The core Ruthless experience is that you don’t have strong enough items to handle the content. Every item that drops has the potential to be an upgrade to your current gear.
In Ruthless, the quantity of items dropped has been massively reduced throughout all game content.
The rate of finding magic, rare and unique items has been massively reduced throughout all game content.
Rings, Amulets and Belts are much rarer than in regular Path of Exile. They cannot be purchased from Vendors.
Most league reward systems have been changed to only grant item rewards that are specific to that league (for example, Cluster Jewels only come from Delirium), plus items from the core drop pool. In Ruthless, getting items from the core drop pool is a valuable reward, especially when there is an item rarity bonus.
Many deterministic items like Divination Cards or Oni-Goroshi cannot be obtained. Many bosses like Atziri that guarantee unique drops still do, but are often harder to access.
In Ruthless, most of your items come from killing monsters. It’s hard to find magic, rare and unique items, and it’s even harder to craft them. Crafting is a powerful luxury that you’ll have to use sparingly for the right items.
The drop rate of crafting currency items has been massively decreased.
The rate at which you receive shards of crafting currency when vendoring items has been decreased.
Master crafting is not available. The crafting bench cannot be accessed and recipe plinths cannot be found.
Veiled Chaos Orbs, Orbs of Binding, Orbs of Dominance, Influenced Exalted Orbs and Awakener’s Orbs cannot be obtained.
When an Influenced Item is reforged or the Influenced Mod is removed, its influence is lost.
Most vendor recipes are not available. A few new Ruthless-specific vendor recipes have been introduced.
In Ruthless, Skill Gem drops matter. Support Gem drops matter a whole lot.
Gems cannot be purchased from vendors.
The Fixture of Fate and Death and Rebirth quests each award you a token that can be traded to Siosa for any Skill Gem of level 31 or lower.
Support Gems can only be found as random drops. You cannot obtain them deterministically. Ruthless is a league of item scarcity. When items are scarce, they are exciting to find, exciting to look for and exciting to trade. We are defining Support Gems as items. This means some builds are harder to assemble, and careful planning is needed by SSF Ruthless players.
Gems gain far less experience than they do in regular Path of Exile. It’s a lot harder to level your skills up, which is another axis of reduced character power in Ruthless. A melee character’s damage comes from their weapon. Spellcasters get a lot of their damage from their gems as they level up. This change helps reduce the power gap between these two playstyles that is otherwise exacerbated by item scarcity in Ruthless. It also means that when you’re farming an area for item drops, you can grind for gem experience at the same time.
Almost all movement skills are not available in Ruthless. In this mode, movement skills trivialise game systems that matter a lot more, such as terrain layout, monster body blocking, and actual level traversal.
Here is a full list of movement skills that are not available in Ruthless: Dash, Frostblink, Flame Dash, Lightning Warp, Leap Slam, Shield Charge, Whirling Blades, Blink Arrow, Smoke Mine, Bodyswap and Charged Dash. Venom Gyre relies on Whirling Blades and is hence also not available.
Ruthless is challenging and punitive. It contains a number of changes that make Path of Exile harder and allow skilled players to differentiate themselves from everyone else.
A compounding character experience penalty applies from level 68 onwards. It takes a lot of investment to achieve a high-level Ruthless character.
Item drops are not allocated to specific party members. Looting is entirely free-for-all. Items really matter. Better pick them up before someone else does.
Flasks and Life/Mana are not restored upon entering town or your hideout. Vendors that sell Flasks (and Helena in your hideout) can refill them for you. This disincentivises the strategy of using Portal Scrolls as an instant full heal.
Onslaught does not grant movement speed in Ruthless. This relates to the absence of movement skills.
If you die near a quest boss in the campaign, a chunk of its life is recovered.
Hardcore Ruthless characters are not migrated to Standard Ruthless upon death. They are just permanently dead.
Utility Flasks can not gain charges while active and have lower duration than they do in regular Path of Exile.
Scarabs only enable mechanics in a map. They do not scale in power with their tiers. Instead, higher tiers of Scarabs are needed for higher tiers of map. Winged Scarabs do not exist.
There’s a Ruthless-specific Atlas Passive Skill Tree.
Content from past leagues is encountered less often than in regular Path of Exile.
You do not accumulate free daily Atlas Missions.
Vaal Side Areas, Enkindling Orbs and Instilling Orbs do not exist in Ruthless.
Ruthless uses separate item filter files which must be created specifically for it. If players used regular Path of Exile ones then they would filter out items that are actually very useful in Ruthless.