The problem is we are a fixed camera game, and everything about our content and engine assumes this.

If you move the camera you will see that there is nothing above the horizon line, the ground looks ultra flat, things like parallax materials and fog all break down, the camera far plane is really close usually, lighting looks terrible (because the player light provides a lot of the light in a lot of scenes), etc etc.

Also the performance of the game becomes bad because we don't have an LOD system. Why would we need one when we know exactly how far away an asset will be from the camera?. So if you look along the axis of the ground the frame rate becomes terrible.

It's kind of hard to persuade us to want to put something in the game that has so much potential to make the game look bad.

The people recording footage from non-game camera angles are taking very careful shots, and often using the editor to remove effects that break, or add in things like extra lights and such.

One thing that we do have in PoE2 is that the character select screen has your characters on it and they are close to the camera, so you get a much better view of them there at least!

Those are technically chests that open on damage. We do in fact have a bunch of those.

The reason you want a diagonal layout for artificial environments is because a lot of terrain features look bad when you have them in cardinal directions.

For example, we have a straight wall bit here that makes it hard to see that there is a door in it.


In this case we literally hung a lantern in it to attract your attention, and it's not so bad. We did discuss removing horozontal doors from this tileset entirely though.

Even in the other orientation though, I don't think you want to overuse it.


It makes for an interesting feature from time to time, but I don't think it's good to overuse.

We played around with other areas having other interesting rotations too..


Here is another one from that angle.


At first it seems pretty cool. There are actually a lot of things to like artistically about angles like this.

What I found though is that that there is something "fatiguing" about playing in an area with an off-axis rotation. It's kind of hard to describe why.

But after removing the angle offset you just kind of go "ahhh, that's better".

The public channels will not be mixed between games by default.

We have a different approach to the controller than before. There are technically 22 bind slots.

That's 11 buttons plus a second set if you hold down L2 (by default, but you can change it to whatever key you want).

However, non-skill actions are bound in the the same slots so Dodge Roll, "Any Life Flask", "Any Mana Flask", Overlay Map, and Portal Scroll are 5 actions that you are likely to want to have bound somewhere leaving 15 remaining for other uses.

Controller doesn't differentiate between Skills and any other type of action, so you can bind anything anywhere you like including the use of individual flasks. Like if you want some emergency flask on "Y" then that is just fine.

You are likely to want to keep the the flask related things on the DPad, things like Overlay Map, Portal Scroll or other rarely used things on L2+Dpad and Dodge roll on L1.

That gives you 12 "easy to use" skill slots which I find to be plenty given that you get 8 skill gem sockets and getting more than 4 skills from your gear would be unusual.

As an example, on Mercenary I like to put one crossbow's primary fire on R1, and my other crossbows primary Fire on R2. Then I like to put the attachments of the crossbows on L2+R1 and L2+R2. Then I put Ammos on the face buttons and then the other more rarely used skills on L2+Face buttons.

I don't love ragdoll on monsters because I think hand crafted death animations look better. One thing we are doing in PoE2 though is that each monster will have 5 death animations.

One for each direction, and one directionless death. Depending on the damage direction and if the monster is running or not, we play the correct one. A skill like Ground Slam would play the directionless death because the monsters are getting hit from below.

Not every monster has had all the deaths created yet which is why the demos don't often demonstrate it.

Actually caring about your mana pool is something that you should have to do in PoE2, and it is an explicit goal.

As you said, the first thing we had to do to make that possible was removing the reservation system in favor of spirit. This was one of the primary drivers behind that change in fact. You cant make mana costs matter when you don't have a big enough buffer against them, and players will always choose a smaller buffer in exchange for more power.

For refilling frequency, I would say that it's your flasks that are the real "state" of your character. Your mana orb can fairly quickly with mana regeneration stats, but if you use supports wtih high costs or supports with high mana multipliers, you are going to want to pack some mana flasks.

It should of course be possible to make your build such that mana is no longer a concern regardless, but it will need to be at the cost of damage or defense.

