Affliction (3.23)

Affliction Spoiler Nonsense

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This morning’s post is almost entirely thanks to SirGog a YouTuber who does an admirable job of providing Path of Exile information and largely just getting straight to the facts or data-influenced predictions. I am writing a blog post about today’s spoilers because they represent a whole order of nonsense. Essentially tomorrow is the big reveal stream for the Affliction League and generally speaking in the days leading up to this stream, we start seeing spoilers from the community staff at Grinding Gear Games. This league has been a bit odd, and the spoiler started later than normal… and have been not terribly forthcoming with information. This could be caused by many different things, not the least of which could be that this is the first spoiler season since the departure of long-term community manager Bex.

To this point we have had a Divination Card spoiled, and some general quality of life changes like the ability to split stacks of currency in the trade window. We’ve also received notice that Trial of the Ancestors league would not be going into standard, and that all of the uniques associated with that league save for the ones that have specific interactions with the tattoo mechanic would be going into the general “drop anywhere” unique pool. Players have focused heavily on the specific wording of this notice “Trial of the Ancestors won’t be going core in 3.23” as a sign that we might be seeing some of these mechanics returning later. I would honestly be shocked if we do not see the Trial in some form because it seemed like it was a huge amount of work to make that content and tattoos as a mechanic were really interesting.

Yesterday/This Morning because timezones are nonsense… Grinding Gear Games released a relatively innocuous image that I have edited to highlight a few things. Firstly the obvious “spoiler” is showing that there is going to be a nice quality of life change that indicates how many character slots you have on your account and how many you have available. Given that I have reached the point where I have to start deleting my characters… this is a good change. What is less than obvious are the two character names. Firstly it was pointed out that those names are too specific to be a community manager banging away at the keyboard. As SirGog states in his video, try typing them and you will see just how awkward it would be to arrive at them by random chance.

This led to speculation and eventually a solution presented by Neversink the dedicated person behind the best series of loot filters for Path of Exile. It was a Caesar Cypher, where you essentially shift the characters by a fixed set of letters to get the original message… in this case an 8-character shift. The end result gives you the message “IWONDER INALTESSENTIALS” which sort of screams Anagram. After many attempts including some rather rude ones… Neversink landed on “Sentinels Atlas Win or Die” which folks are taking to mean that Sentinels are going standard, that Affliction is going to have an Atlas Rework of some sort, and that Ultimatum league is going standard as well.

I admit I did not fully understand what players meant about Ultitmatum coming back, because in patch 3.19 GGG gave us the ability to collect a bunch of nonsense from Vaal activities in order to summon the Trial Master. I’ve done this a few times because one of the rarest items required drops down in Delve. However. since I did not play in this league, I did not realize that there was an in-map component to it as well. I gotta say I am kinda excited about the prospects of something like this permanently getting added to the game. I assume there will be Atlas support for both Sentinels and the Ultimatum Trial encounter, and that the Trial Master will still exist as a weird Vaal crafting recipe.

Sentinels and Ultimatum Trials would already be an awful lot of new content added to the game, but I can’t see that GGG won’t have something new and unique for Affliction. I still think that we are going to see some sort of Ritual rework as part of this patch cycle because the trailer clearly shows a ritual totem. I am definitely looking forward to the stream tomorrow where they announce the full features of the league. If you can tune in tomorrow the stream will start at 12:30 PM PST and drops will be available until 9:30 PM PST featuring a set of Huntsman Wings. Funny enough Diablo 4 is having a stream just ahead of the Path of Exile proceedings where they are going to talk about the upcoming additional changes to Season 2.

I am amped to see what all the Affliction League is going to entail, and I am also bracing myself for some nerfs… specifically to Guardian.

Affliction League Teaser

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Morning Folks! Yesterday we got the name reveal, teaser trailer, full reveal date, and league start information for the next Path of Exile league. It is going to be called Affliction and seems to have some sort of a curse-based theme. This morning I am going to kick my navel-gazing into high gear and spout some speculative nonsense as I overanalyze way too few frames of animation. The concrete details that we have so far are that on the 30th of November, we will be getting the full reveal stream that will go over all of the features of this league. Then on December 8th, the league will start for PC players and for console folks on the 13th. If you want to watch the full teaser trailer before I obsess over possibly made-up details… you can check out the link here.

First of all… I have screwed with the images a bit to lighten them but unfortunately, the sheer amount of darkness somewhat crushes the detail. I’ve seen folks stating that they think this is the delve, but I can’t really follow that thread. Sure everything is bluish-black like you see while delving, but it also very clearly seems to be in a forest at night, and the delve forest biomes look totally different than this. You also don’t really see the swirling shadows that you normally do at the far corners of Delve.

Next, we are going to skip to a scene a bit later in the video when the supplicant seems to be devolving into a swarm of insects. These are Wetas, and I only know this because the Weta is already in the game as a pet… and is a New Zealand thing. It is essentially a giant nocturnal insect… and if you want some nightmare fuel take a gander at this image. I looked so you don’t have to. To me at least that very clearly looks like a Ritual totem from the Ritual League mechanic. This makes me think that the Affliction League is somehow tied to Ritual either as the existing mechanic or something that reworks, expands, and ultimately replaces Ritual. Since we just participated in the Blast from the Past League which featured Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra… I’ve wondered if the insect swarm could work similarly to how Sentinels buff minions around you and also increase the loot chances.

This isn’t a character that I recognize, but they do sorta remind me of the way Einhar is dressed. Einhar is an Ezomyte and his people worship beast gods known as the first ones. It makes me wonder if this could be some sort of Ezomyte shaman that we are seeing in front of this Ritual totem. Another possibility that I have wondered about is if this league will feature updates and changes to the way that Talismans work, as right now they are mostly a quirk of the past and not something that players really purposefully seek out. In Crucible we saw GGG reworking Breach and Abyss and I feel like that is something that they are going to keep doing. So I could see that this league is tied to a revamp of Ritual and maybe a revamp of Talismans and maybe some skill changes focused on the way that curses work and are applied in the game. Of course, this is all me grasping at straws and could be nothing.

I would love to see the Sentinel League mechanic return in some form… and I feel like the Blast from the Past event had to be purposeful in some way. I don’t even really care that much about the recombinators, but I have loved being able to pop sentinels to get juicy bursts of loot. Lake of Kalandra being revisited has made me realize that that mechanic while cool… really needs to be reworked completely before it would feel good. The wildly variable difficulty level of the maps just feels bad… and I think I would rather see something along the lines of how the nodes in Expedition work so that each tile you place gives you boon/debuff to everything in the finally crafted map. I think it would be also cool to see some sort of return of the Crucible mechanic. I thought skill trees on items made for some really interesting build possibilities. I think everyone would love to see Tattoos from this league go Standard as well, but I feel similar to Kalandra… the actual Trial of the Ancestors mechanic needs some work. There is just too rapid of a transition from cakewalk to impossible without cheating by abusing crowd control mechanics.

Anyways! Happy Friday! Happy almost Thanksgiving week! What would you like to see in the upcoming Affliction League in Path of Exile? Drop me a line below.