Hal Moana Exiles, welcome to another Path of Exile 2 video. Now, the next few days of Gamescom didn't come with ascendency or endgame reveals, but instead a deep dive into the existing systems of Path of Exile 2 and a little bit of new gameplay in a brand new area with a brand new boss we have not yet seen before. So, in this video, we're going to be looking at that new area, the new boss, and a ton of new skills, in addition to a bunch of community testimonials for those folks who are actually on the ground at Gamescom, who have been sending me messages. I deeply appreciate all of you who are doing that, and some of the actual people that are just posting on Reddit and their thoughts, including a class tier list for someone who sat in line for the beta or the demo at Gamescom all day and played every single class. So, we're going to begin the video with a look at the mercenary and warrior in a German interview that actually was

done in English in front of a German crowd by Gamar. This was the best interview done at Gamescom that has been released so far. PU2 did have a spot on the Xbox showcase live stream; however, that was a cool little presentation, but it didn't contain lots of new info. Some new screenshots of potential bosses in PU2 and some awesome information from game director Mark Roberts on how they designed bosses, but not lots of interesting new tidbits of information. This interview did, though. It involved Jonathan Rogers and the interviewer from Gamestar, who sat down and went through two areas in the game: one we had seen before and one completely new. The first one was the canopy, which is an area in Act One that lots of people skipped in the various playtests that we have seen done by streamers and content creators like myself. The second was in the ziggurat, which is a completely new area and where a lot of the footage of this particular video is taking place. And this was done on the warrior. Now

Jonathan was coaching this particular interviewer on all things path of exile during this interview, showcasing things such as the new skill gem system, how support gems interact with skill gems, how recommended skill gems interact, and all these new skill gems that we have not seen before, including Hammer of the Gods. We also see Stampede and how Stampede interacts with various slams such as volcanic fissure, and it was all just so rad. I'm especially going to dive briefly into Jonathan's little T talk about cooldowns in path of exile 2 and in general other games, and how he thinks they are lazy game design, but if used sparingly, they are powerful. And that is what we're seeing with Hammer of the Gods, which is an incredibly powerful ability where you call down basically an ancestral Hammer onto your foes, and it does a massive slam and big burst of damage, but it does have a lengthy cooldown. This is used as a finisher, it's used in boss fights on giant packs, and I'm sure there are ways to optimize it.

but it does have that cooldown, and Jonathan stresses the fact that it does not have lots of cooldowns because he believes it's lazy game design. But if used in the proper places, it does make character design and build design better. So, that ability that I've repeated a few times on screen, that is Hammer of the Gods, it looks absolutely rad. Another skill that we went into was Stampede. Basically, it allows you to charge up through a group of enemies or on top of a previously done slam or fissure and build up a bunch of power and then end with a massive hit to the ground. Another movement-based ability, this one a bit quicker than that three-in-a-row slam, which name is escaping me right now, and it looks like if you can abuse this, oh, it's going to be so much fun to run through maps and into great packs of monsters with this ability. In addition to this new area, the ziggurat, which looks like it's some sort of artificial star that the Val have created, and they

basically made the Searing xar, and you're doing a searing exarc fight, although a bit more complicated in the middle of act three, just randomly. Can we talk about how wild that is for a moment? We'll look at the boss design and how they're designing bosses in pee a little bit later, but can you just fathom that we're essentially getting the seing xar, which is an endgame boss, in the middle of Path of Exile 2's campaign. Now, Jonathan does mention this. He tells the interviewer, Hey, this isn't even an endgame boss. This is just a random boss in the middle of PE 2's third act. That's wild. He has the ball face, he has lasers, he has the Innocence beam, he has ads that spawn, he has these crazy black holes that move throughout the arena, and the setting itself is in the middle of this Great temple, wherein they think they've made an artificial star, but they've actually just made a volcano, which is also pretty rad, and just

everything aesthetically pulls together well. Now, the sound effects aren't great on this particular presentation, and even the graphics here. Apologies, it's in Twitch quality because the video isn't even up on YouTube, but it still looks pristine. I cannot wait to play and explore all the rest of these boss fights and bosses. Now, on to the actual skill gems and skill ideas that we learned about in this particular interview. We learned that in addition to creating new support gems or new gems with uncut gems, you can actually use these gems to level up existing gems that you have. So, if you're getting uncut gem drops and you don't need any new skills, you can use them just to level up the gems that you already have, which turns them into a valuable piece of currency, essentially, that you'll always be able to use no matter what. That's very cool. In addition, we actually saw all these new support gems for the first time, most of them in this particular interview. The interviewer was great; he managed to scroll down and showcase all this stuff.

