PoE 2 Nearly Killed Divine Orbs as a Troll Move

"I just want you to know that the troll answer that we legitimately thought we might do for a second is, 'What if we just remove Divines from the game?'" That's Path of Exile 2 Game Director Jonathan Rogers during a recent Tavern Talk stream, casually admitting that one of the most important currencies in the entire game nearly got axed as a joke.

The context: GGG is making Divine Orbs more common in the upcoming 0.5 update, Return of the Ancients, which launches on May 29. The reasoning behind the change is, by Rogers' own admission, kind of ridiculous. During the outgoing Fate of the Vaal league, players figured out a "snaking" strategy in the Temple mechanic that generated absurd Divine counts per hour. With that trick getting nerfed in 0.5, the team knew players would immediately start comparing their hourly Divine income between leagues and complaining about the drop. So rather than deal with that discourse, they just bumped the drop rate. If the numbers aren't comparable, nobody can draw a clean line between old and new.

"This is going to sound ultra dumb to some people, I suspect," Rogers said, laughing, while co-director Mark Roberts buried his face in his hands. Rogers explained that by changing the base drop rate, "nobody will be able to make the comparison any more." He was quick to temper expectations, though. "It's not like they're dropping like candy or anything, but they are an amount more common that is such that it doesn't make them quite comparable."

The Nuclear Option

Before settling on "make them more common," the team floated going the opposite direction and removing Divine Orbs from the game entirely. Rogers framed it as a troll answer, but the fact that it was even on the table for a moment tells you something about how GGG approaches balance decisions. This is a currency that functions as the de facto gold standard for PoE 2's entire trading economy. Players price everything in Divines. Removing them wouldn't just shake the meta; it would collapse the floor under every trade listing in the game.

I love that GGG talks about this stuff openly. Most studios would never admit that a major balance change happened because they wanted to dodge Reddit complaints about loot-per-hour spreadsheets. Rogers saying the quiet part out loud, and laughing about the chaos they almost caused, is exactly the kind of transparency that makes GGG one of the better communicators in the live-service space. Compare this to studios that ship vague patch notes reading "adjusted drop rates" with zero explanation. GGG tells you the reason was partly psychological warfare against their own playerbase's data-tracking habits, and they do it on camera.

Whether the adjustment actually stops players from running the numbers is another question. PoE's community will have new Divines-per-hour benchmarks within 48 hours of the league going live. But the drop rate change, combined with the Temple snaking nerf, should at least make the economy feel different enough that Fate of the Vaal comparisons don't dominate every conversation. Return of the Ancients is being positioned as the game's most approachable league yet, and a slightly more generous Divine supply fits that goal.

The 0.5 update goes live on Friday, May 29, alongside the new league. Rogers noted during the Tavern Talk that loot changes extend well beyond just Divines, with adjustments "all over" the game's reward structure.