Path of Exile 2's recent Steam Reviews have dropped to "Mixed"

With its Dawn of The Hunt update, Path of Exile 2 has brought back 40% of its peak concurrent playerbase on Steam. Yet, good news won't be awaiting GGG when they come back to work after the weekend — the game's recent reviews have dropped to a "Mixed" rating on Steam. For someone tuned into the streaming scene and socials of the PoE community, this will probably not come as a surprise.

Path of Exile 2's Dawn of The Hunt update makes a lot of effort to add fresh content for the first big megapatch, but the reception on its balance has not been very favorable.

What are reviewers complaining about in Path of Exile 2's latest patch?

Path of Exile 2's recent ratings are floundering (Image via Steam)

Path of Exile 2's new patch nerfed a great deal of Skills and synergies, and this is not just the meta ones from the last patch. The developers meant to make the combat deadlier by various means, including cutting down on base player stats on the soft-defense end.

However, with how the performance of numerous Skills was curbed, a vast majority of builds feel very underwhelming. The issue is exacerbated in the first half of the campaign, where it's easy to run into a bind when one can no longer progress past a certain difficulty ramp. Being very early into the League, there's no way to find the resources to reorient your build.

The developers put a good amount of effort into refurbishing the Endgame — previously a big talking point in patch 0.1.0. However, if the leveling throughout the campaign is a slog before one gets to said Endgame, those efforts might not bear enough fruit.

The developers have a very specific vision of game balance that's hard to pull off, and it seems that Path of Exile 2 Early Access is stepping into its bigger growing woes. The game balance state sapping the title's enjoyment is not something players are very keen on, which explains the trail of negative reviews after the Dawn of The Hunt update.

It also doesn't help that the game had several crashes and technical issues for the day-one patch for Dawn of The Hunt. If there's some light at the end of the tunnel, most of the technical issues are now being patched out, and the developers have caved to demands of monster rescaling, starting with the 0.2.0 hotfix 6.

About the author

Sambit Pal is an esports Journalist on Gaming and MMO at Sportskeeda. He has Master's degree in English Literature. In his spare time, he is an amateur sleuth trying to trace the Riven Mafia in Warframe, and a recovering Bethesda modding addict. He also secretly enjoys action Roguelites, a severe lack of gitting gud notwithstanding.

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Edited by Shraman Mitra