Path of Exile 2 streamer Empyriangaming and a group of friends recently pushed the ARPG to its breaking point by summoning a literal army of 2,000 skeletons, grinding their frame rate to a halt, and then luring unsuspecting traders straight into the chaos. It is one of the most gloriously ridiculous experiments we have seen come out of the game.
How Do You Even Summon 2,000 Skeletons?
Most players eventually run out of steam on a given league and simply log off until the next one, but Empyriangaming had a different idea: dump a fortune into the most expensive minion build imaginable. We are talking six complete sets of gear built specifically to summon more minions than the game can actually handle.
Normally, a minion build in PoE 2 runs with roughly 10 to 15 skeletons. Empyriangaming's crew did the math to squeeze out as many as possible. The trick came down to two things:
Reduce the resource cost of each minion down into single digits
Stack up as much of that resource as possible
There was a catch, though. 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 friends to bring their own armies along for the ride. Not the ultimate necromancer fantasy, but honestly, I'll allow it.
What Happened When the Skeletons Showed Up?
The group figured out pretty quickly that their biggest enemy would not be any in-game boss, but the frame rate. When Empyriangaming summoned 255 of his own Skeletal Priests, PoE 2 slowed to a crawl and ran like a stop-motion film, with a stream of skeletons shifting every few seconds as the server caught up with his inputs.
All six players headed to the Trial of the Sekhemas, which offers a buff that doubles the number of minions each of them can summon. That is how the group hit a combined total of 2,000 minions, with Empyrian watching his frame rate graph bounce up and down. It got so laggy that a single dodge roll took about a minute to actually register on screen.
Taking the army into an actual map to test it against a boss did not go much better. When you are waiting a few minutes just to walk forward five feet, it's next to impossible to kill a boss.
The Skeleton Pit Trap
For one last experiment, Empyriangaming brought everyone back to his hideout and had them spam skeletons while he listed an extremely valuable item for an absurdly low price on the game's trade website. The goal was to lure automated bot accounts and unlucky players into the trap, and it worked very well. People flooded in expecting giga riches and instead loaded into a hideout with hundreds of skeletons.
A ton of people joined and immediately bailed before someone finally managed to ninja the item and make it out alive.
If you are keeping up with everything happening in Wraeclast right now, check out our coverage of Curse of the Allflame, the new Path of Exile 3.29 league, and how the Reliquarian Ascendancy is getting a league-specific overhaul.
What is the most ridiculous thing you have ever spent your in-game currency on? Let us know in the comments.
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