Path of Exile 2 FAQ — Ping, Servers, Network

High ping in PoE 2 is almost always a routing issue, not a speed issue. Your ISP may be sending your packets through an inefficient path to GGG's servers — for example, routing traffic from the US East Coast through Chicago instead of directly to the Texas gateway. The first thing to check is your selected gateway: open the login screen, click the gateway dropdown, and compare ping values across all servers. You may find a different gateway shows 30-40ms smaller measured ping than the one you are currently using. If all gateways show high ping, your ISP's path to GGG's network is the bottleneck — a per-app router like PingAim can send game traffic through a second interface (5G tether, second ISP) when that interface measures a smaller RTT to the gateway.

Lockstep mode adds felt input delay equal to roughly half your round-trip ping — at 60ms RTT, every action feels delayed by ~30ms. Predictive mode feels instant but can desync, causing deaths from attacks you visually dodged. The right choice depends on your ping: under 80ms RTT to your gateway, lockstep is the cleaner option because the felt delay is small and desync deaths are eliminated entirely. Over 100ms, predictive mode or auto-switching usually feels better despite the desync risk (the 100ms threshold tracks Henderson & Bhatti 2003 sub-100ms playable bound, DOI 10.1145/944592.944601). You can find the setting in Settings > UI > Networking Mode.

Desync happens when your client and the server have different ideas of where your character and monsters are. In predictive mode, your client simulates movement locally without waiting for server confirmation, so if a packet is lost or delayed, the two states diverge. The most reliable fix is to switch to lockstep mode (Settings > UI > Networking Mode), which prevents desync by syncing every action to the server before displaying it. If lockstep mode feels too sluggish due to high ping, the next step is improving your route to the GGG gateway — reduce jitter and packet loss, and the predictive mode desyncs will become less frequent.

Path of Exile 2 has 16 gateway servers worldwide: Texas, Washington, California, and Canada in North America; Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Milan, and Paris in Europe; Moscow in Russia; São Paulo in South America; South Africa; Singapore and Japan in Asia; and Australia and New Zealand in Oceania. On the login screen, click the gateway dropdown to see all servers with their current ping. Select the lowest-ping option — do not rely on Auto Select, as it can choose a suboptimal server. Characters are not locked to a gateway, so you can switch freely.

Yes. Path of Exile 2 uses no kernel-level anti-cheat (no BattlEye, EAC, or Vanguard), so PingAim's WFP driver method works without compatibility issues. PingAim sends PoE 2 traffic over whichever local interface (Ethernet, WiFi, 5G tether) shows the smaller RTT to your chosen GGG gateway, leaving streams and downloads on the other connection. This is especially relevant in lockstep mode, where every millisecond trimmed from RTT removes ~half a millisecond of felt input delay.

Path of Exile 2 uses TCP ports 6112, 8095, 12995, and 20481 for game traffic, plus standard TCP ports 80 and 443 for the launcher and login. Unlike most modern online games, PoE 2 does not use UDP — all game traffic is TCP. If you are experiencing disconnections or lag spikes, ensure these four TCP ports are allowed outbound in your firewall and are forwarded in your router to your PC's local IP address.