Path of Exile News

Alongside Path of Exile: Delirium, we are introducing gems that allow you to translate mana investment into damage. This post shares more information about the new Stormbind and Arcane Cloak Skill Gems as well as the Archmage Support.

While there are some existing options in Path of Exile that facilitate using mana as a source of damage or defense, these usually come from quite niche sources. Since mana is such a fundamental mechanic, we felt that there could be more support for players who are interested in builds that fully invest in mana. Introducing new gems facilitates this desire while also having the bonus of allowing you to gain damage from your mana pool in a way that is distinct from reserving it for auras.

Arcane Cloak
Arcane Cloak is a Guard skill and, like other Guard skills, it is instant with a cooldown that does not expire during the skill's effect. The extent of your build's mana investment will scale both the offensive and defensive properties of Arcane Cloak.

It uses a percentage of your unreserved mana to grant a buff that absorbs 75% of all damage from hits before that damage affects your life or energy shield (similar to Steelskin and Molten Shell). The amount of damage Arcane Cloak's buff can absorb is determined by how much mana was used.

While the buff is active, you also gain additional lightning damage proportional to the mana used by the skill. The damage bonus relies on the buff being active so you'll need to ensure that you don't take more damage than your buff allows for or you'll lose the effect of both until the cooldown resets.

The flexible nature of this skill allows you to use it in different scenarios, perhaps as a burst of damage against bosses or as a quick layer of defense against incoming damage spikes - just make sure you have plenty of mana to spare!

Stormbind
Stormbind is a level 28 channelling spell that works in a fashion that's similar to Mines but with a channelling component. The initial channeling aspect of Stormbind lays a grid of runes that Hinder enemies. As a second layer of offence, Stormbind also grants the Rune Blast ability, a channelling spell that upgrades the area of effect and damage of Stormbind's runes. The more mana you spend while channeling Rune Blast, the greater the area of effect and damage your upgraded runes will have. When you stop channelling, all of your Stormbind Runes will detonate in a sequence, dealing Lightning damage to an area. Your character will also be teleported to the location of the first rune that was detonated.

Because of its various components, Stormbind can be used in several ways - either as a single layer to Hinder enemies, a sizable blast for your foes or as an option for movement. Because of the way it scales, you'll be rewarded for having a high mana cost and fast cast speed as these allow the runes to be upgraded quickly and to a higher capacity.

Archmage Support
The Archmage Support can be used with any spell that deals damage with hits and has a mana cost. It converts the supported spell into one that scales with mana investment.

Instead of using the skill's inherent mana cost, the Archmage Support causes it to use a percentage of your unreserved maximum mana. The larger the size of your unreserved mana pool, the greater the cost of your supported spell. Mana multipliers from other support gems will further modify this cost.

As a trade-off for this higher mana cost, you'll gain lightning damage based on the new amount of mana your supported skill costs. The higher your skill's mana cost, the more damage you'll gain from the Archmage Support.

This support naturally increases in power as you level and gain a larger mana pool but further investment into mana on your Passive Skill Tree will greatly improve its damage.

Check out the new gems in action in the video below!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Earlier this week, we posted a news article describing some of the changes to the Atlas of Worlds in the upcoming 3.10.0 expansion. In response to community feedback, we have written a Development Manifesto entry to discuss the concerns you raised. As always, thanks for your timely and passionate feedback.

Sustaining Maps
In Conquerors of the Atlas, we dramatically and somewhat inadvertently increased the map drop rate, through the following mechanisms:

• Conqueror influence adding a large amount of monsters and content to Maps when spawned.
  
• Additional maps from Awakening Levels (including Shaper and Elder Guardian maps).
  
• Synthesis Unique Maps dropped by bosses.
  
• Unique Watchstones.
  
• Additional monsters spawned by higher-tier Sextants.
  
• Conqueror maps being opened for "free" by Zana.
  
• The map mod effect from Awakening Levels applying to Quantity and Pack Size modifiers.
  
• Blight going core.
  
• etc.
  

Even though we did remove Shaper and Elder influence, the number of maps added was a lot higher than the amount we removed. Some of our team members finished the league with a many hundreds of excess tier 14 maps in their stash. Players playing the league commented that Delve cities did not feel rewarding any more (because in the past they were a great source of Maps). Similar comments were made about the Temple of Atzoatl, which was also a good place to find maps in the past. The very easy access to maps in the Conquerors endgame diminished the relative reward earned by running other game content.

