Path of Exile News

We have just deployed the 3.10.2 Patch, which includes a Beta version of our Vulkan renderer. This alternate renderer provides much more consistent performance than the DirectX 11 one, especially when under high CPU load.

Over the last few years, we have increased the amount of multithreading that the Path of Exile engine uses, which lets us take more advantage of modern CPUs with many threads (logical cores). Because of the dynamic shader system we use, shader uploads occur frequently throughout gameplay and currently may stall the entire game when they occur. In our DirectX11 backend, shader uploads happen on the background threads, but the graphics driver (the AMD/Nvidia/Intel layer) processes them before the GPU can use them. It does so in its own threads that can be starved when the CPU usage is high. In that case, driver processing appears to happen in the main thread, causing stalls. Somewhat ironically, the additional multithreading we have been adding over the years actually makes this problem worse, as it increases overall CPU usage (in order to get faster frame rates). Thankfully, this is where Vulkan comes in. Among many other improvements, this rendering API lets you do everything in function calls we have full control over, letting us completely avoid these uncontrollable DirectX11 graphics driver stalls.

Because there's no server component to the new renderer, the patch has been released without a full realm restart (so just restart your client to download it, whenever you're ready). Due to new shaders, the patch isn't tiny.

To access the new Vulkan renderer, launch the game and go to the Graphics Options screen. Then change the Renderer option to "Vulkan (Beta)". It should take effect without you having to relaunch Path of Exile.

The Vulkan renderer will not magically make your graphics card perform better than it previously did, but it will make performance a lot more consistent. This means that your peak frame rate will not increase, but you won't have anywhere near as many unpredictable spikes that were making the game feel stuttery and reducing average frame rate. Basically, this new renderer gives us complete control over how resources are managed, so we can tune it for Path of Exile's exact requirements.

On many systems, this renderer is actually marginally slower than the DirectX11 one at the moment. This is something we can easily improve over the coming weeks (and aim to by the release of 3.11). Basically, Vulkan gives you a much better framework for making optimisations, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of this. You may find that even in its marginally-slower state, the significant frame rate stability difference makes it worth using. But the main goal at the moment is stability testing while we work on getting the frame rate as fast as possible through optimisation.

In addition, our Vulkan renderer will force texture detail to "Medium" on systems with less than 3gb of graphics memory. This means we can avoid any kind of stuttering/spikes as textures have to be moved between GPU and system RAM. This type of thing is something we are constantly iterating on and trying to find a solution that looks as good as possible while performing as well as it can. Our philosophy with the Vulkan renderer is frame rate consistency, so that players can enjoy Path of Exile without stuttering/spikes at arbitrary times. Performance will still be proportional to how much is going on on-screen, and better graphics cards will of course always help a lot.

Currently this renderer is in Beta, so there may be issues. Please report any rendering bugs that you encounter in the Bug Reports forum. It may be best not to play your most important hardcore characters with this Beta renderer until you're comfortable that it works well for you. We will rapidly fix reported issues and try to get it as final as possible by the release of 3.11. Eventually it will become the default renderer for Path of Exile.

If you get into a state where the game won't launch with the Vulkan renderer, then you can edit the production_Config.ini file (usually found in Documents\ My Games\ Path of Exile) and change renderer_type=Vulkan to renderer_type=DirectX11

Thanks very much for helping us test this renderer, and please let us know your feedback!

We're currently in the 11th week of Delirium league and thought that now would be a great time to take a look at some statistics.

We'll start by examining unique item usage. First, let's look at all character levels.

Top 10 Uniques (All levels)

• Tabula Rasa
  
• Survival Instincts
  
• Perandus Blazon
  
• Atziri's Promise
  
• Watcher's Eye
  
• Lion's Roar
  
• Rumi's Concoction
  
• Fevered Mind
  
• Voices
  
• Goldrim
  

As you can see, Tabula Rasa is the most-used unique when we look at all character levels. If we compare back to Legion league (which was the last time we publicly showed similar stats), we can see that this was the case then as well. Many of the uniques in this list are leveling uniques, though we do see some endgame uniques in here, primarily Watcher's Eye and Voices. Notably, Watcher's Eye didn't make it into the top ten in Legion league.

