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Juicy Path Of Exile 2 News! - New Skill Gem System, Weapons & More

Aug 02, 2023

ExileCon 2023 is here and with it lots of news about Path of Exile 2. And it’s not at all what I expected. Path of Exile 2 has been in development for around four years since its first announcement at ExileCon 2019. In that announcement, we heard the tagline: one game, two campaigns. 

Path Of Exile 1 VS Path Of Exile 2

This is no longer a true path. Path of Exile 2 is going to be its own title. It appears to be set many years after the first game. And as usual, there are some big bad ones that end the world. 

For those of you worried about what might happen to your favorite game, Path of Exile 1 after the sequel is released, you probably don’t have to worry too much. Because GGG at least initially will be releasing leagues for both the Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. These will be staggered. So, you can play some of Path of Exile 2 and when you get bored with it, you can then jump over to battle Path of Exile 1. That means when life is even more ruined than it was before.

Juicy Path Of Exile 2 News! - New Skill Gem System, Weapons & More

Many people suspected that Path of Exile was going to be announced as releasing later this year into closed beta. I thought this was a little ambitious at least. Through ExileCon 2023, we know that the specific beta time of POE 2 is June 7, 2024

And POE 2 is currently scheduled to release just under a year from now. The sheer scope of the new game is way beyond anything I could have imagined. It features over 100 distinct environments, 600 monsters, 100 bosses, 1500 passive skill points on the tree and 36 Ascendancy classes. There are 240 active skills, 700 equipment types, and six Person Co-op.

Now, the game does look to be a lot slower with a lot fewer monsters than in Path of Exile 1. It looks to be returning to the roots of what the developers originally had envisaged for the original game. The game also looks brutally hard with even the developers who practice 10 times dying in the demo. If you die while fighting a boss, no longer do you respawn outside the room where you’ve got to start the whole area again. Each battle, even the mobs, are a lot more challenging. You’re gonna have to really think and use your skills to beat them. 

The game has solved a lot of the problems from Path of Exile 1. One of them was they had to make bosses immune to free freeze just so you couldn’t perma-free them and kill them. Instead, things like freeze and stun have a hidden meter that builds up as you hit the enemy. Once it reached a certain level, you will freeze bosses. And from the gameplay, we saw the freezes did seem to be pretty meaningful, stopping the boss for a couple of seconds and soon seem to interrupt them pretty regularly. 

Gold Will Be In Path Of Exile 2

One thing that didn’t look very POE was the fact that we now dropped gold. This wasn’t explained very well at the time either. In fact, they just skated over it. Later, we found out that gold will be used for vendors. It helped solve the challenge of the drops where we dropped hundreds of rares in Path of Exile 1. We’ll drop gold instead with only the most notable rares dropping instead. 

All the existing POE Currency were there with a lot of new ones. It also appears that gear no longer has any links at all. It’s just gear. 

New Skill Gem System

Instead, each cat’s class of which there are 12, 2 per stack combination will have nine skill gem slots. 

The skill gems themselves will have up to five links to allow you to support them directly. That means potentially you can have 9 six-links, which sounds truly insane.

In the gameplay demos we saw, the characters only had lit one support in each gem. With up to five, you can imagine the gameplay will be much faster and much easier. They’ve also made it much harder for you to break your character in the early game. 

Path of Exile 2 New Skill Gem System

Grammaticals will now only change the color of a single socket, and it will be deterministic. No more running a chromatic just to find that now you can’t use any of your supports.

One thing that originally concerned me in the demo is that you saw that skill gems were tied to a character class. Active Skill Gems now appear to drop uncut. Right clicking on them will allow you to select the gem you actually want. 

Later in the character skills talk, my mind was put a little at ease as they did say that any character would be able to play any skill gems. So, all the diversity we have in the original game will be in the new one. What is unclear at this point is whether we’ll have to play each character to get those gems or not? If we do, it’s not a major hardship for me. Because I tend to play each character in each league, anyway. 

Furthermore, when these uncut skill gems drop, they’ll drop with the level of the area you’re in. So, as long as you’re maintaining your character to the level of the area, they should be a lot easier to switch over as they drop. 

Weapon Swap

Another thing that I wasn’t expecting is that they’re going to start pushing weapon swappers as a viable option. 

Now a proportion of your skill points on your tree will be able to be changed, depending on which weapon swap you’re in. Different skills can be tied to different weapon swaps. 

So, when you use them, you will swap your weapon automatically. And this, of course, will pick the alternative skill points on the tree. This gives so much diversity. 

It isn’t, however, completely free as you swap your weapon and animation plays, which will slow down the casting of the next skill. 

Animation System

Another problem of the original game is the animation system itself. 

Once a character attack animation has started, it wasn’t possible to change targets. It also wasn’t possible to get out of some animations, which meant you get one slam by a boss. They did kind of change movement skills to interrupt the animation system. 

But this had its own problems and that you would lose Mana. Because the spell would have been cast but never actually hit the target because you interrupted it. 

In Path of Exile 2, every character class will have its own dodge roll. This will interrupt an animation immediately. To get around losing all that Mana, Mana will now be spent from when the skill starts over time up until it hits. This means the early you dodged an interrupture animation, the less man he’ll actually spend. 

Weapons

For the weapons themselves, these used to have a built-in attack that no one ever used. Instead, weapons are now going to grant a free skill. These skills won’t be supportable, so they’ll be pretty weak. 

But they will be Mana cost free, which means when you run at a Mana, you still have something you can attack it with.

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