Players have reached a level of power that the game can no longer track.
Path of Exile 2 enthusiasts are relentlessly pushing the boundaries of theory-crafting, striving for the highest possible DPS. However, it appears that “over-optimizing” a build can lead to a bizarre outcome where damage output effectively vanishes.
A player known as Swedge recently showcased the results of a groundbreaking experiment, demonstrating how he managed to hit the game’s hard damage ceiling and break the underlying system.
Swedge’s findings reveal that if a character inflicts more than 35.79 million damage per second, Path of Exile 2 fails to register the impact entirely.
This limitation is likely rooted in the engine’s technical architecture. In the original Path of Exile, damage-over-time (DoT) was internally calculated as “damage per minute.”
The system hits a wall at 2,147,483,647 damage per minute—the maximum value for a 32-bit signed integer. When converted, this equals roughly 35.79 million damage per second. Exceeding this threshold triggers an integer overflow, causing the value to wrap around and become negative.
In Path of Exile 2, when a boss is ignited with damage exceeding this cap, the game cannot process the astronomical figure, resulting in zero actual damage being applied to the target.
For those interested in the mechanics of this “broken” setup, Swedge has shared the details of the original build along with a more budget-friendly version for public use.
Source: iXBT.games