A new Path of Exile 2 update today is making more sweeping changes to the ARPG’s new season. The first major overhaul since its early-access launch, PoE 2 Dawn of the Hunt was met with a pretty tepid response from players, cited as too slow, grindy, and unrewarding. Developer Grinding Gear Games has been quick to roll out many changes, however, and its latest patch includes some of the most welcome additions yet. Along with the promised ascendancy respec feature, these PoE 2 patch notes include adjustments to charms, crafting, enemy stun, endgame bosses, and stash tabs.
also been lowered, allowing you to use them for points or to respec much earlier on.
While that’s the headline change, there are a lot of adjustments in the PoE 2 patch notes today that are likely to be more impactful, especially if you’re already happy with your current Path of Exile 2 build. Belts you find following the update now have a 1-2 charm slot implicit modifier from level 30, which upgrades to 1-3 at level 60. GGG notes that “in the future we will be expanding the maximum possible charm slots to six.”
That should give a lot more space for you to make use of the defensive boons offered by charms. To further amplify that, all charms except the Golden Charm have had both their maximum charges and charges per use halved, meaning they’ll effectively refill twice as quickly. Additionally, the values for charm effects that restore life or mana, or those granting guard, have been “massively increased.”
If you’re still struggling to survive with the amount of crowd-control effects in Dawn of the Hunt, you’ll be pleased to hear that monsters now have less capacity to light stun you, especially through cruel difficulty and the endgame, with a particular focus on lowering stun from elemental, chaos, and ranged damage. For even more protection, a new cluster of nodes found near Chaos Inoculation on the PoE 2 ive skill tree lets you pick up “a heavy amount” of stun and ailment threshold based on your energy shield.
Your survivability keeps improving as the patch notes continue; several endgame monsters will no longer pull out of attacks if you move out of chase range. In the case of big slam and cleave attacks, GGG has either lowered their damage or increased their cooldowns.
Make it to pinnacle bosses – PoE 2’s current ultimate challenge – and you now have unlimited respawn attempts at the lowest difficulty setting, giving you a chance to learn the fights before you start to ramp things up.
Lower-tier runes will now be removed from the loot pool as you unlock higher-tier ones, with the drop rates adjusted to ensure you’ll still see a similar amount. You can also reforge them into higher tiers, and will find the appropriate level of runes in items dropped by Rogue Exiles. Scepters have been given sockets, and new talisman modifiers designed to complement them introduce more ways to upgrade your minions. Totem skills, meanwhile, gain additional elemental and chaos resistances to help them stay alive in the late game.
Over on the player balance side of things, there are a few solid buffs. The Shard Scavenger skill for Mercenaries now additionally restores one cooldown use for all grenades and prevents crossbow attacks from consuming bolts for two seconds. Shockwave Totem’s base attack time has been halved; its damage has been lowered to compensate, but it’ll now be more useful for the Jagged Ground Eruption effect. There are several smaller improvements to lance and shield skills, and staff s can now interrupt other skills with Frozen Locus to get out of trouble with its backwards leap.
Also extremely pleasing are the quality-of-life improvements. New stash tab affinities will let you set tabs to auto-sort socketables, fragments (including tablets and trial keys), breach, expedition, and ritual items, making inventory management vastly quicker. On the Atlas map, you’ll now be able to place up to 16 bookmarks with labels to keep track of locations you want to easily return to in the future. At vendors, new rarity borders will make it easy to spot the best items for sale.
Path of Exile 2 patch 0.2.0f is being released on Wednesday April 16. You can read through the full patch notes courtesy of Grinding Gear Games for a detailed look at all the changes and bug fixes that have been introduced.
Be sure to take a look through our rundown of the PoE 2 giveaway for a chance to win the $100 edition of the game.
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