I load into Path of Exile 2 and the first thing I do is check what changed since yesterday. Not "since last week," but yesterday. That's early access for you. One patch nudges endgame pacing, the next one rewires how a boss reads your movement, and suddenly your old rhythm is off. You start planning around drops and routes again, and it even makes trading chatter feel different when something like Fate of the Vaal SC Exalted Orb comes up in conversation as a shorthand for how fast the economy can swing after a hotfix.

Last of the Druids Changes the Feel

The "Last of the Druids" update is where the season started to feel properly alive. A new class always sounds simple on paper, but it lands like a brick in the meta. People aren't just leveling a Druid for fun; they're testing how the kit survives real endgame pressure. You see it in boss attempts—more players baiting patterns, swapping forms at awkward moments, trying to squeeze value out of windows that didn't matter before. The best part is the theory-crafting isn't locked to one route. You can go tanky and steady, or you can play greedy and hope your timing holds.

The Nerfs That Split the Room

Then there's the argument nobody can dodge: the diminishing returns slapped onto the Vaal Temple league mechanic. A lot of folks liked stacking high-value layouts because it felt like the game was rewarding smart routing. Now it can feel like you're being told to stop having fun in the exact place you were most excited to optimize. I get why the devs did it—those runs were printing value—but the adjustment hit hard enough that some players stopped engaging with the mechanic altogether. And when a league feature becomes "meh," that's a problem, because it's meant to be the reason you log in on a tired weeknight.

Learning Curve, Gear Pain, and Staying Afloat

Even without balance drama, the learning curve is still steep. Crafting can be brutal in that familiar PoE way: you throw currency at an item, you miss, and you're left staring at a worse piece of gear than you started with. Newer players keep asking why their damage vanished or why their defenses don't "feel" like defenses, and the honest answer is that lots of systems overlap in messy ways. You end up reading tooltips twice, checking breakpoints, and asking a friend what you did wrong. If you're trying to keep a build moving while the market spikes, some players also lean on sites like U4GM to buy currency or items and smooth out the grind without spending the whole week chasing one missing upgrade.