Now let's take a look at unique usage for characters under level 70.

Top 10 Uniques - Level

• Tabula Rasa
  
• Survival Instincts
  
• Wanderlust
  
• Goldrim
  
• Blackheart
  
• Karui Ward
  
• Lifesprig
  
• Wurm's Molt
  
• Kaom's Sign
  
• Lochtonial Caress
  

As one would expect, all of these items are generally considered to be leveling uniques. If you're ever unsure as to what uniques would be useful for leveling, look no further! Wurm's Molt makes a showing thanks to its leech modifiers (in particular, mana leech). Lochtonial Caress is a great source of charge generation, while Goldrim provides much needed resistances for the leveling process.

Now, let's see how this list looks as we tighten up the restrictions, looking at all characters that are level 70+.

Top 10 Uniques - Level 70+

• Tabula Rasa
  
• Atziri's Promise
  
• Perandus Blazon
  
• Watcher's Eye
  
• Lion's Roar
  
• Rumi's Concoction
  
• Survival Instincts
  
• Fevered Mind
  
• Voices
  
• Rotgut
  

Tabula Rasa continues to be the leading body armour choice here, thanks to the easy access to 6-linked sockets. Now that players are able to use it, Atziri's Promise is a universally useful choice, granting extra damage to both attack and spell builds. We start to see Voices make a showing here, which you'll soon see becomes an even more popular choice as we look at higher level characters.

Finally, we'll take a look at high level characters and see how their gear choices differ from the level 70+ bracket.

Top 10 Uniques - Level 90+

• Watcher's Eye
  
• Voices
  
• Atziri's Promise
  
• Fevered Mind
  
• Lion's Roar
  
• Cinderswallow Urn
  
• Split Personality
  
• Rumi's Concoction
  
• Call of the Brotherhood
  
• Prism Guardian
  

Watcher's Eye reigns supreme. This isn't a huge surprise, especially given how many builds a Watcher's Eye can slot into. We see that Voices has become much more popular in this bracket compared to when we included level 70+ characters. Atziri's Promise becomes slightly less popular, though still remains the third most used unique, again, thanks to its flexibility to fit into a wide assortment of builds. Newcomers in this very endgame bracket include Call of the Brotherhood and Prism Guardian (a staple for characters wanting to reserve additional auras).

Moving on to looking at some Map statistics, let's first look at the top-ten maps based on the number of times they were run.

Top Ten Maps by Number Run

Area

Number of Runs

Beach

17,648,116

Jungle Valley

14,777,282

Pier

13,464,286

Wharf

13,442,293

Strand

11,913,135

Burial Chambers

10,658,283

Alleyways

6,883,947

Underground Sea

5,976,159

Promenade

5,218,652

Fungal Hollow

4,945,618

One of the most interesting takeaways from this is how almost all of these maps have one thing in common; they're linear. It's quite cool to see that the league mechanic is clearly influencing player choice, especially when you contrast this list to that from Legion league, where many of the maps were more spacious and wide-open. One thing to note here is that the top four maps happen to be the innermost Tier 1 maps on the Atlas, therefore they'll have been run by almost all players as they progress their Atlas. There's a very large dropoff between Burial Chambers and Alleyways here.

Now, let's look at the top-ten most-deadly areas (based on number of character deaths).

