Path of Exile News

Path of Exile: Royale Twitch Rivals Event

We are excited to announce that tomorrow, we're teaming up with Twitch Rivals for the first time in order to showcase a Path of Exile: Royale event full of your favourite streamers! Competitors will compete in teams of two, earning points for their rank and kills to determine the overall tournament winner.

Tune in on July 29th at 10am PDT at twitch.tv/twitchrivals to check out the action live! The event will be shoutcast by Path of Exile veterans RaizQT and Octavian0 and the participants will be made up of many familiar faces!

Twitch Drops will be available for viewers on all participant channels. After 30 minutes of watch time, you'll be awarded with the Chicken Pet and after 2 hours of watch time, you'll be awarded with the Heartseeker Weapon skin. You can check them out below!

Don't forget that Path of Exile: Royale is available to play all weekend! Matches start at Friday 30th July, 1:00PM PDT and will be open until Monday 2nd August, 12:00AM PDT. Good luck Exiles! Hopefully there is a Rhoa Dinner waiting for you soon!

You must link your Path of Exile and Twitch accounts to be eligible for the drops. If you haven't already done so, follow these instructions so you don't miss out!

Step 1) Log into Path of Exile website.
Step 2) Click here to check your Twitch Settings.
Step 3) Link your Twitch account or click 'update permissions' if you've linked your account previously. Once your account is linked or your permissions have been updated, this page should say 'Your account is eligible to participate in Twitch Drops'.

After you have accumulated enough watch time to earn your Chicken Pet and Heartseeker Weapon skin, you must redeem them from your Twitch Inventory before they will be available in your microtransactions list in Path of Exile.

There's $30,000 in prizes on the line, alongside a slew of Path of Exile's best cosmetic effects; such as Armour Sets, Portals, Back Attachments, Pets and more from the Nightfall, Stygian, Dragon Hunter, Demonic, Darkwood and Dreadspire themes! You can find the full list below.

If you are interested in finding out which streamers are taking part, you can check out the full list of participants below.

Mathil1
Quin69
DatModz
tytykiller
Zizaran
Ventrua
pathofexilebota
Yolonou
Karvarousku
DeadandDoom
BilalDelValle
Kuentinlol
IzakOOO
MarexLoL
nugiyen
ghazzytv
DonTheCrown
cArn_
Mosh47
iLame
mistercop
terence_
Manni2
Legi1
mbXtreme
Baker
nl_Kripp
GenjiArmorXII
CuteDog_
Steelmage
sneakylol
Alkaizerx
Goratha
Quantrik
Velyna
Neph1147
Lighty
Lightee7
havoc616
Waggle
ds_lily
demonzz1
dratnos
Imnotahuman
MrLlanaSC
MeShaMaaN
PathofMatth
pillebrille
LifeOfNata
imexile
theViolette
PiotrMaciejczak
Oriiion1
Konti1337
CorinTV
TriPolarBare
souless
Paak_HC
KroximatuZ
Bloodstainv
shtyr
allenxqt

Brutus: Twitch Highlights

Brutus' Prison renovation was one of our favourite changes for the Expedition Expansion. We couldn't wait to see how players would react, and we've collected some of our favourite reactions in today's news post. Check them out on the news post on our forum here!

NOTE: If you have not experienced this fight since Expedition's launch and do not want to be spoiled, you should know that the clips contain spoilers.

Path of Exile devs acknowledge "there are too many types of splinters"

Path of Exile's Expedition update just landed, and the response has been mixed so far. The devs have put out a post outlining some of the changes coming to the game, and provided responses to some of the most common points of criticism. There are a lot of currency items in Expedition, and Grinding Gear Games is confident that this works for the design of the current content, but more broadly they know "there are too many types of splinters in Path of Exile".

Expedition has a total of twenty different currency items spread across four different vendors. Path of Exile has avoided gold systems for a variety of reasons, and spreading this many currency types around is intended to encourage players to spend time at different vendors and make more strategic decisions around their purchases.