Okay so, here are the specifics.

If you are playing single player and you log out, the instance is paused. If you then log back in, you will resume right where you were so long as the instance is still open. Instance timeout is still a thing.

It seems clear to me looking at it now that when logging in, we will have to present an option to the player about if you would like to log in to the existing instance, or log in to town (and lose the instance) so that if you do want to reset the boss, you don't have to wait.

In multiplayer if you log out, the instance is not paused. In this case, if you were in a boss fight then you are not allowed back into that instance again and will log back in to town.

This is really the only approach to prevent abuse.

The abuse (and what Mark was originally talking about at Exilecon) is the fact that we don't want you to log out / log in in order to dodge an ability, then continue the boss fight. That is important for maintaining integrity of the fight. We don't want it so that logout / login is the meta for dodging some long and hard to dodge boss ability.

That being said, you can always Alt-F4 to abort a boss fight if you see a death coming, and you will not lose your hardcore character. You will need to start the boss again from scratch though.

Basing it on map-tier is pretty reasonable, and something suggested internally as well.

I don't love the idea of having different rules for different outside-map endgame activities though. I just worry it's something that you will easily miss, and having to remember what activities do what is a bit of a pain. Ideally we can come up with a consistant rule that is easy to understand and remember.

It's not a strain on the servers. We would keep that information client side if we were doing it.

It's just that it's a complicated UX task with a lot of considerations, and a lot of tricky details. We could get 90% of the way there very easily. And the last 10% of making it correct/useful would require way way more work.

We don't currently have attribution to specific skills at all. It would be easy to say "Fire damage killed you". It would be easy to say "The boss killed you". Harder to say "This corpse explosion skill did X damage to you", and much much harder to say "This debuff resulted in Y extra damage to you".

If it's not accurate, then it's kind of useless. So we would have to get this stuff right.

And to be completely honest, I just don't value it as much as other improvements we could make to UX. It's not like it's off the table. But there is a lot of other UX improvements that would come first before implementing such a screen.

I don't accept that there will always be a best build. There should ideally be good builds with many classes / skills.

Hopefully you would agree that we were able to get a reasonable variety in PoE1 with top tier builds.

I think you highly overestimate the average player!

Also, you might think 1000x is high, but in PoE1 right now the disparity is much much higher than that.

Yep, that's for character creation. This scene here is the background when you select existing characters.

I have a lot to say about this topic, but it will have to wait until a later time. We will have a big discussion on the details of item drops at some point next year before beta though!

Guilds will transfer. Guild tabs will transfer. It is our intention that chat will work within the guild across PoE1 and 2 as well.

That is the background for characters in Act 1.

It's something like that.

Just internal useage which is mostly used for drop balance based on how hard the boss is supposed to be.

As a general rule a T3 should be twice as hard as a Rare in the same zone. T2 is twice as hard as T3, and so on.

By default the skills that were QWERT are now QERFT. Of these, T is certainly the most annoying and I tend to avoid putting anything there that I need often.

I haven't found this to be an issue in practice. Typically the skills that have more of a "doing in motion" type aspect to them you put on the mouse. You have 3 buttons there.

Then the other skills tend to be more of the style where you use them at the right moment, and those work just fine on the other keys.

Generally speaking, if the skill allowed you to control movement direction by holding the mouse before (and in PoE2, many many skills allow this) then you can control it with WASD also.

Sure, why not.

We intend to have skills for multiple elements for each weapon type, but maybe not always every element.

For example, the Quarterstaves with the Monk. We have a well developed Lightning, Cold and Physical (wind themed) set, but don't have a developed Fire set.

While this is not always respected, Fire is loosely aligned with Strength as an attribute, and it's the exact opposite in terms of attribute alignment with Monk (Being Dex/Int).

I still try to add a bit of synergy just for kicks though. We have skills that interact with elemental ailments, and we make sure to include a Burning interaction just in case someone wants to try and make a build with it.

It is my intention to allow this.

