Path of Exile 2 players suffer the consequences of dealing illegal amounts of damage as boss shrugs off a 95M-damage hit

It's been almost four weeks since the start of Path of Exile 2's latest league, so, naturally, players with nothing better to do are trying to see if they can break the game. This involves putting together ridiculously overkill builds to squeeze out as much damage as possible for the fun of it.

But a group of players found out this week that there is such a thing as too much damage in Path of Exile 2. At a certain point, the game can't calculate the numbers anymore and, instead of pulling a Diablo 4 and going negative, the damage just stops. The boss health bar doesn't budge like some kind of punishment for pushing it further than the developers intended.

YouTuber Swedge, and a few other players, discovered that PoE 2 shares the same damage cap as Path of Exile 1 by lighting bosses on fire for obscene amounts of damage. They put together builds that complement each other by multiplying the damage output to the highest degree. But the result was far from satisfying.

If you manage to hit a boss for over 35.79 million damage per second, the game refuses to calculate it anymore. But unlike PoE 1, PoE 2 doesn't let the damage roll just under the cap, it turns it off completely.

The reason for this might have to do with how damage is handled in the engine that runs both games, as Swedge points out. In PoE 1, damage-over-time (DoT) is understood by the game as damage per minute, probably for server tick rate reasons. That means the cap is 2,147,483,647 damage per minute, or 35.79 million when converted to damage per second. Any more than that and the integer will overflow and become negative.

So, when Swedge and crew ignite bosses for more than that cap in PoE 2, the number might flip into the negatives and make it unrecognizable to the game, resulting in zero damage. That's a bummer for a game all about chasing bigger and bigger numbers. The reward for accumulating some of the rarest gear in the game and developing a build all about dealing the most damage as possible is, well, nothing. My dinky sorceress with thrift store gear at least makes the health bar go down.

Swedge ends the video disappointed and says they hope Grinding Gear Games changes it so that it at least works like PoE 1, even though they'd actually prefer if the cap were raised to please the players who want to push the game to the limit. I'd agree: PoE 2's bosses have plenty of attacks that can one-shot you, so it's only fair if you get to do it back.