Path of Exile 2 0.2.0e patch notes: Massive Minion buffs, monster speed reduction, and big QoL changes

The upcoming patch, 0.2.0e, is absolutely massive for Path of Exile 2 for various reasons. It addresses nearly all the big concerns raised by the community against Dawn of The Hunt, the de-facto Early Access league (sans loot distribution). Notably, the developers are finally addressing the overtuned chase potential some monsters have. This patch also introduces a Minion revival timer buffer change that makes your minion army have much more consistent uptime.

Path of Exile 2 patch 0.2.0e is going live on April 10 at 3pm PDT, and while the full patch notes are not live yet, the developers have outlined everything major about it already.

Compiled below are all the changes known so far, which should act as early patch notes for 0.2.0e; but a few more things can be introduced in the full patch notes here and there later.

All known changes coming in Path of Exile 2 patch 0.2.0e (April 10, 2025, PDT)

Mapping

Rare monsters will show up on minimap at all times. In other words, these targets will be visible immediately after you load into the map.

A more specific change is that the Delirium fog will last 2.5x longer, which makes farming the Distilled Emotions and thereby Amulet Anointment a much easier goal.

Monster Speed Changes

Developer Note: Many players have been reported being overwhelmed by monsters. The cause of this is a variety of factors and we are addressing them on a case by case basis. We have listed monster changes act by act below, but we also made the following changes more generally.

Many human monsters including the Cultists in Freythorn, the Faridun and the Tribal Humans in Act Three have behaviour where they can interrupt their melee attacks if the player moves too far out of range during the attack, especially for attacks that have multiple hits like a swipe left into swipe right. These interrupt events have been primarily removed especially on things that were attacking very fast as it caused the monsters to be relentlessly able to pursue and attack you giving you no time to engage or use skills between their attacks.
The Haste Aura monster modifier no longer appears on monsters that are already fast.

Act 1

Werewolf Prowlers and Tendril Prowlers now will enter a walking stance (as opposed to running) after performing a melee action, they will only begin running again if you get a certain distance away from them. This behaviour has been applied to many faster monsters.
Hungering Stalkers now have 12% less Life and Damage, they were already relatively weak but we have lowered it a bit further to account for their high movement speed and attack speed. They are intended to engage and attack quickly, but be weak and die fast.
Reduced the number of Bloom Serpents in The Red Vale.
Halved the number of Venomous Crabs in the Hunting Grounds.
The Cultists in Freythorn no longer have interrupt events on their attacks as described above.
The Cultists in Freythorn wielding Axes and Maces in Freythorn now walk after performing a Melee Action, only running again once you exit a certain distance.
Blood Cretins on death Blood Pools have had their duration decreased from 6 seconds to 4 seconds, and fixed the area of effect to match the visual more closely.
Reduced the overall density of more challenging monsters in Ogham Manor.

Act 2

The Boulder Ants in Titan Valley have been replaced by Risen Maraketh, as the area had too many monsters that had irritating movement.
The Faridun have all been modified to remove the interrupt events on their attacks as described above..

Act 3

Diretusk Boar and Antlion Charger's are now more likely to push you to the side instead of pushing you along with them when they charge you.
The Lost City monster pack composition has been adjusted to result in less ranged monsters
Massively adjusted the Azak Bog, firstly by the aforementioned changes to interrupt events, but also changed the monster composition of the area to have less Ranged and Elite monsters.
Fixed an issue where the Slitherspitter's poison spray in Venom Crypts was dealing Chaos Damage instead of Physical Damage unintentionally.

Developer Note: We have also identified another issue that affects some areas in which potential monster spawn locations have inconsistent density in different rooms. This leads to situations where some rooms are much denser with monsters than others in an unintended way. We have a fix for this problem but it did not make it into this patch, and will be deployed in a later patch.

These are not the only changes that we will be making to monsters. Further changes will come in later updates. Some changes we didn't get time to make today, and others require new animations that will take a little longer.

Boss Changes

Viper Napuatzi is one of the more challenging bosses for players, so we made the following change.

Lowered the amount and size of Chaos Rains (the purple ones) in the Viper Napuatzi fight, and cleaned up the visual left afterwards faster to make the following drop locations more obvious.

Uxmal had various quirks that made him somewhat annoying to fight. We have made a few changes.

Reduced the number of times Uxmal changes locations through the fight.
Uxmal can no longer recharge Energy Shield while in the air.
Uxmal uses his Flame Breath less often.

