Path of Exile News

In Path of Exile: Heist, we're introducing several new skills and reworking some past ones. Today's news post covers more detail of new skills like Blazing Salvo, Steel Skills and the long-awaited Discharge rework.

Blazing Salvo
Blazing Salvo releases a torrent of fiery mortars that can hit enemies as they fly and land in rapid succession, with each mortar causing an explosion. When targeting up close, the explosions can hit a target multiple times, while targeting at range causes them to spread out and have a higher explosion radius, giving you a wide damage spread.

The skill rewards clever positioning, making it well suited to casting by hand or by being careful about placement of totems, traps and mines. Multiple Projectile supports result in more damage up close and more reliable area spread, while Fork lets the mortars split into two if they hit enemies, with each exploding separately. Combine the skill with Void Sphere to draw enemies in for a concentrated salvo, or use Flame Wall to add fire damage to Blazing Salvo while applying the Flame Wall's burning effect to enemies hit.

Crackling Lance
Crackling Lance shoots out a wide beam of lightning that has secondary areas of lightning that split off it, striking enemies in a wide spread. Crackling Lance comes with built in Intensity, so each cast builds in damage, while the secondary areas angle in, until all the lightning fires in a single wider beam.

The skill has powerful single target damage capacity when handcast, while having reliable area coverage when used with triggers, totems, traps or mines. Its damage bonus is multiplicative with the Intensity support, allowing it to build up incredible single target damage, and its high damage is great for creating very powerful shocks on enemies.

Intensity and the Pinpoint Support
Intensity was introduced as a high-risk, high-reward mechanic for handcasting that lets you build up powerful concentrated damage while casting repeatedly, as long as you don't move and at the cost of area of effect. To improve the mechanic, we're lowering the base maximum Intensity to 3, while increasing all bonuses to compensate. This will make it faster to build up and lose intensity, while also putting more power on the passive tree notable that gives maximum Intensity.

We've changed the Intensity mechanic to be one we can build into other skills and supports, like Crackling Lance and the new Pinpoint Support. Pinpoint Support gives 3 additional projectiles, while each stack of Intensity will reduce the number of projectiles you fire by 1 while greatly increasing the skill's damage. By increasing your maximum Intensity you could lose all projectiles, so this support works well with spells that can easily gain additional projectiles.

Firestorm
A classic Path of Exile spell, Firestorm has been reworked to give it more powerful visuals, more reliable area coverage and a greater reward for casting fewer, more powerful Firestorms. It is now a level 28 skill, increased from level 12. Firestorm now calls down a single, powerful meteor followed by a smaller ongoing storm of fire over a duration. It now has a limit on how many ongoing storms can be active at once, so you can call down as many meteors as you'd like but can't stack up the ongoing fire storms by extending their duration and triggering or casting the skill rapidly. This has allowed us to greatly increase the area of each impact and the overall damage per cast (and improves performance).

Icestorm
The Icestorm skill granted by The Whispering Ice has received a visual overhaul to modernise the skill, while also receiving some balance changes. It has a storm limit like Firestorm, though the limit is much higher than Firestorms so it works better with triggering and rapid cast mechanics. Its impact area of effect and damage has been increased, while the impact frequency has been lowered.

Discharge
Discharge is another long standing Path of Exile skill that hasn't received much balance attention due to how dependent it has been on specific mechanics that can very rapidly generate charges, forcing the balance to be focused on a small handful of unique items that can generate huge numbers of charges as quickly as you can use the skill. To make the skill more accessible, Discharge’s base damage has been almost tripled and its area of effect now scales significantly with the number of charges consumed, but it has been given a short cooldown. This makes keeping up with charge generation much more manageable for a wider selection of builds. Its damage penalty when triggered has been replaced by a damage penalty to ailments, as it can now create a very devastating ignite.

To preserve the classic trigger Discharge playstyle, a new threshold jewel called Endless Misery has been added which sets the cooldown of Discharge to a much lower value, but also comes with penalties to its damage and area of effect, bringing it closer to (though superior in many setups) the previous iteration of Discharge.

It has also received a visual overhaul to bring it on par with modern skill effects and improve its performance.

Glacial Cascade
Glacial Cascade now has additional mechanics that provide a unique playstyle that rewards clever positioning. The skill now has inherent knockback, a fixed cascade spread, and the final burst of the cascade deals significantly more damage in a larger area. Use the knockback from the cascade to push enemies away and into the large impact, and position the skill carefully on bosses to make the most of the damage overlap. The skill still deals significant damage with Traps and Mines, but can now take much more advantage of the deliberate positioning that totems and hand casting allows.

