Massive Endgame Changes to Path of Exile 2 – Towers Are Gone!

The endgame towers mechanic in Path of Exile 2 is one of the most scrutinized aspects of the game. There is still a minority of players who enjoy towers, but everyone can agree that they could be better.

However, there’s an overwhelming majority that really wants it gone or reworked, and Grinding Gear Games has finally given in and removed it completely.

The Towers are Gone – What Happens to the State of Endgame Now?

Towers play a crucial role in the endgame. Players use towers to alter their Waystones or maps, giving a slight or massive change to their farming runs. You like a few league mechanics like Abyss or Breach? Use the towers to apply Tablets and alter the surrounding nodes to farm those mechanics more efficiently.

That’s the core concept, along with applying various buffs to incentivize players to run towers. However, that brought another problem – a crucial one, to say the least. We’re almost forced to run these towers and look for overlaps to get the juiciest Waystones or maps possible. If we don’t see multiple overlaps, our goal shifts to finding one rather than blasting Waystones.

It saves us time, since it is more profitable with this strategy, especially for completing expensive builds. Towers are gone now, completely reshaping how the endgame needs to be played.

While the towers are gone, Tablets are here to stay. Technically, these Tablets are what give us the loot buffs along with map-altering affixes anyway. As a result, we don’t have to look for overlapping towers to stack those Tablet buffs. Instead, we can now directly apply the Tablets to the Waystones or maps.

How does this work? You simply have to stick the Tablets in as you run the Waystones. If you played Path of Exile 1, it is essentially how the Scarabs work.

Since towers can’t overlap, on paper, this is a massive nerf to everyone’s loot experience. To compensate, they have also buffed modifier affixes on Tablets to be at least twice or thrice as powerful.

They also added a few new modifiers to Tablets, mainly ones that force league mechanics to the map, such as Shrines, Strongboxes, Essence, Rogue Exiles, Azmeri Spirit, and Summoning Circles.

To streamline the new endgame experience, GGG has also reduced the size of complex and large map layouts, such as Oasis and Savannah, among others. Apart from those changes, the objective to finish maps changes from killing all rare monsters to beating the final boss of the map, meaning there are map bosses on each map now.

These are all massive but positive changes to streamline the endgame experience, as they remove a few unnecessary complexities.

Path of Exile 2 is Looking More Like Path of Exile 1 – Same But Different

While there’s always a rift in the community between Path of Exile 1 and 2 players, this move actually sways the needle to Path of Exile 2, becoming more like Path of Exile 1.

The endgame experience most players enjoyed in PoE 1 is to do as little as possible to set up your farming strategy and blast maps as hard and fast as you can. Any nuisance, like the tower mechanic, slows down players from just wanting to run maps and improve their build.

The community has been mostly positive with the changes, and some are even jokingly saying, “one more step and we’ll have Scarabs,” referring to the endgame Scarab mechanic in Path of Exile 1.

The pace is still different in Path of Exile 2, so it’ll always be a unique experience when compared to the others.

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