Read More: Uxmal, the Beastlord boss guide in Path of Exile 2

Xyclucian had some issues with visibility of his effects. The arena of Xyclucian has had its ground foliage removed in order to make his effects more visible.

Also Read: Path of Exile 2 Xyclucian the Chimera boss guide

Player and class balance changes

All classes are getting some love, directly or not (Image via GGG)

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 eight seconds from two 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 eight seconds from five 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 one second from two seconds, but the radius has been decreased slightly.

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 six seconds, 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 three 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

Other player changes

Rally support is no longer restricted to Strikes or Slams, and can now support any Melee Attack you use yourself.
Glory (Used by Hammer of the Gods and Spear of Solaris) is now no longer consumed if you are interrupted while using the skill.

CI, ES, and Bleed interaction

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.

Fixed a bug where Blood Boils from the Ritualist ascendancy didn't propagate if the monster exploded on death, such as when using Herald of Blood.

Player Minion Changes

The Minion army have a stricter conscription clause now (Image via GGG)

Path of Exile 2 patch 0.2.0e changes the way minion revive timers work.

When your first minion dies, it sets the revive timer to 7.5 seconds as before, but each successive minion that dies increases it by less and less (still capped to a max of 7.5 seconds).

This should heavily mitigate the situation where most of your minions are dead, but the revive timer keeps resetting to 7.5 seconds over and over.

Furthermore, you can now unbind Spectres (Witch skill) and tamed Beasts (Huntress skill):

Disenchanting a Bind Spectre or Tame Beast gem will unbind them, allowing you to use them again.
Tamed beasts can now fit through gaps of the same size that the player can.

Check out: Best Spectres to bind in Path of Exile 2 Dawn of The Hunt (0.2.0)

Crafting Changes

Wands and Staves can now have sockets.
Caster weapons can now use the following runes: Desert, Glacial, Storm, Iron, Body, Mind, Rebirth, Inspiration, Stone and Vision runes all now work on Wands and Staves, with their own set of modifiers. (Note that it's not confirmed whether Sceptres are also receiving sockets).
New +Attribute Runes are coming.
Renly's abandoned shop in the Burning Village now also has a Blank rune which Renly can forge into any elemental rune of your choosing in case you didn't find any up to that point.
12 Artificers Orb's now drop at fixed locations through the campaign in addition to the random drops and salvageable ones.

Performance Improvements

The ground foliage in many areas has had an optimisation pass to improve performance.

Future changes coming in a later Path of Exile 2 patch next week

The following changes have also been considered for overall game improvement in the coming days. They are not making the cut for Path of Exile 2 patch 0.2.0e, but they will be shipped in patch 0.2.0f sometime after April 14, 2025.

Charm Changes

Developer Note: Charms are a system that we never adequately expanded on, and have had several problems that we will finally be addressing. Overall we want charms to be more useful, and for you to be more easily able to use more of them.

First, the changes to charm slots

Charm slots on belts are now granted by implicit mods that are added to belts depending on the level of the area that dropped them. The number of slots is random up to a cap depending on how high level the belt is. You can use a Divine Orb to reroll the number of slots.
Belts have 1 charm slot until level 32, up to 2 until level 64 and up to 3 from level 65 and onwards.
Unique Belts can always have up to 3 charm slots.
For now, Unique Belts with mods that increase the number of charms will still be capped to 3, later on we will remove the cap.

Then changes to the charms themselves.

Several charms were not protecting you from the hit that activated them, these cases have been fixed to work properly.
We have also done a pass on Charm mods to make them more powerful and rewarding.

Stash Tab Affinities

Stash Tab Affinities for the following categories of items

Socketables
Fragments [Which includes Tablets and Trial Keys]
Breach
Expedition
Ritual

Charms can go in the Flask stash tab or any tab with the Flask affinity.

Atlas Bookmarks

Right clicking a node will allow you create a bookmark by picking an icon and optionally adding a label you can type in.
You can have up to 16 bookmarks at a time.
They will appear as icons around the outside of the screen with a direction allowing you to scroll to them easily, or you can click on them to instantly take you there
You can also view a list of bookmarks under the legend and click them to go there.

That's it for the known changes in Path of Exile 2 patch 0.2.0e. We will update this article accordingly if more changes are added in the full patch notes. Check out our other guides on Path of Exile 2 Dawn of The Hunt:

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 Sambit Pal