With the new League Expedition, many things will change fundamentally in PoE. We spoke to Game Director Chris Wilson about the new features.
It’s that time again: Path of Exile will start its next season on 23 July 2021 – and it will be really extensive. With the new expansion Expedition, not only will numerous new league mechanics be added to the game, but there will also be a lot of other things going on.
We had the opportunity to talk to Game Director Chris Wilson in advance. Which massive changes you can expect in Path of Exile: Expedition in this preview. If, on the other hand, you’re keen on the sequel, we also recently spoke to Wilson about Path of Exile 2.
Expedition makes you an archaeologist
As with every new League, you can expect a very special seasonal mechanic in Expedition, which this time even tells a completely new story.
Long ago, explorers from the continent of Kalguur came to the PoE game world of Wraeclast in the hope of colonising it. If you’ve been to Path of Exile before, you might not be surprised to learn that these explorers never returned home.
As soon as you start in the new league, you will regularly meet descendants of the Kalguurs who will lead you to the old excavation sites of their ancestors – and in these expeditions things will get really interesting.
This is how the expeditions work: Each excavation site is a new area of its own, which is littered with numerous markers. These stand for monsters, bosses and crates, among other things, and now want to be dug up by you. To do this, you place a limited number of explosive charges that bring all the marked enemies and treasures in their radius to the surface. It is up to you whether you want to summon particularly tough enemies or rather avoid them by concentrating on crates.
Not only can currency items like the ever-popular Chaos Orbs and new equipment be found in battles, but also two new types of items: Kalguurian Logs and Artefacts, which you can redeem from the explorers in town or your hideout.
In total, you will encounter four Kalguurs, each with their own options:
Tujen: The merchant offers you powerful items and currency items, but demands many artefacts in return. However, you can negotiate the price with him. If you offer him an outrageously low price, he will break off the negotiations and the chance to buy is lost. If you make a fair offer, Tujen will meet you halfway on the price or possibly accept it outright.
Gwennen: At Gwennen you can gamble, similar to Kadala from Diablo 3. You choose a basic type of item and pay with artefacts. After the purchase, the rarity and values of the item are revealed. So it’s completely down to luck whether you get just rubbish or a real treasure.
Rog: You can also buy items from Rog. Once you have chosen one, Rog will offer to add bonuses to the item for a small extra cost. If your artefacts are not enough, you can accept the offer later.
Dannig: You can hand in found logbooks to the leader of the Kalguuren to start special expeditions. These work similarly to the end-game maps, but are much larger. Each of these logbook expeditions offers special opportunities that you can unlock with your explosive charges: Secret passages, hidden treasure troves and even new bosses that drop special uniques.
New defensive items: In the expeditions you can find equipment with the new trait “Ward”. For example, if you have boots with 200 Ward on, the next incoming damage will be reduced by 200 damage. This ability has a cooldown of five seconds. According to game director Chris Wilson, this new characteristic can be combined very well with the already existing defensive values Dodge and Block. Also, some new uniques should ensure that Ward can also keep you alive solo, such as this fancy crown:
A completely new metagame – 19 new skills
According to the head of Grinding Gear Games, one of the goals of Expedition is to drastically loosen up the well-worn metagame. To this end, 19 new skill gems, i.e. passive and active abilities, were introduced.
- Earthbreaker Support: This skill can be combined with any “slam” skill. Instead of then hitting the ground with your club yourself, a totem warrior will now summon to cast the attack for you. Combined with the Leap Slam attack, you can even summon bouncing totems, which looks pretty funny.
- Rage Vortex: Here you throw a whirling blade that consumes your rage, dealing damage.
- Boneshatter: This attack can stun enemies. Should this be the case, it unleashes a powerful shockwave
- Defiance Banner: A purely defensive ability that places a flag on your back, granting additional bonuses to armour and dodge and weakening nearby enemies. If you place it on the ground, these effects are strengthened.
- Shield Crush: An area attack where you strike with your shield.
- Behead Support: Very exciting, because this Support Gem works like a mini-Headhunter belt – the most valuable and best item in the whole game. If you kill a rare enemy with the melee attack combined with this, you steal one of its properties for 20 seconds.
- Storm Rain: Allows you to unleash a hail of arrows. The projectiles get stuck in the ground and cause lightning damage to nearby enemies.Focussed Ballista Support: Normally, ballistas function like turrets that automatically attack nearby enemies. With this Support Gem, you can now control these attacks.