The integration of PoE1 and PoE2 realms is work that is ongoing, but this is one of the planned features.

At exilecon there was an unintentional issue with stun.

When we added poise to monsters, players also had it too. But we didn't consider that monsters would build up to a stun on the player too. This meant that small attacks would often stun you.

We changed the way poise works on characters after exilecon. Basically it starts draining instantly and at a high rate. You can only be stunned by small attacks if a significant number of them arrive at the same time.

An example of Druid vs Templar.


Same guy, different upbringing.

It's often safer to be near a boss than farther away. This is because the distance you need to travel in order to change your relative angle to the boss is much shorter.

Templar is the class for this yes.

You can main hand a sceptre and offhand a shield. This would give you max defence and spirit in exchange for low direct damage potential.

It isn't going to be the focus for PoE2. Certainly not for launch anyway. It will still be supported like it is in PoE1 though.

Maybe we will give it another crack one day, but not for launch.

I wish I had a better solution to this.

Currently when you click on a character class you get two boxes to the left and right. Clicking the box changes which character is standing there. Because they are based on the same underlying model, it effectively changes the clothes they are wearing / hair style / tattoos. So the transition isn't too jarring.

I'm thinking of theming it as first you choose your attributes, like "Intelligence" and then you choose what the background of your character. Was she brought up as a Witch or a Sorceress?

I'm still not 100% happy about it though.

Having 12 characters standing there waiting to be hanged is clearly rediculous, but having to pick attribute then class just isn't quite as cool either.

Porcupines have been changed in PoE2 to have a delay, an animated telegraph, and the projectiles are limited distance firing because they have been switched to use ballistics.

There are two ways you can use On-Death effects as a designer. The first is "Don't kill these too fast", the second is "You need to counterplay these".

Ideally in PoE2 we are always doing the second but in PoE1 we have been guilty of the first.

The AoE was clearly too large there for sure.

And it shouldn't just one shot you either.

And the static life bar shouldn't disappear until after it explodes.

That particular on-death is really more for theme than a thing that is actually supposed to kill you.

It was initially the plan back at the first exilecon, but not anymore.

The bosses of regular maps in the endgame of PoE2 will be based on the PoE2 campaign bosses.

Even when PoE2 and PoE1 were supposed to have a shared endgame, it was always the plan to use the PoE2 campaign bosses as the staples of endgame maps.

They are a significant upgrade to many of the PoE1 bosses.

We will probably display what they are, but I'm a little hesitant to show the full skill tree for them. I think it's too much.

What we probably will have are some videos of some of the skill architypes that are designed for the class, so you can have an idea about what the gameplay will be like.

Yes. I agree that the complexity is more from being able to know if a stat actually affects a skill or not. After I posted this we talked for a few hours about how to solve this exact issue. We have some plans now, but it will take us a little while to try them out!

You can yes. It takes some time and you will be interupted if hit.

The intention is that you revive your party member after the boss fight is done. You might be able to get away with doing it also if you heavy stun the boss and are fast and careful.

Probably reasonable.

We implemented it. The UX of it was a bit lame. At some point we will make it better and have it in the game.

I agree with you.

We get suggestions for this kind of thing all the time. Literally today I was arguing with a marketing person about this very thing.

I don't think the game should ever tell you what build to play.

> New players have a problem understanding the mechanics

Well the mechanics of the tree are simple. You get a skill point. You click a node. You get the stats. I don't think anybody has trouble understanding that.

So therefore it must be the mechanics of the stats that are complicated. Right?

But are they?

When you look around the tree you mostly see stats like "10% Increased Spell Damage", "10% Increased Physical Damage" or "10% Increased Area of Effect".

This is not exactly rocket science.

Sure, there are some more complicated ones out there. But I'm sure it's probably a few percent at most of tree nodes that are not immediately obvious what they do even to the biggest noob.

So what is the problem then?

I don't think it's a problem of understanding mechanics.

