Morning Friends! I have to say I am getting pretty freaking pumped for the Necropolis League start on Friday. I’m off work on that day due to the Good Friday holiday and plan on starting things up when the servers go live. I will probably talk a bit about my league plans tomorrow, but I am way more excited about this league than I expected to be honest. I think part of that excitement comes from the sweeping changes that are happening in the end game, which are something that the average player may not fully understand. This morning I am going to talk a bit about these changes and how they are going to drastically shift how we interact with maps in general.
Good or bad, a large chunk of your end game in Path of Exile is going to involve running maps. By default without manipulation, a given map has the chance of containing content from some forty different leagues. However, not all builds are designed in a manner to support all league content efficiently. For example if you want to run Legion or Breach efficiently you want the ability to blow up entire screens worth of enemies at a time, so you might favor something along the lines of a Lightning Arrow build or previously a Tornado Shot build in order to clear lots of targets at once. If you instead want to focus on Delve you will need a character with strong defenses as things down in the depths hit rather hard. So much of ARPG gameplay centers around optimization and efficiency, so it becomes more efficient to try and run the content that works best for your builds.
You can utilize the Atlas Passive tree in order to stick your thumb on the scale, but the only truly efficient way of guaranteeing specific content appears on a specific map has been with Scarabs. Right now in their current state they have felt like a mandatory evil, and if you want to run a lot of a specific kind of content you are forced to engage with the trade economy because they simply do not drop often enough for you to be able to sustain them. For example I greatly enjoy Delve, which requires me to run missions for Niko to get sulphite in order to maintain my missions into the darkness. This has always required that I at a minimum buy large stacks of Rusted Sulphite Scarabs in order to guarantee that Niko appears on my maps. There were other techniques like the All Hands Atlas Notable, but the only 100% method was to make sure I was running a Sulphite scarab with every map.
All of this is changing with Necropolis. Essentially they have redesigned the entire Atlas Passive Tree along with all of the Scarabs and have completely removed another system that involved putting enchants on the four voidstones that you unlock with sextants. Previously points invested in Delve nodes on the passive tree increased the chance of Niko, but never let you modify the exact percentage chance of him appearing directly. Now by investing in every Niko chance node, I can reach a point where Niko will appear 104% of the time, making it guaranteed that every map that I run with this talent tree will produce sulphite. More than that we are now going to be able to unlock three different passive trees so that we can swap between different scenarios more easily. So you can set up several trees with complimentary league mechanics and swap between them based on what you need to run.
Removing the requirement of Scarabs being the only methodology of reliably influencing map content has freed up some design space to shift them into doing “interesting things”. Some of these are going to be really wild when it comes to running them and will be the sort of thing that you want to stack a bunch of interesting scarabs together to handcraft a pretty intense map. I am super interested in seeing how these interactions play out, and Scarabs as a whole have shifted from being something that can only drop under certain circumstances to being available from the general loot pool. So we should have way more access to scarabs in general and then they will also provide more interesting interactions when we use them. They also added a “Limit” that indicates that you can use more than one of the same scarab at a time. So for example, if you just really want a lot of strongboxes you can stack 4 Ambush Scarabs and get 20 additional strong boxes in a map. You can see the full list of all 109 Scarabs in this post on the GGG site.
More than that… it feels like there has been a changing of the guard when it comes to the future of Path of Exile 1. I don’t want this to come across as a Chris Wilson bad, Mark Roberts good tirade… but things certainly feel different. The above video is an interview that Mark Roberts did with Zizaran and included some pretty serious philosophical deep dives about changes that he would like to see in the future. Specifically towards the end of the discussion, Mark said “this is the age of questioning original philosophies”, and it certainly feels like a lot of the quality of life changes we are getting this league are a result of this. It is going to take awhile to remove some systems that have just been accepted as “good enough” but it seems like maybe there is the will to make Path of Exile at least in small measures a more approachable experience. There is a brilliant clip at the very end of this presentation assuring us all that Mark really does “give a shit”.
Mapping for maximum profit has never really been my jam. So part of why I am damned interested in this league is that it feels like I am going to have a lot more interesting options to run with maps. I like playing makes as they are rolled in an “alch and go” strategy, and I like that I will be able to use more scarabs more freely in order to just make the entire experience a bit more novel. All the while being able to run an Atlas that makes sure I am getting the maximum amount of sulphite with whatever the heck I am doing. Having three atlases also means I will be able to switch to doing other things when I am full on sulphite and am not quite in the mood to go burn it down again in Devle without feeling like I am wasting resources quite so much. Very much looking forward to seeing how all of these changes shake out in the end, and how they interact with the actual League mechanic for Necropolis which I have spent almost zero time thinking about.
Anyways! I realize I ramble on about things that very few people actually care about, but I thank you greatly if you have survived this long in the post. I am contemplating streaming my league start tomorrow, so we will see if that actually happens.
