Path of Exile 2 happily disappoints by wasting your time in the endgame

I’m nearing 200 hours in Path of Exile 2, now with a level 89 ranger and a level 90 monk that clears everything on the screen so fast it would make Elon Musk jealous. But the further I go, the more frustrating it becomes that Path of Exile 2’s “ultra-endgame” feels mostly about wasting your time rather than actually challenging in a meaningful way.

I previously talked about some of the annoying “midgame” aspects of Path of Exile 2’s ending, I guess you’d call it, which included the fact that one death on a map wipes out XP, all modifiers, your Waystone, path, overreactive punishment.

What I’ve found is that this becomes somewhat less of a problem over time, as you can get so strong that you rarely die, and you’ll have enough Waystones where you can eat a few and that’s fine. (Losing XP never ceases to be annoying).

However, moving away from simple mapping, the main goal of the endgame is to find Citadels to hunt down the boosted bosses of the campaign, and then fight the single ultimate boss once you’ve collected enough of them.

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

It could take dozens, dozens, dozens of maps, and even dozens of hours, and you still might not find a single one. Or sometimes you can get really lucky (I currently have a zone with two on the same board as shown above). But it’s all random, and there’s no way to “plan” your way to them. It seems to be aimed at wasting time without any way to mitigate it.

The second question is how punishing failure is for them. Like I said with the other cards, it will throw you out and wipe out all the valuable modifiers and stuff, but you can still come back, complete that node, and continue.

Citadel is also a one-death, one-fail map, but in this case you have one shot for the entire Citadel. And even with strong characters, one wrong move can mean instant death for these multi-phase bosses. If that happens, you lose the entire Citadel, you’re completely locked out, and you just have to go find another one, which like I said is exhausting.

I learned this the hard way when I went back to the Citadel I had tried and failed about 20 levels ago to see how it would go, when I realized no, no more trying and I needed to find a new one. After about a hundred hours of this endgame, I still haven’t found another version of that Citadel on the map (besides the three copper ones, so far).

Then there’s the best boss of the entire game, which, you guessed it, only allows one death, but has far more throwaway mechanics than any other. It costs a huge amount of time or very valuable currency to even try to fight him. One wrong move and it’s all gone.

Is this… too bad? Of course, the latter half of this is about the excessive death penalty again, but the idea that finding Citadels is completely random and eats up time that you can’t do anything to alleviate. Sure, I’d like to see more content, class balance, etc., but this aspect of the late end really needs help.

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