PoE 2 Mechanics Guide

Visceral combat is at the core of Path of Exile 2's design, with a focus on something that most other ARPG's have struggled with: melee combat that feels good to play.

Abilities will have a feature that allows the character to retarget during their animation, unlocking a higher freedom of movement to be able to turn and change direction. This synergises well with skills that typically have longer wind-ups, providing room for correction to hit a skill that would have otherwise missed its target.

Many abilities will also have built-in movement that is triggered under certain conditions. For example the Hand of Chayula attack skill which dashes a short distance to the target before performing the attack.

Some skills will also allow character movement during the cast or attack animation. This includes many of the bow and crossbow attack abilities, but also includes spells such as Fireball and some melee attacks as well. When a character is able to move during an ability animation, they'll have a movement speed penalty.

You'll also be able to manually cancel an active ability animation by using the dodge roll which will be free to use with no cooldown. This will be important, especially in boss fights where dangerous boss abilities must be avoided and the use of powerful player abilities with long animation times will be crucial to success.

You'll need to find the time to use such abilities, but the option to cancel out of an animation to avoid immediate danger will elevate the feel of combat and keep combat fluid throughout the fight.

Another important change going from Path of Exile 1 to 2 is that the resource cost of using an ability is no longer spend up front upon activating the skill. Instead, the cost is spend across the full animation time from start to finish, so cancelling an ability mid-animation is significantly less punishing.

Accuracy rating is a stat which is used to determine the hit chance of an attack. Accuracy rating can be found on gear modifiers and on the passive skill tree, especially on the lower-right third of the tree. Spells do not interact with a character's accuracy rating in any way.

Accuracy is used in a formula to determine the chance to hit an attack. The calculation weighs the attacker's Accuracy Rating against the defender's Evasion Rating.

The chance to hit an attack can never be lower than 5% because chance to evade is capped at 95%. However, the chance to hit calculation can reach 100%, guaranteeing that the attack will not be evaded as long as it makes contact with the target.

The amount of evasion rating a monster has is based on their monster level and any relevant monster modifiers inherited from magic or rare monster status, such as 'Evasive' which increases their evasion rating by 100%.

The chance to hit calculation and thus the necessity of accuracy can be entirely bypassed by specific modifiers that may be present on the attacker or defender. The attacker can use the 'Always Hits' modifier which can be found on gear such as the Jade Club implicit shown below, or on the Resolute Technique keystone. 'Always Hits' guarantees that an attack will hit as long as it makes contact with the target, completely ignoring the attacker's accuracy rating and the defender's evasion rating.

Meanwhile, the defender may have a modifier such as 'Cannot Evade' which essentially has the same outcome but in reverse – any attacks which make contact with the defender will hit.

In Path of Exile 2, you'll need more accuracy rating to cap hit chance if you're attacking at range, such as using a bow or crossbow, or using a long-range melee slam attack. A less accuracy rating modifier will be imposed on the character based on their distance to the target. This penalty can be countered by using support gems such as Far Reach.

Actively blocking is the action of a character raising their shield in front of them to block incoming hits. By default, if a hit is blocked, all of the damage of that hit is prevented and any on-hit effects that the hit would have applied such as status ailments are also prevented.

Active block is primarily accessed via the Raise Shield ability which is gained from the implicit modifier on many strength-based shields. A character may also enter active block as part of other abilities such as Resonating Shield.

While a character's shield is raised, they will block all incoming projectiles and strikes from the front, but will block larger area of effect hits which come from above or below the character. These area of effect abilities will typically be telegraphed as unblockable. Any hits coming from the sides or behind the character will not be blocked.

A character will have a heavy movement speed penalty imposed on them while actively blocking and they will have an endurance bar associated with blocking. Blocked hits will deplete the bar and any missing endurance will restore over time.

If this endurance bar is fully depleted, the character will cease active block and be stunned for a lengthy period of time, leaving them vulnerable. Managing the endurance bar is crucial to avoid this dangerous downside.

Passive block which is gained as a stat from the passive skill tree or equipment such as shields will still fully function while a character is actively blocking, providing them the chance to be able to passively block incoming projectiles or strikes that hit them from the sides or the back while blocking all of those types of hits from the front.

