Path of Exile 2: Endgame Mechanics Overhaul and Expectations

The upcoming changes in Path of Exile, particularly with simulacrum, indicate a significant shift in endgame mechanics to address player feedback and improve engagement.

### Path of Exile: Endgame Overhaul Teased in Simulacrum Changes
* 🔄  The teaser for the upcoming 3.25 patch hints at a **significant shake-up to the endgame mechanics** in Path of Exile.
* 📉  Player numbers have plateaued and even declined over time, indicating a need for **change to keep the game fresh and engaging**.
* 🎮  The current meta involves **repetitive farming strategies** that can become **boring and monotonous** over time.
* 🏗️  The changes to simulacrum, such as **removing the first 15 waves** and **adding more opportunities for specific unique items**, suggest a **broader overhaul of endgame content**.
* 🧪  The game has been used as a testing ground for **potential mechanics in Path of Exile 2**, leading to **mixed player reactions** and **potential burnout**.
* 🧹  There is a need to address "grind bloat" in the game, streamlining and improving existing mechanics to make the **endgame more enjoyable**.
* 📅  Speculation suggests that these changes may lead to a **longer 5-month league cycle**, potentially to **bridge the gap until the Path of Exile 2 beta**.
* 🔮  The community is hopeful that these changes will make Path of Exile **stand out on its own**, distinct from the upcoming sequel.

welcome back, you filthy Exiles. So today we got a teaser for one of the mechanic changes, in particular with simulacrum that's going to be coming into the game. But we'll have a look at that in a moment. I think it's part of something significantly bigger that we've been waiting for some time to happen in Path of Exile. And we're going to talk about probably five items or so that are pretty major that this sort of potentially alludes to. But anyway, let's have a look at the trailer that came up on Twitter or X earlier today. And then we'll get into the meat and bones of this, of this video. In the Settler's update, we have removed the first 15 waves from the simulacrum. Usually, characters reaching this content were a high enough level that the first waves were tedious and unrewarding. Simulacrum should now be a lot faster to run. On top of this, we have added more opportunities to get the specific unique items like voices by

defeating the bosses as you complete waves. Okay, so aside from the obvious that lacerate is in that video and that voices are going to be essentially made cheaper and potentially easier. Or the price of simulacrums are going to go up because of the accessibility to voices. Basically what I can see from this is we are getting a significant metagame shakeup. Um, and that's quite significant because over the last however many years I've been playing. One of the most consistent pieces of player feedback tends to be the game doesn't feel like it's any different or changing. And so people start to walk off the game and leave the game simply on the basis of there's not a real lot of change outside of the temp League mechanics. Anyway, what I wanted to cover off in this video is five topics in particular talking about stagnant play cycling. So I'll dig into a little bit of detail there and we'll have a look at player numbers too. Meta farming shakeup, uh, and then also experimentation which has been a bit of

a criticism from me for a number of leagues and uh removal of the grind bloat as well and we'll talk about that briefly. And the possibility of what could happen before poe2 uh as far as the length of the league. Anyway let's get into the video and let's talk about these things. So I want to touch on a forum post that was made all the way back in 2015. And unfortunately to this day this is a trend that we see and can be from a number of things. So burnout lack of enthusiasm uh bad League mechanic and such but it's interesting that this problem has existed for some time with League mechanics and the state of Path of Exile. And what's really interesting is when we start to map the number of Maximum players in a league start scenario that's when we start to see the stagnation of The Game come into play. So I did exactly that. So what we can see on the graph in front of us is the maximum player count according to steam DB from

May 2022 through to April 2024, and April 2024 being an average, just on the basis of the weird release time. What we can see, we go back to April 23, which was this time well, the last League start in the previous year. We hit about 209,000 peak players, but we don't seem to average an increase beyond that point. It actually goes down. The player base doesn't increase, and in fact, it's slowly declining over time to a much worse position. Now, this is in comparison to a game like Last Epoch, which if we have a look at those numbers, we had a player count of around 258,000 on the first initial 1.0 launch. However, from what we can see of the recent launch for 1.1, only around 71,000 players peaked based on the numbers that we currently have at a max point. Now, so you might be wondering, what exactly does that mean? Well, the way that I interpret those numbers is generally when you hit a plateau and you level off and talking

