Path Of Exile 2 Pushy Mechanic Improvements: How To Optimize This Awful Mechanic?
Posted: Feb 08, 2025
Posted: Feb 08, 2025
Source: IGGMIf you are an old player of Path of Exile, you know that GGG showed the relevant content of POE 2 as early as ExileCon 2023. Among them, Pushy Mechanic that debuted at the event attracted a lot of players’ attention. It looks very cool, but after playing for a while after Early Access release, you will find that the performance of this new mechanism is really unsatisfactory! We can even say that it is one of the worst systems in PoE 2 at present, because it makes melee worse than it is now.
Pushy Mechanic
Now, Pushy mechanic is a system in Path of Exile 2, which basically allows one entity to push another entity and change their position.
At ExileCon, when the developers talked about this issue, they basically described it as each of these entities. For example, your character and monsters will have different push values, and it’s usually based on the actual size of the entity, so bigger monsters will be able to roll or move towards you and push you out of the way, while smaller monsters shouldn’t have that effect on you. At the same time, the player character should also be able to push things that are smaller than them out of the way.
But we actually saw in a patch released right after Path of Exile 2 was released that GGG improved Dodge Roll so that you can push smaller monsters out of the way more easily, because Pushy mechanic is not working properly right now.
Screen Desync
In my opinion, Pushy mechanic is currently the worst mechanic in the game, especially it feels terrible to interact with it.
Honestly, it doesn’t feel like a specific mechanic that was deliberately positioned in the game to provide this Pushy system. On the contrary, it actually feels like a glitch, it feels like a bug. Because every time it happens, our character will be out of sync, you will even feel like you have a connection problem and completely lose control of your character. Then after a second or half a second, the screen will return to the center of the character, and then we will be in a different position.
From a player’s perspective, there’s no animation or feedback to indicate how the character is being pushed, or which direction they’re being pushed in, they’re just being thrown around. The out-of-sync screen makes them not only unable to deal with enemies normally and pick up POE 2 Currency, but they are even at risk of being killed by the boss. As a result, it feels terrible to interact with it, and it’s undoubtedly the worst mechanic in the game.
Pulls Down The Melee Experience
Now one thing that makes this problem worse is that it’s even worse when you’re playing a melee character, especially a mace character. Because mace swings very slowly, and you’re usually placed close to monsters to launch these slow swing attacks, which means you’re the most vulnerable to being pushed around. Imagine when you’re just standing there, casting Sunder or doing a Rolling Slam, and suddenly you’re pushed across the screen. It’s a bit awkward.
We all know that GGG is committed to making POE 2 the savior of melee combat, you know it’s destined to improve melee combat, and they’re aiming to be much better than POE 1. Because in POE 1, they didn’t have the systems and infrastructure to make melee combat really good, so in POE 2, all these new systems and new things were started from scratch.
And Pushy mechanic, as one of the systems they implemented, this forced mechanism completely deprives melee combat of its power. It doesn’t add anything to melee combat, it just makes you constantly pushed and bullied by monsters, which is terrible!
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How To Fix This Mechanic?
So, at this point, I think this mechanic is in desperate need of fixing. Here we will outline a few things GGG can do to fix this mechanic.
1. Try To Remove It
First, we are going to remove it now. Of course, this is probably the worst idea on this list, and removing this mechanic may not even be possible. Maybe it is completely hard-coded in Path of Exile, including all the moving animations and things like that.
We don’t know how important this mechanic is to the system working in terms of game development or something like that, and whether it can be removed. But I can definitely say that if we read the 0.2.0 patch notes and found out that the entire Pushy mechanic has been completely removed from the game, many people wouldn’t care too much.
2. Improve Mechanic Bugs
But honestly, I think it’s unlikely that it will be completely removed, so the next step is to improve this mechanic. Pushy system actually has a lot of bugs and issues. It’s not just because the system itself doesn’t capture the entire area they’re after, but because it has many bugs in itself. For example, Rolling Slam completely breaks down when you’re being pushed.
What happens with Rolling Slam is that during the animation, if a monster pushes you, you’re pushed in the direction of that monster. But the game’s entire camera angle doesn’t capture the center of the character during the animation, so you move to one side of the screen. Then, once your animation is over, the game immediately repositions you to the center of the screen, which makes you feel like you’re tied up by a rubber band or disconnected from the outside world at that moment.
So if bugs like this were completely eliminated, it would be an enormous improvement and a good direction to go in to fix this mechanic.
3. Add A New Stat
Next, adding a stat for counter-pushing would also be a really good idea, and this could be something as simple as putting it in Strength area of the skill tree. For example, it would make the most sense to put this stat in other places in the tree. As we mentioned before, Pushy system is a really big problem for characters that use mace. So it makes sense to put this stat around the mace part of the tree where Strength area is.
Also, they could have added a stat that increases Stun Threshold. When you’re really getting pushed by a monster, the higher your threshold, the bigger the monster needs to be to push you away. With this, you could definitely increase your resistance by constantly rolling the stat with Chaos Orbs, instead of just being slammed into a wall like a rag doll!
So, something like this that can actually prevent you from getting pushed or at least limit the number of times you get pushed would be a really pleasant change.
4. Improve Character Pushing
The next thing is to improve character pushing. This is actually related to monsters, so now they’ve kind of changed this thing up.
As we mentioned before, when Path of Exile 2 was released, they put in a patch that improved the way to push small monsters with Dodge Roll. But there are actually some problems with this.
Because it’s not just about Dodge Roll, it’s very awkward to be physically blocked by these very small monsters when you’re moving around as a character. And when monsters are three or four times bigger than you, they can easily push you out of the way, but you should also be able to push them out of the way in other ways, which should be a reasonable feature in the game.
5. Improve Object Paths
Finally, for this mechanic, GGG needs to improve object pathing. There are often some terrain issues and things like that in the game that will immediately prevent you from using movement abilities, which results in you being immediately stuck on a small piece of terrain that you can’t even see.
What ends up happening? That’s when monsters are near you, especially when they’re right next to you when you try to use the skill. They may push you a little bit, and eventually you will be off from where you want to go, and then your Dodge Roll will be immediately blocked and stopped.
What’s more important is that once skills are used, if they have a cooldown, they will go on cooldown. This means you’re stuck with your hands tied.
So improving object pathing is a good idea, just remove some small objects so they don’t get in the way.
Since we’re on the subject, I think having more open map layouts actually improves this as well, because there’s nothing worse than being stuck in a corridor. Like a very narrow corridor where you’re completely trapped by monsters and they’re pushing you around and you can’t basically move and you’re just constantly getting tangled up.
These are just some of my thoughts on how I think they could fix the issues with Pushy system. I have to say, this Pushy mechanic is in desperate need of improvement. If you’ve played Path of Exile 2 for a while, you’ll have interacted with this mechanic. But it’s especially noticeable when you start playing as a Warrior and use mace early in the game, you’ll notice yourself getting pushed all over the place. So hopefully GGG hears player feedback soon, and let’s look forward to seeing changes in the next update!
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