Death penalty is unbalanced after a certain level and needs to be reformed to be progressively diminished as you level at 95+

[Ded Moroz]

With all classes at 80+ level and hundreds of hours in the game I've decided to move out to reach level 100. After investing in good build and gear, I run my huntress at Tier 15-16 maps with layers of delirium without any issues. This char is lvl 93 at the moment and during endgame experience my opinion about 10% experience penalty moved from neutral to positive and, now, negative.

After finishing campaign many many times, I did not much care about death penalty at levels 65-80. It's easy enough to get experience and penalty was just simple deterrent from people who does not want to spend time and effort. Logic feature which adds to POE2 goodness.

Between levels 80-92 I even started to like this penalty - it added to pursuit for even better build and search for even better gear. I've dismissed people's complains. It's not D4 after all!

After hitting level 93 and facing massive experience penalty when Tier 16 map with layers of Delirium yields you 0.7% of a level - death penalty just sucks all the joy out of the game. I am taking no risks, reducing levels of bosses in atlas and yet from time to time some combo of abilities or wifi spike or mere distraction from my dog makes me miss a moment and cost me 20-30 maps of play. Based on available information - I will be able to grind couple more levels in 20-30 hours of game play, but after that such penalty stops been a deterrent or stimulus - it becomes prohibitive and decimate game experience.

My logic is the following - 10% loss of experience is designed to avoid lazy players to push their way without investing in better skills. So it's really - "getgut or suffer" type of thing. But any player who got to level 95 with this penalty is "gut". So keep the deterrent - but make it proportional. 10% penalty at lvl 90 cost an average of 3-4 hours of game play. Keep it this way. At lvl 93 - lower penalty to 5% and level 95 - to 1%. High level players are penalized for reaching high level. It's not a challenge like pinnacle bosses or a chase after Temporalis - its mindless grind with as little risk as possible.

[Chris]

wifi spikes, and dog distractions..

xp penalty exists to cull the casuals like this out of reaching 100.

most people do not reach 100
there is also no reason to reach 100

if you are going to kill the pinnalces you have done this by 90-95 at the latest, at which point people start a new character.

if you are someone that wants 100, but die because you are patting a dog.. perfect. xp loss working as intended.

[DirtyMick]

Yeah level 100 in this game is quite an achievement. Its not for regular people to achieve. Its a very special and rare thing. You won't do it. :P
(I hope this makes you really commit just to shove it in my face)

[HouseOfTheRat]

Something gets harder as the game gets harder? Clearly this doesn't make sense!

[fx!]

Use search next time, this topic has been discussed into oblivion already.

You need tanky enough build to level past a certain point, there is no way to bypass that. Level 95 is pretty much (or close to) the soft level cap. Use omens and don't run maps where you have a serious chance of dying.
They've done a decent job with providing pause functionality when you press escape and also when you lose connection to the server. I'd focus on fixing your unstable connection first.

[Kalvix]

The exp penalty is a carry over from a time when devs didn't know how to make death punishing. All it does is encourage very safe play styles and for people to not experiment as the huge penalty means you want to be as safe as possible and stick to what you know works.

It's anti-fun, getting back to where you were is the penalty, and having to maybe grind or figure out how to improve your build. It also massively undermines the point of a huge skill tree as why have that if you make respeccing hard and then punish people harshly for dying, all you're saying with that is "make sure to look up a good build online".

But I'm sure the extremists will continue to spout that because they looked up a good build and can grind for hours a day that makes it completely ok, and then when the game has a very low population because normal people get tired of having their time wasted they'll start to wonder why people aren't playing as much while continuing to berate anybody asking for their time to be respected.