There is a lot more I could say about this, but unfortunately I find it hard to actually assemble what the root of the problem is. I think that there is a UX issue here for sure, but what can really solve it?

I sort of thought that we were adding a "Socketed skills do not shock" stat to that one. But I don't see it in your link. It's possible the stat description wasn't added.

It seems likely that it would be too broken to allow IMHO. I prefer to add that stat than to add an artificial cooldown though. I'm fine with autobombers being possible, but I don't think it should be that easy.

The difference with flicker strike compared to before is that it no longer bypasses cooldown. Instead, each power charge increases the number of "flickers" before it ends. That means if you are able to get power charges somehow during the flicker striking, then you will still have to cast the skill again to do another set.

There is an extra wind up right at the start of the flicker strike. What you would see is a bunch of faster flickers, then a pause as you wind up for the next invocation, then a bunch of fast flickers again.

That said, getting charges is harder now. We are being a lot more careful with giving them out. If you want to do a continuous flicker striking build, you will probably have to be doing some shenanigans.

It's not like we have designed every way to get them yet, but it's not going to be nearly as easy as PoE1.

Yeah, they will carry over.

I'm honestly open to an idea about how to solve this problem.

I think full resets suck. Beyond like level 15 it just feels like you nuked your character. I actually hate logging in to an old character and having the skills reset. I always feel like I screw up the allocation.

I think the natural evolution of "I need more defence", "I need more cast speed", "I need more damage" driving your decisions as you go through the game is kind of important. When I get a full respec, I always feel like my character is "off" afterwards. Sure, this concern is less relevant to those following a build guide, but then, people doing that don't have the excuse of making mistakes either!

I think a limited number of full resets suck even more. If it's okay to do once, why is it not okay to do unlimited times?

Okay, so why not freespec? Well, at that point, what even is your character? I'm not a fan.

I'm not saying Regrets are a great solution, but it's sure as hell better than all the others I know of.

I kind of like the idea of being able to freespec Specialisation points (The ones you get from Skill books). But when you think about it, it's very hard to let that happen in a way that isn't a total eldrich nighmare of a UI.

The currency in PoE2 has removed all the reasons you would need click over and over again many times.

The way sockets work now doesn't need it. The way Chaos orbs work now doesn't need it either. And we removed Alts.

Yes

I am keen to try and get "most" of the PoE1 content in there. Some things will go in in a way that is quite different from how they were in PoE1 though.

I have a pretty good idea about which leagues we will be adding. Not going to make a list now though!

There will be new endgame content on launch, but possibly not in the beta. We will have to see how much time we get.

I think we might not have tainted currency, at least not at the start. It would be nice for Corrupted to be Corrupted again, at least for a while. A Vaal 6 link would be hard to get due to that.

I believe we made the Quality currencies rarer and moved to being more of an end-game think. They don't have a huge amount of value during the campaign IMHO.

My first instinct is that we will probably not want to have new core league mechanic when PoE2 officially launches. But it will depend. Will have to see how we feel when we get there.

The endgame during Beta will not be as big as it will be at release. We plan on adding back in League Mechanics during the course of the beta one by one.

No. We are free to play. Doesn't really work for the business model.

Trade searches are pretty heavy, so we had to do something about it.

For your specific case I would suggest adding a username/password to your Path of Exile account. You can have that at the same time as your steam credentials. That way you won't have to use steam guard so much.

The intention in PoE2 is that not every character uses auras.

I'll discuss it with Mark. I do understand the issue for sure.

Haven't considered the controller UI for highlighting buffs while paused yet, but it would make sense for us to have a way to do that for sure.

You might have an issue with a problem called Bufferbloat. Try this test:

https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

Yep, they will all be there. But there will be many play style differences.

So there are a lot more keyworded concepts in PoE2 that skills trigger off. And we consider "state" a lot more. Be that things that are in the world or on monsters.

Because of that there is a lot more oppertunity for cross-party-member synergy.

