2.3.0 Changes to the High-level Experience Equation

The race to level 100 in Path of Exile is not meant to be fast. The upper echelons of player level in Path of Exile are about bragging right more than absolute power. The marginal benefits of the last few passive skill points are low, and there currently aren't any items that require level 97 to equip.

Over time, players have become both better at building characters, better at playing to maximise experience and have more powerful tools at their disposal. The race to 100 gets faster and faster each league.

To compensate for this, we have periodically applied changes to the experience equation to slow down the top players reaching 100. Sometimes we apply changes that intentionally slow a larger band of players down, but this is due to our dissatisfaction with their leveling speed also. As we have seen this league, players are still able to reach high levels rather quickly.

We didn't go into detail about the specifics of the 2.3.0 experience change in the patch notes. This was an oversight. The details are as follows:

We reduced the effective level of endgame areas for the purposes of the experience equation. The below chart lists the monster level of the area, what the level is for the experience penalty before 2.3.0, and then the effective level after 2.3.0. You can see the details of the experience penalty equation on the Path of Exile wiki (http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Experience).

Level 70: 70 -> 70
Level 71: 71 -> 70.94
Level 72: 72 -> 71.82
Level 73: 73 -> 72.64
Level 74: 74 -> 73.4
Level 75: 75 -> 74.1
Level 76: 76 -> 74.74
Level 77: 76.9 -> 75.32
Level 78: 77.7 -> 75.84
Level 79: 78.4 -> 76.3
Level 80: 79 -> 76.7
Level 81: 79.5 -> 77.04
Level 82: 79.9 -> 77.32
Level 83: 80.1 -> 77.54
Level 84: 80.2 -> 77.7

We've found that players who aim for max level enjoy a harder grind to reach this goal. The harder grind also more clearly signals to players who like building alternate characters roughly when to reroll.

In the future, we'll release content that has a higher monster level than level 84. This would make the race to 100 even faster. We'll probably apply experience penalties directly to the upper levels themselves rather than continuing to drop the effective area levels for experience. For example, maybe it'll take 50% longer to reach level 100 from level 99, but the experience gain of lower-level players would be unadjusted. This depends a lot on the specific level of content that comes out in future releases. We want to strike a good balance between rewarding progression and a race to 100 that isn't over in ten days each league.

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Achilion wrote:

#makeFrogsGreatAgain

I spoke to the art team. While they won't be gigantic, they and some other pets will probably be increased in size. I can't promise a timeline on this, but maybe soon.