In Path of Exile 2 you can customize and improve your equipment with various items. However, until now it was not possible to exchange runes on your gear. Grinding Gear Games has now changed that – much to the delight of the community.
What items are we talking about? In Path of Exile 2 you can specifically improve your character’s stats with collectible items such as runes. Some runes increase your resistance to certain types of damage, others increase life or mana points. Good defensive stats are important to get through the content, which some compare to Dark Souls due to the level of difficulty.
Once inserted into the equipment, you have not yet been able to remove or replace the runes. In the worst case scenario, this meant that you had to forego important defensive values, as you could only use suitable runes if you exchanged gear.
Patch 0.1.1 finally lets you exchange runes
What has changed now? With the last patch 0.1.1, GGG (Grinding Gear Games) brought a change to the socketable items in Path of Exile 2. The change in the patch notes specifically reads: “Sockable items, such as runes, can now be used with another socketable item be overwritten in the version.”
If you now insert a new rune into an item, you will be asked whether you would like to replace the existing rune with the new one. If you decide to do so and click “Accept”, the old rune will disappear irrevocably. If you don’t already have a large supply of runes, you should think carefully about which rune you use in which item.
This NPC in Path of Exile 2 identifies your items
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“Now we can finally start”
This is how the community reacts: As a post on Reddit shows, the small but important change has been really well received by the Path of Exile 2 community. Many players had barely used their runes so far because they changed their equipment regularly and didn’t want to “ruin” or waste their high-quality gear.
xisupaz_blackbird writes in the comment: “Very nice. All of us who have hundreds of runes can finally start reducing the stack.” And oxyscotty thinks: “This increases the value of many items that people with bad or useless ones [Runen] for their build.”
Vorstar92 adds that it’s nice to be able to customize gear more easily and swap out runes for resistances. “I’m sure we’ve all used runes to maximize resistances, only to end up extremely overcapping when resistance hits,” he writes.
And Pokepunk710 writes: “Such a great change. I simply left my socket slots empty because I change gear often and that would have messed up my resistances.” And Foray2x1 also thinks that he can finally socket runes into his equipment. “I haven’t done it yet because I didn’t want to create problems for later,” he explains.
Runes drop from monsters and bosses in the Path of Exile 2 campaign as well as in the endgame. It is also possible to trade runes with other players. However, the trading system is increasingly being criticized and more and more players are complaining about the poor implementation. You can find out more about this here: Fans of Path of Exile 2 demand an important feature, but the developers refuse it on principle