As I type this, more than half of Path of Exile 2’s peak Steam concurrency was playing the game – well over 300,000 humans in there right now – which is quite a feat for an early access game in the middle of a Tuesday. And Grinding Gear is responding a week and a half into the game by promising a fresh patch to address some of the problematic design parts still poking up.
“[As] we mentioned last week, we’ll be adding the capacity to fast-travel between Checkpoints within an area, as well as adding many more checkpoints to areas, generally at all entrances and exits to areas, meaning if you find these first you’ll be able to instantly travel to them to continue exploring,” the studio says. “We’ll also be making Passive Point respeccing 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. This should generally result in approximately 40-50% less gold cost for respeccing between the start and middle of endgame progression.”
Other goals of this patch? Honor Damage at close range is being reworked, with an eye toward making Trial of the Sekhemas suck less; endgame maps are being nerfed and rebalanced for player survivability as they were “more punishing than intended”; nerfs for multiple overpowered skills such as Skeletal Arsonists Spirit, Tornado, Vine Arrow, and Magnetic Salvo; and buffs to underpowered skills, including Rolling Slam, shield skills, bow and crossbow skills, Bone spells, chaos DOTs, and quarterstaff abilities.
It’s not clear whether this patch is coming immediately; while GGG says patch notes are coming soon, the team is also departing for winter break and says it “look[s] forward to getting back in the new year refreshed and ready for an exciting year of development in 2025.”
