The Best Endgame - Path of Exile: War for the Atlas

When developer Grinding Gear Games introduced the ascendancy classes to Path of Exile, a friend and colleague of mine, who reviewed the game at the time, was sure that this is it. "It's a great new expansion, but I think we've seen it all now and they've run out of stuff to add. It's probably time for them to look into creating something new."
That was a bit of a bold claim and you have to be careful with those when you review stuff. So he asked me how I felt about it and I agreed with him. The game now had a story stretching across four acts, you killed what we then presumed was the main villain, then did it all over again on the higher difficulty settings and you had the endgame maps and Izaro's labyrinth, which let you specialize your class and build some more to make it perfect. What could you possibly add on top? In terms of features and content, at that point Path of Exile was already going above and beyond its main inspiration - Diablo 2.

The first big surprise came with The Fall of Oriath, which more than doubled the game's available story content, bringing it to a massive ten chapters full of insane boss battles, even more monster variation than before, new abilities and spells, new gear and easily one of the best Free2Play experiences any fan of ARPGs could possibly wish for. There's an insane amount of content and it doesn't cost anything at all. Heck, even if you decide to throw some money at the game, all it'll get you is extra storage space for more loot and some cosmetic armors and effects. All of this is nice to have, but it's by no means mandatory.

In one big update, Path of Exile's story portion got bigger and better than anyone thought possible. You can now easily fight your way up all the way to level 70 and higher just by following the story and using one of the countless possible builds using the game's huge (and admittedly mildly stupid) skill tree as you go. Fight as a slayer, who storms across the battlefield with whirlwind attacks. Be a clever and nimble shadow, who zips and teleports around, taking out enemies before they ever see you. Blow them to bits with fire, ice and lightning. Or get a little more creative and summon an army of ballistae to destroy the bad guys for you. Become a pathfinder, who draws her power from the game's many powerful and unique potions. Or be a necromancer, who potentially controls not three or four, but literally hundreds of minions by raising their corpses, manipulating baddies to fight for you or animating weapons and armor dropped by fallen enemies to rise against your foes. If there's any other game in the genre, which grants players so much freedom and so many possibilites in how they get to play their characters, then I haven't heard of it.

But while the story got a major overhaul, the endgame was still severely lacking. Only a small handful of builds was really viable for the super hard content, which came after the story's final boss. Many challenges were so over the top, that only a tiny fraction of the player base could ever see, let alone hope to overcome them. To many players, Path of Exile simply stopped after the story, which is still fair in a free game, but the endgame was far too exclusive. It also had severe balancing issues. Some endgame maps suffered from labyrinthian level design and low monster density, making them absolutely no fun to play, while others had bosses, which were massively overpowered for their tier of difficulty, while other, higher level bosses, were a pushover by comparison.

I'm using past tense here, because the most recent content update to Path of Exile, War for the Atlas, basically does to its endgame, what The Fall of Oriath did for the story part of the game. All of the maps have been re-balanced, many of them had their layouts changed for better pacing, there are now decent amounts of enemies to fight, kill and loot on every map and the bosses are an absolute blast! Rather than simply throwing an extra tough damage sponge at you, who hits a little bit harder than regular trash, many of the new boss baddies require you to use a bit of strategy. They have some deadly but well-telegraphed attacks you need to avoid, some of them come with several phases and there are no more "WTF just happened" insta-deaths like with certain map bosses before the update. Granted, many of these fights are harder versions of boss fights you see in the story chapters, but they're simply a lot more fun to play than just another extra juicy, slightly larger skeleton with an oversized life bar.

Powerful new loot is always welcome, too!

On top of that, you now actually get to see some endgamey content, even if you're on the more casual end of the player spectrum. In the past, you had to work your way through 16 tiers of maps, fight four insanely strong guardians and then face the Shaper, the final boss in the Atlas of Worlds. But chances were, if you weren't dual-wielding credit cards to get the world's most powerful gear off some shady 3rd party website (or devote your life to farming for that stuff) in an attempt to copy some famous streamer's flavour of the month build, you'd probably never get to see the Shaper, let alone defeat him.

The Shaper is still here in the new update, his four guardians are still massively powerful and you're still gonna have to show some serious dedication if you want to beat this guy. But things are no longer as restrictive as they used to be. First of all, the shaper now battles some new entity, 'The Elder' for control of the atlas. You will constantly run into both of these guys as you play endgame maps. They will do nasty shit such as strengthen the map boss or spawn portals and nasty, otherworldly monsters to hinder your progress. This can happen on just about any map, so it's new content you'll get to experience just by playing these endgame maps. On top of that, there's a whole bunch of super powerful new gear dropping in areas affected by the Shaper or the Elder, potentially helping you to become stronger a bit faster and without trading and grinding for new gear all night and day.

The new story bosses completely change the way you tackle PoE's boss fights.

Endgame build diversity has received a bit of a boost, as well. Sure, some of the most popular builds were utterly destroyed by nerfs. It's no longer possible to simply die to a boss, then remain dead and watch as your minions kill the boss for you. Yes, people actually did this. You could make certain minions more or less invincible, so this trick worked pretty much everywhere. It's no longer possible to get so much life-leech on hit that you'll basically become immortal for as long as you keep on punching. And for a while now, the possibility to build up enough energy shield to make yourself practically unkillable, has been removed, as well. So there's a certain amount of moaning going on about the brutal nerfs and some say that damage spikes are still too punishing for melee builds, which may still get eradicated by surprise oneshot-attacks.

It's tempting to join sides with the folks raging against nerfs. But I don't think I've been killed by any surprise onehit wonders ever since the new content update and I strictly play melee now. It's true, there are some bosses and mechanics, which can wipe you out in the blink of an eye, but they're all fairly predictable. Volatile monsters no longer explode on death to immediately take you out. Instead, they make a distinct noise and then spawn an exploding orb, which will follow you before it blows up, giving you ample time to react. Bosses with powerful attacks usually have a long, clearly visible windup phases, making everything avoidable if you know what to look out for. It's true that many ARPGs let you stand right in front of any boss, clicking it to death whilst popping a ton of potions, so if you're not into active dodging and figuring out some boss patterns, then PoE will cause you some frustration.

Particle spam can also be a problem when trying to avoid attacks.

With that in mind, the skill tree has undergone some tweaks and it's now easier to gain life, armor, resistances and gain some all-around toughness without having to spend every last point on survivability, whilst completely ignoring your offense. You still need to find a good balance in order to achieve both enough defenses as well as decent kill speeds, but the game no longer feels like 'Path of Life Nodes'. Claire and I are more or less playing the same builds we had before the update and they feel significantly tougher than before. For the first time it feels like I can actually play exactly the build I want in PoE's endgame without getting punished for it. We're tackling Uber Izaro next and judging by our map progress, we're starting to circle in on the Shaper, himself.

I'm not entirely sure what to do once we'll be done with that or whether PoE really needs any more endgame after that. There's such a mind-boggling amount of content in here, which feels so complete and polished, I'd be happy to simply do it all over again with a bunch of different characters. But knowing Grinding Gear Games, they're already working on the next big content expansion, which will completely destroy my expectations. How fucking cool is that?