Hey Folks! On Thursday we had the reveal stream for Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur aka 3.25 and it was nonsense. The patch notes are over 30,000 words long and involve some big shakeups to existing metas. The biggest thing is that melee may now be back on the menu because all melee-focused abilities essentially got their damage at least doubled. Detonate Dead which was a massive meta ability last league, is essentially dead now… Raider was deleted as an ascendancy and turned into Warden, and my favorite bow ascendancy Champion is far less powerful. Melee Totems were deleted from the game, Banners are essentially dead as they are used for only specific situations, and Warcries are universally worse for anyone who is not a melee character. Physical Damage Taken As conversion is essentially dead… because everything but a few sources lost that affix including the ubiquitous Taste of Hate.
So if there are so many negative impacts… why then am I excited about this patch? Essentially the game is getting what it feels like a completely new core system. We are building Kingsmarch a city that will play a heavy role in Path of Exile 2 and with it comes this entirely city-building mechanic. We will be able to recruit NPCs to help us along and build up Kingsmarch to add new functionality. There will be this whole material gathering and trading system that will allow us to send off NPCs while we are doing other things… and then reap the rewards of their work. I love this aspect of the Retainers from FFXIV, where I can send them off to gather needed things for me and check in every so often to a significant payday. In many ways, it reminds me of what the endgame systems of Wolcen were trying to be, where you are building this entire City for your account to benefit from.
By far the best part of all of this is the fact that we are now going to get a true Auction House system in Path of Exile. Right now it has limited scope and can only be used for “non-itemized” items aka items that stack and do not have individual rolls. However, this fixes so many problems in the game, and anyone who has ever tried to trade for bulk resources can attest to just how painful it is to gather up 20 Catalysts needed to quality up an item. In fact it was hinted during the Q&A session that this system exists because of the amount of frustration Mark Robert had when trying to trade for currency late game. He said he messaged over 100 people with no responses and then decided there had to be a better way. This is going to be amazing because honestly, I am going to be posting things while leveling that I don’t think I really need, knowing that at some point in the future, I will be able to buy them back when I actually do need them. I think the fluidity of trading will probably bring prices down considerably. There was also some discussion of trying to expand this if it is successful.
Settlers introduces a new currency called Gold, and really I think this is a dry run for figuring out how this is going to work in Path of Exile 2. Gold will drop from mobs and we will also be able to earn it through trading resources around the globe. What is interesting about this is that Gold will be an untradeable resource meaning that it essentially rewards playing the game rather than being an eternal auction house flipper. Mapping will be an excellent source, and I am hoping it drops down in Delve as well. I get that they nerfed the shit out of The Adorned so one of the major Delve cash items will weaken significantly… but I liked playing the Fossil and Resonator game long before that existed. With the fluidity of the currency market, I should have a much easier time selling my Delve wares than ever before.
Sending off harvested resources to other ports in shipments seems to be the high-risk and high-reward side of this gameplay. There were moments in the feature reveal trailer where they showed off bringing back three loot pages full of resources from a single shipment mission. I’ve always liked 4X games and specifically the city management aspect of them. Making cities pump out resources in Civilization is a heck of a lot of fun, and so far everything I am seeing makes me think this entire side game will be a blast in Path of Exile. I’ve never been someone who can chain blast maps without a break… and going to Kingsmarch to fiddle with shipments and such seems like a perfect pause button when I need one of those breaks. I am really hoping that we have our own private copy of Kingsmarch because I don’t really want another Heist problem where it is MTX hell whenever I want to engage with that content.
Another thing I am super interested in is the ability to have map runner NPCs churn through your bulk maps. Even contributing maps regularly to the guild bank… by mid-league, you end up with a glut of maps that you do not want to run. Delve is amazing for generating maps early in the league but given that it does not take your voidstones into account when maps drop… you end up with a bunch of sub-t16 maps that you would never actually run other than on secondary characters. This system will now be a sink for those otherwise useless maps and you can send teams of NPCs out to get interesting drops. Likely this is just going to be a lot of “bubblegum” currency aka alts, alchs, chisels, and the like… but that is still putting the map to more use than sitting there in your bank. I am not expecting this to generate massive amounts of divine orbs, but a non-zero amount of resources would be great.
The in-map encounters seem like they are going to be fun. Sure it is the good old-fashioned “fight in a circle” mechanic but anything that adds additional density to the map… specifically additional rare monsters is a win in my book. The fact that you start the encounter and then the resources are collected automagically is also a big plus. There is no real downside to engaging in this mechanic and as a result, I figure I will be gathering a ton of these resources just by getting through the atlas. One of them is a Crucible-style channel up to increase damage mechanic but that is probably fine given that it sounds like that one is going to be considerably rarer. Combine this with a bunch of returning mechanics like Sentinels showing up in maps… T16 mapping should be more enjoyable than it has been in awhile.
I’ve honestly BARELY scratched the surface of all of the features of this league. The presentation was limited to nothing but Path of Exile 1 content and was roughly 45 minutes long. I highly suggest you watch it as it is EXCEPTIONALLY content-dense. Now comes the challenge of figuring out what the hell I actually want to play. I could go with old reliable and do Righteous Fire again because I do love it so. I am also contemplating a Bleed-based Earthquake build on the newly changed Gladiator ascendency, specifically a block-based Shield/Axe variant that I saw the other day. I’ve had a lot of fun in the past with Volcanic Fissure of Snaking and given the melee buffs it should be in a pretty great place… though I am not entirely certain what Ascendancy I would want to play it with. Legitimately right now… I have no clue what I am actually going to do when Friday rolls around.
I do know that I am probably going to pause a lot of the nonsense that I am doing in FFXIV for a little bit as I get established in this new league. I will probably be spending a lot of time with my head down and focused on mapping while listening to Audiobooks. Are you going to be checking out this league? What build are you thinking about going with? Drop me a line below.
