What We Are Working On
The opening weekend of Path of Exile 2: Return of the Ancients is finished, so it's time to take stock and talk about what we are working on, and what still needs to be improved. The main issues that we were focusing on over the weekend were a significant number of progression blocking bugs in endgame quests. If you run into these, it effectively ends your progress, so they are rated as incredibly critical. Almost all the progression blockers we know about have now been fixed, but sometimes it's not incredibly clear in the hotfix notes, so if you did get stuck, we would encourage you to try again. In some cases the fixes might require you to rerun some content. We are also working through the list of the most common crashes that players experience. We have made a pretty good headway here already, but there are still more fixes to make. In addition to these simple bug fixes though, there are a few other things we are looking to address over the next week. General Endgame We are adding a large number of new atlas tree nodes which add more content to specific biomes. Once we add them, the points for these nodes will be added to existing maps, so you will get them automatically if you have already completed those maps. There is currently a bug where you can't independently map from two different hideouts while in a party. The atlas will remember where it was opened to if you reopen it in the same area. Some players experience a black screen during quest events that open the atlas. We are investigating the cause of this. Ritual When doing the Rite of the Nameless you can currently change your mind about which maps you picked. This allows you to potentially see more mods than if you didn't do that. This isn't as bad as it first appears because all the mods that you can see are prerolled, and it only selects in that set, but technically it's advantageous to do this. We will be changing the system to effectively lock in each choice. It's currently possible to get 100% ritual reroll cost reduction. This mechanic is still limited by the number of rerolls you can do per area, but it's possible through various mechanics to legitimately increase this to fairly high values. We will be capping this stat to 90% for safety. We are turning off the knockback on the Blood Waves ritual mechanic. The Mysterious Rites node needs a buff to its rewards. Delirium Currently it's possible to fail a Delirium by moving forward too quickly, especially if the fog is paused by doing another league mechanic. We will make this no longer possible. Breach Breach hive colony monsters are getting stuck and not pathing sometimes. This often results in the combat of these encounters being very underwhelming. The Tear Open The Rift notable will be made multi choice and have another bonus added as it's not always good for all players. Instead of replacing the Rare monsters in Stabilised Breaches, Vruun will now spawn after you have defeated them. This means that getting Vruun will not compromise your investment into rare monsters. Runes of Aldur We are turning off the knockback on the Tidal Waves runeshape mechanic. The Pinnacle boss uniques that are crafted from Ore are currently not set to the correct item level. This means that the skills are lower level than was intended. Character Balance and Fixes Some extra quality stats on gems that came from the Gemling Legionnaire were missing descriptions, or had incorrect descriptions. These are getting fixed. We are adding some new Elemental Damage Clusters to the passive tree near Jewel slots to make elemental conversion jewels more useful. We are changing Heavy Stun state to be saved when logging out, preventing abuse where you log out when you are stunned, or near to being stunned. We will be adding a new rare Lineage support to Atziri which will allow you to reserve Life instead of Spirit on reservation gems. Other General Fixes Using Click to Move on skills with the "Always Attack Without Moving" option turned on while also holding down the button to move causes some strange behavior where the character stutters or moves when you didn't expect. Strongbox keywords shouldn't be clickable unless you are holding Alt to prevent misclicks. The MTX shop is not currently showing "Already Owned" on some stash tabs. Controller Only: We will be adding Magic/Rare/Boss weighting back into the targeting system and making this a preference that can be modified. We are looking into some other reported targeting issues on Keyboard/Mouse where skills are not going where you intend them to. Fix to missing drops on Pinnacle bosses when respawning in some cases. Campaign Improvements While we did go a long way to making the campaign smoother, we have some other things that we plan to do over the next week. Farrow will reveal the location of his quest objectives when talking to him in campaign areas. Singing Caverns: We will make the mechanic of listening to which direction the siren is singing from more obvious so you can find her more easily. Journey's End: We will add a portal from the boss back to the NPC to make it more obvious that you need to continue the quest. Machinarium: We will make it so that if you checkpoint back to the start, you no longer have to wait for power to be slowly restored. Halls of the Dead: We will make the location of the objects that give you permanent character boosts more obvious. Azak Bog: Completing the fire ritual in the center of the zone will point you in the direction of the boss. The Shark Fin quest currently has a confusing state where you had to do a bit of optional dialogue in order to get the option to turn in it. Controller Trade Improvements Added a button to swap the currency pair while editing a trade. Added a button to copy one of your active trades so that you can easily sell more of those items. Added a button to open Sale History. Added text search back to the top level of the trade UI. Adjusted text sizes in some elements. Of course, these are not the only changes we are planning, just a set of the initial ones that we believe we should be able to get out in the next week.