Attributes are made up of strength(STR), dexterity(DEX) and intelligence(INT). Each piece of equipment and each skill gem that a character uses will have an attached requirement which includes attributes and a necessary character level – a character must meet these requirements to be able to equip the item or socket the skill gem.

Attributes in Path of Exile 2 also provide stats of their own which differ from those granted in Path of Exile 1.

Strength : +2 to maximum Life per 1 STR

Dexterity: +5 to Accuracy Rating per 1 DEX

Intelligence: +2 to maximum Mana per 1 INT

Attributes are at the core of character build archetypes and are strongly linked with class type based on the passive skill tree starting location. For example, a two-handed mace weapon requires a large amount of strength to equip – many melee and mace-centric passive tree nodes appear in the lower-left third of the passive skill tree and the classes that start in this location will typically have synergy with mechanics that relate to strength, such as life, melee and generic physical damage. In this regard, the passive skill tree has attribute alignments where you'll typically find mechanics associated to a specific attribute in its related third – the closer you move to where two attribute alignments would meet, the more you'll begin to find nodes that combine archetypal stats together. For example in the image below, where red(STR) meets blue(INT), you may find nodes which provide equal increases to armour and maximum energy shield.

Path of Exile 2 will introduce a new type of attribute requirement related to support gems. Each support gem that a character uses will add to any requirements they already have to provide a new total that much be met. For example, the image below shows the Added Cold Damage support gem which imposes +5 INT to a character's attribute requirements.

Each support gem used will impose +5 to an attribute based on the gem's colour. Red support gems add a strength requirement, green support gems add a dexterity requirement and blue support gems add an intelligence requirement.

Players will be able to easily solve attribute requirements in regards to gems and gear, especially during campaign levelling, using a new feature on the passive skill tree: selectable attribute nodes.

The travel nodes between skill tree clusters, also known as 'highway' nodes, will have a choice between +5 STR, +5 DEX or +5 INT to provide support in being able to easily swap and use new support gems as and when. You'll also be able to freely respec your choice on nodes you've already allocated.

Charges are counters that can be spent to empower abilities. The default standard charges are Endurance, Frenzy and Power, with each charge type being associated with an attribute.

Endurance charges are associated with strength and are typically spent to empower strength-related abilities such as Infernal Cry, which consumes all endurance charges to exert an additional attack per charge spent. Meanwhile, frenzy charges are associated with dexterity and can be spent to boost dexterity-related abilities such as Rain of Arrows, which fires additional arrows per frenzy charge consumed.

Power charges are associated with intelligence and can be spent to empower intelligence-related abilities. Falling Thunder is a melee attack skill that has a projectile component that's only unlocked by spending power charges. This ability is a great example of how powerful spending charges can be, massively boosting the potential damage of the attack.

Some abilities also allow the spending of charges to bypass a restriction, such as Raise Zombie which allows a character to raise a zombie minion without needing a corpse if a power charge is spent.

Importantly, endurance, frenzy and power charges do not provide any inherent stats in Path of Exile 2 like they do in Path of Exile 1. This makes the value of generating charges shift based on the abilities you can use in your build to spend them. Charges can be generated in different ways, including abilities like Lingering Illusion which is a persistent buff and a more passive way to provide charge generation during normal gameplay.

Another persistent buff is Magma Barrier which rewards good timing of actively blocking hits by granting an endurance charge if you block a hit within a short window of a character first raising their shield.

A critical strike is a hit which succeeds a critical hit check roll based on the attacker's critical strike chance. A hit which is a critical strike deals bonus critical damage by default.

The critical strike chance of a hit is determined by a number of factors – spells have a base critical strike chance shown on the gem itself while attacks have their critical strike chance derived from the weapon used for that attack, with the exception of unarmed attacks which also gain a base critical strike chance from the gem.

Base critical strike chance can also be improved by rarer modifiers which add directly to critical strike chance. The base chance is then scaled by modifiers which increase critical strike chance to provide a final total.

