Getting Decked
It’s not all challenges and pain this update. There’s a handful of quality-of-life features coming (mostly in tuning up the Atlas Of Worlds UI), and the official introduction of gamepad support for the PC version. This also means that Path of Exile should now be natively playable on the Steam Deck, although I wonder whether Valve’s handheld will keep up during PoE’s notoriously CPU-straining endgame.
So that’s a good chunk of new content coming to Path of Exile, but the past couple expansions have seen Grinding Gear retire the oldest and wonkiest parts of the game to avoid bloat. This time 'round nothing significant is being canned. Instead, last season’s Archnemesis league mechanic (where you created custom mini-bosses) has instead been stripped for parts, and its pool of simpler, clearer monster modifiers will replace the current stack of verbs. It’s one of the few instances of simplification PoE has seen recently, but it should mean you have to read a lot less text around health bars, which is nice POE currency trade .
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Grinding Gear Games)(Image credit: Grinding Gear Games)(Image credit: Grinding Gear Games)
Another nice thing (especially for players happy with their current character build) is that there are no buffs or nerfs being introduced in this league, and no reshuffling of passive skill grids. No major new skills or class reworks to build your character around. Path of Exile is famous for completely upending the meta (a word I will not allow Facebook to sully) every major update, but the changes to monster modifiers and the chaos the Sentinels are introducing should be spicy enough. I expect the regular chaos of complete balance reworks to continue next league.
It would be remiss of me to ignore the buffed and uber-ified elephant in the room; the looming specter of Path of Exile 2, the ambitious looking sequel-spansion announced way back in 2019. Between the pandemic and the harsh realities of game development, Grinding Gear admits that we’re unlikely to see it until late 2023, possibly slipping further into 2024. Still, a key focus on these seasonal updates is paving the way to that big release. The plan is still to have both the PoE 1 2 campaigns as separate experiences, but both lead into the same shared Atlas Of Worlds endgame, hence the focus on that. I’d speculate that the overhaul to cheap POE currency monster modifiers is something that will carry over to the sequel too.
