‘Path Of Exile 2’ Just Unleashed Nerfs So Hard They Have Killed Characters

A large number of Path of Exile 2 players were unamused on Wednesday when Grinding Gear updated the game with a new patch. Among bug fixes and quality of life changes, they nerfed one type of build specifically. And not just nerfed, destroyed, and in the process, unless something changes, have actually killed or bricked a number of players’ active characters.

The nerf in question is to “Cast on X” skills, where those builds, especially a popular “Cast on Freeze” build has been obliterated, some parts reduced to a sliver of their old functionality. Some parts no longer function at all. And in turn, this means that many people’s characters are now functionally unplayable, especially in higher level content.

The main issue here is not only that this may have been an overreaction to a strong build, with echoes of an infamous early Diablo 4 patch, but that players have no real recourse due to how the skill point system works. Every time you backtrack on the vast skill tree, it costs anywhere from hundreds to thousands of gold per point. That means to totally change your build now costs an exorbitant amount of money that most players simply do not have. So it seems like the main option here is to…start a new character from scratch.

The proposed fix here is to let everyone do a full, free respec of skill points in order to try some other build without losing dozens of hours of playtime. Grinding Gear has not said anything about this yet, but no doubt they are hearing the reaction of players.

I’ve heard the rationale here is that this is technically an early access version of Path of Exile 2, so big changes and broken builds that need to be nerfed like this will be common. But that excuse only goes so far. This is still a game that is taking people’s money and time, and whether it has an early access badge or not, it still needs to respect player investment. And if builds are broken, which some of these were, there need to be systems in place to mitigate that level of destruction so players aren’t left with what are essentially dead characters, which is what’s happening now.

Diablo 4 has been criticized for being too casual and flexible with builds, but in cases like this, it makes it relatively easy to switch out your entire build from the skill setup and paragon perspective, which is not something Path of Exile 2 is doing here. Sure, there is something you can say about “committing” to a character’s path and build as being a harder core version of the ARPG concept, but when something like this happens, you can see how a system like that can be too rigid with no accounting for what this actually means for players in practice. Hopefully we hear something soon about what Grinding Gear will do to fix this.

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