"This results in twenty currency items for use at the vendors, which does feel like a lot," the devs write. "However, because you can immediately stash them into the Expedition Locker after an encounter, the variety of currency types doesn't really cause additional inconvenience. Regardless of whether we had one type, four types, or twenty types, you'd still have to pick up a few items and stash them."

Read the rest of the story...

The Midnight Pact Mystery Box

The hidden figures of Wraeclast emerge from the shadows in the new Midnight Pact Mystery Box! It contains 38 new cosmetic effects, some of which can be combined to create a unique version for even deeper character customisation. Check out the full trailer below to see what's available or get yours here!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

What We're Working On

Over the weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Expedition! We've been really enjoying watching the community play through the new content and conquer the challenges that lie within. We have deployed many hotfixes and a restartless 3.15.0b patch so far, and have more coming! This post provides more details.

A lot of players have tried to derive our player concurrency numbers based on the data shown for Steam users, and have expressed concern that fewer people played this expansion than the previous two. To be transparent, the number is that 23% fewer players joined us at launch compared to our all-time record, and this is something we were prepared for. In addition to the normal variance between releases, we completely understand that Path of Exile had a lot of changes in 3.15 and this is definitely unnerving to some players. Thank you to everyone who has tried it out so far. We're really enjoying reading about your experiences playing with the recent changes.

Since release, we have released the following patches:

[h3]3.15.0 Hotfix 1[/h3]

Applied a tentative fix to a new graphical T-posing issue.
Fixed various instance crashes.

[h3]3.15.0 Hotfix 2[/h3]

The Reaper created by the new Summon Reaper skill gem now has better survivability at all levels.
Fixed a bug where the bleeding damage modifier on Summon Reaper wasn't applying.[l/i]
Fixed a bug where The Reaper would sometimes try to consume non-minions.
Fixed a bug where Boneshatter's self hit didn't trigger when-hit events.
Fixed a bug where Unearthed Zombies could be revived by Necromancers into a broken state.

[h3]3.15.0 Hotfix 3[/h3]

Allowed Expedition Vendor Reroll currency items to drop from Excavated Chests as well as Runic Monsters.
Fixed an exploit where PvP-only characters could try to buy items from the Expedition vendors.
Fixed an instance crash related to Instilling Orbs.

[h3]3.15.0 Hotfix 4:[/h3]

Fixed a bug where some instilled flask mods could remove grace period when entering new areas.
Fixed an instance crash.

[h3]3.15.0 Hotfix 5:[/h3]

Fixed a client crash that could occur when using Forbidden Rite.
Fixed an instance crash related to Lion's Roar.

[h3]3.15.0b (from earlier today):[/h3]

Applied another tentative fix for the graphical T-posing issue.
Fixed a bug where Divergent Eye of Winter did not have a description for its alternate quality effect.
Fixed a bug where non-unique Iron Flasks were not dropping.
Fixed a bug where you could not sell items to Tane in Tane’s Laboratory.
Fixed a bug where mini life bars were not shown for allies on full health.
Fixed a bug where the audio for player footsteps was too loud.

[h3]Soon:[/h3]

Added the missing affix name for the "Chance to avoid being Stunned during Flask Effect" mod.
Added display for quantities of Expedition Currency in vendor windows.
Fixed a bug where the art for Alternate-art Flasks was not displaying.
Fixed a bug where the labels for Delve Chests and Azurite were not displaying.
Fixed a bug where Skin of the Loyal was unable to roll blue sockets.
Fixed a bug where gaining or losing modifiers that change the effect of Freeze on you, such as from an Aquamarine Flask, would not immediately update the effect that pre-existing freezes were having on you.

So far today we have been discussing a variety of community feedback and have either explanations or changes planned for a number of topics, which are listed below. Please note that this is not a complete list yet - we're still discussing many other topics but this is the set we are ready to talk about. We'd much rather get this first post out now rather than wait for it to be an exhaustive list.

[h3]Can the Merchant Vendor Windows show you how many Runed Artifacts you have?[/h3]
Yes, we are working on making it so that the vendor window displays how many artifacts of the relevant type you have available for trading with the Expedition merchants. We'll release this feature as soon as it's ready (but it may be a few days).