to us. We also saw some brand new skill gems too and edited gems like armor-piercing rounds. We saw blind support, break endurance chain, concentrated effect, control destruction, critical damage, and many, many more gems. I'm actually going to have the link to everything I'm talking about in this video in the description below, so don't feel like you're missing out if you're not looking at the screen. If you want to peruse over all of these at your own pace, everything will be in the description. So, we also saw, you know, explosive grenade launcher and its current version B of War support, flash grenade launcher, and many, many more gems. People took screen grabs. Here we see Mana Flare and Mana Leech, minion instability. There was just a bunch of stuff that was showcased in this presentation that we haven't seen before. We even got to see grenades interacting with multiple projectile support and seeing a bunch of grenades just flying out and then all exploding in unison. It was absolutely rad. I'd also like to call out the fact that Jonathan spent a good

deal of time talking about WASD in this interview and how about 75% of the grinding gear games office has converted from mouse and keyboard to WASD and the fact that yes it is going to feel very different to the usual ARPG enjoyer when they first try out WASD with Path of Exile 2. It took lots of people who are constantly playing the game to get used to it. So us who have been playing POE1 for the longest time hopping into POE2. He encourages to attempt to use WASD and give it a chance and buy you know midway through act one. We're going to get used to it. We're really going to like it and we're probably going to swap to WASD. We've seen a lot of these boss fights too. You need precise movement. So yes you can use the mouse to try to configure your movement through all these bullet hell phases and wild boss fights but using WASD with the mouse to aim certain things probably is going to be the way to go. I know this is a controversial topic for a

lot of people who have only been playing W, not WD, mouse and keyboard for the longest time in their beloved Path of Exile 1 or other ARPGs, but give it a chance. I was anti-controller until I tried it for 6 hours at the console event, and I actually enjoyed it. So, give it a chance. Let's see how it feels. It did feel clunky to me in March when I played the warrior, but I may be able to attribute that to many other things that have been updated since then, such as the flask system and the like. So, when it comes out, as Jonathan is saying, give it a try. You might really enjoy WD. One last little thing from this interview, and it's actually something I totally forgot to mention from the Ziggy D interview in the video that I released yesterday or the day before, and that's the fact that Ritual is basically the first confirmed league mechanic from Path of Exile 1 to be in PoE 2 in terms of we're seeing it in the game itself. Both this interviewer

and Ziggy showcased a ritual in the game. Unfortunately, we didn't see the reward screen, but we did see an actual ritual encounter. It looked very similar to the ritual in POE1, except there's no extra flare or effect like a frost beam circling around or poison orbs spewing out chaos projectiles. It just looks like a lot of monsters, darkness surrounding the area, and you kill them, and then the fight ends. In the Ziggy interview as well, we do see the boss of the canopy is the king in the mist, so he will definitely be appearing in POE2 as he has been appearing in POE1. Okay, before we get to the community testimonials from folks on the ground playing the game and getting juicy little tidbits of information about the passive skill tree and changes there, let's take a look at the Gamescom Xbox boss spot that was revealed by Path of Exile 2. Now, a lot of us were thinking that, Hey, this presentation is going to involve something really brand new, such

as ascendancies or endgame or some other system that we've not seen before 'cause there's going to be lots of eyeballs on it. That is not the case. The only big real piece of new information we have received from games has been the Early Access launch date, which is November 15th. Everything else is reiterations or iterations of new ideas on existing revealed content, and that is the same with this particular presentation in which Mark Roberts, game director on Path of Exile and the primary boss designer for POE 2, talks about how he and the team design bosses. And this was a wonderful segment. Like I said, I'll link all my sources below; you can watch it. It's about 4 minutes. There were a few juicy tidbits of information here, including some screen grabs, which I will be cycling through on screen while I talk about it, of potential new bosses in Path of Exile 2, and some of them are just eldritch and horrifying. There's these creatures which I can't even begin to describe that Mark Roberts says, Hey

Sometimes we need to create a boss encounter for the story, and the iron count plays over the voiceover while he's talking about this. Clearly, that's the act one boss. They needed that boss to be designed specifically for the story. And then he says, And in other cases, and in the wildest cases, we just tell the artists and the designers to go wild and make whatever they think is cool. And then it just cycles through all these pictures that you're seeing on screen now, these wild abominations that we have not yet seen in-game, and we will be fighting in Path of Exile 2. Let me know in the comments below, do you have any ideas on what these creatures might be? Do you think there's an act boss littered in there, or do you think they're one of the over 100 other bosses that we will be fighting in the game? Regardless, they look awesome, and Mark Roberts, after that, reiterated that there are over 100 bosses in Path of Exile 2, with many more on the way, and none

of them reuse assets from their Library. Each boss is unique. They sit down from square one and they design it, art, abilities, and all, and they really want to stress that since you have to design these bosses to be killed from 100% to 0% because you can't portal out, you can't log out without restarting the flight from 100% Health. You can't cheese these fights. That they have to be measurable, they have to be predictable, you have to be able to outskill bosses. Okay, that's awesome. I cannot wait to fight these because a lot of complaints that people have about pe1 bosses are that they're cheap or something, right? And that they're designed with six portals in mind. Well, with of Exile 2, that's not the case. They are designing this with a 100 to zero attempt in mind, and they are trying to be very meaningful and mindful with all the abilities that they're giving said bosses, and that's exciting. And it's also exciting that every boss is unique and

there are so many more on the way. 100 plus is just the baseline. With every league, they're going to be adding new bosses. And keep this in mind, as Jonathan said in the interview we talked about before, we haven't seen any endgame bosses yet. What are they even going to look like? They're stressing this already that you think I'm a hype Lord. GGG are the master hype Lords because they're hyping up the endgame bosses after showcasing all these wild encounters as just campaign encounters. What we're going to see that's comparable to the Shaper or the Maven or Cirrus in P2, I cannot even begin to imagine. All right, so basically, that was all the new bits of information directly from Grinding Gear Games and their press presentations at Gamescom. But I have some community testimonials from people who were at Gamescom and messaged me about their experiences at the demo and some stuff from Reddit that I'd like to go over with all of you today. There's

some juicy stuff about the passive skill tree here, and at the end of the video, I'm going to let you all know when I think we're going to get the next bit of pb2 information, so make sure you stay tuned until the end. The first one right now is from Ero Aris. He says, Hey, try. I had the opportunity to play P2 at Gamescom today, and I took a close look at the passive tree, and because it might interest you, I tried to compile a list about changes I noticed. Keep in mind we weren't allowed to take any pictures, so this will all be from my memory, and a dev told me the passive tree balance isn't done yet, so these are my general observations. And before we get into the observations, just a note, yes, any pictures you're seeing of the passive skill tree are not final, and all these changes I'm about to talk about are not final, and pictures of the tree you're not supposed to share when I played it in LA the first time and the second time.

they explicitly said don't zoom out on the tree. We're not done with it yet. Please just stay in the designated areas. Essentially, don't go sharing all this information because a lot of it is going to change. So, with that being said, we already have the first Closed Beta test finished as of 8/22. We're about to get into another closed beta test surely very soon, and Early Access is upcoming on the 15th of November. So, let's take a look at what the tree looks like presently. So, most of the passes give you the same stats you get from gear, even on notables. Every notable I saw gave things like 30% increased area of effect. Next, the tree is very interwoven, which makes for way smoother pathing. And finally, there were Jewel sockets on the tree, but less, and I didn't see any Big Jewel sockets. Okay, interesting stuff. We'll go through all the changes and then we'll react at the end. Next, keystones that changed. Whispers of Doom is a keystone now in the top.