Top Ten Areas by Deaths

Area

Deaths

The Cavern of Anger

12,017,243

The Karui Fortress

9,301,367

The Harvest

8,096,858

The Belly of the Beast Level 2

8,003,605

The Chamber of Innocence

6,540,721

Beach

6,317,491

Azurite Mine

6,267,286

The Blood Aqueduct

6,162,409

The High Gardens

5,870,453

The Rotting Core

5,714,269

We see a lot of campaign areas popping up here as the most deadly; in particular, Merveil appears to be quite lethal. Many campaign bosses received significant buffs in 3.9.0, and the impact of those changes is very evident in just how many players are getting mercilessly slaughtered by them. In Legion, we saw six map areas in this list, but in Delirium, we only see one. Beach is the most-deadly map, though much of that can be explained by the fact that it is one of the first maps players will run on the Atlas, fresh off the back of a resistance penalty, and up against an elemental-damage-dealing boss. The Azurite Mine makes another showing (as it did in Legion), though is slightly less deadly (relatively speaking) thanks to the campaign areas above it.

This set of statistics has been fascinating to look at, particularly how much of the unique usage is represented by endgame uniques, rather than having quite a few leveling uniques in the list (as Legion league did). Seeing how Delirium has affected players map choice has been intriguing as well as the impact of the 3.9.0 campaign boss buffs. We will keep an eye on how things unfold in the next league and will certainly keep you posted!

The press tour has begun which means that for the next week we'll be showing our upcoming expansion content to scores of journalists. This also means that our announcement is just around the corner - in fact, you'll be able to check out the announcement details in all their glory at 2pm June 2 (PDT).

While we are on track to announce the expansion as scheduled, it's still too early to provide a firm confirmation of the expansion's launch date. As we mentioned last week, there is a possibility that it may be further delayed. The launch date will be confirmed alongside the announcement.

In terms of the size of the expansion, it's in-line with most of our others like Delve, Incursion, Blight, etc., but smaller than our recent December expansions like Conquerors of the Atlas and Betrayal. You can expect all the hallmarks of a Path of Exile expansion like a new challenge league, improvements to existing content, new unique items, skill gems, support gems, rebalanced gameplay and more!

This also means that you only have one more week to purchase the Delirium supporter packs before they're replaced by the upcoming 3.11 Supporter Packs. If you'd like more time to get yours, you can arrange a payment plan! You can find out more information about these supporter packs and payment plans here.

As we mentioned last week, be sure to tune into ZiggyD's stream live when the announcement hits. He'll be streaming the new trailer, his insights into the expansion and then hosting a live expansion Q&A with Chris Wilson!

While we can't reveal the details just yet, we know many of you are looking for any morsel of information. In honour of those of you, we're happy to reveal that the colour of the expansion logo is bright blue, yet this league definitely has many other colours. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled and your ear to the ground for other teasers that may crop up.

Launched in December 2019, Conquerors of the Atlas introduced a new endgame storyline for Path of Exile. Nick, one of our narrative designers, describes the process of creating lore for the Conquerors in today's news post.

Conquerors of the Atlas was the third major endgame update to Path of Exile's complex endgame, following War for the Atlas (which introduced the Elder) and Atlas of Worlds (which introduced the Shaper) before that. However, unlike those two updates, we were not simply adding a story or augmenting an existing story, but progressing it, and examining the consequences of those events from an outsider's perspective. How did it come about? Well I'm glad you asked me!

We knew we were doing some endgame changes about 6 months ahead of the launch of Conquerors. What we didn't know was the scale of those changes, or what would happen to the existing Atlas and its associated storylines. And ExileCon was coming up quick, where we would be announcing not only this expansion, but the Metamorph league and the sequel to Path of Exile, which was also actively being worked on.

We looked at our array of story elements, and at the current Atlas storyline. We considered replacements and changes to campaign elements, but ultimately, what appealed most was this idea that the community often echoes anyway: The Exiles have finally gone mad farming the Atlas.

Now, it's one thing to have a cool hook like that. It's very different to turn that into a cohesive narrative. For one, which Exiles? It can't be the player's character, because the player's character is the one who has to go fix this mess. So it's a different set of Exiles, but they have to have access to the map device (and Zana).