- Explosive Concoction: A completely new skill, this uses charges from your Ruby, Sapphire and Topaz Vials to brew exploding projectiles.
- Ambush: Teleport to your opponent, blind them and dish out a powerful single attack.
- Voltaxic Burst: Starts a countdown at the end of which a burst of energy erupts from you, injuring nearby enemies.
- Blade Trap: A trap that spawns two whirling copies of your weapon.
- Forbidden Rite: Fires chaos projectiles at a targeted location as well as nearby enemies. However, also causes damage to you each time it is used
- Eye of Winter: If you’ve ever played the Sorceress in Diablo 2, you’ll surely remember the Frost Sphere. This is exactly how the Eye of Winter works: A swirling projectile that also fires small shards of ice. At the end of its trajectory, it explodes and spreads even more ice shards.
Battlemage’s Cry: A battlecry that taunts nearby enemies and then hits with a selected spell.
Manabond: Creates a mana bomb whose damage is based on your current mana – the less you have, the higher the damage output. A large mana pool therefore also increases the maximum damage.
Absolution: The skill triggers a shockwave. If an enemy dies as a result of this, it will resurrect as a purified warrior who also casts Absolution. Theoretically, entire armies can be summoned with this skill.
Spectral Helix: After the Frost Sphere the next skill that could come directly from Diablo, keyword Hammerdin. Just like the Blessed Hammer, here you throw a whirling weapon that hurts enemies as it flies over them
Summon Reaper: Last but not least, a brand new Necromancer skill awaits you. The Reaper is a powerful servant that takes down monsters with fast melee attacks and bleed damage. However, the Reaper wants to be your only servant – if you summon additional zombies, for example, the Reaper eats them and gets additional bonuses such as life and damage.
His best tip: “Make sure the Reaper always has other servants to eat!” To do this, you can combine a Summon Skeleton gem with a Totem Support gem, for example – creating a totem on the ground that will automatically keep summoning new skeleton servants.
In Path of Exile 3.15, however, there will not yet be any special Unique Items designed for the Reaper – but if the powerful servant is well received by players, these should already follow with the next League.
PoE will be harder, but more beginner-friendly
Path of Exile is now entering its thirtieth release. In order to always provide players with enough engaging content, better weapons, more effective crafting options and stronger skills were introduced with each league.
This led to a so-called power creep: this means that a lot of old content became easier and easier over time. To counteract this effect, Grinding Gear Games plans to revise all previous content over the next twelve months. According to Wilson, because the developers have noticed how players have the most fun:
“Players enjoy League content because it’s challenging. They also told us that they really enjoyed the Path of Exile 2 demo at ExileCon, even though it was set almost punishingly hard in terms of difficulty. (…)
For a few years now, we’ve been creating difficult leagues where the monsters’ life and damage values are much higher than the normal monsters that players fight between league encounters. We are rebalancing the campaign to make it challenging. So far we’ve focused mainly on act one, but with each upcoming expansion we’ll be expanding on that. (…)
While this added challenge probably won’t stop our most experienced players from dominating the campaign with ease or running through it to get to the end-game maps quickly, it will mean that players who engage with the other content will find a consistent level of difficulty between League content and regular content.”
On the other hand, new convenience features are coming into play, such as the overhaul of the potions system: many experienced players use special potions in the endgame, as they grant powerful bonuses. Since these recharge quickly by killing monsters quickly, they can be drunk virtually every second. For maximum effectiveness, many pros hammer the keys 1 to 5 continuously, which is known in the community as “flask piano” and is said to have caused one or two cases of tendonitis.
To counteract the Flask Piano, new orbs are now being introduced: “Enchanting a potion with the Enkindling Orb will now automatically trigger it when a prerequisite of your choosing is met – such as when the potion is fully charged or when you are suffering from a certain status effect. This should help inexperienced players in particular to better control the chaos of potions.
Such revisions are expected to flow smoothly into Path of Exile 2, which Grinding Gear Games has announced for 2022. A PoE expert tells you why the new action role-playing game probably won’t be for every type of player:
Battle Royale is back
While update 3.15 with the new Expedition League won’t be released until 23 July 2023, there is one piece of news you can enjoy again right now. In 2018, the Battle Royale mode for 100 players was brought into the game for the first time. What was meant to be an April Fool’s joke was surprisingly well received by many players.
The mode is now available again and has been completely reworked: There is now a separate skill tree, PVP-oriented variants of skills and special unique items that can be found in the games.
Those who manage to achieve first place here will receive a trophy for their stash, which is further upgraded with each victory
