Exciting New Information Revealed in Latest Tavern Talk Interview

The latest Tavern Talk Podcast, hosted by GhazzyTV and DarthMicrotransaction, joined by guests Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts from Grinding Gear Games, featured discussions about the upcoming Return of the Ancients patch and its associated league, The Runes of Aldur. The developers shared insights into development philosophy, discussed their plans between 0.5 and the 1.0 launch, and shared some exciting new information exclusively. If you have yet to watch the interview, you can find it in full here!

Design and Development Discussions

A lot of the podcast centered around the decisions the developers are making every time they look at Path of Exile, and many of the responses revealed critical insights into those decisions. Here are a couple of the interesting outcomes of those discussions.

Playing Bad Builds can reveal Big Problems

Jonathon described a recent experience where he played a deliberately “bad” build, focusing on a defensive passive tree and following along with recommended supports. This allowed him to discover some critical issues with core systems and specific encounters that he had otherwise never would have discovered.

An example is the absolute mess of “crap all over the screen” that can occur when Rare monsters have a lot of different modifiers. For most “good” builds, you simply out-defense or instantly kill monsters like that, but a player with a less optimal build, particularly melee, will find themselves oppressively restricted by having no obvious way or window to deal damage to the monsters.

Another example is a Boss fight in the Interludes within the Blood Wood. Here, players encounter a version of The Devourer boss, and will fighting it with a low damage build he noticed that the bosses various abilities were not even triggering! He was shocked that he hadn’t realized this before, and that it had remained a problem for as long as it had.

This also revealed some other deep-rooted issues, such as:

• Recommended Support Gems being misleading or, in some cases, straight up detrimental to builds
• Defensive Scaling being poorly communicated to the player, with no audio-visual feedback for things like Energy Shield breaking
• Monster density late in the campaign was being scaled incorrectly, leading to players feeling swarmed
• Boss “Poise”, a system which determines how hard it is to crowd control a monster, was scaling incorrectly in maps

It was a great relief for many players to hear passionate developers discussing the problems that many average players run into that more experienced players may not ever encounter.

The Return of the Ancients Update

Another topic with a lot of discussion was the upcoming Return of the Ancients Update. The developers revealed a ton of information about how they design leagues, their hopes and fears for the upcoming launch, the goals behind many of the new systems and how they expect them to impact new players, and much much more!

The New Endgame

When asked about the Fortress and the intentions behind that design, the developers spoke at length about how they expect players will engage with the new Endgame content. The Fortress is expected to be the first port of call that players will head to, as the initial questline leads them in that direction, and is structured to allow players to learn about different endgame mechanics while earning some Atlas Passive points. For more experienced players, the Fortress will be able to be completed very quickly by “Boss Rushing”, grinding through the map tiers quickly before rapidly finishing the Fortress.

This design holds true for all the other League Mechanic hubs, with experienced players being able to skip a lot of the maps or content that provide League Tree Passive Points by engaging with the pinnacle content multiple times to rapidly complete the various endgame quests before heading out into the Infinite Atlas.

Atlas Masters and the Atlas Passive Tree

The new Atlas Passive Tree, combined with the Atlas Masters system, allows GGG to provide players with a wealth of impactful choices that can be quickly changed on the fly, giving players more agency over the type of rewards they want or the type of content they want to engage with. The new system also lets them add much more impactful modifiers to these systems.

GGG’s Biggest Content Update Yet, and the Secrets Hidden Within

When asked how the development cycle went for 0.5 and whether they were nervous or excited about certain things, Mark and Jonathan both spoke about the absolutely crazy scale of the update and how it impacted them and the company. Many things they had hoped to include had to be left on the cutting-room floor to ensure that the various endgame systems were as well integrated as possible.

They also spoke to the sheer volume of deliberately hidden or unrevealed secrets scattered throughout the update, and how they decide what to tease and what not to tease. An example given during the interview was the inclusion of Berek’s Rings, a classic Path of Exile 1 set of Unique Items, and whether players will likely wonder if there is a special interaction in Path of Exile 2 for them. Apparently there is!

The Biggest Problems and What Comes Next?

The final topic discussed was what their goals are for development after the release of Return of the Ancients. They were very forthcoming about where they think the biggest issues in PoE2 are, and what they will be doing to address them.

Unique Items, and Why Are They Bad?

A lengthy discussion was held about the state of Unique Items in the game. GGG has been teasing some really transformative Uniques, but there are some serious gaps in the drop pool, and many Uniques are simply not up to the standard that GGG has set for themselves. They went into great depth on how Unique design has evolved in POE2, how it differs from POE1, and what they will do moving forward to address these problems.

Most importantly for many, they revealed they have heard the community regarding Level 20 Skills on Unique items, the lack of a 5th Support Gem socket, and the ability to scale builds utilizing Uniques. They plan to fix this, somehow, as soon as possible. Ideally, this will happen before 0.5 launches, but if not, then very shortly after.

What are the Plans between Now and Launch?

This particular part of the conversation was very revealing. Jonathon and Mark both explained that almost all of the focus over the coming months will be related to player power and core system design. There will be multiple economy resets functioning as mini-league updates with small-scale content additions and big changes to core systems and player balance. Here’s a list of specific things they touched on you can expect to see changes to in these updates:

• Skill Balance, and adding new Skills for existing weapon sets that have poor gameplay experiences.
• Passive Tree updates to improve support for underperforming systems
• The Final Ascendancy Classes for existing Classes in the game
• Addressing issues that may arise from the Endgame Changes in 0.5
• Adding many new Unique items, particular in the Level 30-60 range, and revisiting old Uniques
• Love for Damage over Time builds, and Chaos Damage over Time/Chaos Hit builds specifically

Overall, Mark and Jonathon seemed to have a great time, and once again showed the community how passionate and grounded they are as the lead developers at Grinding Gear Games. DarthMicrotransaction and GhazzyTV did a fantastic job guiding the conversation and allowing the developers to provide context and clarification.

There were laughs, there were teasers, there were even live development decisions! A big congratulations to the hosts, and a massive thank-you to Mark and Jonathan for once again showing up and giving us all such excellent insight into this game we are all so passionate about.