Path of Exile 2 World Record: Level 1 to 100 in 37 Minutes

Level 1 to 100 in 37 Minutes: A Path of Exile 2 World Record

37 minutes and 5 seconds. That’s how long it took the Mirror Tier team to take a character from level 1 to level 100 in Path of Exile 2, starting from the riverbank. A world record. The Mirror Tier | POE 2 YouTube channel published the full video detailing every step of this feat.

It all started from a simple idea on paper: build a hyper-optimized XP temple, then pull every single monster toward the entrance before the carry even starts attacking. The temples are enormous, the pull takes months of testing and sometimes crashes the servers. After all that work, the team succeeded.

This record rests on four distinct pillars. Upon arriving in town, there’s no question of doing the campaign: the team teleports directly into the Vaal ruins to enter the first temple as fast as possible. The total investment to level all the characters in the project is around 150 mirrors.

• The league mechanic: without Fated to the Vaal and Atziri’s temple pushed to its limits, this record is impossible.
• The pull build: a build entirely dedicated to grouping enemies at the temple entrance. The pullers are the tankiest characters ever built in PoE2, capable of absorbing thousands of monsters without dying.
• Optimizing the level 1 character: every piece of gear is chosen to maximize both XP gain and survival in rooms filled with hundreds of enemies. If you’re looking for a solid foundation for your own leveling, check out our selection of the best PoE2 Season 5 builds.
• The carry: over 100 mirrors invested to build a character capable of clearing entire screens of monsters in an instant.

The Vaal Temple Pushed Beyond Its Limits

The Fated to the Vaal league grants direct access to Atziri’s temple, a zone designed for experienced players. The Mirror Tier team decided to enter it at level 1, skipping the entire campaign. From the starting town, a simple teleport to the Vaal ruins is enough to enter the first temple.

The result is absurd on paper. Clearing this first zone takes the character from level 1 to level 22 in a matter of seconds. One space, one fight, twenty-one levels gained at once.

Why do the monsters still end up spread across multiple rooms? Path of Exile 2’s servers have a limit. The team tested over and over, pushing the threshold with each attempt. Result: around 15 to 20 rooms is the maximum the servers can handle without crashing. Grouping more would cause a crash. The packs therefore remain spread out, due to a technical constraint.

What makes the temple so efficient is the XP modifier applied to the monsters inside. Via Simplex Labs, this bonus reaches around 1400%, multiplicative with other gain sources. Combined, the experience efficiency runs into the thousands of percent compared to a normal zone.

The first temple takes the character to around level 54, according to the team’s tests. Once done, it’s straight on to a new temple immediately. The cycle starts over from the beginning, with a character now capable of clearing rooms even faster.

Immortal Pullers to Absorb Thousands of Monsters

Before the carries even start killing, someone has to gather the monsters. That’s the puller’s role. Their mission: pull all enemies from the temple and place them in the right spot, right at the start of the zone. Without them, the strategy falls apart.

The first challenge was technical. It required a build capable of reliably attracting enemies to wherever the team decided. The solution: reverse knockback, a mechanic that inverts repulsion and pulls enemies toward the character. Paired with a large area of effect (AoE) and good spam speed, it allows hundreds of monsters to be grouped in seconds.

The second challenge was brutal. Pulling hundreds of monsters onto yourself means taking hundreds of hits at the same time. The pull takes time and the enemies never stop attacking. The puller therefore had to be nearly invincible.

Two team specialists, London and Glitch, each designed a version. The first: a Warbringer based on armor stack and life stack, with life reserves and physical damage reduction pushed to the extreme. The second: a Shaman build that converts incoming physical damage into elemental damage, then reduces those until they’re nearly zero. Two different approaches, two identical results. These are, by far, the two tankiest builds ever constructed in PoE2.

The key to this survival comes down to a single amulet: Defiance of Destiny. It heals the character based on missing life, and that heal triggers before each hit received. With a massive life pool and a constant rain of hits, the heal fires continuously. If the heal exceeds the damage of one hit, the character simply cannot die.

The puller absorbs thousands of hits without flinching, while the carries do their work in complete safety. A brutally efficient division of roles.

The Blood Mage Carry at Over 100 Mirrors

Mirror Tier’s temple clearer is one of the most juiced Blood Mages in the entire game. His gear alone exceeds 100 mirrors, resources farmed largely by Viking and Glitch throughout this league. Glitch is at the controls of this monster of a character.

The rule is simple: he must one-shot absolutely everything that appears on screen. No survivors, no delay. A screen cleared in a fraction of a second.

The build choice surprised many people. The team initially wanted to play Fubgun’s Spark Blood Mage build, the reference of the moment. They ultimately went with a curse Blood Mage, based on curses. This cast on crit triggers its crits through curses applied to enemies.

The reason is purely technical and it comes up like a refrain within this team: server stability. Spark hits hundreds of enemies hundreds of times. Path of Exile 2’s servers can’t keep up. The curse Blood Mage, on the other hand, only hits each enemy a few times. This allows pulling much denser packs without risking a crash.

Optimizing Character XP: Shrines and Curses

Once at a sufficient level, the leveling character can finally gear up properly. Two priorities guide the choices: experience first, survival second.

