Feels like the genre of "ARPG" is starting to mean a lot of different things. Much like "Souls-like" and "Rogue-like", I wonder if we could normalize "Exile-like" for ARPGs that follow the Path of Exile formula...

"An unexpected disconnection occured." Still having more fun than in D4

Nice game. 2 ez tho. I'm playing on hardcore, got a level 62 staff, everything's maxed out and now I can access maps with 4 things. If there's a way to get higher difficulty, I don't know what it is.

10/10 Pros: - Fast intro screen. - Easily readable fonts. - Nice drop down menus Cons: - No access to the actual game. Conclusion: Still better than Diablo 4

I can't even get into the game but the login screen is already better than diablo IV

Before diving into my review, I want to say that I absolutely loved Path of Exile 1 and have spent countless hours enjoying it. Naturally, I was excited to dive into Path of Exile 2, and after investing over 300 hours, I initially enjoyed the game as well. Unfortunately, my perspective shifted drastically after just one day. Here’s what happened: When I logged into my main character (Infernalist), which I had painstakingly leveled to 94 and invested most of my playtime in, I discovered my account had been hacked. Nearly all of my valuable gear and items were stolen. I immediately reported the issue to support via email and forums, hoping for swift action. While investigating, I managed to track down the hacker myself by searching for my missing items in the trade market. They were openly selling my entire setup. I provided this information to support and even posted about it on the forums, asking the moderators to block the hacker from selling the stolen items. To my shock, my forum posts were removed, and I was put on probation for requesting action against the hacker. Not only was I robbed of the time and effort I’d invested in the game, but I also felt silenced by the very team I turned to for help. The email response from support was even more frustrating. After receiving a generic, copy-paste reply, my account was locked—effectively punishing me for being the victim of a hack. As I browsed the forums, I found that many other players had experienced similar situations: accounts compromised, reports filed, and then locked out by support. This entire experience has been deeply disappointing. It feels like being kicked while already down. Instead of offering meaningful support, GGG’s response added insult to injury. Until there’s a significant change in how these situations are handled, I cannot recommend Path of Exile 2 in its current state. Edit: I am still locked out of my account, with no response from support despite multiple follow-ups. To make matters worse, players on the forums are reporting being locked out for weeks without any resolution or updates. This lack of communication only adds to the frustration and leaves me questioning GGG’s commitment to resolving such critical issues. Edit2: It’s the start of a new year, and I’m still locked out of my account with no response from support. The wait continues. Edit3: For those seeking more details about similar account-related issues, I recommend checking the "Help and Information" section on GGG's Path of Exile forum. Many players are sharing their experiences there, which might provide additional context regarding the current situation. Edit4: My account has been locked since December 27, 2024, and I have not received any response from support. The situation surrounding account breaches remains as unclear as ever. Numerous players, including myself, have reported taking extensive security precautions, yet accounts are still being compromised without any evident cause or pattern. Efforts to get information about the account recovery process, including inquiries made by locked-out players on the forum, have provided no clear details or timelines. Meanwhile, the number of compromised accounts seems to be increasing daily, a situation that can be followed on the forums, further adding to the growing frustration and concern among the community. It’s particularly disheartening to note that the hacker I identified—who had taken my gear and items—still has access to the game and appears to be actively trading an even wider range of gear and items. Until these issues are resolved, it might be safer to avoid engaging with the game to protect your account. I do not place blame on GGG, but the growing reports of account compromises and the lack of understanding about how they occur are deeply unsettling. Edit5: 10.01.2025 - Still no response from support and still locked out of my account. Reports of compromised accounts continue to increase. Edit6: 11.01.2025 - Support responded. The recovery process was completed within 3 hours and I got access to my account again. Edit7: 15.01.2025 - Final Update GGG has issued an official statement confirming that the account compromises were caused by a malicious actor gaining access to a PoE admin account through social engineering. This admin account allowed the attacker to access private information and even change passwords on 66 accounts, although no passwords or password hashes were exposed. While GGG has now secured their admin accounts and taken steps to prevent similar incidents, the vulnerabilities exposed during this event caused significant damage to player trust. In my case, the weeks-long silence during the investigation and the need to verify ownership of my account after the compromise only added to the frustration. While GGG has apologized and acknowledged these issues, the lack of earlier communication and transparency remains a sore point. Path of Exile 2 is a game I had high hopes for, but this entire experience has made it hard to fully enjoy or recommend. For any live service game, robust account security and responsive customer support are essential, and I hope GGG continues to improve on both fronts.

