News Tag: POE 2 Patch 0 2 0

On April 4th, Path of Exile 0.2.0 patch was released. This also means that all players need to start from scratch. Although most players are very familiar with the entire process, the early upgrade process still takes a lot of time.

So here I recommend a Monk leveling build in patch 0.2.0 for all players. This build does not require any starting items or currency. It can help you pass the first three acts of the game and reach the end at the fastest speed.

Weapons

As a high DPS character, weapons are always very important. For Monk, the higher the quality of the weapon, the better. It mainly depends on whether the weapon modifier is suitable. If you don’t know which modifiers are more suitable for Monk, then you can focus on finding the following affixes on the weapon:

• Percent Increased and flat Physical Damage
• Flat Fire/Lightning/Cold Damage
• Attack Speed
• + levels of Melee skills

The best modifiers are Flat Physical and Increased Physical Damage. If these are on the same weapon, it’s a good weapon for a Monk. You also need Fire/Lightnin damage to trigger your Tempest Bell. For modifiers that increase elemental damage, look for them on rings and glove prefixes.

Attack Speed is also a good affix. Modifiers that increase skill level can increase skill power but also increase mana cost, so use them with caution.

Level 4: Long Quarterstaff

At a low level, a white quality long quarterstaff is the best choice. You can get a random level 4 weapon after defeating Red Vale, which is your best chance to get a quarterstaff. You can try to modify the quarterstaff with currency, but if you don’t get a good affix randomly, don’t worry, don’t waste so much currency on a regular quarterstaff.

Level 11: Gothic Quarterstaff

You need to make a good Gothic Quarterstaff before fighting Count Geonor, the boss at the end of Act I. You’ll need this weapon for a long time, so you’ll need currency like Regal Orb, Alchemy Orb, Artificer’s Orb to get good enough modifiers for it. If you don’t have these currencies, it’s best to buy POE 2 currency.

Level 20: Crescent Quarterstaff

This is an optional boss in Act 2. Killing L’im the Impaler can drop a rare level 20 weapon. For your Crescent Quarterstaff, this boss is worth the effort.

If you don’t get Crescent Quarterstaff, skip it and look for a Steelpoint Quarterstaff.

Level 28: Steelpoint Quarterstaff

A good Steelpoint Quarterstaff will last you through Act 3. You should usually make it before the final boss of Act 2. You can use Exalted Orb and Blacksmith Whetstones to improve its quality and get some good modifiers for it.

Level 33: Slicing Quarterstaff

If you don’t have a good Steelpoint Quarterstaff, use Slicing Quarterstaff as a substitute.

Boots

Boots are the most important armor for Monks. Monks need high movement speed to ensure their survivability. Modifiers that can increase movement speed are the highest priority modifiers, followed by life attributes and resistances.

Here are the item level requirements for the different movement speed modifiers on the boots:

• 10% Movement Speed (ITEM LEVEL 1)
• 15% Movement Speed (ITEM LEVEL 15)
• 20% Movement Speed (ITEM LEVEL 30)
• 25% Movement Speed (ITEM LEVEL 50)
• 30% Movement Speed (ITEM LEVEL 70)
• 35% Movement Speed (ITEM LEVEL 82)

Armour

The choice of Armour mainly depends on Evasion and Energy Shield. Monk’s survival in the battlefield mainly depends on them. You need to choose the right Armour for it according to your current Orange Level. Armour with the three affixes Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence can also be kept, which can increase Monk’s output damage.

Jewelry

Jewelry rarely appears in drops and is not common in the goods of merchants. Therefore, there are few choices. Here are the drop locations of Jewelry:

• Iron or Lazuli Ring at Cemetery
• Amulet in Keth ruins
• Resistance Ring in Buried Shrines
• Ring in Sandswept Marsh in Hanging Tree

When choosing Jewelry, you need to prioritize fixed additional damage, life, resistance, and increased attributes.

Currency

Your POE 2 currency needs to be concentrated on weapons, but don’t waste all of it on the same item. You need to find out your current weak points and use your currency in a targeted manner.

Skill Gems

Monk’s skills can bring him very high damage, and it has been verified that Ice Strike Monk Build is very good. Therefore, the recommendation for Skill Gems is still based on Ice Strike. The following are the recommended skills and corresponding auxiliary gems.

• Ice Strike: Martial Tempo, Primal Armament, Heft, Ice Bite
• Tempest Bell: Cold Exposure, Strip Away
• Charged Staff: Persistence, Arcane Tempo
• Shield Charge: Ingenuity
• Combat Frenzy: No
• Herald of Ice: Lightning Infusion, Conduction, Magnified Effect
• Herald of Thunder: Cold Infusion, Glaciation, Innervate

Attribute Requirements:

• Strength 30
• Dexterity 30
• Intelligence 35

That’s all about the weapons, modifiers, skills, and support gems for Monk in patch 0.2.0. As a powerful character in patch 0.1.1, the performance of Monk in the next patch will not be too bad, but players need to be familiar with his operation. If you haven’t played this class before, give it a try in patch 0.2.0.