about in a like a revenue sense, there's not a lot of, I guess, Supply that's pushing the demand, and that's economics 101. But what I get, what I'm getting at is there hasn't been very much variation to The Path of Exile endgame for quite some time, and it's actually become clunky and cumbersome to the point where there's almost like a mandatory grind Arc that players have to go through every league. And what happens over time is the longer that that is permitted to continue, players have started to secede from the game and just give up. And then they go, well, nothing's really going to change. They might add a league mechanic, definitely with necropolis that was not a good League mechanic. Andor it wasn't an correction, it wasn't a heavily engaging League mechanic for those players who chose not to play it. There wasn't a lot to come back and see the sights of the game, and so they experienced play loss or player drop off or deferral of players. This is a massive

problem with Path of Exile one as it is right now, and based on that one teaser with that one change to Simil Acum, I suspect that there will be a significant shake-up that's going to come to the end game and change every mechanic to make it either more about targeting to build a character that meets your power trip, so players can have a lot of fun. I, for one, think that's really good from a trade League standpoint. It definitely will either, in most likely, decrease the value of things like Voices, which again will make those items become more accessible to the vast number of players so people can enjoy a lot more different types of build variations in the game. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing despite the fact that some people will probably be complaining a lot about it because that was their source of income. It's just a case where you're just going to have to adjust your approach. Fingers crossed though they don't touch Delve like that in any significant way, but it's not a bad change, and I think that from what we can

see from that one teaser, this is something that G is aware of, and they want to focus on getting their player count back up. And the best way to do that is change the end game and change the game, make those players who felt the game went stale come back, and that'll put your numbers back up to the initial Glory Days of 200 plus, and hopefully further beyond that point. Now, in relation to the current meta around farming and endgame grinds, currently the process is to complete the campaign, blast Maps, find an early farming Strat, make early currency, gear up your character to push harder Maps, then Juice It Up to get the best drops, and focus and repeat until you get bored or your eyes start bleeding. This can be extremely boring and mundane and unexciting to do on hours and hours and hours, and also some of the mechanics, such as simulacrum, those first 15 levels were just straight up unnecessary, so it's not surprising they would start making changes, these mechanics to speed them up, make them more efficient, make

them more friendly to the user. But what we also saw was a partial shift in this direction of methodology in last league with the introduction of all the new scarabs to promote players to play a much more varied amount of content in the game. Also, what we're seeing is a six-map slot as well, which we've been teased so that's also definitely on the cards to try and push players to play a lot more robust rotations. So, from the reduction of endless monotonous components of many of the endgame mechanics, such as this said reduction to the number of waves in the simulacrums, it could speed up the process to which players progress through the endgame and farm those mechanics. It'll allow for faster currency gain, so we'll see an aberrant change in the market, which will definitely change the way that players progress the characters moving forwards. So you can expect to progress a character much quicker in a league and be able to play multiple characters or multiple varied skills that used to cost.

a lot more will be made a lot cheaper and accessible. This approach may also allow players to say, You had 2 hours. You might spend 1 hour in Simulacrum. Maybe you'll spend 1 hour of Simulacrum now, and then another hour in, you know, Harvest or something like that. And the returns of that 2 hours would be significantly increased as opposed to what it previously was. Not just in the currency that you'll generate from that, but also the ability for the player to actually enjoy the game. And lastly, the game will just be less boring. Obviously, I enjoy things like Delve. A lot of people find that mundane. I'm not sure what you would change in Delve to better that, but definitely there could always be improvements to the depth levels and whatever. Some of the examples I thought of just inefficiencies that they could harness with different League mechanics would be what this one's a fan favorite, which is automatically opening doors in Heist based on proximity. This has been asked for from the community for many

years now reductions to early depth levels. This was already done a number of leagues ago. I think it was in 3.16 or 3.15, something like that, but this wouldn't be a disadvantage either though. It'd be interesting to see how people would progress with harder delving and the increase in the number of rooms a single incursion will allow you to accumulate. And also basically taking it from 10 encounters to five encounters, and you adjust two rooms per encounter as opposed to one room, which would speed up the progression to get into incursion of Temple encounters as well. This could be a major advantage and would push players to play incursion a hell of a lot more moving forwards. Okay, so one of the other major things that we might be looking at with this, just this one teaser from simul acam, could be a real shakeup to the fact that they may be stopping their experimentation run on the player base. So for quite some time over the many, many leagues that have occurred over the last few years in the

lead up for Path of Exile 2, in particular, and we can go back to as far as the first Exile con. GGG have been experimenting on the player base around endgame mechanics. Total was a bit of an experimental thing, but a really cool mechanic. But some of the leagues that really stuck out to me as things that they were sort of testing the waters of were things like kandra. When we look at the infamous archam system where they tried to basically change the entire endgame mechanic around how enemies react and how they're designed, this was an absolute disaster. We also had Affliction where they had secondary scies which was really cool, and then they took that away from us and we lost the Heap of power, and then that's where you start to have a power creep scenario. But I would say there are definitely elements in the environmental design as well as enemy design that look like and appear to be that they've made their way in The Path of Exile too Crucible.

was another great example. That was where we had skill trees built into our items, and that didn't stick for any leagues beyond that point. It would have been really cool to see that make it some way in into the base game, and or have those items survive somehow. But unfortunately, it didn't make its way into the base game. I would assume that potentially there could also be some elements of that in pee2, but that was a bit of a test League. It wasn't a great League by any measure, but the itemization was really cool. Expedition with deterministic crafting was Rog, and that very much looks like that's probably going to be in Path of Exile 2. And in fact, Rog is even in Path of Exile 2, and Sentinels Sentinel league with combinators. So Rec combinators are really big because you could take two items, smash them together, and hope with some RMG to get an absolutely fantastic item. A lot of plus two amulets and Wands and things like that were being made in

that League because it was super accessible. What I'm getting at is we might be starting to see a Path of Exile 1 that isn't about experimenting on the player base because Path of Exile 2 has been progressed so far now to a point where we're getting on the cusp of release or at least a beta. And so finally we're just getting Path of Exile one for what it should be, and this patch or this teaser potentially is going to be an indicator of that direction moving forwards, which I totally embrace. I hate being treated as a test dummy in video games to figure out what works and what doesn't work. What I want to see is PoE just be PoE1. I also see it from the other side of the sort of fence where yep, they have to test these things to see what happens and what works, and I totally understand. But when you're basing an entire league mechanic based off of some of this theory testing for your next game, this is definitely most

likely annoyed a number of the players over the leagues which is accounted for the drop off of the total player numbers that we spoke about in the uh first part of this video. Okay, so this topic is more or less self-explanatory removal of grind blo basically what's happened the more amount of years that have passed the more they've just sort of stacked into the game and not really revised over a number of the mechanics because they were sort of in a rush to get the next League mechanic out or they're in a rush to do their testing for Path of Exile 2 and whatnot and in between mechanics have fallen to the Wayside. I.E simulacrum is just one great example. Heist has definitely dropped off over the leagues and things like delve has been totally forgotten about and in fact last League all Flames resulted in certain mechanics such as delve simply just breaking uh where they basically had an infinite azerite glitch which allowed play to totally chese the resonator Mark so because of these

factors. The game has sort of become inefficient and clunky in the end game, and I can see them basically doing a bit of a house clean with this 3.25 patch and just tidying up that in-game. They've had four months to do that and 4 months to break it down and four months to improve a lot of these mechanics, so there really is no excuse for this at this point. Things like the change to Beyond and also the change to metamorph, and things like that, were some examples of where they started doing this in the past to refine the game in the endgame area a little better, but there definitely needed to be a lot more attention. I'm hoping that what we will see is a large number of mechanics in this expansion, not just patch, but expansion, getting a total overhaul to streamline them and take away a lot of the mundane hour-on-hour grindy crap that's been in the game for a very long time. That's both frustrated and irritated players and resulted in drop

offs in the total play and numbers players. Okay, so what does all this mean for the duration of this league? I sort of suspect they're going to make a lot of changes to this end game in hopes that it will engage the players for a longer duration of time, so that they can get themselves prepped and ready for say November this year for an Exile 2 Beta launch. What I suspect this might mean, and we'll see what happens when they do the league announcement on, I think, Thursday or Friday, is they may do a 5-month league, which would be terrible, but it may also be necessary to allow for them to have enough time to equip themselves to get Path of Exile 2 prepped and ready for the player base and figure out any other last-minute issues and whatnot. I can sort of see them potentially buying time like this. This is just a speculation; I have no fact to base this on, but just a gut feeling. This could be something that they may be doing, and maybe they've sort of

