 12 Rogue exiles in this version. The idea is to try and make it so that, basically, the big full set of uniques that could drop from regular content can spawn on them. They all have specific AI for those uniques but they have lots of different options. There'll be Rogue exiles that contain most uniques that you would want to find. They're very interesting fights because they know how to use the items. They're pretty cool and feel very PvP-like. They're dodge rolling around and everything.

A lot of changes in the new content touch on player feedback. How do you balance that with Grinding Gear's vision for Path of Exile 2?

We always listen to the players to determine what the problems are, but we still have our ideas with regard to how we're going to solve those problems. The players are really the ones bringing things to our attention. Normally, there'll always be some kind of third way. Like, we've got an idea of how it should be, and the players have an idea of how it should be. If we try to combine the concerns of both us and them, we'll come up with a third way. There are a few issues that aren't like that, but generally speaking, we're always going to be able to come up with some kind of thing that both the players can get excited about and we can feel happy about as well. Ideally, that's the best solution.

Do you have any plans to enable players to loot items from the ground in case they die immediately after killing a mob?

That's kind of something that I would say is pretty disliked as far as solutions go, because we tend to avoid things that don't make any physical sense thematically. Obviously, if you're dead you can't pick items. I know that's one of those issues that players are unhappy about, but fundamentally, there is just a thing of if you die, you don't get to loot stuff.

Will the least-played Ascendancies, as Acolyte, Chronomancer, Warbringer, and Witch Hunter, get changed in the update?

I wouldn't say Chronomancer is not very well played, but for the others, the overall balance is changing very significantly. The reason why certain Ascendancies are played the most is usually because there's something broken going on with them. It isn't necessarily the case that the less played ones need buffing, although in lots of cases, we will do it. Effectively, all your previous assumptions just need to be thrown in the bin because there's enough changes as far as balance is concerned that you just can't expect things to work exactly the same.

Can the Smith of Katava take multiple of the armor modifiers, and does it require committing one Ascendancy point for each of them?

Yes, you can take as many as you like as long as you have Ascendancy points. It's a question of, do you want to be using the other elements of the class or do you want to go all in on those armor modifiers, which can be pretty powerful. There's just quite a lot of choice there in this class.

What additional uses do you have planned for gold in the future?

I'm not going to announce any right now, but it's just useful having that currency around.

It looks like map portals are tied to the number of resurrects and get lower if it gets harder. If we have some maps with fewer portals to go back and forth, does it mean we won't be able to carry as many items, especially for maps with multiple breaches?

That is the case. However, I guess the theory here is that you shouldn't generally need to take more than an inventory or two full of items. It is a concern, though, and we'll have to see how well it works. I would hope there's something that we can do to alleviate that. I'm just thinking right now that maybe after the map is completed, we could allow potentially more, but I'll have to think about that. It's actually something that I should probably um investigate a bit more.

Will Temporalis get removed or overhauled? It broke the game in several ways.

It's not getting removed and it's not getting overhauled either. It might get nerfed a little bit but I should mention that it's not like everyone should be getting a temporalis just on demand. It's supposed to be a very hard unique to get. Just due to the other balance issues, it meant that getting a Temporalis was much easier than it would have otherwise been. Consider what you actually have to do to get one: you have to be able to play through Sanctum without getting hit one time. It shouldn't be something that is easy to get. Sometimes, we balance things by rarity, like, they are supposed to be a broken thing, but if you get them, they are incredibly ridiculous.

This is one of those cases, but because there were builds that allowed things to be very broken, it just meant that there were too many of them in the economy. Something I just want to stress is that it should be possible to become incredibly powerful. It's just that it shouldn't be the case that you get that without a huge amount of effort. For example, it really was a problem that the pinnacle bosses got killed in like 14 seconds the first time that people fought them. It really should be a long, protracted battle the first time, but of course, once you've played it several times, you've had more time to grind other stuff, you get to the top of the end of what is economically possible.

At that point it's fine to be killing pinnacle bosses in 14 seconds. It's just that it shouldn't be like that the first time. It's a question of getting the power scaling right. When you release a new game, there's just tons of stuff that's unintended.

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Are you planning to adjust the drop rates of currency items?

There's always adjustments. Generally speaking, normal currency is mostly fine. We don't really have a particular issue with it. There are certain things, for example omens are not common enough and we made it so that every ritual has an omen in it now. But I wouldn't say overall that currency items needed a buff or anything like that. We're mostly happy with them.

Any hints about the remaining story? Will they be released individually or maybe as a big story league or expansion?

We are planning on launching them later. We're not going to announce when that's going to be for the time being, but obviously, they all have to get done by the time we get into full release.

You initially talked about wanting the Path of Exile 2 early access phase to last one year. Now we're a little further in, does it still feel like a realistic goal to reach the state you want for 1.0?

I am definitely very keen to get it done this year. I would be very disappointed if we weren't able to.

It's not 100% guaranteed. We might slip. I'm still very much hoping that we're not going to. Looking at the content of this particular expansion, there's a lot of stuff going on here and a lot of it is reactionary to the problems that we saw with the game, but in the background, we've still got artists and people all working on other acts. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes work going on in creating the rest of the content. We might have released more of that stuff if it hadn't been for the fact that we felt like we had to add a lot of in-game features. Can we get it done this year? I think it's possible.

Are there any plans to change gold so it isn't a drop item but rather an auto-pickup on kill, like expedition artifacts received that QoL in Path of Exile?