When a hit is a critical strike it deals bonus damage, referred to as critical damage bonus. The critical damage bonus system replaces the critical damage multiplier system going from Path of Exile 1 to Path of Exile 2. The base critical damage bonus is 100%, therefore a hit that is a critical strike will effectively deal 200% of base damage by default. Modifiers to critical damage bonus can directly improve the bonus damage of a critical strike. There are two types of scaling modifiers for critical damage bonus; Firstly the more common multipliers which scale the base critical damage bonus, and secondly the rarer additions which directly add to the base critical damage bonus prior to any multipliers being applied.

With the above items taken into account and no other modifiers, the character's critical damage bonus would first apply the addition modifier from the Corpse Smasher Holy Flail to bring the base critical damage bonus from 100% to 141%. The multiplier modifier from Tempest Paw Spiral Wraps is then applied, increasing the critical damage bonus by 22% from 141% to 172%.

Culling strike is a mechanic that causes a hit to immediately kill a target if they are hit while below a certain life threshold or if the damage of that hit brings their life below the threshold. In Path of Exile 2, the required maximum life threshold for culling strike is based on monster rarity. Normal or white monsters will be culled at or below 30% of maximum life, magic or blue monsters at or below 20%, rare or yellow monsters at or below 10% and unique or boss monsters at or below 5%.

A hit which has culling strike does not need to deal any damage to the target in order to proc culling strike and immediately kill the target, as long as that target is at or below the required maximum life threshold when the hit takes place. Importantly, culling strike is an on-hit property and does not interact with damage over time in any way.

Curses are spells that apply a basic duration-based debuff to the target(s).

A character has a maximum curse limit of 1 by default, meaning they can only apply a single curse on a per-target basis. This limit can be increased by modifiers to maximum curse limit, such as the one on Whispers of Doom, which is now a keystone in Path of Exile 2.

Unlike in Path of Exile 1, mark skills are no longer considered to be curses in Path of Exile 2, so their usage does not count towards a character's maximum curse limit. Instead, marks now have a duration and provide an upside which may end the mark early providing a payoff, such as Sniper's Mark which improves the critical damage bonus of the next critical strike that hits the target before expiring the mark to grant a frenzy charge.

Curse skills in Path of Exile 2 have an activation delay after being cast before their debuff takes effect on the targets. This delay will be modifiable through modifiers on the passive skill tree. However, the curse activation delay can be bypassed entirely by utilising other methods of curse application such as Blasphemy, a persistent buff meta gem which applies socketed curse debuffs as an aura in an area around the character.

Damage conversion refers to two modifiers; gained as extra and converted to. Modifiers which grant X damage gained as extra Y damage provide their extra damage without removing the base type of damage, while modifiers which grant X damage converted to Y damage remove the base type of damage in order to provide a new type of damage.

In Path of Exile 2, damage that has been converted will not remember its origin types for the purpose of scaling that damage. For example Herald of Thunder, shown above, converts 100% of physical damage into lightning damage. The portion of damage that has been converted will no longer interact with any modifiers that scale physical damage specifically, such as x% increased Physical Damage. Instead, you'll only be able to scale that damage with modifiers that improve lightning damage, such as generic x% increased Damage or x% increased Lightning Damage. In general, this will make reaching 100% conversion more important as you'll want to be efficient with investment into modifiers to scale the output damage.

However, an important note here is that modifiers which grant extra damage gained from one or multiple types of damage are still incredibly valuable despite the change to damage conversion no longer remembering origin types. This is because those modifiers are calculated prior to converted to modifiers, meaning they can still provide a lot of value when used in damage conversion chains.

Damage conversion has a priority system which places some modifiers above others. Conversion from skill gems or support gems is considered to be skill type conversion which has the highest priority. If damage conversion exceeds 100%, it's uniformly scaled down to meet 100%. However, skill type conversion takes priority and will not be scaled down if possible. For example if a character has 100% conversion from skill type modifiers and 50% conversion from modifiers on equipment or on the passive skill tree, the 100% skill type conversion takes priority and the rest will be ignored.

In Path of Exile 2, unlike in Path of Exile 1, damage conversion no longer has a conversion order that cannot go backwards. Damage can be converted from any type to any other type as long as the modifiers exist.

Control effects are status effects that hinder or fully inhibit a target. These effects are sometimes tied to a particular damage type and can only be inflicted by damaging hits of that type.

