Path of Exile 2 is set to receive its biggest update yet with the upcoming Last of the Druids content drop. The new update brings substantial performance gains to Grinding Gear Games’ frenetic ARPG, a host of new content, balance changes, and fixes, but it won’t add everything fans have been asking for.
As of the game’s 0.31 update, Path of Exile 2 removed rare monster markers from the game map, much to the dismay of many fans. However, speaking to FRVR prior to the launch of the ARPG’s next update, game director Jonathan Rogers revealed he regrets ever adding rares to the game’s map in the first place.
The removal of rares from the game map was a decision tied to the game’s itemisation. Always showing rares made exploration trivial, and it made players jump from rare-to-rare without taking any notice at the game’s overall loot pool, which harms itemisation.
“You need to have a really good balance between random rewards that can come from any source, as in the core drop pool, and rewards that can come from specific content,” Rogers explained. “Because people both like the feeling of people able to target to find a specific thing, and they also like the fact that something can drop at any moment. So, that’s something that were always stressed to make sure that we’ve got the balance of that stuff.”
“It sucked so much because it meant the game was just playing the mini-map.”
Path of Exile 2 lead Jonathan Rogers
Rogers explained that randomisation is also a massive part of making itemisation feel rewarding, and that means that “loot doesn’t always come from rares”. Rogers explained that they completely regret putting rares on the map in the first place, and that feature of earlier Path of Exile 2 builds is not coming back—or, more accurately, not in the way it was originally implemented.
“That is a feature I highly regret ever having had,” Rogers said. “It sucked so much because it meant the game was just playing the mini-map, like you never even saw anything. It honestly, I feel like, really degraded the experience of exploration and stuff. So, yeah, we don’t wanna do that again.”
Rogers revealed that there is a change coming that will make rares appear again. “When you’ve found all the checkpoints on the map and killed the map boss, then the rares will appear on the map, on the mini-map after that. That’s a change we’ve made. Actually, I’m not sure, did we ship that? It might be in 0.4. I’m not sure if we shipped that to live at all.”
The Path of Exile 2 lead explained that this feature has been designed to make sure that players aren’t missing out on “the value that a map provides”, but it doesn’t harm exploration as players must not only defeat the map’s boss, but also find all of its checkpoints.
“Then it’s perfectly fine to be like, ‘okay, here’s the couple of rares that might be lying around’. So there’s a feature we’ve either added or are adding now. I actually don’t remember whether we’ve patched it in or not,” the director said.
Path of Exile 2 is still in the midst of development. At the end of the day, it is an early access release and that means that features will be added, removed, reshaped and restarted as Grinding Gear Games continues to create its new ARPG.
In a previous article, Rogers explained that Path of Exile 2 still has a lot way to go, but the team is confident that the game’s 1.0 build will be finished and playable sometime in 2026. The game’s 0.4 update launches on December 12, 2025.
