Rufous

Path of Exile 2Grinding Gear
I am still barreling my way through Path of Exile 2, the new ARPG that is looking to reinforce the series as a champion of the genre and pose a significant threat to Diablo.


And, if you’re coming from Diablo, there is one specific aspect of the game that may hamstring you, if you’re too married to old Diablo systems. It took me a number of hours to realize I was in the wrong about an early choice here, but it’s never too late to switch.

I’m talking about WASD controls versus point and click with the mouse. And boy, is WASD ever the correct answer.

For a long while, I used point and click because that’s just how Diablo works at baseline, so I figured that I should just keep doing that after a thousand hours in Diablo 3 and 4. Things were not going great, and I took some advice that WASD is better. And now I am giving you that same advice, because it is better.

Path of Exile 2Grinding Gear
It may depend on your class in terms of just how much this makes an impact, but I’ve found especially for my ranged Ranger, it’s immensely helpful as it lets you move and keep shooting rather than stopping more frequently with point and click where stopping makes you dead quite often in Path of Exile’s one-shotting boss fights.

This dramatically transformed boss battles that I was stuck on, and while you still need the gear and the build and what not, it absolutely makes attacks easy to dodge more generally with more freedom over your movement without being led around by your cursor. These are “Dark Souls” ARPG bosses in that timing and learning their movesets is much more important than in Diablo, and without difficulty options, you are usually not just going to be overfarming to blast them out of existence and ignore mechanics.

I think point and click works for Diablo, but Path of Exile is a more methodical type of game with not all that much movement tech based into characters, meaning simply walking and rolling is a huge part of your way to avoid damage, and as such, WASD is definitely the better option for that. You may have to get used to where your skill buttons end up after that rather than the QWERTY bar, but it really does not take much time.


I understand why Path of Exile 2 might be frustrating for many players, but if you are coming directly from Diablo, I would definitely pivot to this control scheme which will make things feel better in terms of how the game plays. The rest of it is up to you.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.