right of the tree. It had a second line that gives curses 40% increased curse delay. Pain Attunement now gives more crit damage on low life and less crit damage if you're not on low life, and it is in the top right of the tree. Necromantic Agus Keystone changed to work with amulets and has a new name. Mind over matter now makes all damage taken by Mana before life but doubles all Mana costs. But I saw life tap is still available. This seems insane. And finally, ancestral bonds effect was changed completely, but I unfortunately don't remember what I was changed to. And then keystones that I don't think changed but are present: Zealot oath, Avatar of fire, iron reflexes, ghost Reaver, chaos inoculation, conduit, Eternal Youth, and glancing blows. That is all from AO arus. Many thanks to you. It's interesting to hear about the general design of the passive skill tree, that many of the passives are giving you the same stats that you're seeing on gear, and a lot of the Nobles are just giving

you like 30% increased no flat additions, lots of percentage increases to general effects there, and then the design of the tree itself in terms of how it's weaving together and how it's not uniform in the slightest. If you've seen early pictures of the passive skill tree before, you see that it's asymmetrical, nothing matches, everything is wild, there's all these different shapes and designs, very reminiscent of the atlas passive skill tree from Path of Exile 1, and I really love that they're embracing this design. And then Jewel sockets being present, yes, we know Jewels will be in Path of Exile 2, but I don't think we've seen any examples of what kind of balance they're going for on Jewels. We know that cluster Jewels are probably not going to be in the game during Early Access, but they might come later, so we'll have to see more on those when they come. Next up, another Community testimonial from someone on Reddit who was not invested into all the pe2.

teasers so they're very new and they know that they're not aware of all the new info coming out. So, this is what they had to say. I'm not as invested into following all pe2 teasers as some of you guys here are, so most of this is probably not new info. I also have a lot of hours in pee1, so there might be some bias there. I also didn't play too long. It's hard to time after the fact, but I only did one character and left. I think it was 20 minutes. I found out afterwards that some people just waited out the timer and made a new character, but I didn't know you could do that. What they played, I only played the mercenary, which started around level 15, I think. Might be a bit off on this one. I only managed to get to one boss, some dude with a hammer, I think. I almost got to a second boss, but then clicked resurrect in town accidentally instead of a resurrect at checkpoint, and my timer ran out. I didn't

die to the boss. All my DS were getting surrounded by mobs, which my life FL couldn't deal with for clear. I mostly used the fire ignite bolt incendiary. That one just felt better than the other bolts, even against fire resist mobs. I also threw grenades sometimes, but more on that later. For single target, I used some machine gun skill that breaks the enemy armor, and then when the armor was broken, I used some piercing bolt, which synergizes with broken armor. This seemed to do by far the most damage in the limited testing I managed to do. What I liked: WD movement feels good, takes a bit to get used to flasking, but utility flask spam is gone anyway, so it's fine. Game looks amazing, boss mechanics actually feel learnable and not dodging is punishing. I was actually scared I'd run out of life flks on the boss. I did. The interface for choosing the skill or a gem you get when you get one of those gemstones seems pretty nice. New socket system is definitely an improvement. The play style of dragging wobs behind you.

and dealing damage behind you in the camp still exists. If you're going semi-fast, it's not like all the demos trailer show where you meet a pack of mobs and then kite them back from where you came from. It didn't feel like I need to do stuff like switching to ice skills because I met some fire-resistant mobs. It did. I didn't get to test too much of this, though. I feel like this is a slightly unpopular opinion, but I kind of like the combo skills, and game pausing when you allocate passives is nice. What they didn't like might be PE one bias, but white mobs felt way too tanky at the boss fight. I did just end up kiting his ads in circles and focusing on the boss instead. Grenades felt really hard to use. It might be a matter of learning, but I think of it like using Frost bomb for clear, but there's a minimum range away from you you have to place it, and it doesn't always one-shot mobs. This might still be a work in progress too, but the

skill tree. From what he saw, he didn't do full exploration. He had limited time, felt kind of boring. Most of the stuff I could take were things like minuscule amounts of armor, evasion, projectile speed, and some ailment threshold stuff. Resurrect in town is still there. Dang misclick. I felt my gear was pretty crap, but I think in the 20 minutes, I found literally zero magic or rare items I could equip. Everything had some int requirement that this class didn't have. The only currency items I found were wisdom Scrolls and gold, if you count that. And finally, small fun fact about vendors that everyone probably knows already. I didn't know this. There's no separate purchase/sale items menus anymore. It's both in one menu now, which makes way more sense. All right, a lot to unpack there. This is very interesting coming from a PE1 vet who hasn't been invested in the PE2 news. It's interesting to hear that they loved WD, they liked the socket system, obviously they enjoyed the bosses and thought that.