Definitely not. I think it's nice that you pick it up. It's got a relatively large pickup radius; you just run over it. I don't have any particular problems with this myself at this point.

What changes to the trading system can players expect during the Path of Exile 2 early access?

I don't have anything to announce about this, but I do have some things I want to try and improve here. Obviously, currency is much easier to trade. There are other things people want to do with trading. There are things that I would potentially change, and we definitely want to make sure we're testing those changes before the end of early access because it's one of those things that can affect the economy pretty significantly.

Will the new update implement more cosmetics people have unlocked in POE1?

The answer is yes. I don't have a list of them, but we're continuing to move through that list and add more things, so yes, more of them will be added.

Will you please clarify if this update is a league on its own or if there will be several leagues before the next major content update?

Every new update we do will contain a new economy. In this particular case, we decided not to put any of the content exclusive to the new economy, but in the future, we may decide to do that before early access is over. But generally speaking, there's probably going to be more content in these Path of Exile 2 updates than what you would have seen in Path of Exile 1 leagues in the past, just because we're finishing the game at the same time. That should result in a lot. In this particular case, our focus was really more on endgame and making sure there were lots of new encounters to find there. While we did add the wisps throughout the game and we've also added a strongbox and things like that, we didn't think it quite rose to the level of being able to make it exclusive to the league and to be able to call it a challenge league in the way that we would have done in the past.

The wisps were the closest thing to a new league mechanic here, but as I said, we decided not to make them exclusive this time. I am keen to do exclusive challenge league content for future expansions before the end of early access just because when we do that, we can also decide whether we want to remove them, change them, or mess around with them. That's our plan, but honestly, we'll see because, ultimately, everything comes down to the degree to which we want to feel like we're addressing the concerns that people have online.

Currently, having plus level link levels to skills feels like a must since it gives such a large power boost for one mod. Is it intentional? Are there any changes coming to it?

It is intentional and it's exactly the same as having increased physical damage on weapons. There are certain mods that are more powerful than others; that's part of the fun of finding them. It's one of those things, just like how you need run speed on boots. There are certain things that you want to be able to find. You need chase mods in order to make the bad mods feel better. It's just part of the design.

Any plans to add a higher difficulty mode for existing acts?

No, because even the fact that we have two difficulties right now is not the final stage. We'll be removing that difficulty the moment we have the rest of the campaign. The higher-difficulty content is the endgame content, which is already done. While it all looks unique, it technically remixes all the act content and reuses the bosses in different ways. It's not like you don't have high-level content to do; it's just that it's done in a way that feels different from the campaign.

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Will all the remaining classes be added to early access before release, or could some be held back for the full launch of Path of Exile 2?

There is actually a chance of that. I suspect we're probably not going to have all of them for full release, but we'll see. It depends on how things go and where things end. Obviously, I'd like to get them all in, but they do take a long time to make. The most important thing for the full release is that we have the full campaign, and there's all the content that we need. It's not like we've got a shortage of classes. If we didn't have one or two of them for the full release, that wouldn't be the end of the world. We'll try to get them all in, but if we don't, then whatever.

The last time, you mentioned that Path of Exile 1 will continue receiving updates as long as it has players. Are the current player numbers sufficient to justify ongoing development?

So it absolutely is. The issue with Path of Exile 1 development really just comes down to studio bandwidth from the perspective of designers who know how to make Path of Exile. We don't have a huge number of them. Obviously, we have a bunch of people who work on the game, but in terms of game director tier people who are able to lead a project like that, we don't have enough to the point where we can just be, okay, you just go off and you do your thing.

Mark and I have to keep an eye on it. For that reason, it's been a challenge to get the structure in place so that we can actually get both games rolling. Right now, I think we're getting to that point, but it certainly was a bit rough around the launch of Path of Exile 2's early access where POE 1 stuff got quite paged in order to make POE2 happen. We're going to continue to do that stuff.

With regard to your question, our company had both games in the top 20 player concurrency for Steam at one point a few weeks ago. I'd certainly say that both games have their place with

regard to player popularity. It's definitely worth continuing to support Path of Exile 1.

Are there any mana cost changes?

Yes. I don't even know what they are because, as I said, everything's just been rebalanced. Some will go up; some will go down, and some will go sideways. For the specifics, you're going to have to wait for the patch notes to see.

Will Path of Exile 2 and its predecessor alternate new seasons from now on, or will there be another Path of Exile 2 season after Dawn of the Hunt?

There will be another Path of Exile 1 season between Dawn of the Hunt and the next Path of Exile 2 season for sure. As for how it works going forward, we're keen to alternate them, but it's going to come down to the realities of development and what happens. Certainly the eventual goal by the time everything is rolling and working smoothly, it will definitely be the case that they're going to alternate like that, but I can imagine scenarios during early access of POE 2 where POE 1 might end up with a delay here or there.

Any plans for the endgame map to have an option to place bookmarks or better navigation changes?

We actually do have plans for this. Unfortunately, they didn't make it for this update. We have UI designs. I have a feeling you might see them in 0.21. We definitely know that that's an issue, but our UI guys were quite busy. We'll get to it.

With the Atlas tree expanding, are we going to have more points for the Atlas tree?

Yes, you are. Actually, I don't remember the number now. Both the corrupted Nexus objective and the unique map objectives get you Atlas points. Both the tree and the points have expanded.