Path of Exile 2’s New League Meets an Old Problem
Path of Exile 2 has only been in its latest league for a few weeks, and players are already doing what they always do in deep action RPGs: trying to completely break the game. That means stacking damage, stacking gear, and creating over the top builds purely to see how far the numbers can go.
A group of dedicated players, including YouTuber Swedge, have now discovered that there is actually a hard ceiling on how much damage you can deal in Path of Exile 2. Push past that point and something strange happens. Your giant, carefully engineered numbers do not just lose efficiency. They stop working entirely.
Instead of deleting bosses instantly, your hits simply do no damage at all.
How the Damage Cap Works and Why It Exists
Path of Exile 2 appears to share the same damage over time cap as the original Path of Exile. The key number here is 35.79 million damage per second. If your build starts dealing more than that to a target with damage over time effects, the game engine simply refuses to process it.
This comes down to how the engine handles numbers and how damage over time is stored internally. In Path of Exile 1, damage over time is tracked as damage per minute instead of per second. That is likely tied to how the server tick rate and calculations are implemented. Because of this design, there is a maximum value that can be stored in a standard 32 bit signed integer.
That integer cap is 2,147,483,647 damage per minute. When you convert that to damage per second, it becomes roughly 35.79 million. Go above that value and the integer overflows and flips into the negative range, which effectively breaks the math.
In the original game, hitting that limit causes damage to roll under the cap. In other words, anything above the maximum value would effectively be treated as something just below it, still resulting in huge but functional damage. In Path of Exile 2, however, going past that cap seems to be handled differently. When Swedge and others ignite bosses for more than that limit, the number appears to break so badly that the game just treats it as zero damage.
The result is a bizarre situation where carefully crafted high end builds that should melt bosses instead do absolutely nothing once they cross that invisible threshold.
Why This Matters For Players and High End Builds
For most casual players, this damage cap will never be a real issue. You will likely never see 35 million damage per second in a normal playthrough. But for hardcore theorycrafters and endgame enthusiasts, this cap is a big deal. Path of Exile as a franchise has always attracted players who love to push systems to their limits, min max everything, and chase absurd power levels just to see what is possible.
Swedge and other players built extremely specialized setups designed to multiply damage as high as they could. This meant stacking rare gear, optimizing passive trees, and using skills and interactions that supercharge ignite and other damage over time effects. The whole point of this style of play is to see bosses evaporate the moment they spawn.
Instead, they found bosses that simply stopped taking damage once the build became too strong.
That creates a strange kind of punishment for doing the thing Path of Exile encourages you to do: improve your character, find rare items, and build smarter and stronger over time. When the reward for all that effort is a boss health bar that does not move, the experience feels broken rather than powerful.
Meanwhile, as the writer points out, a low geared, basic character can at least reliably chip away at a boss. That contrast makes the cap feel even worse. It is not just a technical detail behind the scenes. It is something that directly undercuts the fantasy of building a godlike character.
What Players Want Grinding Gear Games To Change
At the end of the testing, Swedge says they hope Grinding Gear Games adjusts how this works in Path of Exile 2. There are a couple of possible solutions that would keep the spirit of high end builds alive while still respecting the technical limits of the engine.
- Make it behave like Path of Exile 1 again, where damage that exceeds the cap rolls under but still counts as very high damage.
- Raise the cap significantly so that only the most extreme, almost impossible builds ever touch it.
- Rework how damage over time is stored and calculated so that it can handle larger values without overflowing into negative numbers.
Players like Swedge would actually prefer if the cap were raised, because the whole appeal of Path of Exile at the top end is seeing just how ridiculous your build can become. The game already features bosses with mechanics and hits that can one shot you if you make a mistake. From that perspective, it feels only fair that players should also have the potential to one shot bosses with extreme effort and investment.
Until Grinding Gear Games makes an adjustment, though, there is now a practical soft limit on how wild damage over time builds can get before they literally break the math. For anyone who loves pushing ARPGs to their limits, Path of Exile 2’s damage cap is now one more system to work around, optimize under, or attempt to crack in the future.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/path-of-exile-2-players-suffer-the-consequences-of-dealing-illegal-amounts-of-damage-as-boss-shrugs-off-a-95m-damage-hit/