The skill benefits greatly from increased area of effect, allowing for more overlap between bursts. We've also changed the skill to convert 100% of its physical damage to cold, so no enchantment or threshold jewel is required to fully convert the skill. We're replacing the Enchantment and disabling the Long Winter threshold jewel from dropping, to be re-introduced in a new form later.

Splitting Steel
Splitting Steel is a new low level skill that uses the shard mechanic. Each use fires a single shard that explodes into additional projectiles when it hits an enemy or reaches the targeted location, creating smaller shards that fly towards nearby enemies before detonating in smaller explosions. The skill has some added physical damage and a chance to impale, something that wasn't previously accessible at such low levels.

Changes have been made to the Split mechanic that means Splitting now occurs before other projectile behaviours; This means that Fork, Pierce or Chain would take place after Split has generated all of the additional projectiles, opening up all sorts of interesting ways to take advantage of these mechanics.

Call of Steel
Call of Steel is a secondary skill granted as long as you have any of the Steel gems equipped. It lets you detonate all impales on enemies in a very large range, causing them to deal their stored impale damage in a small area around them. This includes any dead enemies whose corpses are impaled.

Call of Steel also generates Shards that can be used by any of the Steel skills, generating one for each impaled enemy in range as well as 4 shards when first used, then another 4 every half a second until you're at the maximum of 12 shards. Using a steel skill will interrupt this ongoing recharge, so it's best to time your use of this to when you'll be performing other actions if you don't have enough impaled enemies nearby.

Shattering Steel
Shattering Steel has received some changes to make the skill more flexible at the cost of consuming two shards. Shattering Steel projectiles can no longer hit the same target multiple times, but instead deal much more damage up close when consuming shards. The skill now has four additional projectiles (from two) and projectile distance is now more reliably modified by projectile speed. Projectiles still explode in a cone area when they stop, and these areas can hit a target multiple times if you can get them to overlap.

The skill now grants buffs that give a chance to block whenever you use it while consuming a shard. You can have up to 6 of these buffs that grant block chance, each with its own duration, so you've got to keep using the skill frequently to keep the bonus active. These give a sizable defensive advantage to keep you alive when getting up close for those deadly close range shots.

Lancing Steel
Lancing Steel has been completely reworked. Using the attack now consumes 4 shards, creating a whirling cluster of shards pointing forward. The cluster rapidly fires out its projectiles, aiming towards enemies in front at great range or enemies in any direction close to the cluster. The projectiles target enemies the cluster hasn't hit first, letting the cluster pick off weaker enemies before focusing on remaining targets. The projectiles deal more damage to targets that haven't yet been hit by each cluster of shards, to make the skill much more effective at taking out very large groups of enemies that are spread out.

Additional projectiles add to the total number of projectiles each cluster fires, with 50% more projectiles fired for each shard consumed. This means that the skill usually fires three times its number of projectiles at a fixed rate, creating a hail of shards that deal a devastating salvo of damage, especially when combined with the impale effect. You can have multiple clusters active at once, limited only by how fast you can generate Shards.

Because of the high shard cost, you'll likely want to invest in a chance to impale, so that you've got more shards in enemies to draw out with Call of Steel.

We hope you enjoy these new skills as you make your way through the perils of Heist! Check them out in action below.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In Path of Exile: Heist we're making some changes to curses to provide incentive to self-cast them. We've made some small changes to existing curse mechanics, improved their visuals and added one new curse skill and one new support gem.

An Overview of Curses
Curses are among some of the first skills that were introduced to Path of Exile. Over time, we've introduced a number of ways to take advantage of their mechanics like the Blasphemy Support which creates a curse-aura, or adding the ability to apply curses with the Curse on Hit support.

While having a number of methods of applying a curse is certainly a good thing, there was a lot of automatic-cursing going on and we wanted to give some incentives to those who wanted to take the time to actually cast a curse manually on a pack of monsters.

While we were doing this, it felt like a good opportunity to review all curse gems and see what other improvements could be made. We were going to see if we could add any new curses to the pool, but found that the current set of curses already covers pretty much every niche we wanted. However, this didn't stop us from making other gems that could interact with them in some way.

To this end, we've added one new skill gem, one new support gem, reworked a number of curse skills and improved their visual effects.

Curse Types
Curses are now divided into Hexes and Marks. We've tried to make them feel distinct while still sharing some identifiable properties of being a curse.