In addition to the above changes that made maps a lot easier to find, our plan for 3.10.0 was already going to take it even further:

• Improved Temple of Atzoatl
  
• Improved Vaal Side Areas (and they can now drop maps!)
  
• Metamorph going core
  
• Delirium being a high-reward league if you take risks
  
• Being able to tell when Conqueror Influence is about to occur so that you can roll your maps for it to maximise drops
  

We decided to tweak the Awakening Objectives to remove the bonus to map tiers because it felt unnecessary after replacing it with the Map Mod Effect, and it wasn't really an exciting bonus for most players to work towards.

Playing through the Atlas in 3.10.0 will still result in a flood of maps compared to pre-3.9.0 Path of Exile. If you're worried about not being able to sustain maps easily, you needn't be. It feels good in our testing so far, and we will be keeping a very close eye on this.

Target-farming Maps and Cartographer's Seals
This is a big topic that we're still discussing internally. Philosophically, we don't like that Cartographer's Seals go against the natural progression of your Atlas. Ideally we'd prefer that things were designed in a way where un-completing maps was not necessary. We want players to earn map completion and bonuses objectives and to feel good about having them. Cartographer's Seals worked directly against this.

We have some ideas that we're discussing that should help on this front, and we'll let you know as they progress through internal testing. To be clear, our solution will not involve Cartographer's Seals coming back in the same form they were before.

Map Mod Effect
A separate goal in 3.10.0 was to make Awakening Objectives more desirable. As we just discussed, map drops were at an all-time high so we didn't want to add more map drops to Awakening Objectives. Our plan was to move the popular Map Mod Effect increases to the Awakening Objectives in order to give them more of an incentive.

You're completely right that Map Mod Effect isn't always positive for every build. For example it can ruin Ignite builds by making it impossible for monsters to be ignited. While map mods are designed to hinder your character, the Map Mod Effect can sometimes push it over a reasonable limit. We will make adjustments to those cases.

If there are any other problematic mods other than ailments, please let us know and we'll look at those too.

Alongside Path of Exile: Delirium, we're introducing two new Wand skill gems, with some associated wand changes. Today we're going to look at Kinetic Bolt, Spellslinger and changes to the Wandslinger notable.

Kinetic Bolt
Kinetic Bolt is a new level 1 Wand skill. It fires a projectile a short distance before forking, splitting into a primary projectile and a limited range secondary projectile, each angling off at 45 degrees from the direction the skill was aimed. It then starts doing this at regular intervals or when hitting enemies, forking 5 times at gem level 1, creating an angular spread of projectiles over a wide area.

Increases and reductions to Spell Damage also apply to Kinetic Bolt's attack damage at 150% of their value, opening up new build paths and item choices right from when you get the skill, and taking advantage of increased Spell Damage on your wand.

The skill has unique interactions with a number of projectile modifiers. Adding "Projectiles Fork" causes the skill to fork an additional time. Adding additional projectiles causes the secondary projectiles to fire this many additional projectiles each time they're created by a fork. With the Barrage support, each shot fired still performs all forks, resulting in both high single target damage and extra side projectiles.

The skill is offered to the Witch after completing "Enemy at the Gate", but purchasable from the vendor for Witch, Ranger, Shadow and Scion.

Spellslinger
Spellslinger is a new Skill-Support that supports linked spells. Activating the skill causes all of these spells to reserve mana, and when you perform a wand attack, all of the skills are triggered. They have a 0.5 second cooldown and gain cooldown recovery speed as the gem gains levels, so you don't need to push your attack speed too high to get the most out of the support.

Spellslinger also provides a unique effect to supported spells: Your wand's base damage is added to the damage of the spell. Base damage includes all local added and increased damage modifiers, making attack wands powerful when you're focussed on Spellslinging.

Spellslinger sets the reservation cost of linked spells to 15% of your maximum mana, with support gem mana multipliers have a direct impact on this reservation cost. This makes it a cheap way to trigger unsupported spells, or lets you reserve larger values of mana for devastating fully supported spells.

You can have multiple skills reserved with Spellslinger, letting you perform combos like triggering Frostbolt and Ice Nova together, Desecrate and Volatile Dead, or Bladefall and Blade Blast. You could also use Spellslinger to activate secondary skills like Curses, Wave of Conviction or Lightning Warp.

The skill is offered to the Witch after completing "Lost in Love" from Clarissa, but purchasable from the vendor for Templar, Witch, Shadow and Scion.