I'm keen on cross-polination of mechanics/keywords across classes because it opens up the possibility for people to come up with lots of weird builds that involve using things from different classes.

But it also helps make multiplayer more interesting too since you can support each other.

Not sure what to do about cases where one person's auras break another persons builds though....

So something you can do in PoE2 is pause the game (if you are playing by yourself), and the currently highlighted monster will remain highlighted so you can read the mods.

You can also mouse over the buffs/debuffs on yourself and enemies to look at what they do while paused.

I'll have a think about your suggestion. I don't think I quite like it as described, but I get the issue. I'll ask our UX guy if he can think of an improvement.

I think we have similar thoughts. I think you will probably enjoy the things that we have to announce in future.

I'm curious to hear peoples thoughts on what they want out of minion builds. I have my own thoughts too, but I don't want to spoil anything yet. Do you want a more active play style, or a more passive one? Do you want more control over minions or smarter AI?

We have some more things to show for sure.

My hope is that we can suprise people with each new class we reveal. I mean my explicit goal really is "How can I deliver something nobody is expecting" every time.

I actually don't know yet. The intention is to have the campaign end at approximately the same level, but yes, as some other people in here guessed, it will depend on progression testing. We will adjust accordingly.

My hope is that when people (even PoE1 veterans) play PoE2 for the first time, that it takes them a long time because they haven't played any of the bosses before / haven't optimised builds.

But I have no doubt that people will begin to optimise and work out better strategies and before too long they will be burning through the game again :P

It's just like PoE1.

The only thing locked by class are the Ascendancies.

In our marketing, of course, we always present things like "This is what the Mercenary does" because I think that conforming to a stereotype is what new players will understand.

Hmm. That's.... actually not a bad suggestion.

I guess the feeling with this for us was always that you shouldn't be able to make it look like you have an item unless you actually earned it in the league you are in.

So like, you can't walk around looking like you are wearing a Kaom's Heart unless you actually found one.

Thus, the way the current system was designed. There might be a way to achieve that same goal with another system, but I feel it will not have the simplicity of the current way.

I don't know exactly. I should hope it wouldn't need to be as long as a year. 6 months sounds more like it, but we will see.

It will continue until launch.

Totems for sure. It's PoE DNA for sure.

Being able to make an army of them to fight for you? Of course. It's a play style that some people love. Spirit will allow this to be balanced.

Brands maybe. Still under discussion.

It's a tricky question, and we haven't answered it ourselves yet. We already have enough trouble keeping up with the microtransaction schedule we have now, let alone doubling it.

The most likely outcome right now is that we have supporter packs that come out alongside the PoE2 leagues, and they just stay current for the PoE1 leagues as well, but we will have to see what we can do.

I can't say it's top of the list in terms of priorities for us unfortuantely.

I don't have anything against these kinds of features, but unfortunately they are just not a huge draw for most players, so it's more like the kind of thing that would be upgraded post release rather than pre.

Initially it was just that PoE players know what a 6 link is. So if you say "Every skill can be a six link" that is a really simple way to communicate the concept of what is changing.

But I don't think it's wrong either.

You want skills to have two support sockets as a baseline because having one at the start feels lame. If you get two supports early you want to be able to choose between supporting two skills with one, or one skill with two.

Then you need a pretty early game way to upgrade to 3 supports so that you can start to choose which skills you want to focus more on before eventually becoming easy to upgrade all your gems to that. Then you want to introduce a late game advancement to 4 supports just as 3 is becoming easy. Then you want a more grindy endgame objective to upgrade all your gems to 5 supports.

I think more than that would probably feel like a chore, and water down the mods. There is more of an argument for less to lower mod dillution, but I think it would feel like you don't get enough upgrades then.

There will be controller support.

Steam deck should be fine, but we will have to look into what the performance is like. I haven't tested the game on one myself.

We are going to attempt, to the greatest extent that we can, to make all of that stuff work.

I don't see a reason why Spark Spiders can't work on PoE2 spark. It's still technically just a bunch of projectiles.

