Path of Exile 2 News

In Path of Exile 2, a new class has been added in the latest Dawn of the Hunt league: Huntress. Although the leveling experience is a little weak, with a series of subsequent adjustments, this class has gradually become stronger in the game.

Since its release on April 4, players have developed a variety of reliable equipment, among which Lightning Spear is the most popular among players. It has an excellent map clearing effect and strong single-target damage to monsters.

Bleeding Huntress’s main skill is Bleeding, which is a continuous damage skill with low burst damage. When encountering a boss with Energy Shield, the damage caused by this skill will be greatly reduced, and most bosses in POE 2 have Energy Shield, so Bleed Huntress was not popular with players at first.

Subsequently, POE 2 made some changes to Bleed Huntress, upgraded the damage of Bleed Huntress, and greatly increased the damage it caused. When paired with Lightning Spear, it produced some unexpected effects. This combination seems to have become a very good choice in POE 2.

Skills And Basic Gameplay Of Bleed Huntress

The most basic gameplay of manipulating Bleed Huntress is to use Rake to rush to the enemy and fight, causing Bleeding to all enemies hit, and then use Disengage to cause damage to the enemy, while jumping back to escape. When Bleed takes effect, if the enemy is not dead, use Blood Hunt to attack the enemy. If you hit an enemy who is losing blood, it will cause blood to explode and cause Consume Bleeding. If necessary, use Spearfield to provide additional damage.

At the same time, you can use Parry or Block to cancel the animation effect of Rake to speed up the battle.

The following are the recommended skills for Bleeding Huntress and the recommended supports for each skill:

• Rake: Stomping Ground, Lacerate, Brutality, Heft, Deep Cuts
• Disengage: Martial Tempo, Ingenuity, Maim
• Spearfield: Impale, Incision, Rearm
• Blood Hunt: Bloodlust, Blood in the Eyes, Close Combat
• Herald of Blood: Life Thief, Magnified Effect, Execute
• Wind Dancer: Blind, Quill Burst, Culling Strike
• Bloodhound’s Mark: Single Out, Physical Mastery, Rupture
• Attrition: Vitality, Cannibalism, Precision
• Thunderous Leap: Shocking Leap, Untouchable
• Bleed Huntress recommends lighting up Passive Tree and Ascendancy

In terms of attack, Bleed Huntress’s Passive Tree recommends lighting up Strength, Damage, and Critical Hit; for defense, the main recommended skill is Evasion, and you can also light up some Blind and Block to reduce damage.

To increase your Ascendancy, Critical Strike is the first choice, followed by Predatory Instinct and In For The Kill. If you want to light up penetration and make adjustments to trees and gear, it is best to have a strong and suitable weapon first.

Gear And Recommended Affixes

For the gear recommended by Bleed Huntress, you need to look for weapons that can increase Physical Damage, such as percentage increase in Physical Damage, Accuracy, and Attack Speed. The affixes required for other equipment are mainly health, resistance, critical hit rate, critical hit bonus, and strength.

For some exclusive items, Venopuncture, Meginord’s Girdle, or anything else that can increase strength can be considered. In the endgame, the gear upgrade of Bleed Huntress in POE 2 Currency is similar to the before, with damage first, followed by health and resistance, and critical hit rate also plays a role. For basic attributes, mixed armor and dodge are the first choice.

Here are the recommended Affixes for Bleed Huntress’ Gear Slot:

• Helmet: Accuracy, life, attributes, resistances
• Weapon: Physical Damage (flat/increased%), Accuracy, Attack Speed
• Shield: Life, resists, attributes (or Lycosidae unique shield)
• Chest: Life, resists, attributes, evasion
• Rings: Life, resists, attributes, life leech, mana leech
• Amulet: Life, resists, attributes (or Astramentis)
• Gloves: Physical damage, life, resists, critical damage bonus, attributes
• Boots: Movement speed, life, resists
• Belt: Life, Strength (or Ryslatha’s Coil)

Bleed Huntress was not very strong when it first appeared, but with the adjustment of Bleed Huntress in POE2 and the discovery of skills and equipment by players, the strength of Bleed Huntress has gradually emerged. I hope that players can develop more interesting gameplay in subsequent games.