Some examples of control effects are stun, freeze and electrocute.

Freeze

Freeze is a non-damaging ailment that can only be inflicted with a hit of cold damage by default. A frozen target has their action speed slowed by 100%.

Electrocute

Electrocute is another non-damaging ailment that can only be inflicted with a hit of lightning damage by default. A target that is electrocuted cannot perform any actions.

Stun

Stun is a status effect that can be inflicted by any hit of damage. However, melee damage is more likely to inflict stun while non-physical damage is less likely to inflict stun. This is because melee damage has a +25% bonus to the damage effectiveness of the hit regarding stun, while non-physical damage has a -25% penalty. A target that is stunned will be interrupted out of any action they are performing and will be unable to act while the stun is in effect.

Ailment Threshold

Non-damaging ailments like Freeze or Electrocute are inflicted based on an ailment threshold. The ailment threshold of a monster is typically equal to their maximum life, with the exception of endgame bosses where the threshold is lower to allow for more consistent ailment application. In the case of freeze, a larger hit of cold damage will inflict a longer freeze, but if the damage dealt isn't high enough to cause a 0.3 second freeze then the freeze is discarded.

Stun threshold works very similarly to ailment threshold, where a hit must deal enough damage to be able to inflict a stun, and a larger hit will inflict a longer stun.

Ailment Buildup

However, in Path of Exile 2, unlike in Path of Exile 1, control effects will have a 'build up' feature that will allow the eventual infliction of the status effect, even with smaller hits of damage. In addition, some abilities will build towards a heavy stun which is a much more significant stun that takes a longer time to build up. A heavy stun on some bosses will be easy to recognize due to unique animations that are played and may last up to 6 seconds or longer, providing a large window to deal damage.

One massive change going from Path of Exile 1 to Path of Exile 2 is that monster damage will no longer be categorised under specifics such as attacks or spells for the purpose of player defences.

Instead, some of the mechanics that interacted with these categories in Path of Exile 1, such as Spell Suppression, will no longer exist in Path of Exile 2.

Block & Evade Changes

Meanwhile, other mechanics are being changed, like blocking and evading, which will work differently in Path of Exile 2. You'll be able to block or evade incoming projectiles or strikes – it doesn't matter if that projectile is an arrow from a monster attack or a fireball from a monster spell.

This will make player comprehension of what they can and can't block or evade much more straightforward, especially with visual clarity planned to be a lot better in Path of Exile 2.

However, by default you won't be able to block or evade larger area of effect abilities that come from above the character or from under the ground beneath them. This is where the dodge roll would come in handy to move out of the way in a hurry!

Spirit is a brand new resource in Path of Exile 2. By default, reservation skills such as auras or persistent buffs will reserve spirit. This is another massive change going from Path of Exile 1 to Path of Exile 2, as all characters will now have a full mana pool by default, regardless of how many reservation abilities they're using.

Arctic Armour

However, the usage of spirit in Path of Exile 2 is a lot deeper than just the existing pool of reservation abilities in Path of Exile 1. You'll also need spirit to maintain permanent minions such as Skeletal Brute or to make use of trigger-based meta gems, like Cast on Minion Death.

Skeletal Brute

Cast on Minion Death

Spirit is largely obtained from equipment modifiers or from the passive skill tree. One of the main sources of spirit is the sceptre, which has been reworked going from Path of Exile 1 to Path of Exile 2.

This one-handed weapon will no longer have any attack stats but can still be equipped in either the main hand or the offhand. However, you cannot dual-wield two sceptres at the same time. Sceptres can roll aura-like modifiers that affect allies and other modifiers to boost the spirit gained.

Leech is a mechanic which recovers a resource over time based on a percentage of hit damage dealt. Damage over time does not interact with leech. The most common type of leech is life leech, but modifiers also exist to allow a character to leech mana or energy shield.

Path of Exile 1's system for calculating recovery from leech is one of the most overly complex mechanics, but fear not – Path of Exile 2 is significantly simplifying this concept. In Path of Exile 2, there are only two modifiers which directly impact leech: Percentage of damage dealt modifiers which calculate the total leech value from damage dealt, and leech resistance which will exist on monsters. Let's discuss how they work.

