Path Of Exile 2 Patch Notes: Monster Nerfs Arrive After Much-Disliked Updated

A number of Path of Exile 2's promised balance changes have gone live, after a recent update that has been incredibly unpopular with fans. The update saw PoE2's recent reviews on Steam dip into the dreaded "mostly negative" category, and the devs have been quick to address issues raised by fans. You can see the latest batch of patch notes below.

First and foremost in the latest patch, which is live now, are a number of nerfs to speedy monsters to prevent players from feeling overwhelmed. The changes have been applied individually based on monster behaviors--some monsters have had annoying abilities removed, some will now only walk instead of running until the player moves a certain distance away from them, while in some cases the number of monsters in an area has been decreased.

The devs note that not all the intended changes have made it into this patch but promise they will be coming with future updates. These include an issue causing inconsistent monster spawn density between different rooms, and further changes to monster behavior that will require new animations.

A few of the more frustrating bosses are also getting changes in this patch, with Viper Napuatzi and Uxmal both getting minor nerfs. The arena of the Xyclucian fight has also been cleaned up after the ground foliage was making it difficult to see the boss's attack effects. Ground foliage across the game has also been optimized with the intention of minimizing its impact on performance.

While there aren't a lot of changes to the player character in this update, there are a few small buffs and bug fixes live now. All runes have now been updated to work on Wands and Staves, each with their own set of modifiers for these weapons. Players will also have access to a blank rune that can be forged into an elemental rune of your choosing.

That's the extent of what's live with the latest update, but Path of Exile 2 developer Grinding Gear Games (GGG) isn't stopping there. In future updates the studio promises changes to make Charms more useful, and quality-of-life updates including new Stash Tab affinities and the ability to bookmark locations on your atlas.

The full dev notes for the latest update can be found below:

Path Of Exile 2 0.2.0E

Monster Speed Changes

Many players have been reported being overwhelmed by monsters. The cause of this is a variety of factors and we are addressing them on a case by case basis. We have listed monster changes act by act below, but we also made the following changes more generally.

• Many human monsters including the Cultists in Freythorn, the Faridun and the Tribal Humans in Act Three have behaviour where they can interrupt their melee attacks if the player moves too far out of range during the attack, especially for attacks that have multiple hits like a swipe left into swipe right. These interrupt events have been primarily removed especially on things that were attacking very fast as it caused the monsters to be relentlessly able to pursue and attack you giving you no time to engage or use skills between their attacks.
• The Haste Aura monster modifier no longer appears on monsters that are already fast.

Act 1

• Werewolf Prowlers and Tendril Prowlers now will enter a walking stance (as opposed to running) after performing a melee action, they will only begin running again if you get a certain distance away from them. This behaviour has been applied to many faster monsters.
• Hungering Stalkers now have 12% less Life and Damage, they were already relatively weak but we have lowered it a bit further to account for their high movement speed and attack speed. They are intended to engage and attack quickly, but be weak and die fast.
• Reduced the number of Bloom Serpents in The Red Vale.
• Halved the number of Venomous Crabs in the Hunting Grounds.
• The Cultists in Freythorn no longer have interrupt events on their attacks as described above.
• The Cultists in Freythorn wielding Axes and Maces in Freythorn now walk after performing a Melee Action, only running again once you exit a certain distance.
• Blood Cretins on death Blood Pools have had their duration decreased from 6 seconds to 4 seconds, and fixed the area of effect to match the visual more closely.
• Reduced the overall density of more challenging monsters in Ogham Manor.

Act 2

• The Boulder Ants in Titan Valley have been replaced by Risen Maraketh, as the area had too many monsters that had irritating movement.
• The Faridun have all been modified to remove the interrupt events on their attacks as described above..

Act 3

• Diretusk Boar and Antlion Charger's are now more likely to push you to the side instead of pushing you along with them when they charge you.
• The Lost City monster pack composition has been adjusted to result in less ranged monsters
• Massively adjusted the Azak Bog, firstly by the aforementioned changes to interrupt events, but also changed the monster composition of the area to have less Ranged and Elite monsters.
• Fixed an issue where the Slitherspitter's poison spray in Venom Crypts was dealing Chaos Damage instead of Physical Damage unintentionally.

We have also identified another issue that affects some areas in which potential monster spawn locations have inconsistent density in different rooms. This leads to situations where some rooms are much denser with monsters than others in an unintended way. We have a fix for this problem but it did not make it into this patch, and will be deployed in a later patch.

These are not the only changes that we will be making to monsters. Further changes will come in later updates. Some changes we didn't get time to make today, and others require new animations that will take a little longer.

Boss Changes

Viper Napuatzi is one of the more challenging bosses for players, so we made the following change.

• Lowered the amount and size of Chaos Rains (the purple ones) in the Viper Napuatzi fight, and cleaned up the visual left afterwards faster to make the following drop locations more obvious.

Uxmal had various quirks that made him somewhat annoying to fight. We have made a few changes.

• Reduced the number of times Uxmal changes locations through the fight
• Uxmal can no longer recharge Energy Shield while in the air.
• Uxmal uses his Flame Breath less often

Xyclucian had some issues with visibility of his effects

• The arena of Xyclucian has had its ground foliage removed in order to make his effects more visible

Player Minion Changes

• We have changed the way that minion revive timers work. When your first minion dies, it sets the revive timer to 7.5 seconds as before, but each successive minion that dies increases it by less and less (still capped to a max of 7.5 seconds). This should heavily mitigate the situation where most of your minions are dead, but the revive timer keeps resetting to 7.5 seconds over and over.

• Disenchanting a Bind Spectre or Tame Beast gem will unbind them, allowing you to use them again.

• Tamed beasts can now fit through gaps of the same size that the player can.

Other Player Balance

We don't have a lot of other player balance changes on top of the ones described yesterday, but we did manage to sneak in the following additional changes:

• Rally support is no longer restricted to Strikes or Slams, and can now support any Melee Attack you use yourself.
• Glory (Used by Hammer of the Gods and Spear of Solaris) is now no longer consumed if you are interrupted while using the skill.
• Fixed a bug where Blood Boils from the Ritualist ascendancy didn't propagate if the monster exploded on death, such as when using Herald of Blood.

Crafting Changes

• We have now finished adding all of the mods to runes for caster weapons. Desert, Glacial, Storm, Iron, Body, Mind, Rebirth, Inspiration, Stone and Vision runes all now work on Wands and Staves, with their own set of modifiers.
• Renly's abandoned shop in the Burning Village now also has a Blank rune which Renly can forge into any elemental rune of your choosing in case you didn't find any up to that point. As mentioned yesterday, 12 Artificers Orb's now drop at fixed locations through the campaign in addition to the random drops and salvageable ones.

Performance Improvements

• The ground foliage in many areas has had an optimisation pass to improve performance.