Path of Exile 2, a dark ARPG masterpiece from Grinding Gear Games, recently released the 0.2.0 version update, officially opening Dawn of the Hunt League. As the player community sets off a new round of play enthusiasm, a key question has surfaced: should players create characters in the new league, or stick to Standard League and old characters?

League Mechanism

For players who are new to POE 2, Dawn of the Hunt is undoubtedly the best time for them to experience the fun of the game. As a first major league in the early access stage of POE 2, its design logic continues the previous classic mode: everyone starts from the same starting line, the economic system is completely reset, and unique mechanisms and limited rewards are introduced. This seasonal gameplay not only eliminates the accumulated advantages of old players, thereby creating a fair gaming experience for new players, but also gives the game lasting vitality through the cycle of zeroing-rebuilding-competition.

Perhaps this also reflects that the core goal of Dawn of the Hunt is to create a pure technical and strategic arena for players. Whether you are a veteran of POE series or a newcomer to Wraeclast continent, you have equal opportunities here.

Therefore, it is definitely worth creating a new character for Dawn of the Hunt. For new players, Dawn of the Hunt is tailor-made for them, so there is no reason for them to go to Standard League. In addition, for old players, if they want to fully experience all the changes introduced by Path of Exile 2 version 0.2.0, creating a new character in Dawn of the Hunt league is also the best way.

Dawn Of The Hunt

• Fresh Economy

The most significant change in Dawn of the Hunt is the completely independent currency system and economic ecology. All players start to accumulate hard currencies such as Path Of Exile 2 Chaos Orb again, which means that old players who have a huge advantage in the standard league have no advantage in Dawn of the Hunt. This healthy economic environment ensures the fun of the game for new players and brings freshness to old players.

• New Class

What’s more, version 0.2.0 also launched Huntress Class and some new ones, which completely changed the build logic of POE 2. Huntress is known for its Dexterity, and with the suitable gems, you can create a powerful build.

But please note that if you want to experience the female hunter in Dawn of the Hunt League, creating a new character and re-leveling is an inevitable choice. Although the game also provides players with an opportunity to experience these in Standard League, we all know that in Dawn of the Hunt, it is the best place for new characters to release their charm.

• Endgame Optimization

The focus of 0.2.0 version update is all about endgame, and it improves campaign QoL. GGG provides players with a better entry transition from campaign to the endgame, and optimizes the problem of the separation of plot and endgame. In particular, some background explanations are added to the story of the game - why Exiles needs to clear endgame map nodes and cleanse corruption.

Of course, some players will prefer to choose Standard League. For example, players who are not interested in repeating campaigns but are only interested in endgame may find that Standard is more suitable for them.

In addition, due to the item nerfs brought by patch 0.2.0, some players may also prefer to stay in Standard. Because although many items have been adjusted, based on experience, players who already have these broken items can keep them as they are in most cases. But if these items are dropped after the update, then the players will get the weakened ones. Therefore, for some players who have already built broken builds, it is a loss to rebuild a new character in Dawn of the Hunt.

After all, we hope that everyone can find their own game fun. No matter what mode the player will choose in the end, this exile adventure is destined to be full of unknowns and opportunities.

After the latest content of Path of Exile 2 was released, the evaluation on Steam was a bit polarized, which was far from the previous unanimous praise.

We all know that the developer released Path of Exile 2early access version as early as December 2024. At that time, the players’ experience of the early access version was still very good, and the evaluation was almost positive. They believed that the game had made major improvements on the original basis, and believed that the official version released later would definitely have more fresh things, which would greatly improve the player’s experience. But in fact, this is not the case.