banked out enough content here fixed enough things to keep the player base engaged for a much longer period of time, and potentially the new league mechanic might be a lot more of a long-haul mechanic, so it's going to take a lot longer for you to progress it than what you have in other mechanics, and that might be by deliberate design, but who knows, anything could happen in the next few days, okay, so I hope this video gives some insightful sort of theories and ideas and speculations of what we might be looking forward to expect in the next few days. I really hope that this is a start to really making PoE just stick out as its own thing and separating and having that divide of difference between what will be Path of Exile 2 and what currently is Path of Exile 1, but anyway, we'll see what happens when we get the uh, the league announcement. Anyway, if you like this type of video, don't forget to like and sub to the channel, don't forget to follow the Twitch, the Twitter, the X.

whatever it's called these days, and I will see you guys on stream a little later. If you're after the league starter guide for my shield crush jug, that will be out later tomorrow night. I just need time to finalize the trees and PS and everything. From tonight, we're going to be League starting some uh uh cold conversion uh spectral Shield throw Champion gameplay and see how that feels early on. Anyway, I'll see you guys later and have a good one.

This Change Could be much BIGGER Than we Think in Path of Exile: Settlers of Kalguur

Jorgen

Teaser for Mechanic Changes in Path of Exile

A teaser for the upcoming Path of Exile mechanic changes suggests a significant metagame shakeup, potentially addressing the consistent player feedback of the game feeling stagnant.

The teaser indicates a faster and more rewarding simulacrum experience, with the possibility of a meta farming shakeup and the removal of grind bloat.

This change could bring about a much-needed transformation to the game and address long-standing player concerns.

The Decline of Path of Exile and Predicted Changes

The player base of Path of Exile has been plateauing and declining, possibly due to a stagnant endgame and unengaging league mechanics, leading to a significant problem for the game.

The upcoming changes to the game's mechanics, particularly with Simulacrum, are expected to shake up the endgame and make it more enjoyable for players, potentially increasing build variations and accessibility of items.

These changes may impact the income of some players but are likely to have a positive effect on the overall gaming experience.

Strategies to Revive Player Count and Enhance Endgame Experience in "G" Game

The game is looking to increase its player count by revamping the endgame and gameplay to make it more engaging and less monotonous, potentially leading to a significant increase in the player base.

The proposed changes in endgame mechanics, such as reducing the monotony of certain activities and increasing the efficiency of progression, aim to speed up character development and make various skills more accessible.

Additionally, the game plans to promote a more diverse range of content through the introduction of new mechanics, such as the six-map slot and the use of scarabs, to encourage players to explore different aspects of the game.

These adjustments not only seek to boost currency gain but also enhance the overall enjoyment of the game for the players, ultimately making the gaming experience less tedious.

Proposed Changes to Endgame Mechanics in Path of Exile 2

The upcoming update in Path of Exile 2 may include a reduction in depth levels for early delving, aiming to increase the speed of progression and encourage more incursion play.

The game developers have been experimenting with various endgame mechanics in recent leagues, such as the Archam system, Affliction, and Expedition, testing new features like enemy design and deterministic crafting, which may indicate potential shakeups in Path of Exile 2.

These experiments, including the introduction of Rog and combinators, seem to have influenced the development of Path of Exile 2, suggesting a significant impact on the game's mechanics and itemization.

The Anticipated Changes in Path of Exile 1 and 2

Path of Exile 2's progress suggests a new direction for Path of Exile 1, moving away from using players as test subjects for new mechanics.

Over the years, the game has become inefficient and clunky in the endgame, with many mechanics being neglected in favor of testing for Path of Exile 2.

25 patch is expected to clean up and improve these neglected mechanics, streamlining the gaming experience and reducing the tedious grind for players.

Speculations on the Duration of the Path of Exile League

The speaker speculates that the Path of Exile end game may undergo significant changes to engage players until the launch of Exile 2 Beta in November.

There is a possibility that a 5-month league may be introduced to allow time for preparing Path of Exile 2 and keeping the player base engaged.

The speaker also suggests that the new league mechanic may be designed for a longer progression, potentially aiming for a more extended engagement of the players.