Things to do before playing Path of Exile 2: -Go grocery shopping -Block friend and family from texting/phoning you -Take your weekly shower -Make sure you have enough time for your 16 hour long sessions 1000+ hours later and it will be worth it.

Staring at a login screen for the past 30 minutes and still more fun than Diablo 4.

If they designed this game around the offline 'SSF' experience it would probably be my favourite game in any genre ever. And yet as it is, I genuinely hate it. Why? Because I hate the concept of seasonal content. I hate server issues. I hate trading with other players. I hate classes that are fun getting nerfed to protect 'the economy'. I hate the concept of an in-game economy. I hate that their in-game economy is inherently capitalistic. I hate server issues. I hate essentially being forced to redo the whole campaign again every season. I hate drop rates on necessary crafting items being pitifully low just so trading no-lifers can feel wealthy. I hate server issues. I'd very happily pay for an offline, stand-alone version of the game at full release for the price of a full game. Because the actual game underneath all the bullshit is brilliant. Fuck the 'micro'transaction model of monetisation. It kills fun.

I really want to like the game, but after 12-15 hours I'm just not having fun. It's slow, there's no loot, bosses are painful slogs. I don't feel like I'm getting more powerful or progressing, I just feel like I'm on a treadmill sweating to just not fall off. I have to use multiple skills to kill trash mobs, everything respawns if you die, and it all feels unrewarding. There's just no joy in the game right now.

>Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. >Connecting to login server... >An unexpected disconnection occured. Hello again old friend. The day one experience I have come to know and love.

"An unexpected disconnection occurred." Clearly we can gather 2 things from this: 1. Diablo 4 bad 2. This is the greatest game of all time.

They made a game mode for Path of Exile 1 called "Ruthless" that was extremely slow and boring with very few item drops. They said it was a "side project" that wouldn't affect the game. Nobody played Ruthless mode in PoE 1 because it wasn't fun to play. Ruthless was the beta test for PoE 2. Path of Exile 2 is their vision for Ruthless as a stand-alone game. Not playing Ruthless 2.0 - sorry, it's just not fun!

Nerfing builds during EA is understandable. Nerfing them to the ground without enabling us to respec for a fraction of the cost is NOT understandable. Respect my time, devs.

Every time I start doing good in the endgame the game reminds me that I'm trash, that my build is trash, that I'm a garbage player, failed husband and father, and that I should be fired from my day job. 10 out of 10, would recommend

I deliberately chose Lich in a hope it won't suck so much. Instead, I'm running around a boss for 10 mins, waiting for him to die from covid. Truly a chinese game

Path of Exile has been my favorite game for over ten years now, saying that I was hyped for Path of Exile 2 would've been an enormous understatement. The game is graphically stunning, the sound design and music are top notch and the performance is great. However, I am happy this is an Early Access, as the game has some issues that need to be addressed: 1. The concept of using your currency during the campaign to make your items better is perfect, but to do so you need the aformentioned currency, which barely drops. There is no deterministic crafting during the campaign, so you pick up an item, make it magic, if it's a good mod you upgrade it, and you continue this cycle for a few times until you have the item you want. There is no guaranteed way of getting upgrades, Path of Exile had this and it made the campaign quite a lot better. 2. The reason why the currency drop rate is lowered is because of the new loot system, supposedly dropping more useful items at the cost of not having entire screens of loot. Again, this is perfect in a vacuum, but the items you can use are rare, I've gotten halfway through Act 2 and I am still using mostly Act 1 items. 3. The new gem system is intuitive and takes away a lot of the frustration that was present in the old system. What is not fine is dropping 25 Uncut Skill Gems every 1 Uncut Support Gem. Every choice you make regarding your build feels almost permanent; people always hated this, and for a good reason, Path of Exile is a franchise built on experimenting, you simply don't have enough freedom to do so right now. 4. Gold is now an integral part of the game, being the main currency to buy items and refund passive points. This system had already been tested in Path of Exile and received a lot of praise... with one complaint. The amount of gold that drops is too scarce, if I want to buy a random ring (that isn't even guaranteed to be rare) I have to spend THOUSANDS of gold, which (at the start of the game) equals to hours of playing. The same applies to refunding skill points, we have an entirely new passive skill tree, new weapons, new skills, etc. and we are still half-locked into tentative choices. 5. This is probably only an issue because of the previous complaints but, the balance feels quite off. It takes really long to kill any enemy, especially some bosses that take 15 minutes of perfect dodging and continuous damage uptime. I think the balancing is based on having decent rare items that are appropriate to your level, but since this is not the case currently (see points 1 and 4), every fight is an unfun struggle. I won't complain about server issues and the likes because this is the exact reason why we have an Early Access, to iron out things before the full release. This review is to be taken as just feedback from a quite experience player, both in Path of Exile and ARPGs in general. I believe the game has the potential to become the best ARPG ever made, it's just not there yet.

