Path of Exile (PoE) from Grinding Gear Games has reached the halfway mark for its open beta. For the uninitiated, PoE is a totally free to play (anti-pay to win) action RPG in the style of Diablo and Torchlight, except it does many things, much much better than either of those two titles.
While PoE received minor and moderate patches and updates almost on a weekly basis thus far, this week we’ll see the first major open beta game-changing update. Here’s what you Exiles can expect:
Anarchy League is a new 4 month Standard League mode. This plays pretty much like the current Standard League except there are 13 different rogue exiles wondering about that you will randomly encounter. These characters are equipped with the same type of weapons and powers that player characters have and will drop a ton of loot on death.
Onslaught League is a new 4 month Hardcore League mode. Monsters will all have 20% increased movement, attack and casting speeds. As always, if your character dies in this mode, it’ll end up in Standard League just like the current Hardcore. This mode was done at the request of players who thought the game was too easy.
Each of these new leagues will run for four months, at which time your character will be placed back into Standard League, if you were playing Anarchy or Hardcore, if you were playing Onslaught.
Both Anarchy and Onslaught will have a new feature called challenges. There are eight challenges to be achievable over the long haul and need quite a bit of commitment. Players who manage to check off all the challenges in both leagues as complete over four months will be awarded a Path of Exile T-Shirt by Grinding Gear Games. As an example of a few of the challenges and their difficulty, one is to receive 34 different items via vendor recipes and one is use all of the currency items.
Why would you want to play these new modes? Well, new different loot is the reason why, you loot whore! These leagues have the following new items : Moonstone Ring, Amethyst Ring, Diamond Ring, Turquoise Amulet, Agate Amulet and Citrine Amulet. These items are taking the place of Prismatic Ring, Onyx Amulet, Thief's Torment, Lori's Lantern, Astramentis, Carnage Heart, Eye of Chayula and Kaom's Heart which will not drop in either of these two new leagues. Also there are six new unique items, two drop only in Onslaught, two only drop in Anarchy and two will drop in both.
I won’t run through the huge list of all the other changes, but one fundamental gameplay change is a reduction in monster damage. Even though, at first glance, it’s pretty overwhelming the amount of build diversity that should be possible. The reality of the situation is most of your build choices have to be wasted on health and energy shield/armor options especially for higher level characters. This severely reduces the amount of choice a player has and this change is suppose to address that, along with giving people Onslaught mode who want the ultimate challenge. Since this is a fundamental change, everyone will be awarded a total character respect resetting their skill tree and letting them re-apply all their skill points.
For a complete list of the upcoming changes, look at the patch notes on Grinding Gear Games forums: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/403446