I'm not saying I'm going to remove div cards. I think the ability to save up is cool. But we need to find a solution to the fact that the "correct" highest expected value way to play is just to grind the same map over and over again for eternity.

Well I'm not going to promise that the mechanics will not change. We had a discussion about RF would work just a week ago actually.

Ideally the "flavour" of the skill will be the same even if the mechanics of it differ.

We will certainly be making PoE2 versions of any skills that people enjoy in PoE1!

The uncut gems are not class specific.

When you open the screen on a Witch, the UI will pop open with the Witch gems in the center of the screen, but you scroll around and pick a gem with any attribute alignment you want.

Correct.

There will certainly be crafting in PoE2, and for the crafting bench specifically, we are not actually removing it, just changing how it works to deal with some of the problems it has. (Not announced yet).

In fact, I have a specific goal that people do more crafting than they currently do. In PoE1 non-bench crafting is not something normal players often do. The design changes we already mentioned to some of the currency items go a long way to addressing this.

It is absolutely the case that Ascendancies do not mention weapon types. When we design them we always try to make it so that the "obvious" way to use the Ascendancy class is to use it the way that is depicted in the art.

But we try to never actually limit you, and we want people to think of how they can use them in non-obvious ways too!

We still plan on having ascendencies be specific to classes. The new PoE1 ascendancies are a thing we thought would be a cool to try out for a league in PoE1, but I wouldn't say it's something that I'm immediately wanting to do in PoE2.

That is our current design thinking. But we still haven't been able to do enough progression testing to really validate that this is correct!

There was an early discussion about what can we do to make weapons types different. What actually makes an axe and a sword different? In PoE1 it's.... actually very little.

We initially tried to do it only with stats, but there isn't really all that much you can do to truely make weapons feel different with only stats. You can make 3, maybe 4 weapon types feel different like that. But more than that? It's hard.

So what makes an axe and a sword different in real life? It's the kind of attacks you can do with them.

We made the call to limit all attacks to specific weapon types in PoE2. It's actually not as much of a limitation as you might expect because we have have the automatic weapon swapping, so you can easily use multiple weapon types if you want to mix attacks from different weapon types.

I think that it's been a huge advantage for design as well. Our animation team previously strugged to make attack animations actually cool with the old system. In order to make the character really use a weapon in the best way possible for that weapon, there is a lot of details around weight and timing that you need to take into account. Having to make that same animation work for multiple weapon types just waters it down and you effectively get the lowest common denominator. If you make different animations for each weapon type, then all the timing and stuff changes, and the balance needs to change as well.

At that point you might as well just make another skill. So that's what we did.

Take something like Cyclone. Traditional Cyclone is an axe specific skill. But with a quarterstaff we have Whirling Assault, which is still spinning around with your weapon, but it works a bit differently, and the animations are totally suited to the rest of the quarterstaff skill set. That isn't to say that every weapon type has a cyclone equivilent, but it's design space that we can consider individually for each weapon type.

For Two Hand vs One Hand versions of weapons, it's more Stat driven. Two hand gives you more but slower damage, One Hand and Shield is of course more defence for less damage, and Dual Weilding gives you more damage but still fast hitting.

Generally, almost all attacks will work for One Hand or Two hand versions (If the weapon type has one hand vs two hand of course).

So basically if you use a skill while moving, you don't stop moving.

You click to move to a far away location, then while you are doing that, you can attack an enemy and your character can continue moving backwards while firing forwards, for example.

At first it might seem like that is a lot of back and forth movement, and it is. But it's not actually different to what you are already doing now when stutter stepping. You just get to be moving at the same time as attacking.

I wouldn't say WASD is required to use crossbows, but it certainly makes it feel better to me (which is why we implemented it!).

I played crossbows for quite a while before we had WASD working and it worked just fine.

We will have hideouts. I'm personally a fan of the system. All your hideout MTXs will carry over.

I also don't like big sprawling towns. I hate getting lost and they never seemed to serve much purpose to me.

