As one of the best ARPGs around, Path of Exile has been one of the shining examples of what the genre can do in the modern age. However, as with any game, PoE isn’t perfect with the developers often struggling to balance loot drops in both the first and second games in the series.
Path of Exile game director Mark Roberts admits that balancing the quality of loot across ground drops, chest drops, and more is always going to be the biggest issue for the ARPG series, but the teams are constantly working on making loot feel more satisfying.
Speaking to PCGamesN, Roberts explains that balancing loot in the game is “a kind of ebb and flow situation” with past leagues resulting in an abundance of good loot that then needs to be nerfed which gives the community a sense that loot is always getting worse with every update.
“It constantly feels like there’s this nerfing of loot dropping because of all these extremes that we keep missing because the game is just inherently so complicated, and there are so many levers, and it’s hard to find it all. And so it feels a lot like nerf, nerf, nerf,” Robert’s explains.
“Meanwhile, someone will be like, ‘This league’s unrewarding,’ and those get buffed and buffed, […] and now we’re at a tipping point where one of the sides is heavier than the other and now we need to kind of go back in the other direction.”
Nevertheless, the game director admits that this has been a “consistent issue” for many years now, but the team can’t rush massive balance changes or else everything around the game will break. After all, loot is the game, and breaking the loot means everything unravels.
“Long story short – we’re working on it,” Roberts continues. “ We’re aware of the problem. Yes, we need to work on [improving] ground drops, loot drops, drops from monsters, whatever you want to call it.”
Roberts also explains that changes to loot drops after a new update releases rely heavily on player feedback. While addressing loot concerns may feel slow, the team works to collate reams of feedback from players to figure out what actually needs changing.
“We can’t just wake up tomorrow and decide ground drops are good enough,” the developer says. “So we just wait to be told about these problems. We listen. It’s important to keep listening and then work out a plan and deal with it.”
While players might scoff at the need for developers to wait to act on issues, it is true. Path of Exile is a live-service game, and more players are running through a new content drop in the first hour than the entirety of internal playtesting. What’s wrong in an internal test environment is different than a live play environment, and that’s the curse of any constantly-updated, live-service title.
As any ARPG fan will know, itemisation and balancing loot drops is the biggest hurdle for pretty much every game in the genre. While Diablo 2 is often seen as the peak of itemisation in the genre, Blizzard is still continuing to tweak drops with new patches to the game’s Infernal Edition. Path of Exile is no different, and changes to loot will always be the most pressing changes for the game.
With all this said, Roberts hopes that the new Mirage update will make ground loot feel more satisfying when it releases in just a few days on March 6, 2026. Of course, as with any major update for the game (or any game in the genre, really) we will likely see a healthy dose of post-launch patches that further refine loot drops, but Roberts is confident that this new update should launch in a good place.