Since Path of Exile 2’s Early Access release, players have been very enthusiastic about many of the existing systems and features, but there are still a few mechanisms that are still controversial. For example, Towers in POE 2, players question its necessity and would rather Towers disappear from the game.

In order to improve players’ perception of Towers and give this mechanism a new lease of life, GGG plans to introduce some new changes to Towers in Patch 0.2.0, allowing all content, including bosses, to spawn in Tower maps. This seems to be a good move, as these new additions make Towers more interesting. However, GGG overlooked that many players don’t even want to fight Towers, so spending more time to complete Towers may only make the feature worse in the minds of players.

Towers Explained

First, let’s take a look at how Towers actually work. Towers in Path of Exile 2 are structures that can be found in the endgame map system, once you reach a Tower you can place Waystones into it and run that map like any other map.

However, Towers have specific layouts and can only be rolled on a Tower map that is randomly selected from five layouts. Once you complete a Tower map, you can place Precursor Tablets into Tower to add extra content to the unfinished map within the radius of Tower.

For example, a Breach Precursor Tablet can add extra Breaches, or an Overseer Precursor Tablet can add map bosses, you can also roll tablets to add extra power-ups such as Item Quantity and Item Rarity dropped.

Running Maps Inefficiently

Now, this system presents the first problem, players who want to be more efficient need to figure out the best map route to reach Tower.

First, they need to reach Tower with the worst layout and the least juice maps, so that they can use Precursor Tablets to provide better support for the layout of the surrounding map. But this problem becomes more severe when there are multiple Towers, because their radius overlaps on multiple maps.

Now, players need to find the best route to each Tower without exhausting the best maps in the surrounding area. They need to reach all Towers first, and then they can use Tablets to support the remaining maps. However, many players just want to run maps and collect Divine Orbs, and don’t want to solve puzzles on Atlas.

Without a doubt, Towers are one of the biggest problems with POE 2’s Atlas map system, and they just cause unnecessary friction.

Tower Updates In Patch 0.2.0

And through the update trailer for the upcoming POE 2 patch 0.2.0, we saw GGG’s new adjustments to Towers. They will give all content the ability to spawn in Tower maps, including Bosses, which means that Towers will have the same clearing requirements as regular maps, and you need to meet these requirements to activate Tower.

In addition, Towers will be able to randomly spawn content on Atlas, and they can also obtain content by using Tablets on other Towers within this radius.

The Problem Could Get Worse

We can see GGG’s efforts to get players to like Tower mechanic again, but it may be the opposite, and this update will only exacerbate the problems of Tower in the upcoming patch.

Towers can now spawn additional content, such as Ritual, Atlas, or map bosses, and they can also add additional content by providing any Precursor Tablets to other Towers in range. However, they now also have the same completion conditions as normal maps, so you need to kill all rare creatures and any existing map bosses to complete Tower before you can apply Towers to enhance the surrounding map.

Bad Layout

This may seem like an upgrade, but this change leads to more problems. The first is that no one wants to run content like Breaches in this layout. Because it’s bad enough when Breaches spawn in the bad layout of normal maps and you can’t take advantage of them, but in several Tower maps, this is almost always the case.

This is because their layouts are always terrible for this type of content, meaning you always need to kill all the bosses and win rare items and materials to complete Towers. This is so inefficient that some players who are just trying to farm POE 2 Currency quickly might as well just run a normal endgame map.

While this is fine for layouts like Bluff, which is pretty much the only really good Towers layout, for layouts like Lost Towers, you really just want to get to the end of the Tower as quickly as possible to complete it. This is really bad because it inevitably leads to a lot of backtracking to find some rare items you missed.

Tablets Are Wasted

Honestly, this was already a common problem with most bad layouts in normal maps, but now there’s more of a problem. Because Towers maps can now add additional content by applying Tablets from other nearby completed Towers, this means that Towers will now consume one of your Tablets of progress again.

This can be beneficial if you want to top up Bluff map, but if that Tower has a bad layout, which happens often, then you have to make sure to reach every Tower in the area before placing any Tablets into it to avoid topping up other poorly laid out Towers.

Imagine adding more Breaches to Lost Towers map. Towers can then spawn the map boss, preventing some players from completing them. If they can’t beat that boss, they still need to run a low-level Waystone to complete the Towers, meaning that any extra content that exists on that map is worthless and any Tablets that were taken up by that Tower are wasted.

It’s clear that the problem with Towers isn’t that they don’t have any extra content, but rather their functionality and how players deal with them. If GGG doesn’t make changes to this fundamental problem, perhaps this patch will end up being a waste of time.