Hexes
Hex Spells apply curse debuffs to each enemy in an area. If the spell was self-cast, the debuff will gain doom over time up to its maximum. The effect of the curse is increased by the amount of Doom it has.

The curses that are now considered Hexes are Flammability, Frostbite, Conductivity, Elemental Weakness, Vulnerability, Despair, Temporal Chains, Enfeeble and Punishment.

Marks
Marks apply the curse debuff on a single target and cannot be applied to more than one target. We've created new passive skills that apply specifically to marks and marked enemies. We're aiming to move Marks towards being more dexterity-aligned as a mechanic, so these passives will be closer to the Ranger area of the passive tree.

Curses that are considered Marks are Warlord's Mark, Poacher's Mark, Assassin's Mark and Sniper's Mark (which is the reworked Projectile Weakness).

Impending Doom/Doom Blast
Impending Doom is a support gem that can support hexes. When the supported hex expires or is removed in any way, it triggers Doom Blast which causes a chaos explosion. The more Doom the supported hex built up before its expiration, the greater damage the explosion will deal.

There are a number of ways to cause the explosion to occur. At the most basic level, you can simply kill a monster with the supported hex. However, there are many other ways you can cause a hex to expire, but that's an exercise that we'll leave to you to figure out!

Hexblast
This is a new skill gem that calls down a beam of chaos damage on the target. If the target is cursed with a hex, it consumes that hex and causes a shockwave around that enemy. Similar to Impending Doom, the more Doom the supported hex built up, the greater damage the skill deals.

Although Hexblast is a chaos damage spell, it has some elemental-themed properties that make it special. For one, the damage it deals has the ability to ignite, shock or freeze. Secondly, it deals damage based on the lowest resistance the enemy has! For example, this lets you use an offensive hex such as Flammability and still make use of the fire resistance reduction that it provides.

Punishment
Punishment has now changed to provide benefit for a greater variety of builds. It no longer causes you to gain bonuses when monsters hit you but instead curses monsters to take increased damage when they are on low life. This synergises with the second effect that Punishment now applies which causes monsters to explode, dealing a percentage of your overkill damage to monsters around them. In addition, if cursed monsters hit you, they get debilitated (a debuff that causes enemies to deal less damage and have less movement speed) for a duration.

These changes make Punishment much more useful and a more well-rounded curse, with mostly offensive capabilities as well as a defensive component to it in case monsters are able to get close to you.

Sniper's Mark
[To be revealed later]

Existing Marks
All Mark Curses have been rebalanced to be more suitable for a single target. In addition, the curse penalty that is found on many bosses in the endgame no longer applies to Marks and only applies to Hexes, allowing Marks to apply to these bosses at their full power.

Other Small Changes
We have also made some smaller changes to radius values, bonuses that certain curses give and some additional quality stats. You'll find these changes outlined in the patch notes.

In addition to these changes, there will be some passive tree adjustments and a new keystone that changes how self-cast curses apply their debuffs.

Check out the Curses in action in the video below!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Alongside Path of Exile: Heist, we're introducing four new skills which produce powerful, long-lasting effects that allow you to take control over an area. The interesting effects generated by each skill mean that they are a good fit alongside a wide variety of builds but also offer a particular benefit to spellcasters that need to stand still to spread damage.

Void Sphere
Void Sphere creates an object that generates a pulse within a large radius. This pulse deals physical and chaos damage and pulls normal, magic and rare enemies toward its centre. The first few pulses generated by Void Sphere have a much greater gravitational pull than subsequent pulses. All enemies in its area of influence will also be hindered. The effect of this debuff increases the closer enemies are to the centre of the sphere. Enemies that die within the area affected by the Void Sphere will have their corpses sucked into the void.

Void Sphere can be useful for controlling dangerous enemies, grouping a cluster of slower enemies together to inflict a concentrated damage burst and for triggering on-hit effects over a long period. The skill has a long cooldown, so it can take full advantage of the Second Wind Support to enable you to use Void Sphere twice in relatively quick succession. Note that only one Void Sphere can be active at a time.

Frost Shield
Frost Shield creates an icy dome on the ground at your location that protects the caster and their allies from enemies. When cast, it rapidly consumes your energy shield at a flat rate for one second and will grow in power and life based on how much energy shield is drained. The skill provides protection until it runs out of life.

Frost Shield will protect you and your allies from a small portion of enemy damage if they're within the shield or a large portion of their damage if the enemies are outside the shield. All enemies close to or within the shield will also be chilled.