Cannot recommend in its current state. - Your build got too popular? Its nerfed - Want to optimize your gear? You are too poor - Want to not be poor? Use gear with magic find - Want usable gear with magic find? You are too poor - Want to play endgame? Farm this map 150 times for a single upgrade - You dont have magic find? Farm the map 1500 times

Game is Fun. Roses are blue. My face turns red while doing Trials part 2.

I love GGG. I think they're an amazing company and I've thoroughly enjoyed PoE1. I absolutely realize this is an early access but, I'm terrified of the direction PoE is going. So far, PoE2 feels like playing PoE1 on ruthless, but worse. The movement is insanely slow and sluggish and everything feels extremely punishing without giving much reward. I simply can't imagine trudging through the campaign as it stands every league. The game feels far too much like Dark Souls and not enough like PoE. If you're on the fence about wanting to participate in early access, I'd wait and give them some time. I'm sure GGG will figure out the balancing and it will eventually be an amazing game. But, as it stands right now, it's just not that much fun. It's exhausting and tedious.

The game hard crashes taking the OS with it, requiring manual shutdown by using the power button. GGG has been silent about this issue except a single post in known issues which misdiagnoses the problem as a "Win 11 24H2 issue". GGG requested DxDiags and did not access them. GGG does not mention this issue in the patch notes. Currently on the Path of Exile 2 Early Access Bug Reports Forum has two main threads: 1) Hard crashing PC locks up: 248 Pages, 2471 Replies, 146069 Views. Created at 7th of December, 2024. 2) POE 2 Complete PC Freeze while loading screen: 216 Pages, 2159 Replies, 204635 Views. Created at 7th of December, 2024. In comparison the entire " Bugs" thread has 138 Pages, 1370 Replies, 29196 Views. In terms of ratio, more than half of the replies and views to the forum belong to these two threads. There are no bugs that are more important than this. This is not "I cannot use X skill bug". This is "improper usage of system APIs by the application" causing "100% CPU utilization" leading to a crash, resulting in "shortened component lifespan and possibly bricking PC". There are people who have lost their PSUs, SSDs, GPUs, CPUs, Bluetooths, USBs... Any part you can put in a PC, there is someone on the forum that have lost it due to this "bug". This happens on every kind of OS and hardware. OS: Happens on Linux, Win10, Win11. Hardware: AMD and Intel CPUs, AMD and Nvidia GPUs in all types of combination. If a hardware can run it, there is a person with that hardware on those 400 page threads with this crashing bug.

Review after 7hrs: Stick with POE1, this game's pacing is slow and the skills are both extremely limited and boring to use. The skill tree is pretty meh as well and really kills the joy of leveling up since the passives are meh. Overall at current the game pretty much pales in comparison to most other ARPGs on the market. The entire playtime I've been waiting for the enjoyment factor to scale up, but it's been boring enough that I've uninstalled and will probably just reinstall some other ARPG like Last Epoch or Grim Dawn and play that instead Original Review: Pay for a game and they can't even keep their auth servers online to play it... FFS it's a damn ARPG... Give me a offline single player mode... Never have even played the first game in a non-solo fashion. I don't want to deal with people, I want to play a game and forget they exist in the first damn place...

Game won't launch on first day. Diablo 4 and NoX perfect launch, showing the true kings of the genre.

*** revised after dawn of the hunt (on the fence)Your movement and actions are more deliberate than other ARPGs, almost Dark Souls like. (on the fence) Many hard hitting set up require 2-4 skills to pay off. (con)There is a lot of bullet hell elements where the whole screen is filled with projectiles and you have to either tank or dodge them. (con) some of the rewards for killing a boss are laughable - at least in DS you get an upgrade lots of xp and / or a recipe The devs smeem to be slowing the game down even more and imo making it less fun. There was a happy medium we were in on release now it almost feel slugging ; this can be further emphesised by your character class. This period right now reminds me of D4 nerfing most of the skills and buffing monster in one of the patches - they did apologise (in a corporate way) and gave players more options to have fun eventually. Still on my hard drive, as I hope it gets better one day.

This is a review for general sane public and not for the ARPG jihad groups. - The game is very good and fun - Very good depth but at the same time very enjoyable for casuals as well - Amazing graphics, sound designs, gameplay design - A LOT of content and constantly updated with huge new content (every 3 months) Yes, this is the best one in the genre. You can not find one better than this. Ignore all the fanatics reviewing bomb this.