the game looked incredible, and they liked the ability that they could still group up a ton of mobs and kill them like in pe1. It's not how it's presented in all the demos of pee2, in the trailers that grinding gear games is showing. They also like combo skills. I do too, and they Shout Out game pausing being great, which is an amazing feature, and I will reiterate that 'cause some people actually didn't know, and I mentioned it in my last video. You can pause path of Exile too. You can press pause at any time, and the entire game freezes for you. Incredible for dads, incredible for people in general who just need to stop and take a moment to chill. Now, what he didn't like was very interesting: the grenades feeling hard to use. That makes sense. Those sound like they're kind of a skill-based thing, especially because you can detonate them too prematurely. So, that's probably going to take some time to practice, and if you only have 20 minutes, that's probably going to occur.

the other big part is the gear being crap, and that's because in Path of Exile, it drops whatever gear, okay? It's not tailored to your specific class, so you could get gear that you literally cannot equip, especially if you're starting at level 15 and you weren't able to build up organically, and you don't have any items or points on the passive skill tree that are tailored to the kind of gear that you keep finding, like the int-based gear. It's not something like Diablo 4 that has tailored drops for your class, so that is a problem that grinding your games, and the players will have to balance a loot-based ARPG where not everything is cleanly laid out for you as you progress. You're going to have to seek it out, find it, go through a bunch of stuff, and find what works for you. I'll also just quickly shout out Lee. He played Path of Exile 2 at Gamescom, and he released a bunch of new footage, so if you would like to look

through that here there is going to be a link to his YouTube channel in the description below. If you'd like to see new pe2 gameplay, I know everybody is desperate to see new gameplay. In addition to that, I uploaded the full press kit gameplay from Gamescom to my second Channel, Talk of Try Extras, with no commentary. So, it's the full sound effects; it sounds amazing. And unlike other versions, it's not desynced. Other people had desync copies of it for some reason; mine isn't. So, if you want to check that out, go to Talk of Try Extras. It's sitting there waiting just for you. And then finally, just for fun, we had this tier list from someone who played all the classes at Gamescom, tight ad2 47. They played the mercenary, the monk, the Sorceress, the witch, and the warrior. I guess the huntress and the Druid aren't available presently, so I was wrong on that. Apologies, everybody. So, they rated the mercenary as an A tier, the monk as S tier, the Sorceress as D tier. That's bad.

witch a tier, and then the warrior is B tier, so this is kind of in line with what I thought, honestly. After playing some of the classes myself, the monk is definitely super strong, quite mobile, and you need to be mobile in this game. Now, the Sorceress, yes, seems incredibly squishy, and if you don't get the right skill combos going on, you're going to feel really bad. Now, the mercenary, I haven't played before, but it sounds like a lot of people are really enjoying the play style of the Merc with all the different types of ammunition available. The witch is super strong with the minions blasting down mobs and mobs being diverted from you to the minions themselves. And then the warrior, very interesting line right here from this person, B tier. If you were to compare current Warrior to 2023 Warrior, then it's SSS tier. It's a very big improvement to last year's iteration. Completely agree from watching when I played the warrior in March of this year. It felt really bad. Everything that I

have seen thus far about the warrior has changed that opinion. All the gameplay footage, all the testimonials, all the feedback that I've seen has completely flip-flopped my thoughts on the warrior, and I cannot wait to play it once more. Okay, and that's going to wrap up most of the news, but when are we going to get the next Path of Exile 2 information? Well, one Ziggy D is still sitting on some more interviews that he had when he was out in New Zealand interviewing Grinding Gear Games, especially about the campaign and changes that they've made to the campaign to make it feel even better while playing through it. That did not come out during Gamescom, so there should be another interview dropping any moment now from Ziggy. I'll be watching out for that, and I'll probably do a TL;DW on my channel after I've given it a few days to go through YouTube, and for the people who want to watch the full thing to watch it then. Grinding Gear Games is also going to be at PAX West next week.

so hopefully there's some more new information there about ascendancies and game other classes. Early Access and the like. If there's not, well then everyone, we have about three, three months until we get to play Path of Exile 2 on our own computers. They're going to have to release a lot, lot of information about it, including endgame, ascendancies, crafting, how to actually access Early Access and the like. And if they don't, well then we will be going in blind and that will be exciting all the same. Thank you so much for watching this video, everyone. Make sure to hit the like button and to subscribe to Talk of Try for more POE1 and POE2 content in the future. I will see you in the next one. T'laura, my fellow exiles.

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