[h3]Expedition Vendor Refresh Currency is too Rare![/h3]
The team are discussing increasing the rate that you find vendor reroll currency items for Rog, Tujen and Dannig. Gwennen's was already 4x as high as the others and is in a good place. We'll probably have a value for this decided by tomorrow.

Also, we are discussing increasing the stack sizes of vendor reroll currency items and all Expedition currency in higher maps. This should make playing in hard maps more rewarding than trying to farm specific campaign areas.

[h3]Were the Mana Cost Multiplier changes on Support Gems too Extreme?[/h3]
Yes, they were too extreme. Based on feedback and data, we are reviewing the mana cost multipliers again and will be reducing many (but not all) of them. While this will ease the impact on your mana by a moderate amount, the goal is still that mana matters a lot more than it did before.

[h3]Are there any Changes coming to Ailment or Curse Immunity?[/h3]
Ailment Immunity granted by flasks is being increased from 1 second to 4 seconds. Staunching Flasks will make you immune to Corrupted Blood, if they remove Corrupted Blood from you. Arctic Armour will grant Freeze Immunity. Aquamarine Flask is being buffed from 40% to 60% freeze reduction. The map mods that curse the player no longer apply the curses with increased effect.

[h3]I hate Goatmen. Tell me some good news.[/h3]
We're nerfing Goatman Leap Slams and Molten Shells in the late game.

[h3]Why does Expedition have Twenty types of Currency?[/h3]
We thought it would be helpful to explain how we ended up with so many currency items in Expedition:

Each of the four vendors needs their own type of currency. If we had one unified currency that works across all vendors, then the correct behaviour would be to determine which of the vendors technically has the best expected value, and to spend all of your currency with them. As it stands, there's incentive to use each of the different novel trade methods and not ignore any.
Each of the vendors needs several tiers of currency. We experimented with just one tier internally, but this basically became a gold system. By having multiple tiers that do different things and have uncertain exchange rates between them, we get all the advantages of Path of Exile's currency system and avoid the dangers that having gold would cause. Here's a very old news post from over 10 years ago that describes our philosophy here!
Each of the vendors has a separate currency for rerolling their inventory that differs from the ones that you spend buying things from them. This is intentionally different so that you have competing scarcity - sometimes rerolls bottleneck you and sometimes purchasing items does. Again, trying to prevent the bad consequences of having something similar to gold.
Dannig exchanges his artifacts for ones from other vendors, giving you a limited ability to smooth out temporary shortages in currency availability. Also, all the vendors will wait for you if you have to go and come back with currency later.

This results in twenty currency items for use at the vendors, which does feel like a lot. However, because you can immediately stash them into the Expedition Locker after an encounter, the variety of currency types doesn't really cause additional inconvenience. Regardless of whether we had one type, four types or twenty types, you'd still have to pick up a few items and stash them.

We feel that the gameplay benefits described above (plus the ability to immediately stash them in the field) justify the number of currency items that the league uses. Having said that, we hear you. There are too many types of splinters in Path of Exile. We will be mindful of this for the design of future releases.

[h3]Where is the Mystery Box?[/h3]
We expect to release it tomorrow morning! It's slightly late this cycle because one of our team members had a family emergency, but that's all resolved and everyone is fine.

[h3]Quick PSA about how Remnants Work[/h3]
We quickly wanted to clarify this because some players misunderstood it. Sorry for not being more clear!

Remnants are detonated in a sequence (as your chain of explosives reaches them). When one is detonated, its effects apply to the monsters unearthed by that blast and all subsequent blasts. This is one of the things you need to consider strategically while planning where to place the explosives. You do not need to wait until all explosives have gone off before you start fighting the monsters.

There are many more topics that we are going through that our discussions haven't reached yet. In the interests of communication, this post represents where we're up to so far. We felt it was better to post this now rather than wait a few days until everything has been discussed. We'll let you know as we decide more stuff on other topics. Thanks for the ongoing feedback!