Modifiers will exist which can be acquired on gear or on the passive skill tree. These will provide a percentage of damage dealt leeched as X resource, for example '2% of Physical Attack Damage Leeched as Life'. When the character attacks a monster and deals physical damage, the monster will take an amount of damage after mitigation and this amount is multiplied against the total sum of percentage of damage leeched as life. Let's say the character only has the above modifier and the monster takes 2000 physical damage from the hit, therefore the leech amount is 40 life (2000 * 0.02 = 40). However, that's not the full story because there's a second modifier which directly impacts the recovery gained from leech; monster leech resistance.

Monsters have leech resistance based on their monster level. The higher the monster level, the higher the leech resistance that they'll have. This is designed to counter exponential growth of character damage as they progress and should provide a somewhat equal amount of recovery from leech when comparing different zone levels. If we go back to the previous example, let's say the monster has 30% leech resistance. This modifier is multiplied against the leech amount and therefore the character would recover 28 life (40 * 0.7 = 28).

Modifiers which apply to the recovery rate of a resource will improve the recovery gained from leech. For example, '25% increased Life Recovery Rate' would improve the recovery in the above example from 28 life to 35 (28 * 1.25 = 35). However, recovery rate modifiers only improve resource recovery which is recovered over time – if a character has a portion of instant leech, for example from the Vaal Pact Keystone, any modifiers which interact with life recovery rate wouldn't apply to the portion of life that's leeched instantly.

The dodge roll is a new action mechanic that is available by default to every character in Path of Exile 2. Dodge rolling doesn't have a resource cost and it also doesn't have a cooldown. However, the dodge roll does not improve a character's movement speed – instead, a character engaging in a dodge roll will move a greater distance during the opening portion of the roll and a shorter distance for the remainder of the roll, moving the same total distance overall that would have been covered by running normally. Usage of the dodge roll will cancel a character's current action, including cancelling out of any ability animation.

A character that is using a dodge roll will also have avoidance frames in the opening portion of the roll, avoiding all hits that are considered to be projectiles or strikes. Area of effect hits or ground effects cannot be avoided using the dodge roll.

Importantly, the dodge roll does not provide phasing by default, so a character cannot use it to escape being surrounded by monsters. However, smaller monsters such as skeletons may be pushed out of the way when dodge rolling.

The dodge roll can be modified by nodes on the passive skill tree or persistent buff skill gems. There's also a unique item which changes the dodge roll into an instant blink with a cooldown.

Energy shield is a defensive stat in Path of Exile which acts as a hit pool that takes damage before your life by default.

When energy shield is damaged, it doesn't immediately recover naturally unless the character has additional investment into non-standard sources of energy shield recovery such as energy shield regeneration or leech. Instead, energy shield has its own recovery mechanic: recharge. Energy shield recharge is a mechanic that recovers at a base rate of 33.3% per second, but it only begins if the character has a period of time where no damage is taken to energy shield or the resource that it's protecting. In Path of Exile 2, this delay before the start of energy shield recharge is 4 seconds by default. If damage is taken to energy shield or the resource it's protecting, any ongoing recharge will be interrupted and delayed until the delay period has passed once more.

Energy shield also has specific interactions with certain damage types. The damage over time from both the poison and bleeding damaging ailments will bypass energy shield and deal damage to life directly by default. Meanwhile, chaos damage no longer bypasses energy shield by default like it does in Path of Exile 1. Instead, in Path of Exile 2, chaos damage will remove twice as much energy shield when dealing damage to this resource. However, for bleeding to be inflicted on an entity, the inflicting hit must deal damage to life – therefore an energy shield based character will naturally prevent bleeding unless a hit would deal enough damage to remove all of their energy shield and deal damage to life. This also means that a character using the Chaos Inoculation Keystone is pseudo-immune to bleeding.

Energy shield has a built-in stun prevention mechanic which grants a chance to avoid being stunned. As long as a character has energy shield when a hit deals damage to them, they'll have a 50% chance to avoid a stun that would be inflicted by that hit. This inherent chance to avoid stuns is not additive with any other 'chance to avoid stun' modifiers and is calculated separately.