Path of Exile News

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!

It's that time again! Today we'll be breaking down which Ascendancy classes players have been gravitating towards in the Harvest leagues on all platforms.

Let's begin by looking at level 70+ characters in both Harvest leagues on PC.





As you can see, the most popular choice by far is Necromancer. If we look back at Metamorph's Ascendancy class breakdown (which was the last time we published class data), we can see that Necromancer was equally popular in the Level 70+ bracket then as well. Juggernaut is notably more popular in Hardcore league than in standard (as was the case in Metamorph); it remains a reliable choice for players looking for some serious defences.

Comparing the Standard results to the Hardcore results, Assassins, Berserkers and Saboteurs are much more popular on Standard while Juggernauts, Chieftains and Tricksters are much more popular choices on Hardcore.

Next, let's take a look at the same level bracket, but this time, in solo self-found leagues.




We can see that Necromancers remain the most popular choice in SSF leagues. Surprisingly, Juggernaut is suddenly much more popular in SSF Standard than it was in non-SSF Standard, coming in in the number three slot. Juggernaut, Chieftain and Trickster remain the biggest defensive leaders when we compare Standard to Hardcore ascendancies.

Next, let's tighten up the level range of characters we're looking at by only looking at characters that are at least level 90.




As we look at level 90+ characters, we start to see an even larger gap between Standard and Hardcore ascendancy class choices. Assassin is by far more popular in Standard. Trickster also becomes even more popular when compared to the level 70+ brackets. Necromancer remains by far the most popular choice in both Standard and Hardcore.

As we did with the level 70+ bracket, let's take a look at how ascendancy class choice looks for the level 90+ bracket in solo self-found leagues.




As with non-SSF characters, Necromancer continues to reign supreme, making up almost 30% of all characters. Trickster is significantly more popular on SSF (~17%) than on non-SSF (~10%), meanwhile Assassin drops from ~11% down to ~5% on Standard leagues.

When we look at Hardcore, Necromancer and Juggernaut are seeing roughly equal play whether in an SSF league or not. As with Standard, Trickster sees more play in SSF than in non-SSF.

As we're looking at level 90+ characters, we can still see some clear leaders between Standard and Hardcore, with Necromancer and Berserker having the largest gap (favouring Standard play) and Chieftain and Juggernaut favouring Hardcore play.

It's interesting to note that in both level brackets, the difference in class usage between SSF Standard and Hardcore is much smaller than in the trade- and party-enabled equivalents. Given the reduced access to items, you might assume that inherent class traits would create a sharper divide between the two leagues, but we're seeing data that illustrates the opposite.

Moving on to consoles, let's take a look at all characters on Xbox One.




Consistent with PC, Necromancer remains the most popular choice, though we do see a bit more variation in ascendancy class choice. It's important to note that this is looking at characters of all levels, rather than a higher level set of characters. One theme remains consistent, with the trio of Necromancers, Juggernauts and Tricksters remaining top choices for Hardcore characters.

Finally, rounding this all off, we'll look at ascendancy classes on PS4.




One of the main interesting things of note is how much more popular Juggernaut and Guardian are compared to Standard leagues. If we look at Xbox, they're both significantly more popular than their Standard counterparts. Guardian in particular is seeing four times more play on Hardcore than on Standard (on PS4)!

That about wraps up this look at ascendancy class usage. Make sure to keep an eye on the news for the fourth and final statistics post of the Harvest league cycle, coming out in the near future!

By the end of this week we're planning to deploy the 3.11.1f update with several bug fixes. Check out a preview of its patch notes below. The 3.11.1f patch on consoles will be released as soon as possible after being deployed on PC.

Please note that these patch notes may not be final and are still subject to change before the patch.

• 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 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.
  

We know that many of you have been wondering whether we'll implement improvements to the bloom technology we talked about several weeks ago. The team has been working very hard on those and made some good progress. We'll announce the changes as soon as they're close to being deployed. Thanks for your patience!

September 1st marks the 10-year anniversary since the announcement of Path of Exile! At that time Path of Exile had been in development for four years. It's been 10 years and we're still continuing to expand Path of Exile to bring fresh new gameplay mechanics to the shores of Wraeclast. Shortly after the anniversary we'll be announcing our third expansion of this year, while continuing work on Path of Exile 2. The past decade has been extremely busy, productive and full of amazing memories. We can't help but feel nostalgic already!

Path of Exile has grown immensely over the past 10 years and you, our community have grown alongside it. Whether you joined us several years ago or just recently, we're sure each of you have warm memories related to Path of Exile. We would love to hear them!