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How Has Crowd Control Mechanic In Path Of Exile 2 Changed From Before? - Differences & Impacts

Sep 11, 2024

Hello Exiles, Path of Exile 2 Early Access is finally confirmed to be released on November 15th! I believe you are already rubbing your hands and are ready to jump into the game. But don’t worry, here we will highlight the mechanic changes between PoE 2 and PoE 1 in the future so that you can be prepared before the release!

In this guide, we will focus on introducing Crowd Control effects, such as Stun and Freeze, to see how exactly they work and how they differ from the same mechanics in Path of Exile 1.

So this guide should be useful for anyone who is completely new to the series, and it will serve as a good resource for PoE 1 players to help them compare the mechanics of the two games and how they stack up against each other, whether they are new or old players.

After the release of Path of Exile 2, it is very likely that league updates between the two games will be staggered, and some players will play both games at the same time and jump between the two leagues when new leagues are released. This inevitably makes it a bit jarring for some players to switch between two games with different mechanics, but this is where this guide comes into play. If you plan on jumping into POE 2, then don’t miss this guide!

How Has Crowd Control Mechanic In Path Of Exile 2 Changed From Before? - Differences & Impacts

Crowd Control Effects & Differences

Crowd Control effects in POE 2 include, but are not limited to, Stun and Freeze and a new effect that didn’t exist in POE 1, Electrocute. These effects prevent you from performing normal actions, but they can be implemented in different ways. For example, Freeze applies a 100% Action Speed Slow, preventing movement and the use of abilities, while Stun interrupts the action and then plays the stun animation, during which the stunned entity cannot perform any actions.

Although the results of these Crowd Control effects are very similar, the major difference is how they are applied. For example, Freeze is inherently tied to Cold damage by default, and is inflicted by Cold damage that has a chance to Freeze or Critical Strike. With Stun, on the other hand, any type of damage can naturally cause Stun, but melee damage is more effective at causing Stun, while non-physical damage is less effective.

Stun also has a new mechanic, Heavy Stun, which will build up over time and appear as another bar below the monster’s health bar. Heavy Stun will cause a significantly longer stagger animation, providing a larger opening for damage.

Then we have Electrocute, which by default is caused by Lightning damage. But even if you have a 100% chance to do so, it doesn’t mean you will always cause this Crowd Control effect.

Path Of Exile 2 Electrocute

Damage Threshold System

This is because there is a Damage Threshold System that determines whether a strike will cause a Control effect on Freeze and Electrocute.

This is an Ailment Threshold that is generally equivalent to the monster’s maximum life. You must have a chance to cause a Control effect or cast a Critical Strike, and must also cause enough damage for it to be effective.

Using the monster’s Ailment Threshold as an example, for Freeze, a strike that causes 5% of the monster’s maximum life will have a base Freeze duration of 0.3 seconds, and any lower strike will not apply Freeze.

However, you can re-roll modifiers to increase Freeze duration by spending POE2 Currency, which means you can go as low as 0.3 seconds. Freeze Threshold is smaller in damage relative to Ailment Threshold, though. For Stun, you can also adopt a similar system to set Stun Threshold.

What Are The Affects Of The Changes To Control Effects?

But the important thing is that Crowd Control effects have changed drastically in Path of Exile 2. Control effects that do not reach Threshold are not simply discarded like in POE 1, instead, they are added to a counter. This counter keeps track of all instances of Control effects of that type, and the counter adds the size of these instances together until they reach the required Threshold.

Builds

At this point, the effect will affect the entity, which means that some builds that were used to dealing multiple slight damages and could not reach Ailment Threshold of Control effect in POE 1 with a single hit can now finally shine in POE 2.

This will also have a significant impact on build crafting, as you will be able to more reliably inflict these Control effects on enemies that were previously restricted from doing so.

Bosses

In addition, these settings will deal a lot of positive damage in a single hit. But the most notable impact of this change is on boss design. Because in POE 1, GGG was forced to make bosses immune to Freeze by limiting their minimum Action Speed, and they also needed to patch the ability for players to Stunlock bosses by making bosses immune to Stun for a long time after being stunned.

But in POE 2, it will work very differently. Bosses will not have a minimum Action Speed ​​or Stun Immunity. Instead, when a boss is affected by a Control effect, the threshold that needs to be reached to inflict the same Control effect will increase, so players will need to wait longer and longer to apply these effects to the boss.

However, this threshold scaling will also decay naturally over time in boss encounters, so you can take advantage of these Crowd Control effects even with low damage builds.

This system with threshold scaling is largely to prevent over-application of Crowd Control effects to bosses, and to avoid situations in party games where players can stack a bunch of the same effects and keep stunning the boss.

Overall, I have to say this is a great way to apply Crowd Control effects. When you apply these Control effects to a boss, you feel rewarded for really investing in them, which is really not that good in POE 1 at the moment. What do you think of this? Do you think there is room for improvement? See you in the game!

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