Wand Skill Balance
Power Siphon and Kinetic Blast now deal a higher portion of base damage at lower levels, growing to slightly more damage at higher levels. This greatly improves leveling with Wands.

We've also adjusted damage on a couple of unique wands that were below the damage curve of other unique items around their level, making them better tools for leveling and early mapping.

Wandslinger Notable change
Wand passive skills were recently reviewed, so not many changes have been made here. We have made a major change to Wandslinger, granting a new effect that was previously only found on the Crown of Eyes unique item.



This means that if you want to use a wand skill other than Kinetic Bolt, but you've already invested in spell damage to take advantage of its special spell damage interaction, then Wandslinger has you covered. It also opens up new build possibilities for classic wand skills.

As a result of making this interaction more accessible, we've improved the Crown of Eyes unique item so it now grants attack damage from spell damage at a higher ratio, and Crown of Eyes is still the only way to get this effect on other weapon types.

Check out a preview of these changes in action.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We hope you've enjoyed this look at some of the new Wand mechanics available. Reality is an illusion. More teasers are coming soon, including an in-depth look at new mana based gems later this week.

In the Conquerors of the Atlas expansion we heavily revamped the endgame, adding five new bosses and drastically altering how players explore the Atlas. Today, we'd like to talk about some of the changes that are coming to the Atlas of Worlds in Path of Exile: Delirium.

One of the main pieces of feedback we saw was that spawning conquerors felt too random. Previously, you would randomly spawn Shaper and Elder influence on your Atlas and then were able to deterministically push the influence around to spawn the Elder Guardians and the Elder itself. We want to bring some of that determinism back into the Atlas. Here's our current plan:

Beginning after you're first able to fight the Awakener, you'll need to spawn influence in a region. This influence will spawn randomly but with a high chance. Once influence spawns in a region, you'll see a new icon and bar next to your Atlas Inventory (where your Watchstones can be stored on the left). This bar is segmented into either 5, 7 or 9 sections. The first, middle and last segment in the bar represent maps that contain influenced monsters and outcomes. In the following screenshot, the first map has been completed, with the 3rd and 5th map still to be.



Let's use a 5-segment bar as an example.
Map 1: You'll be met with the usual packs of monsters that you've become accustomed to.
Map 2: Will not contain any influence monsters, but will progress the bar.
Map 3: Will once again contain influence monsters and outcomes.
Map 4: Will not contain any influence monsters, but will progress the bar.
Map 5: Will once again contain influence monsters and outcomes.

After the fifth map, your bar will be filled and you'll be able to speak to Kirac and Zana in your hideout to open portals to the Conqueror itself.

The upsides of this approach are that long unlucky streaks are much less likely to occur, and you will know ahead of time when you're going to get the second and third influence outcomes. This means that you'll be able to plan ahead and run your best maps to maximise rewards.

Sextants
We are bringing back the Sextant vendor recipe. You will once again be able to trade three of a sextant for one of the next-best sextant. Three Simple Sextants will yield a Prime Sextant. Three Prime Sextants will yield an Awakened Sextant. Related to Sextants, we are adjusting the "Uses Remaining" counts for Unique Watchstones such that they will be divisible by 3, and where changes are being made, we're rounding up; no more Watchstone with a single use remaining and the unfun decision about whether to use a sextant on it or not.

Atlas Reshuffle
We are making very minimal changes to the Atlas in Path of Exile: Delirium League, though we'll be making minor adjustments to a few map tiers. This will result in Atlas map completion being reset on Standard league. You will retain your Unique Map completion. Completing a high-tier map will complete all maps one tier below the map that you completed. For example, completing a Tier 15 Map will complete all maps up to Tier 14.

Awakening Level and Awakening Bonus Objectives
We're making a few changes to Awakening Level bonuses. Your Awakening Level will be set per four Watchstones that you have socketed in your Atlas. This means that you can have four Watchstones socketed in four different regions and you'll have Awakening Level 1. This should result in players having an Awakening Level that gradually increases as they journey through the Atlas, rather than almost all of the levels coming much later.