Additionally, while you're inside Frost Shield's dome, it will provide added base critical strike chance. This makes it great for defensive positioning on bosses, letting you take cover within the sphere and unleash hell as long as the shield holds.

Just like Void Sphere, it works well with the Second Wind Support. Using the Increased Area of Effect or Concentrated Effect Supports allows you to control whether you want more space to move within or a tighter area. A smaller shield provides you with better control over how many enemies enter the shield's area for maximum damage mitigation.

Sigil of Power
Sigil of Power creates a potent circle on the ground that grants additional lightning damage to you and allies standing within it, while also slightly increasing the cost of your skills. As you spend mana, the skill powers up in stages. Each stage grants more additional lightning damage. Once it's fully powered up, it also causes enemies standing within the circle to deal less damage.

This skill offers a way to empower your abilities while facing a difficult boss, providing additional damage when you need it. Its defensive properties can be really beneficial when you're able to keep the boss within the Sigil or against bosses that remain in one place.

Like the other spells mentioned above, this ability has a long cooldown and can take advantage of Second Wind if you'd like to. Increasing its area and duration also works well to extend the reach and lifetime of your powered Sigils. It works well alongside skills with the Archmage support to increase their mana cost, but other spellcast builds usually spend enough mana to fully charge up the Sigil.

Flame Wall
This skill is available from early in the game and creates an area of burning flame. Any enemies that pass through it will be inflicted with a secondary burning effect. This means that you can place a Flame Wall between you and your enemies then watch them melt as they try to reach you. Any projectiles fired through the wall will have fire damage added to the projectile. These flaming projectiles will apply the wall's secondary burning effect to enemies they hit.

The skill can be deployed to boost the damage of any projectile skill without any additional supports, or can be supported with burning damage to specialise in its damage over time property. You can spread the burning effect yourself with any projectile skill, use projectile firing minions or have party members spread the effect.

You can have up to three Flame Walls active at once, so you can create multiple fire fields in a row with the Spell Cascade support, or a wide defensive barrier with Awakened Spell Cascade support.

Check out these skills in action in the video below!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In the coming week, we'll be deploying the 3.11.2 patch which contains many technical changes to the internals of Path of Exile in preparation for the release of Heist. This patch changes the way that Path of Exile stores its data, requiring a complete redownload of the game. There are a number of improvements we have been waiting several years to make which each require a full redownload, so we were able to bundle them all together at this opportunity. Today's news post explains what has changed and why.

Changing how Path of Exile Stores its Data
After a decade of our current technique, we're changing how Path of Exile stores its internal data files. The technical specifics of this are irrelevant to the playerbase, but there are some advantages that we'll detail in this post.

A Full Re-download
Firstly, it's important to understand that this will require a re-download of the entire game for all users. That's a large cost (both in terms of time and bandwidth), but we felt it was better to only do the full re-download once and to simultaneously include enough additional benefits that we feel it's definitely worth it for everyone.

Note that you won't need to uninstall and reinstall Path of Exile. Patching to 3.11.2 will automatically re-download the necessary data.

Faster Patching
Patching Path of Exile with the standalone patcher will be a lot faster than before. With the new system, files are bundled together, which means the files being downloaded are now a lot larger on average. The previous patcher had to make hundreds of thousands of separate web connections, so there was a significant amount of overhead. With our fast CDN, it should now plow through it much more quickly.

Improvements to Steam Patching
Another important consequence of this patch is that the Steam version of Path of Exile will now patch a lot more quickly. Previously, the entire GGPK file had to be copied by the Steam patcher, which meant that even small patches took quite some time to apply. With the new system, small patches will be basically instant, and large patches also a lot faster than before. It should be a similar speed to using our standalone patcher.

Preloading Improvements
The new way of storing files also improves how we preload important assets. The most noticeable improvement is that players without an SSD will have a much, much better time. The benefits for users with SSDs are more marginal.

Texture Quality Improvements
As everything is being re-downloaded, we re-exported all of Path of Exile's textures with a newer compression system that produces much better-looking results. This results in much sharper textures throughout the game.

Audio Re-export
In a similar way, we have also re-exported all of our audio files using the most recent version of the audio library we use. Normally this would be a luxury that we couldn't justify (as it'd result in a large patch), but if we're redownloading everything anyway then we'll take the free improvements to audio.

Engine Improvements
This patch also includes many small engine/renderer bug fixes and performance improvements. We don't want to promise specific improvements because it will vary from system to system, but we are excited to see what impact it has on performance with both Vulkan and DirectX 11.

