Path of Exile 2 Confirms Several Class Buffs in Upcoming Update

Since launching the big 0.2.0 update for Path of Exile 2, Grinding Gear Games has been hard at work addressing player feedback. Yesterday, they announced a list of planned changes to improve area clear time, particularly in Act 3. Today, the Path of Exile 2 team has shared several player balance changes heard for the game with this week’s update. The Dawn of the Hunt update included quite a few nerfs, so now the developers are turning their attention to buffs. Several specific classes will get major balance changes, along with a few more fixes to improve overall balance in Path of Exile 2.

The class with the longest list of upcoming buffs is the Sorceress, who has been heavily impacted by nerfs in the past. In particular, certain spell radiuses and the freeze buildup fr Ice Nova have been increased. The brand-new Huntress class is also get some fixes to make her more effective, including more effective parries along with better AoE for Rapid Assault. Along with these two classes, the Warrior and Ranger can expect to see some class-specific buffs in the upcoming Path of Exile 2 patch as well.

Today’s post from Grinding Gear Games primarily focuses on these upcoming class buffs, but there are a few other balance fixes in the works for this week’s update, as well. There will be some changes to crafting, finding rare items, monster speeds, and more. This, along with the previously outlined changes to area clear rates for Act 3, should make a pretty big difference to the feel of Path of Exile 2 gameplay once they arrive this week. The changes “will be deployed over the next few days” with more information coming tomorrow.

Planned Player Balance Changes for Upcoming Path of Exile 2 Update

We’ll likely get the full patch notes once the Path of Exile 2 update arrives this week. However, the preview for what Grinding Gear Games has worked on and will be implementing over the next few days gives a pretty detailed overview. So, here’s what you can expect to see to hopefully improve balance for players in Path of Exile 2 as updates arrive this week, as shared in the Path of Exile 2 forum post from Grinding Gear Games.

RELATED: Path of Exile 2 Previews First Major Dawn of the Hunt Changes After Backlash

Sorceress Specific Changes

• Arc now does a lightning explosion when it hits a shocked enemy but can no longer shock. It does not consume the shock.
• Eye of Winter now gains bonus elemental damage when passing through other elemental orbs like Solar Orb, Orb of Storms or Frost Bomb.
• Incinerate’s exposure duration has been increased to 8 seconds from 2 seconds.
• Mana Tempest can now be used with all spells, and has been changed to cause empowered spells to split to additional targets instead of chaining or forking.
• Frostbolt explosion radius has been increased by 50%.
• Ice Nova’s freeze buildup has been increased significantly.
• Frost Bomb exposure duration has been increased to 8 seconds from 5 seconds.
• Mana remnants has been changed to work with other elemental ailments than just shock.
• We are lowering the delay for Ignites spreading from sources such as the Wildfire support to 1 second from 2 seconds, but the radius has been decreased slightly.

Bleed/Chaos Innoculation

• Energy Shield no longer prevents bleeding from being applied.
• Chaos Innoculation now prevents bleeding.
• The passive clusters that grant you additional stun threshold based on your maximum energy shield now also increase your ailment threshold so you will no longer be ignited/chilled/frozen/shocked as often while using CI if you take these passives.

Huntress Specific Changes

• Parried enemies can no longer evade your attacks.
• The spear stuck in enemies by Rapid Assault now always bleeds on hit when you detonate it, the AoE has been increased by 20% and the detonate does 67% more damage.
• Spearfield’s spear duration has been increased to 10 seconds from 6 and had it’s damage growth increased, dealing 30% more damage by level 20.
• Herald of Blood no longer deletes the corpses of Rares or Uniques, allowing you to use Ritual Sacrifice on the rares.

Warrior Specific Changes

• Temper Weapon on Smith of Kitava now adds 3 empowerments per strike of your weapon, and is 25% faster. The damage might need to come down a little.
• Shield Wall is now detonatable with Warcries.
• Armour break being applied to players by monsters no longer has the 20% extra physical damage modifier that was intended to only be a buff to players, and we have also reduced its duration to 4 seconds from 12. In addition, there was a bug where partial armour breaks were never removed on the player.

Ranger Specific Changes

• Stormcaller arrow now proliferates shocks to nearby enemies in a small radius and has had its AoE radius increased by 50%.
• Lightning Rod damage has been increased by 30%, and their duration has been increased to 20 seconds.
• Lightning Arrow has had the radius at which it arcs to targets increased by 50%.
• Tornado Shots maximum duration has been increased to 15 seconds

New Support Gem

• New support gem called Inhibitor that prevents charges being consumed but increases the damage of the supported skill by 4% for each type of charge you have.

Delirium Changes

• Delirium encounters now last approximately 2.5x longer.

Crafting

• Added several Artificers Orbs to fixed locations throughout the campaign allowing you to craft with them more often.
• Added runes for attributes allowing you to fix early game requirement issues.
• Updating all runes to also apply to Wands and Staves. This work will require adding specific mods for these items. We are unsure if Soul Cores and Talismans will be able to be added at the same time, but it is our intention to attempt to make this change.

Finding Rares in Endgame

• During endgame a common issue is missing a Rare in the corner of the map that you didn’t happen to explore. In order to mitigate this issue, we have changed rares to show up on the minimap at all times.

Matlan Waterways

• We have made a change to Matlan Waterways to merge some sections of water together, reducing the average number of levers that you will encounter while playing it by 6 levers.

Monster Speed

• One of the issues that is often reported is getting swarmed by monsters. We are currently doing a pass to investigate this issue and can probably talk about specific changes tomorrow, but the changes are likely to be targeted at specific monsters that are too difficult, especially in zones that have a lot of fast monsters.

In addition to the planned changes, Grinding Gear Games also notes that they are addressing a Ritual Exploit that has resulted in 301 accounts being banned through the end of the current league. The exploit has since been patched.