The fastest player in Path of Exile 2 looks like he’s playing as a music visualizer. Lightning bolts ping-pong across the screen in sync with the breakneck beats he’s been blasting for the past nine hours on Twitch. He’s racing to be the first player in the world to hit the action RPG’s max level, and the competition is fierce.
Andrew “TidesofTime” Biessener is level 98, just two levels shy of the finish line at level 100. And so are the eight other players right behind him, according to the official leaderboard. Experience gains are glacial this far into the game, but he could take the crown over the weekend if he keeps going at this pace.
A former professional Dota 2 and Hearthstone player, Biessener is defining what professional PoE 2 looks like at this stage in early access, and it seems to be a screen full of lightning bolts. His Stormweaver sorceress is a conduit for serious shock damage and speed. Where other classes have to risk getting hit while aiming arrows or charging into monsters, Biessener’s build does the work for him so he can teleport through maps efficiently. All he does is spam the Spark skill and watch thousands of blue bolts clear the dungeon for him.
Biessener took a short break on Thursday to run through his setup on stream, but don’t let his sprawling skill tree scare you. It’s actually pretty simple: Everything runs on mana. One of PoE 2’s passive skills overloads your shock damage based on how much mana you have, and the Mind Over Matter node in the skill tree turns your mana into your life. With no need for regular life anymore, Biessener is also running with the node that reduces it to one and makes you immune to chaos damage, the scariest damage type in the game. He’s effectively more mana than sorceress.
There are five other sorceress players in the top 10 who are using a similar, if not identical, build. Such is the power of finding a single attribute — in a game overflowing with them — that does it all. Lucky loot drops aren’t even a factor at this level of play. Buying items off other players is the only way you’re going to find the perfect gear, which means the race is largely a marathon of clearing through dungeons as fast as possible. One Reddit user tallied up all the different classes in the leaderboard of the top 1,000 players and it’s overwhelmingly Stormreaver sorceress.
But second place is actually an Invoker monk who is around an hour behind Biessener, pushing him to keep going. “I can’t stop because the Invoker won’t stop,” Biessener said on his stream Friday.
If Biessener’s Steam profile is any indication, it’s taken him over 260 hours to get this far. I’m not quite world record pace 60 hours in with a level 66 witch, but there’s always next time.
Path of Exile 2 is available in early access on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC.