The fastest player in Path of Exile 2 looks like it’s playing as a music visualizer. Ping-pong lightning flashes across the screen in sync with the breakneck rhythms he’s been beating out for the past nine hours. Cramp. He’s racing to become the first player in the world to reach the maximum level of the action RPG, and the competition is fierce.
Andrew “TidesofTime” Bissener is level 98, just two levels away from the finish line at level 100. As are eight other players right behind him, according to official leaderboard. There is little experience gain at this stage of the game, but if he continues his pace, he could take the crown this weekend.
Former professional Dota 2 AND Hearthstone Player Bissener defines what is a professional PoE2 looks at this stage of early access and appears to be a screen full of lightning bolts. His Stormweaver sorceress is a source of sedate shock and speed damage. While other classes have to risk getting hit when aiming arrows or charging at monsters, Bissener’s design does this for him, allowing him to teleport efficiently across maps. All he does is spam his Spark skill and watch as thousands of blue bolts clear the dungeon for him.
On Thursday, Bissener took a miniature break to finish its configuration on stream, but don’t let his extensive skill tree scare you. It’s actually quite uncomplicated: everything runs on mana. One of PoE 2 passive skills overloads your shock damage based on the amount of mana you have, and Mind over matter a node in the skill tree turns your mana into your life. No longer needing a normal life, Bissener also runs a node that reduces it to one and makes you immune to chaos damage, the most terrible type of damage in the game. In fact, she has more mana than the sorceress.
There are five other sorceresses in the top ten that exploit a similar, if not identical, setup. Such is the power of finding one attribute – in a game overflowing with them – that does it all. Lucky loot doesn’t even matter at this level of the game. Buying items from other players is the only way to find the perfect gear, which means the race is largely a marathon of getting through dungeons as quickly as possible. One Reddit user compiled all the classes in the top 1000 player leaderboard and here’s the result: predominantly a Stormreaver sorceress.
However, second place goes to Monk Invoker, who is about an hour behind Bissener, pushing him to keep going. “I can’t stop because Invoker won’t stop,” Biessener said in Friday’s broadcast.
If Bissener Steam profile whatever indicates that it took him over 260 hours to get this far. I’m not quite on record pace in 60 hours with a witch of 66, but there’s always next time.
Path of Exile 2 is available in early access on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Windows PC.