Why Now?
While we have been testing this patch thoroughly, there may be small issues that only come up when a million or so community members try to use it. We'd rather this doesn't occur on Heist's launch day, so we'll be releasing this technical patch beforehand so that we have time to fix any minor issues that crop up. It's also an opportunity for you to get the large download out of the way in advance.

macOS Version
While Path of Exile for macOS is officially launching alongside Heist on September 18, we'll be making a 3.11 (Harvest) client for it available for some community testing before Heist's release. Sometime after 3.11.2 is deployed, we'll probably post a link to a macOS client for people to start giving us feedback on. The important reason why this needs 3.11.2 to be deployed beforehand is so that the game's data is stored in the new way rather than the old way.

We're very excited about all of the improvements that 3.11.2 brings. It has certainly been a long time coming, and will hopefully be a great baseline to deploy Heist on top of, on September 18.

This September we're teaming up with community streamer Zizaran to host a boss-kill event where players can compete to kill The Awakener while playing in Heist HC SSF mode. Zizaran's event sponsor, Shopify, will be teaming up with him to supply $40,000 to the race's prize pool. On top of the cash prizes for players, there will also be microtransaction prizes provided by us. To top it all off, Shopify will be supplying $13,000 in microtransactions to community streamers to give away during the event! Find out more in this news post.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

How to Participate
This event runs for the first month of Heist, starting on September 18 (PDT). Only characters playing in the Heist HC SSF League will be counted for the cash prize.

As normal, you can place Watchstones in Citadels in the Atlas. These level up your maps and make defeating The Awakener more difficult. Only kills with a fully-Watchstoned Atlas will be counted.

We are creating two custom ladders (order and number of kills of The Awakener) and will link them from this post once the Heist expansion is deployed and the ladders are available.

Cash Prizes
We will create a special ladder that records the order that players kill The Awakener with a fully-Watchstoned Atlas in the Heist HC SSF league. The cash prize pool provided by Shopify ($30,000) and Zizaran ($10,000) will be distributed as follows:

• First Place: $11,000
  
• Second Place: $6,000
  
• Third Place: $3,000
  
• Fourth-fifteenth Place: $750
  
• First Atziri Kill: $750
  
• First Uber Atziri Kill: $2500
  
• First Shaper Kill: $1500
  
• First Elder Kill: $750
  
• First Uber Elder Kill: $2500
  
• Deepest Delve: $3000 (calculated one month after the league starts)
  

Randomly-drawn Microtransaction Prizes
Any player who kills the Awakener on any of the following leagues (Heist, Heist HC, Heist SSF, Heist HC SSF) within the first month will be eligible to win the below prizes. It's possible to win more than one per account. The number listed below is the total number of each microtransaction up for grabs.

• 500 x Angels and Demons Mystery Box
  
• 20 x Demonic Parasite Armour Set
  
• 20 x Automaton Armour Pack
  
• 10 x Raven Demon Wings
  
• 20 x Automaton Weapon Effect
  
• 20 x Ravenous Hideout
  
• 30 x Malachai Portal Effect
  
• 50 x Blood Guard Pigeon Pet
  

Console Prizes
The first eight players to kill The Awakener on Heist HC SSF on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (16 players total) will win console-specific codes.

The first eight players on Xbox One will win a 12 months Game Pass Ultimate Subscription valid from October 16th, 2020 to October 15th, 2021.

The first four players on PlayStation 4 will win a one year subscription for PlayStation Plus. The next four (ranks 5, 6, 7, 8) will win a one year subscription for PlayStation Now.

Note that any players who kill the Awakener on console in any Heist league will also go in the draw to win the randomly-drawn microtransactions.

Additional Rules

• Placings and prize eligibility are entirely at the discretion of Grinding Gear Games.
  
• The winners of cash prizes must be able to receive a PayPal payment from Zizaran in order to be eligible to receive it.
  
• Any form of account sharing (or other breaches of the Terms of Use) will disqualify a player from receiving prizes.
  
• The cash prizes are only available to players playing on our PC realm, but players who manage to meet the criteria on Console realms will also be eligible for the microtransaction prizes and special Console-specific prizes.
  
• Grinding Gear Games Employees are not eligible for prizes.
  
• Only valid (maxed-Watchstone) Awakener-kills in the Heist HC SSF league are eligible for prizes. Dying or migrating your character out of the league doesn't remove prize eligibility as long as the kill occurred while in the league.
  
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Big thanks to Zizaran and Shopify for putting on this event!