We spent a while working out the exact timeline of events. There were going to have to be changes (after all, for a lot of players, they WERE the Elderslayers!), but we wanted to keep them to an absolute minimum.

If you read my post about integrating a league's story into the campaign, you might remember that we often bump up against the cyclical timeline of each league's launch. In short, it makes it difficult to 'progress' the narrative past the end of the campaign or maps. But with Conquerors, we were doing exactly that.

We established characters fairly quickly. As is often the case, we knew what they would look like before anything else. Art tends to be months ahead of everything else in the pipeline. I wanted each character to stumble into a different type of madness, though early versions had them far more mad at the time the player found them than they ended up being. It was important that each character have a reason for their exile, even if it wasn't always spelled out, that set them at odds with Dominus and the Templar.

It took a little while before the exact Atlas mechanics were nailed down, which meant that what those characters were doing, why the player wanted to pursue them, and how exactly the story developed was in flux for a while. When designing a narrative for an expansion like Conquerors, it is integral that the player's motivation line up with the character's motivation, which hasn't always been the case (I'm looking at you, War for the Atlas), and that can take a lot of time and discussion. And since we were also ramping up to ExileCon all this time, working on getting Path of Exile 2 into a reasonable state, including recording all of Act 1 for PoE2. It was... busy.

Unfortunately, because it was so busy, not all of our storytelling tools were implemented in time. The journals, which filled in the gap in time between the slaying of Kitava and the player's first forays into the newly-conquered Atlas, were in the game files but wouldn't drop at the end of fights as they were intended to. This left the Elderslayers feeling a little more "mysterious" than we really wanted, especially as we had some exceptional voice performances for them.

It also meant that Sirus, a character that featured prominently in the journal entries, appeared seemingly out of nowhere. This was made worse due to the cancellation of mechanics that would have him invade your map in place of one of the other Conquerors.

Before I leave you, here's a fun little fact you might enjoy:

Zana has a fairly wide variety of mission types, and has different voice lines for each one. She even has special voice lines for Shaper and Elder guardian missions, as well as the Synthesis unique maps. In fact, for Conquerors of the Atlas, we ended up recording about 21 pages of dialogue for Zana alone!

We're finishing preparation for the 3.11 press tour which starts next week while continuing to work on the expansion and its announcement which is currently planned for the 2nd of June (PDT). In other news - we're discounting every type of Stash Tab, including the Delve Tab, Unique Collection Tab, Fragment Tab, Map Tab, Premium Stash Tab Bundles, Premium Quad Stash Tab, Essence Tab, Divination Tab, Currency Tab and Guild Stash Tabs (PC only)! Press M in game to view the full selection of discounted stash tabs.

The sale runs all weekend and ends at May 25, 2020 9:00 PM (PDT) (this is displayed in your local time). If you need some extra points, we recommend checking out the Delirium supporter packs, before they leave the store forever!

In addition, community racing organizers Brittleknee and Rex are teaming up to host a series of events over the next two weekends! There's a race day planned this Saturday (May 23rd PDT) which includes a variety of events from Boss Rushes to an XP Race and should be quite exciting to watch! If you'd like to participate this Saturday, you can find additional information in this forum thread. Casting will be done live by ZiggyD and Octavian on www.twitch.tv/ziggydlive.

Next Saturday (May 30th PDT), they are hosting a HC SSF Delirium Class Race to level to 80! Supporter Packs and Point Packs are on the line for not only the first overall, but the first three finishers in each class! In addition to these prizes, there will be a league-wide raffle for an additional twenty 200 Points Packs for anyone hitting level 80 prior before the time cutoff of 12 hours. This allows a wider range of participants the ability to potentially bring home a prize even if you’re not a top racer, or maybe can’t start right away due to time zones. More information about the class race including signup information can be found here.

Thank you so much for your support! Have a lovely weekend everyone!