I think the hideout editor could certainly use some UI improvements though!

I personally don't particularly want to implement the full on character editor that a lot of games have.

We don't currently have anything like that, and it's something that would take a huge amount of work. It's also something that I don't think would have a huge payoff for us. You tend to immediately cover your character up with armour after all.

I think the reason that a lot of games even get away with the dev cost of it is because they use the same tech for creating NPCs in their game world as well. If you need to create hundreds of human characters, and you want your game designers to be able to do that, then an in engine character editor can make that happen.

But this kind of thing goes against our philosophy in some ways.

When designing a town we prefer to have 4 characters that say 40 things, rather than 40 characters that say 4 things. I like a small town, with a few characters where we have room to explore the characters individually more, rather than having a giant sprawling town with a bunch of forgettable NPCs.

That said, we will probably eventually have MTX's that swap the entire character out for a different one (which we would then also have voice acting for). If we did that, we would likely start to alternate gender versions of all our character classes since that is something that I think quite a lot of players would like to have.

All the armour MTXs will work.

During the Beta, a lot of older armours (more than a few years old) will not be rerigged yet though. We intend to get through the backlog during the closed beta. So by release they will all be working. It’s quite a lot of work!

Unfortunately we can’t really update how old armours look. There are multiple reasons.

For one, we just don’t have the time to do that. There are literally thousands of old micros.

And for two, even if we did have time, I’m not sure it’s even a good idea. What if a player doesn’t like how it looks after changing it? They purchased something that looked a specific way, we can’t really change it out from under them.

Divination cards are a bit of a hard one.

In theory I like target farming. I think in SSF that works really well.

However, in non-SSF, you are in an economy that makes it so that you tend to just play in whatever area has the highest payoff. This means that many players just grind the same map over and over again forever because it's the highest expected value, even if they don't enjoy doing so particularly.

For the sake of variety, I think that we would need to change how they work to some extent, but I don't have a specific plan right now.

We will do showcases of all the classes before beta.

We will probably make some videos about the ascendancy classes before beta as well so that people can have a think about which builds they would like to play.

One change we have already made in PoE2 to accuracy is that distance from action to target matters.

The farther the distance, the more accuracy needed.

So a melee character doesn't really need to worry about accuracy unless they are using particularly long range melee attack.

Accuracy is much more important if you are playing a ranged character.

We haven't shown endgame because we are not ready to show it.

Right now in each demo, we basically balance the areas in isolation to whatever we feel like shows off the combat the best.

We did discuss making a build that represents our best guess as to what end-game balance would be like, but decided in the end to avoid doing that until we actually know what it will be for sure.

To be sure, we would have to be able to progression test the whole game from start to finish. That would mean the game would have to be more complete than it is right now, because nobody wants to play through an area with boring monsters that we haven't added the "fun" to yet.

We will get to this point quite soon though.

We don't have a set timeline. It's going to depend on how the beta goes. It will certainly be at least a couple of league cycles.

That said, the cycles may be shorter because we will probably make a new league each time we make substantial balance changes, so that we can see how the new meta develops in a fresh economy.

I could see us making a new league start every 1-2 months during beta. But once again, it's not a set timeline.

I’m not sure where it was mentioned we were removing the crafting bench. I think the existing crafting bench has issues for sure, but we have a plan for how it will work in poe2.

For the resets during beta, they wouldn’t have a mechanic as such. But we would be introducing “new” content each time as we continue our process of readding the poe1 league content (updated for poe2 of course). The plan is to add that stuff back in during the beta.

So we actually tried less flasks. For a long time it was 3 by default, and then you get 4 and then 5 as you upgrade your belt. But it just didn’t feel as cool, so we just went back to always 5.

I haven’t found flasking with WASD to be particularly a problem, but that is also because we ended up removing mechnics on flasks that cause the “flask piano” gameplay.

I don’t think we will get time to write a first party filter editor unfortunately. Not against the idea but it’s just not something that we have time for right now.