‘Path Of Exile 2’ Is Delighted To Frustratingly Waste Your Time In The Endgame

I am nearing 200 hours in Path of Exile 2, now with a level 89 ranger and a level 90 Monk that deletes everything onscreen so fast it would make Elon Musk jealous. But the further I get, the more frustrating I fund it that the “ultra-endgame” of Path of Exile 2 seems mainly about wasting your time rather than actually posing a challenge in a meaningful way.

I’ve spoken before about some irritating aspects of Path of Exile 2’s “midgame” endgame, I guess you’d call it, which involved the fact that a single death on a map erases XP, all modifiers, your Waystone, a way, overreactive punishment.

What I’ve found is that this becomes somewhat less of an issue as time goes on as you can get so strong you rarely die, and you’ll have enough Waystones where you can eat a few and it’s fine. (The XP loss never stops being annoying).

However, moving past just simple mapping, the main objective of the endgame is to find Citadels to hunt down beefed-up campaign bosses, and then fight one ultimate boss once you’ve hit up enough of those.

Citadels are frustrating for two main reasons. First and foremost they are simply a nightmare to find. The way mapping works in the current Path of Exile 2 endgame is that you simply have to go in random directions and hope you find a Citadel. And the “right” Citadel out of three, depending on what you’re looking for.

This can take dozens and dozens and dozens of maps, and even dozens of hours, and you still may not find one. Or you can occasionally get very lucky (I currently have a zone with two on the same board, seen above). But it’s all random, and there’s no way to “plan” a path to these. It seems expressly geared toward wasting time without any way to mitigate that.

The second issue is how punishing failure is on these. As I said with other maps, it will kick you out and erase all valuable modifiers and other things, but you can still go back, complete that node, and keep going.

Citadels are also a one-death-failure map, but in this case, you have one shot for the entire Citadel. And even with strong characters, one wrong step can still be an instant death on these multi-phase bosses. If this happens you lose the entire Citadel, you are locked out completely and just have to go find another one which, as I said, is exhausting.

I learned this the hard way when I circled back to a Citadel I had tried and failed about 20 levels ago just to see how it went, when I found that nope, no trying that again, and I need to find a new one. About a hundred hours into this endgame, I’ve never found another version of that Citadel on the map (but three Copper ones, so far).

Then there’s the ultimate boss of the entire game, which, you guessed it, only allows for one death, but features way more one-shot mechanics than any other. It costs an enormous amount of time or very valuable currency to even attempt to fight him. One wrong step, all of that gone.

This is…very bad? Sure, the latter half of this is about being overly punished for death again, but the idea that finding Citadels is just completely random and a time sink that you can do nothing at all to alleviate. Sure, I’d love to see more content and class balancing and so on, but this aspect of the late endgame needs help, badly.

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