One of our goals is to provide more incentive to complete Awakening Bonus Objectives. We'll be taking a few steps to achieve this. We'll be moving the "x% increased effect of Modifiers on non-unique Maps" bonus from the Awakening Level bonus to Awakening Bonus Objectives. This will result in the sought-after bonus still being available, but having a different means of acquisition. Otherwise, all of the bonuses that Awakening Levels grant remain as is. Secondly, you'll be able to increase your chance of getting an Atlas Mission on completing a map by completing Awakening Bonus Objectives. We will be reducing the base chance of receiving an Atlas Mission chance slightly, but the net result is that with 75 Awakening Bonus Objectives complete, you'll be back to a 40% chance. With 150 Awakening Bonus Objectives complete, you'll have a 45% chance to receive an Atlas Mission. We'll also be removing the "x% chance for Maps to drop one tier higher" bonus from Awakening Bonus Objectives.

Summary
Awakening Level bonuses will give everything that they gave before, except x% increased effect of Modifiers on non-unique Maps.

Bonus Objective bonuses are unchanged.

Awakening Bonus Objectives will now give:

• x% increased effect of Modifiers on non-unique Maps (up to the 24% previously available)
  
• x% increased chance of receiving an Atlas Mission (10% total in addition to the base chance of 35%)
  

Path of Exile: Delirium introduces a skill called Blade Blast. Alongside this new skill, we're making some changes to some existing spells that it can interact with. Among these are Ethereal Knives, Bladefall, Blade Vortex and as a follow on effect, Animate Weapon.

Blade Blast
Casting Blade Blast deals damage in a medium sized area at your target. Enemies hit will be Unnerved, increasing their spell damage taken. If there are any blades from Ethereal Knives, Bladefall or your own Blade Vortex in the area of effect, Blade Blast will detonate those blades as well, creating a chain reaction. This way, you can set up and detonate a long sequence of explosions to finish off enemies in a large area, or deal high damage to targets in a cluster of blades.

Ethereal Knives
Ethereal Knives has received some visual improvements while also allowing one in every three knives to remain as a small blade in the ground. A blade in the ground will do nothing and fade away after a duration but these blades can be interacted with by other skills.

To make the most of Ethereal Knives with Blade Blast, using the Slower Projectiles Support lets you create a dense field of blades close to you, and adding the Unleash Support will result in easily setting up a huge damage burst for taking out bosses. Using the Ring of Blades unique jewel will let you spread out the blades in a ring around you, which results in a large circular area of Blade Blast explosions.

Blade Vortex
As Blade Vortex already has respectable single target damage, Blade Blast has a different purpose when interacting with it. Blade Blast can detonate blades as they spin around you and for each Blade Vortex blade detonated in sequence, the area of the Blade Blast is multiplied, gaining over three times the area on the tenth blade destroyed. This lets Blade Blast cover a large area around you in a burst of damage that can clear out a dangerous group of monsters (or your delusions) in one quick cast.

Blade Blast won't detonate Vaal Blade Vortex or other player's Blade Vortexes so you can't destroy your Vaal Skill or 'accidentally' end your party member's Blade Vortex.

Bladefall
Bladefall will leave one blade per volley, resulting in 6 blades per cast. The blades are placed relatively central in the volley, so with Concentrated Effect you can place them close enough to create a lot of overlapping Blade Blasts.

Combining the skill with the Unleash and Spell Cascade Supports, you can place a huge number of blades with one cast, actually going over the maximum of 50 blades. Use Awakened Spell Cascade instead to spread them over a wider area.

Having a setup where Blade Blast, Bladefall or both are triggered by a trigger support or cast by totems lets you create a devastating area of effect combo with ease.

Animate Weapon
Blades from Ethereal Knives, Blade Vortex and Bladefall can now be Animated by Animate Weapon, making the skill much easier to sustain.

Blades animated this way have base attack speed, crit and range similar to a Glass Shank, but Animate Weapon adds bonus physical damage to Ethereal Blades based on the level of the Animate weapon skill, on top of the added damage granted to all weapons by Animate Weapon. This also means that blades from a low level Bladefall can be used by a high level Animate Weapon as effectively as a high level Bladefall's blades.

We've rebalanced Animate Weapon to lower the maximum number of blades and lower the time taken to reach full power, which also improves server performance. To compensate for the minion count loss, we've significantly improved their speed and granted much more added damage. The skill now has a faster cast time, lower mana cost, and grants More Attack Speed. The skill grants increased minion movement speed as the gem levels and a higher minion limit as the gem levels.

Here is a preview of these mechanics in action.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We hope you've enjoyed this preview of the blade spell changes. Next week we'll talk about the new Kinetic Bolt Wand skill and the Spellslinger gem. Stay sane, Exiles!