Most players eventually lose the drive to keep grinding a new league, or season, in Path of Exile 2 and simply log off until the next one. Others gather up all their in-game money and spend it on something ridiculous, like an army of 2,000 skeletons.
PoE 2 streamer Empyriangaming decided it was time to test the action RPG’s limits by creating the most expensive minion builds I’ve ever seen. We’re talking gear that cost him more in-game currency than I’ve earned over the course of my 700 hours in the game. There’s min-maxing and then there’s whatever Empyriangaming did to make six complete sets of gear to summon more minions than the game can even handle.
Normally, a minion build has around 10 to 15 skeletons accompanying them in PoE 2, but Empyriangaming’s crew did some math to figure out how to squeeze out as many of them as possible. The trick is to reduce the resource cost of each minion into single digits and to stack up as much of that resource as you can. Unfortunately, the game refuses to let you summon more than 255 of each minion type before deleting them all and resetting the counter back to zero, so Empyriangaming recruited some friends to bring their own armies.
The group learned pretty quickly that there was going to be one major problem with the plan: frame rate. When Empyriangaming summoned 255 of his own Skeletal Priests, PoE 2 slowed to a crawl and ran like a stop-motion film. Every few seconds a stream of skeletons from the heavens would shift as the server caught up with his inputs. But even though it was completely unplayable, the group decided to see what else they could break.
All six players took a trip to PoE 2’s roguelike Trial of the Sekhemas mode where you get powerful bonuses that only work while playing it. One of them happens to be a buff that basically doubles the amount of minions each of them can summon. Empyriangaming watched as his frame rate graph jumped up and down like a heart rate monitor as everyone spawned in a total of 2,000 minions. It was so laggy that simply dodge rolling took about a minute to actually happen on the screen. “Oh god, I didn’t aim my dodge roll properly. Give me like 30 more seconds,” one player said as they attempted to merge their skeletons into one glowing mass.
When they took their army to an actual map to see how it performed against a boss, the frame rate continued to stand in their way. It’s pretty hard to kill a boss—let alone find one—when you’re waiting a few minutes to walk forward five feet.
Knowing this, Empyriangaming brought everyone back to his hideout for one last experiment. He called for everyone to start spamming skeletons while he listed an extremely valuable item for an absurdly low price on the game’s trade website, luring automated bot accounts and unlucky players into their trap. It didn’t take long for people to start flooding in thinking they were getting the deal of a lifetime and actually getting a room full of hundreds of skeletons.
“Wtf is this,” one of the players wrote in chat as they stepped into the skeleton pit. A slew of people joined and immediately left before someone managed to swipe the item and make it out alive. But you do have to wonder if the experience of loading into a hideout with more skeletons than Hades will haunt them for far longer than they’ll use the item. PoE 2 isn’t tagged as a horror game on Steam, but Empyriangaming might’ve just prompted some people to suggest adding it.