At present, the latest evaluation of Path of Exile 2 on Steam has gone from high praise to polarization. But overall, there are still more good reviews, but it has to be admitted that the negative reviews of this game have increased sharply after Dawn of the Hunt update. This shows that the game does have many problems. The negative comments are mainly concentrated on the following two aspects:

1. Slow Update Progress

In the released 0.2.0, revealing a plethora of nerfs to the most powerful builds, skills, and items in the game, also hitting some core functionalities. This makes the game progress too slow, which not only wastes time but also affects the player’s interest in whether to decide to continue playing the game.

2. Major Performance Issues

Because the progress becomes slow, the player’s character power in the game cannot be strengthened, while the power of enemies and opponents is infinitely expanding. In other words, the strength of monsters and enemies increases, while the overall strength of players is weakened. In this way, the confrontation is significantly weakened, forcing players to strengthen their defense to fight against the enemy.

However, many players usually enjoy the confrontation process and do not like to defend blindly. There is no doubt that players who like confrontation will definitely have a bad evaluation of the game.

At the same time, because the defense needs to be constantly strengthened, then, This also means that skill combos were hard to pull off in most cases, leading to build that favor the use of one or two skills to beat the game. The spear skills that players expected before could not be used, and many players were very disappointed.

And because the overall strength of the players was weakened, the players needed to complete the build with great effort, because only good builds can survive in the game. In short, this makes the already difficult game worse. If you use POE 2 Currency, you may have a chance to increase your strength, but it will be difficult in general.

In response to the above problems, many players have complained about this, and many players have also put forward their own opinions, asking the developer to either weaken the monster’s ability or increase the player’s strength. However, the developer has not yet solved this, so the players know nothing about the future progress of the game. In this regard, I still hope that the developer can face up to the players’ ideas and expectations.

Grinding Gear Games, Path of Exile 2's developer, announced a 65% chance of a full release in 2025 following the recent 0.2.0 early access update media conference.

This frank statement is surprising. But he also added that the problem is that he is not sure whether it can be completed on time. It is challenging, but not impossible. But if the game cannot be released this year, we will not have to wait too long.

The technical aspects are enough to make people doubt it. Just to complete the remaining main story chapters, five new classes, and the unannounced end-game system, the development team has only eight months left. It is very urgent. And this is only assuming that the scale of the other updates is similar to the current one. What's more, the developer said that some updates will be even larger.

However, the developer has its own development strategy that can ensure efficiency and speed. Maybe they have several teams advancing core modules such as plot, classes, and end-game gameplay in parallel.

The current situation that only 7/12 classes are available in the Early Access version is like a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of developers. Although Huntress has already appeared, the development progress of the remaining five classes varies greatly. Some have completed the skill framework, while others are still in the concept design stage.

Even more difficult is the class balance issue. For example, when someone uses the recently released Huntress with an excellent build made with enough PoE 2 Currency, the damage caused is amazing. This makes some players worry that there will be an imbalance in class strength and destroy the fairness of the game. However, there is no need to worry too much about this problem for the time being, because the game will be optimized and improved later.

But each class has a unique growth logic, which is like solving six differential equations at the same time. It is not easy to do these problems well at the same time. This also shows that the challenges faced by developers are great. Therefore, I suspect that players may not see the full 12 classes when the full version is released.

Many players also do not trust GGG to launch the full version in 2025. In the voting post on the official forum, less than half of the players believe that GGG can deliver on time. This skepticism is also justified, because a season update of POE was postponed, which led to a drop in the praise rate. Now facing the larger POE 2, players are also very skeptical about this 65% probability.

But GGG's announcement of the 65% probability is not completely groundless. They have a large team developing Act 4, but we can't see it. And there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes. In addition, there are many monsters and other content that are semi-finished products that have been completed but not yet completed, just waiting to be completed and presented to the players. They should speed up this process and bring extra surprises to everyone as soon as possible.

From a macro perspective, the development dilemma of Path of Exile 2 is also a challenge for the entire game industry. When players' demand for game content and quality increases significantly, and new games emerge in an endless stream, the traditional development model is no longer sustainable. Developers need to consider a new and efficient development model. Behind the 65% is the hard work of countless people, and it is also a challenge for developers.

In any case, the race between developers and time will be revealed in December this year, and we will wait and see.