Path of exile review

Path of Exile 2 — Punishing, Gear-Locked, and Hostile to Player Progression

Path of Exile 2 is shaping up to be one of the most mechanically ambitious ARPGs ever made—and simultaneously one of the most frustrating. At its core, the game suffers from a severe identity crisis: it demands near-perfect gear to participate in endgame content, yet provides no reasonable, player-friendly way to obtain that gear without submitting to a broken economy and excessively punitive systems.

What should feel like a test of mastery instead feels like a constant reminder that you are under-geared, under-funded, and one death away from losing hours of progress.

1) Extreme Gear Dependency Turns Mapping Into a Dead End

Mapping in PoE2 is less about gameplay decisions and more about whether your gear hits a narrow, unforgiving checklist:

Capped elemental resistances

Adequate armor, evasion, or energy shield

Enough DPS to avoid being overwhelmed

The problem? The game rarely allows you to have all three.

Players across forums and blogs have noted that gear with meaningful resistance values often comes at the cost of damage, while DPS-focused gear leaves characters dangerously fragile. This creates a suffocating “pick your poison” system where no choice feels good, only less bad. Community feedback consistently highlights how difficult it is to cap resistances through drops alone, especially in mid-to-high tier maps, forcing players into trade far earlier than feels reasonable .

Instead of enabling build creativity, the system funnels players into narrow, gear-checked archetypes. If your drops don’t line up perfectly, progression simply stops.

2) Self-Found Is Effectively Dead, and Trade Is a Nightmare

At higher levels, self-found gear becomes functionally useless. You are forced to trade—but the trade economy is one of PoE2’s most criticized systems.

Divine Orbs, the backbone of meaningful trading, are astonishingly rare. Community posts repeatedly report dozens—or even hundreds—of hours of play yielding only one or two divines, if any at all. At the same time, the market prices for “decent” gear (not best-in-slot, just usable) demand absurd amounts of currency, creating a massive gap between what players can realistically earn and what the economy expects .

To make matters worse:

Trade interactions are clunky and unreliable

Many sellers never respond

Prices are wildly inflated or manipulated

Players regularly describe the economy as feeling disconnected from normal progression, favoring no-lifers, market experts, or meta farmers while locking out average players entirely .

The result is an endgame that feels less like an ARPG and more like a second job in economic micromanagement—except the pay is terrible.

3) Mapping Death Penalties Actively Discourage Playing

PoE2’s mapping punishment system is one of its most demoralizing features:

Die once → lose experience

Lose the map

Lose modifiers

Lose momentum

This design has been widely criticized as overly punitive, especially in a game filled with unpredictable damage spikes and boss mechanics. Forum discussions consistently describe how a single death can erase hours of progress, making players risk-averse and stressed rather than engaged .

Instead of encouraging learning and experimentation, the game teaches you one lesson: don’t try anything new unless your gear is already perfect.

4) Progression Walls, Map Scarcity, and Level Lockouts

Hitting a hard wall around the mid-80s is a common experience. At this point:

Gear requirements spike

Maps become scarce

Experience loss outweighs gains

Being unable to sustain maps while also being unable to level creates a brutal feedback loop. The fact that you can’t reliably buy maps from Doryani unless you continue leveling only worsens the issue. When leveling itself is blocked by gear and map access, this system feels fundamentally backwards and hostile to recovery.

Many players report being stuck in exactly this situation: unable to progress maps, unable to earn currency, and unable to level out of the problem .

How This Can Be Fixed (And Should Be)

These issues are not unsolvable. In fact, many of the solutions are already common requests from the community or proven systems in other ARPGs.

1) Make Resistances More Accessible

Add more baseline resistance scaling through passive trees or quest progression

Increase resistance roll frequency and values on mid-tier gear

Reduce the all-or-nothing nature of resistance caps

Players shouldn’t need near-perfect items just to avoid getting deleted in maps.

2) Improve Crafting and Self-Found Viability

Introduce more deterministic crafting options earlier

Allow targeted resistance or defense crafting without massive currency sinks

Make dropped gear more consistently usable

If players could reasonably fix their own gear, trade would feel optional—not mandatory.

3) Fix the Economy and Divine Scarcity

Increase divine drop rates at mapping tiers

Introduce alternative currency paths for purchasing gear

Normalize market prices through better sinks and supply

A functional economy should reflect what players can realistically earn, not what a tiny elite can exploit.

4) Reduce or Rework Death Punishments

Remove XP loss below certain levels

Allow map retries or partial recovery

Preserve map investment after death

Deaths should be learning moments, not progression killers.

5) Fix Map Sustain and Vendor Access

Allow map purchases regardless of level once mapping begins

Add map catch-up mechanics for stalled players

Improve baseline map drop rates

No player should be locked out of endgame because of a few bad deaths or unlucky drops.

Final Thoughts

Right now, Path of Exile 2 feels like a game that punishes players for not already being successful. The gear dependency, broken economy, brutal death penalties, and progression lockouts combine into an experience that drains motivation rather than fuels it.

This isn’t difficulty—it’s attrition.

Unless Grinding Gear Games meaningfully rebalances progression, gearing, and punishment systems, PoE2 risks alienating everyone except the most dedicated, most informed, and most economically savvy players. And that would be a tragedy for a game with so much potential.

I 100% agree with the message above. Only 1 note, the xp loss can be helped buy a found/purchasable item u keep in your inventory. Then you only loose like 25% xp. Still sucks you lose any but at least its better then nothing atm. (Cant remember the name of the item for the life of me, but you keep it in your inventory).

Everything else is SPOT ON!