On the passive tree, the Giant’s Blood node allows equipping a two-handed weapon in a single hand. The character can therefore carry two two-handed weapons simultaneously. These two slots are occupied by two Hammer of Faith, and that’s the heart of the XP system.

Each Hammer of Faith cycles through random shrine effects. One of these buffs is the experience shrine, which grants 100% additional XP multiplicatively. The temples already provide several thousand percent base XP. If both hammers roll the XP shrine at the same time, the gain shoots even higher. A helmet and a belt with sockets complete the gear by adding bonus experience.

Leveling then reaches a speed that’s hard to imagine, with multiple levels chaining in just a few seconds.

For survival, the build reuses the same pieces as the pullers: Defiance of Destiny and Kaom’s Heart. The character becomes nearly immortal, leaving hands free to focus on XP.

The gloves and boots are two uniques focused on curse. Shackles of the Wretched reflect curses cast on the character back onto themselves. Windscream applies them without delay, instantly. Together, they enable a key mechanic.

Temporal Chains also affects shrine buffs. This curse slows the expiration of all effects, both buffs and debuffs. By casting Temporal Chains on themselves via the gloves, the character extends the active duration of the XP shrine. An effect that normally lasts 10 to 20 seconds can last much longer depending on the curse’s magnitude. Jewels in the passive tree specifically boost this magnitude and duration, for the most powerful Temporal Chains possible.

The decisive moment comes at level 65. The greater the level gap between the character and the zone, the less XP is gained. Reaching level 65 cuts this penalty. Result: the team instantly recovers 16 levels at once, sometimes all the way to level 81 or 82. In some runs, the jump goes from 65 to 92 in a single room. It’s at this precise moment that the full respec is performed to equip the Hammer of Faith. Without the XP shrine, progression is twice as slow.

Server Stability: The True Boss of the Run

Before even talking about speed, builds, or coordination, the Mirror Tier team had to face a far more unpredictable enemy: GGG’s servers. By far the most brutal bottleneck of the entire project. Everything else was built around this constraint.

To map the precise limits, they built a build whose sole objective was to crash the servers. Thousands of projectiles per second, deliberately. Every server in the game was tested. The result was unexpected: it was the North American servers that showed the best stability.

The lag spikes themselves caused very concrete problems during the run. When the server falls behind, it stores all player inputs and replays them in one burst when it catches up. Result: you think you pressed the movement skill once or twice, but the game thinks you held the key. The character catapults across the screen.

Two aggravating factors were identified. Damage instances are one, whether enemies are hitting or being hit. The other, more surprising one, is loot generation. It caused major lag spikes on its own. The decision was made: everyone plays with their loot filter disabled, no exceptions.

One test pushed the thinking even further. The idea: build characters capable of culling all normal monsters to keep only the rares in the zones. Fewer monsters, less lag, XP preserved. On paper, logical. In practice, rares only represented about a third of the total XP. And they gave almost as much individual XP as normal monsters. A data point that contradicted everything the team thought they knew about the experience mechanic.

The logistics behind all this were colossal. Ten temples had to be opened and pre-pulled before the run even started. Each pull took three to four hours per temple. Ten different characters to keep each instance open simultaneously. According to GGG’s rules on multiple accounts, the chosen solution was three separate computers, each running two instances of PoE on different characters. Other team members ran the same setup on their end.

The direct consequence: around 24 consecutive hours of play with no possibility of sleeping. If a single player disconnected, their instance would drop. And if an instance dropped, everything had to start over from scratch. Zero margin for human error over that duration.

150 Mirrors and a Breathtaking Final Sprint

Before even talking about the timer, there’s the question of the budget. Across all characters, the Mirror Tier project cost around 150 mirrors. In Path of Exile 2’s economy, that’s a sum beyond comprehension for the vast majority of players.

To give a concrete idea: gloves with 50 energy shield, for a level 1 character, cost around 80 divines on their own. And that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the full project.

An unexpected stroke of luck lightened the bill a little. With the loot filter disabled, the team dropped a mirror and a Hinekora’s Lock during the run itself. Not enough to reimburse 150 mirrors, but still a nice bonus.

The final stretch remains the most stressful. From 99 to 100, the game slows down and RNG takes over. The XP shrine becomes central. Everything depends on whether it appears in the temple or not. Temple number 8 didn’t have it at all. Temple number 9, on the other hand, had the shrine almost constantly, offering between 25 and 30% XP at level 99. The team found themselves in a good position to finish quickly in the final temple.

Managing deaths at level 99 deserves an explanation. An XP omen reduces the death penalty from 10% to just 2.5% of a level. But you can only use one per instance. A second death in the same temple, once at level 99, is the end of the run. The team suffered one death at that point. After that, it was total lock-in. Zero risk-taking.

The final moment came in that last temple. Everyone was focused on their task. Nobody saw the level 100 « ding » happen in real time. Three seconds of delay before it sank in. The pop-off was enormous regardless.

The official time: 37 minutes and 5 seconds. Level 100. World record. The Mirror Tier team is already announcing they’re preparing more projects of the same kind, as well as builds adapted to the latest endgame mechanics of patch 0.5.3.