Path of Exile News

Last week we told you about the 3.11.1f patch we've been working on. After further investigation and testing, the team decided to include some improvements to the bloom technology in this update. We expect this patch to go live on PC later today. In the meantime check out its full patch notes.

• Bloom is now applied after Exposure, resulting in a game-wide reduction of bloom's intensity, especially in dark areas.
  
• Added a Bloom slider in the Graphics Options, allowing you to adjust the intensity of bloom effects from 25% to 130% of their base intensity.
  
• Adjusted many area environments to be less bright.
  
• Reduced the intensity of Bloom effects from Delve Flares.
  
• Messages intended to be sent to a Global Chat Channel which contain "WTS" will now automatically change the chat window to a Trade Chat Channel. This has been done in a way which should not affect legitimate words that end in 'wts', such as newts.
  
• Special characters are no longer required when searching for public parties.
  
• Fixed a bug where you could access the Sacred Grove in non-Harvest leagues.
  
• Fixed a bug where the label for the portal to the Sacred Grove could be visible before interacting with the Seed Cache in various map areas.
  
• Fixed a rare bug that could prevent Conquerors from spawning on your Atlas after migrating from a solo self-found league.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause duplicate rooms to appear in the Temple of Atzoatl.
  
• Fixed a bug introduced in 3.11.1d where the delayed shockwaves from Betrayal Mastermind's "X-Slam" skill didn't deal damage.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused black boxes to sometimes be rendered on top of objects.
  
• Fixed a bug where Elusive would cause some cosmetic effects to lose their textures briefly when the buff expired.
  
• Fixed a client crash that could occur when using Shield Charge.
  
• Fixed a client crash that could occur when taking a screenshot while using Vulkan rendering.
  
• Fixed an instance crash that could occur in the Hall of Grandmasters unique map.
  

As always, please continue to give us your feedback about specific Bloom cases that feel excessive. Thank you for your reports and patience!

Last Friday we announced the results of our recent Harvest Fan Art Competition. As always, our community has outdone themselves, having submitted a lot of amazing pieces of fan art inspired by the latest Path of Exile expansion. Due to the huge amount of excellent entries, we're happy to reward additional runners-up with a helmet effect of their choice.

arawena

damjanusz

HallowGazer

kanterbow

Kokogon

Check out more runners-up here!

We're running a sale on all cosmetic microtransactions introduced in the Thaumaturgy Mystery Box. More than 50 microtransactions are available at discounted prices, including the recently released Thaumaturgical Hideout.

This sale will run from the time of this post until 9PM, August 17th PDT.

Check out the Thaumaturgy Mystery Box trailer below to see everything that's available or press M in game to view the full selection of discounts.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Thanks so much for your support! Have a great weekend!

A few days ago we concluded the Harvest Fan Art Competition where we asked our community to create fan art inspired by any content introduced in the Harvest expansion, including Oshabi and the Sacred Grove, Delirium and new skills. Over the past month our players have submitted more than a hundred entries to the competition. We've looked through every single one of them and are ready to announce the winners!

We're also offering a special prize (Demon Parasite Armour Set, Demon Parasite Back Attachment, Blood Guard Character Effect, 2x Angels and Demons Mystery Boxes) to the most popular submission amongst our community. We've uploaded all the submissions listed below to this album to our Facebook group. To vote for your favourite piece of fan art, just hit the 'Like' button on it! The entry with the most amount of 'Likes' wins. We'll announce the fan-favourite submission next Monday (August 17th) at 1pm NZT in our Twitter.

[h3]Top Three Winners[/h3]
'The Land Demands a Sacrifice' by BellenaS



Fan Art by Verdeimparat8b



'Oshabi, Ersi, Janaar and Namharim' by Ravenx_



[h3]4th and 5th Place[/h3]
'Can you hear it, Exile? Madness approaches' by BaronBenG



Oshabi by Kardalak_IX



Check out more winners here!

There are five weeks left in Harvest which means things are starting getting closer to the launch of our 3.12 expansion in September. In the meantime, you may be wondering what the future of Harvest looks like. We're ready to share our plans!

In short, Harvest will not immediately become a core gameplay mechanic but may be reintroduced in the future.

When we designed Harvest, we wanted to experiment with a more deterministic crafting system that would enable players to access powerful items earlier in their character progression. In this sense, we feel that the crafting system has been very successful. However, at the top end of gameplay, Harvest has made it too easy to gain very powerful items that previously required a lot more work and investment to ac quire. This was acceptable for a temporary challenge league but poses problems for the long-term health of Path of Exile's item economy if allowed to remain in its current state.

As such, Harvest would require a significant amount of rebalancing in order to achieve a healthy level of power for the core game. We would be reassessing the crafting mechanics to determine how many of them we're willing to keep and how much of the remaining crafting would need to be rebalanced.

The standard method of adding mechanics to core gameplay where they gain a 10% chance to appear in maps also doesn't really work for Harvest, as it would mean you would only make growth progress in your Sacred Grove every ten maps which would be dissatisfying and slow. We plan to look at an alternate method of providing access to the Harvest mechanic that isn't strictly reliant on RNG but implementing something like this will take a fair amount of time and therefore not be immediate.

The Harvest mechanic also creates some database issues in terms of the amount of data being stored. This is a non-trivial technical problem we would need to resolve before allowing it to exist long-term.

All of these changes are too time-consuming to implement immediately. We would like Harvest to be core in the future, but we are not yet sure of what that would look like. In summary, if you're enjoying Harvest in its current form, be sure to take advantage of it while you can!