The end of a league in Path of Exile is a time for shenanigans. Most players log off until the next season, but others, like streamer Empyriangaming, gather their in-game currency for truly ridiculous experiments. This time, the goal was simple: test the action RPG's limits by summoning the most expensive minion army ever seen.
We're talking about gear costing more in-game currency than I've earned in 700 hours of play. Normally, a minion build in Path of Exile 2 has around 10 to 15 skeletons. Empyriangaming's crew did the math to reduce the resource cost of each minion to single digits and stack as much of that resource as possible. The game, however, has a hard limit of 255 minions per type before it resets the counter. So, they recruited friends to bring their own armies.
The Frame Rate Apocalypse
The group quickly learned that their ambition would be throttled by a much more formidable enemy: the frame rate. When Empyriangaming summoned 255 of his own Skeletal Priests, the game slowed to a crawl. It was like watching a stop-motion film, where the action would shift every few seconds as the server caught up with his inputs.
Naturally, they decided to see how much more they could break. They took the group to the roguelike Trial of the Sekhemas, where a buff effectively doubles minion numbers. The frame rate graph jumped like a heart rate monitor. "Oh god, I didn't aim my dodge roll properly. Give me like 30 more seconds," one player said as they tried to merge their skeletons into a glowing mass.
The Ultimate Troll
Taking the army to an actual map was a disaster. It's hard to kill a boss when you're waiting minutes to walk five feet. So, Empyriangaming brought everyone back to his hideout for one last troll. He listed an extremely valuable item for an absurdly low price on the game's trade website, luring automated bot accounts and unlucky players into their frame rate trap.
"Wtf is this," one player wrote in chat as they loaded into a room filled with hundreds of skeletons. A slew of people joined and immediately left before someone managed to grab the item and escape. Empyriangaming might have just prompted some players to suggest tagging Path of Exile 2 as a horror game on Steam.