I’m not that into the original Path of Exile, but playing so much of the sequel has exposed me to plenty of people who do. A huge topic of discussion around the current league is about loot and the lack of it.
Many players are unhappy with the majority of the loot coming from chests rather than monsters, and the inability to scale the difficulty up for more rewards. Basically, loot isn’t very exciting, especially when you roughly know what you’re going to get before you even finish an activity.
Developer Grinding Gear Games is already addressing some of the immediate issues in upcoming patches, but it’s also planning on a much bigger rework in its next major update. Speaking to PoE streamer Zizaran in a recent interview, Christopher “Octavian” Laferriere said to expect “an extreme shakeup of the endgame” in patch 3.30.
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“3.30 will have a huge emphasis on endgame shakeup,” Laferriere continued. “We plan to get to as many existing league mechanics as possible and give them all something new, something interesting, something different from before, because one of the problems that we see is that the endgame has just gotten stale.”
PoE has been around for over a decade and has accumulated a lot of unique league mechanics over the years. This is why people will tell you they’re still a beginner with only 1,000 hours clocked. Balance tweaks aren’t enough to spark new creative ways to engage with it all, so one of the focuses of 3.30 will be allowing different league mechanics to interact with each other more often. It will also include a reevaluation of what items should even be tied to a specific mechanic rather than something you can find anywhere. The idea is to make random loot drops more spontaneous and less deterministic—something Path of Exile 2 does really well.
Laferriere told Zizaran later in the interview that the scope for 3.30 will be so big that smaller additions—in this case, new transfigured skill gems—might be limited. The update won’t be out for another four months, but it already sounds like it’s going to be a significant moment, as POE borrows ideas that have gone over well in the sequel and sees how they fare.