-20% exp on death needed

I’ve made similar topics in the past, but the situation keeps drifting further in the wrong direction. It has become absurdly easy to level up, to the point where the current XP penalty barely matters. And please, turn 5-way and sanctum into a boss-arena style with no experience gain or loss—it completely undermines the natural progression of the game.

Right now, glass-cannon builds dominate simply because the XP system rewards speed far more than it punishes dying. You can blast through a maps, die, and still come out ahead because gaining 10% XP is dramatically faster than losing it. There’s almost no real incentive to invest in meaningful defenses.

I think the game should introduce more mechanics that actively test a player’s defenses, like the pulse damage in Hive Fortress. Encounters that force players to respect mitigation, recovery, and positioning help reward balanced builds instead of pure DPS stacking. Path of Exile has so many defensive layers and interesting interactions, yet many of them feel irrelevant because the penalty structure doesn’t support using them.

Increasing the death penalty would push players toward more thoughtful, resilient builds instead of hyper-fragile speed setups. Ultimately, it would make character progression feel more meaningful and restore some weight to the endgame, where decisions should matter.

They already nerfed exp in 5-ways once to deter players from doing it. People still do it, and I'll happily give my divine orbs away to the kind 5-way rota hosts out there. Trade 820 chat is full of these legion 5-way hosts all day, and so is TFT. Its beautiful. Bless them for selling their services for divine orbs in order for players to reach lvl100 while completely side-stepping and ignoring exp loss.

When setting your game to 800x600 windowed mode and going afk in a group while colors explode from a KB HH build is the best leveling method, you know the problem lies somewhere else. Go ahead and increase the exp loss, I will just live in Sanctum all league until lvl100, or pay divines to buy my lvl100. And other people will quit over that kind of change too.

Right, I forgot about including sanctum to be turned into boss arena zone. It should be no exp loss/gain zone too.

"

Nomancs#6176 wrote:

Right, I forgot about including sanctum to be turned into boss arena zone. It should be do exp loss/gain zone too.

That would help me farm exp faster, so I'd love that.

"

Toforto#2372 wrote:

"

Nomancs#6176 wrote:

Right, I forgot about including sanctum to be turned into boss arena zone. It should be no exp loss/gain zone too.

That would help me farm exp faster, so I'd love that.

Fixed the typo ;) Happy you agree with me that Sanctum need be the "no exp" zone.

[Removed by Support] These changes are never happening because the game would just lose players like crazy.

On the contrary, they disabled exp loss in endgame bossfights, and every patch is giving us more and more QOL. We have automatic offline trading AH now, and Currency Exchange. Its already going in the right direction for the majority of players.

The mass-opening blight chests QOL is just 1 step away from auto-loot for many currencies with 1 click. Its so close.

Should be a two-prong approach:

1) increase the difficulty of the base game
2) offer meaningful defensive options to every build

As I see it, there are some egregious balance issues between certain Ascendancies and archetypes. For example, ES has been dominating the meta to an almost absurd extent to the point where the trade-off for going that route is negligible. The other part is how some Ascendancies have a hard time building meaningful defense, which gives an extra incentive to double-down on clearspeed and raw damage.

This could be a good opportunity to also review if the existing extra mods for Tier 16.5 and 17 are effective in their intent and purpose. I.e. "deal no damage every 10 seconds for 3 seconds" is basically always a reroll unless you're feeling extra masochistic. Adding more mods to the pool while reviewing outliers like that would add more variety to endgame mapping as well.

Generally speaking, the game has become easier and easier over time. This is expected, as a certain amount of powercreep is being introduced with every content release. But sometimes you have to raise the floor to keep the game interesting and engaging.

Or, and hear me out on this absurd idea, care about your game and not about what others are doing.

We all are aware of your antics on how the game is too forgiving and all that glass cannon nonsense but as soon as you stop caring about everyone else the game becomes what you make of it… [Removed by Support]

"

Nomancs#6176 wrote:

Right, I forgot about including sanctum to be turned into boss arena zone. It should be no exp loss/gain zone too.

+1 same as the 20%

"

Toforto#2372 wrote:

These changes are never happening because the game would just lose players like crazy.

According to whom? I don't think we can speak of player"s" if nobody would actually leave, except maybe one.

"

ArtCrusade#4438 wrote:

Should be a two-prong approach:

1) increase the difficulty of the base game

This is something they should have do quite a while ago.

"

TIGRElaranja#2163 wrote:

Or, and hear me out on this absurd idea, care about your game and not about what others are doing.

We all are aware of your antics on how the game is too forgiving and all that glass cannon nonsense but as soon as you stop caring about everyone else the game becomes what you make of it… [Removed by Support]

You are so close to understanding why these suggestions are made. So close.

I wished people would use actual arguments instead of immediately attacking the messenger.