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.