Highlights
- Path of Exile is expanding with the Necropolis League and PoE 2 is revamping the Ranger class.
- Game Directors Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts provide insights on dynamic skill changes, Ascendancy classes, and Tier 17 Maps.
- PoE 2 will focus on maintaining class identity and encouraging diverse builds.
Path of Exile is soon launching its Necropolis League alongside plenty of quality-of-life changes and additions, and at the same time, Path of Exile 2 revealed to the world its revised version of the original’s Ranger class. The Path of Exile franchise is ever-growing and proving it can be the go-to action RPG for generations to come, and the way the base game is reinventing itself with Necropolis is a testament to that.
Path of Exile 2‘s new Ranger class also holds a lot of promise, offering many cool Lightning or Poison-based skills to players. Game Rant talked to Grinding Gear Games’ Jonathan Rogers (Path of Exile 2 Game Director) and Mark Roberts (Path of Exile 1 and 2 Game Director) about this and a lot more, including Path of Exile‘s upcoming release of Tier 17 Maps or Path of Exile 2‘s approach to Ascendancy classes. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Path of Exile 1 and 2 Interview – Ascendancy Classes and T17 Maps
Q: Does duration change dynamically in PoE 2? For example, you have Rain of Arrows going on, then you gain a Frenzy Charge with Sniper’s Mark and Snipe. Does Rain of Arrows’ duration change immediately or does it only affect future ones? Does this apply to all duration-related effects?
Rogers: For that effect in particular, it’s when you use the skill rather than when you get the Frenzy Charge. Using the skill is effectively consuming the charge so the skill will continue. Generally speaking, though, things do update dynamically as your stats change in Path of Exile 2, but that particular case is one where it’s intended to spend the charge as part of the skill’s activation.
Q: Let’s talk about Ranger Ascendancies. For example, the Pathfinder was for a long time hard to balance in PoE 1, but one of the main reasons for its success lay in its heightened survivability and utility with flasks and poisons. How are you handling Ascendancy classes in PoE 2 to address similar situations?
Roberts: I wouldn’t say we are drastically changing our philosophy with anything in particular there. The Ascendancy class system in PoE 1 is a success. We get to change them all the time, people are excited about them changing, it creates a lot of build diversity, and so on. There have obviously been times when balance was off and all of a sudden half of the players are playing a single class.
Aside from those outliers, it’s just where we come to PoE 2 which is going to have an additional 18 Ascendancy classes, and the existing Ascendancy classes are going to be completely reworked and changed in many different ways – it’s just taking the knowledge of when we rebalance and rework them and applying that here with all the new game systems to link to. There’s not a major change in philosophy, and they’re going to be new, exciting, and fun.
Q: How do you think the introduction of Tier 17 Maps can change the endgame and the in-game economy? Are T17 maps entirely tradeable?
Roberts: Path of Exile Tier 17 Maps are certainly less mandatory to run. The expectation is still that people are running whatever tier they are comfortable with. This is a problem in every game, of course – once you get to the pinnacle of difficulty, a lot of people see it as if you’re not running that pinnacle content, then they see it as a deal-breaker. That is a problem across many, many games, especially the ones that have been around for longer. People should feel comfortable playing at whatever tier of Maps their character is capable of doing. Tier 17 is just there for the people who want to push a little bit further, and there are a lot of those players. And it’s good to have content to aspire to, but Tier 17 Maps are a lot harder.
You can’t roll them, for example. They come pre-rolled and you can’t modify them, they are generally larger, way more difficult, and it’s really more of a test of your character. It’s meant to be something that you do occasionally as opposed to something that you’re farming all the time. Another thing is that the Divination Cards that drop from other Maps don’t drop in these. There was that Scarab that I talked about in the presentation where you can change which cards drop where, but aside from that, we don’t expect people to be farming these actively all the time because first you’re not getting as many, and it’s more like you’re occasionally doing some of Path of Exile‘s Tier 16 Maps and occasionally you go and do a Tier 17 or two and try to overcome the boss fights. A little more of that instead of “I’m doing Tier 17 Maps all the time forever.”
They are tradeable, but of course, if you trade them you can run them all the time forever like anything in our game. Assuming you’re good enough to do it, then yes, but if you’re just playing organically and not trading too much, then you are not going to get too many unless, of course, you are trying to maximize your drops and whatnot, in which case you are going to get a lot. You can’t get Tier 17 Maps from Tier 17 Maps, so you can’t farm them forever unless you are trading or, at some point, you have to go and do other content to get them.
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Path of Exile 1 and 2 Interview – Class Identity and Archetypes
Q: How do you feel about the current “Chase Unique” meta, and do you think it is changing with the reworked Uniques in Necropolis? How, if so?
Roberts: I don’t see a substantial shift there. Mageblood is still going to be Mageblood, Headhunter is still going to be Headhunter, and that’s cool, we don’t want to change that. There are always new Uniques, and some will hopefully become chase Uniques and popular, but we can never predict that. We can try our best, but you can’t ever be certain. You don’t know what the meta is going to be, you don’t know what the builds are going to be – you can have a best guess and that’s about where it lies. That’s the beauty of it, honestly, you’re just throwing puzzle pieces into the mix and hoping that they land, and that’s completely fine for us. One thing we are hoping to do is have it be that – Affliction, you’re obviously going to have a lot of metric finding at the end, and obviously that’s fine, but there’s going to be a little bit less of that going on, so we’re going to make some changes around some Unique drop rates to make it more friendly for world drops and a little bit less friendly in non-world drops, but that’s probably something that we’ll talk more about later.
Q: Path of Exile 2 has much more combination-focused gameplay than PoE 1, with classes having lots of possible skills to combo together to maximize the effects of a given playstyle. However, this can sort of pigeonhole players into specific builds or at least themes. Did you address this with PoE 2’s itemization system? How, if so?
Rogers: I guess there are a few things going on. One thing that we’ve noticed is that while doing some testing with Path of Exile 2‘s Sorceress we found people would just want to use fire, so they got all the fire skills. Intentionally, it’s supposed to be the case – mixing archetypes is supposed to be beneficial and useful to your character. We have a few ways to make sure we incentivize that and improve that, and the one thing that is really obvious about it if you’ve seen PoE 2 stuff before is the system that allows you to have multiple specializations, so you can have multiple weapon sets, and those weapon sets can have different stats on the weapons of course, but also change your passive tree, so that allows you to use more elements and combine things more easily, but we’re also trying to make sure that there are a lot of keyowrds that go across different archetypes and things.
A great example of that is armor break, which we initially conceived as something for the Warrior, but then we also added ways to access it and utilize it both across different skills and different classes, like the Mercenary and Ranger that we showed recently, but also by using things like Support Gems so that anyone can have access to this kind of mechanics. That Corrode Armour Support Gem that I showcased in the demo for example, that is a way to access armor break on a poison build in PoE 2, but then we also want to make sure that other builds access this kind of mechanics too. We tried to make those kinds of keywords generally available across a wide range of skills, so that should mean that you should have the ability to create builds across heterogeneous class pieces. Ideally, we like to compare it to something like Magic: The Gathering – sure, you can always run a red deck, but you can hypothetically run decks that combine different colors because they combine the mechanics of the different colors together.
Q: How did you determine class identity during the developmental process for Path of Exile 2?
Rogers: Effectively, what we looked at, was that each class will generally speaking have some sort of signature weapon type most of the skills are going to be about. But, as I was saying before, we’re still a game with open systems as far as using stuff between classes goes, so really that’s just a heavy suggestion so that new users understand a good path. If you’re a new user, you can say “I’m the Ranger, I’ve got a bow, I’m going to pick these bow skills,” and that makes sense to you.
But then, as you get more accomplished with the game, you realize that there may be interesting things that the Ranger allows you to do in regards to Ascendancy classes that are interesting with other builds as well, and that’s the kind of thing that a more advanced player may realize. Ultimately, the reason we want to make sure that each class has a strict identity with regard to both what we show in marketing and also what the game pushes you toward is that you have a fairly obvious path to follow if you want to follow it. It’s when you go off-class that all the crazy things that Path of Exile is known for starts to happen.
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Q: How does the game alert the players of possible combinations, like the ones you showed with Gas Cloud Arrow and Explosive Arrow?
Rogers: Each skill now has a little video associated with it that effectively shows the core mechanics that you’re going to be dealing with. In those videos, we also do say things like, for example, with Gas Cloud Arrow, that it can be exploded by other attacks that do some kind of explosion, and then for the case of Gas Cloud Arrow we specifically showed Explosive Arrow since that’s the other obvious Ranger skill, but it can be exploded by a variety of other skills or mechanics, like ground fire and so on. We have a video that shows it, but we also have to effectively communicate to the player that there are other effects that can take advantage of this mechanic too.
[End.]
Path of Exile 2
Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile 2 is an action RPG that takes place years after its predecessor’s events. A free-to-play project with multiplayer, POE2 features a six-part campaign along with an endgame.
