On my recent trip to the Grinding Gear Games studio I had a chance to interview Mark and Jonathan, game designers on Path of Exile 2 as well as play the game...
Default attack is an intended part of combat now. It’s free, auto-scales, and can have support gems.
If you use a skill while out of mana, you do nothing instead of doing a default attack
Monster health bars show if your attack missed
Monster skills aren’t divided between attacks and spells anymore because the distinction isn’t visually obvious. Mechanics that used to distinguish between the two don’t anymore, but have still changed in other ways.
Every change to help melee also caused redesigns of every boss and additions of new systems
In scourge, I built a character super invested into block as a primary defensive layer. That was a MASSIVE mistake, because one of the common scourge enemies, the angel, had a skill called omega beam, which did a MASSIVE amount of damage, and wasn’t an attack OR a spell. You have chance to block attacks and chance to block spells as your stats. So, that massive fuck off laser beam couldn’t be blocked and made my primary defensive layer pretty much useless. Super happy they’re going to be getting rid of the distinction.
Biggest points from this interview
In scourge, I built a character super invested into block as a primary defensive layer. That was a MASSIVE mistake, because one of the common scourge enemies, the angel, had a skill called omega beam, which did a MASSIVE amount of damage, and wasn’t an attack OR a spell. You have chance to block attacks and chance to block spells as your stats. So, that massive fuck off laser beam couldn’t be blocked and made my primary defensive layer pretty much useless. Super happy they’re going to be getting rid of the distinction.
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