Path of Exile News

Alongside the release of the Blight expansion, we're introducing the Carrion Golem and a handful of new Support Gems that let you customise your minions.

Summon Carrion Golem
The Carrion Golem is a well-rounded attacker, using a rapid melee attack, a leap slam to get into the thick of combat, and a powerful cooldown-restricted multi-cascade slam. As its passive Golem buff, it grants added physical damage to all non-golem minions, including their attacks and spells. It has a unique feature among golems, gaining more damage for each of your non-golem minions around it, up to 80% more damage.

A single Carrion Golem fits well into established Minion builds as an extra bonus to all of your necromantic minions. It can also be invested in more heavily by taking various sources of additional golems (including a new notable passive) and using multiple golems alongside a swarm of zombies or skeletons.

There are also four new support gems that you can place on minions to change their behaviour and function:

Feeding Frenzy Support
The Feeding Frenzy support gem makes supported minions aggressive, increasing the range that they'll seek out enemies. It also gives hits from the minions a chance to give you the Feeding Frenzy buff, granting more minion damage and increased minion attack, cast and movement speed. While you have the Feeding Frenzy buff, the supported minions deal even more damage.

Meat Shield Support
The Meat Shield support gem makes supported minions defensive, causing them to only attack enemies that get very close to you. It also gives the minions a chance to taunt on hit, reduces the damage they take, and causes them to deal more damage to enemies close to you.

If minions are both Aggressive and Defensive, those effects cancel out, returning the minions to their original behaviour. All other bonuses from the support gems still apply.

Deathmark Support
The Deathmark support gem grants supported minions more damage, and grants you the Deathmark skill. Casting Deathmark on an enemy causes all minions supported by a Deathmark support to prioritise attacking the target, and gives them a further damage multiplier against that enemy. Casting Deathmark on a new enemy removes any existing Deathmark.

You can Deathmark to have precise targeting for specific minions, and the Deathmark targeting will override Aggressive or Defensive behaviour while it is active. The minions will fall back on their regular targeting if no Deathmark is present.

Different combinations of these three support gems let you use different minions for different roles. An example might be using your Zombies with Meat Shield to protect you, your Carrion Golems with Feeding Frenzy to clear groups of enemies, and the Deathmark Support on both of them so you can send all of them in after bosses while you evade the bosses abilities from a distance.

Infernal Legion Support
The Infernal Legion support gem causes supported minions to take a large percent of their maximum life as fire damage over time. They all gain a burning damage aura, dealing fire damage over time to nearby enemies. The effect doesn't stack, but is modified by minion damage increases and other support gems.

This support can be used to deal damage to large groups of enemies, and is available at quite a low level, so is an alternative to Melee Splash for some minion types. It also works well alongside the Minion Instability keystone, letting you use your minions as walking time bombs.

We'll be revealing further minion changes, including the new wand base type, Necromancer ascendancy, and passive tree in the upcoming teasers and news. In the meantime, check out a video of the new gems:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We're proud to announce Path of Exile: Blight! Help Sister Cassia stop the spread of the deadly Blight by building towers to defend against monsters held in its thrall. This expansion contains the Blight challenge league, three revamped archetypes with new skills and support gems, plenty of new items and much, much more. Please check out the announcement page and watch the trailer!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The 3.8.0 press tour has finished and we're ready to show you our next expansion! Don't miss the announcement at 2pm PDT (9am NZ time) tomorrow! As we near the end of the Legion leagues, we thought we'd take one final look at how the base class and Ascendancy class breakdown looks now that players have had ample time to experiment.

Firstly, we're sampling all leagues and including all characters. Naturally, we see a high amount of unascended characters, with Slayer and Trickster being intermingled between some of the base classes. We can see a fairly high amount of lower level characters that haven't yet gotten to the point of being able to ascend, possibly for a multitude of reasons (but this is totally normal).



As we restrict our statistics to characters that are at least level 70, it means we should now have a more defined group of characters. Most characters have chosen an Ascendancy class and have a solid game plan of what they want to become. Slayer is overwhelmingly the most popular choice thus far, with Trickster being close behind. Looking quickly at how this compares to the last time we looked at Legion class statistics, we actually see less Slayers and Tricksters (42% previously compared to 35% now).



Looking at high level characters, we can see the gap widen between Slayer and Trickster. This either suggests that either players are playing their Slayers for longer (and thus getting to higher levels) or that Slayers have more survivability than Tricksters. Perhaps the playstyle of the skills that Slayers are using is more enjoyable and thus are being played for more time!



Looking specifically at statistics from Hardcore Legion, we can compare how the level 90+ characters compare between Standard and Hardcore. Slayer makes up significantly less of the total breakdown here, with Trickster being more common and Juggernaut making an impressive jump (from 3.6% to 14.5%). The fact that Trickster has pretty much caught up with Slayers on Hardcore suggests that the reason they're lower than Slayers in Standard is not because they're less tanky than Slayers; if anything, it suggests they're more tanky!



Taking a look at characters in Solo-Self Found leagues that are level 90+, we see some similarities between those in leagues where you can trade. We still see that Slayer is very popular, likely thanks to many Melee skills being adjusted prior to update 3.7.0, making them less reliant on powerful weapons; an important factor in determining what to play in SSF. Trickster isn't much of a surprise here. Interestingly, Gladiator is almost twice as common in SSF. There are significantly fewer Ranger Ascendancies seeing play in SSF (4.3% compared to 10.6% in non-SSF leagues), perhaps indicating an increased reliance on specific items.



PS4 players have had a fair amount of time to learn the ropes of Path of Exile by now, so one would expect their statistics to slowly converge to be similar to PC. Comparing them, we see that Slayer is even more popular on PS4 than it is on PC, possibly due to how satisfying Cyclone feels to play with a controller? Trickster is again in second place, followed by a large gap to the next closest ascendancy. Among the remaining Ascendancies, there is a fairly even distribution.



Given that we've already compared PS4 to PC, let's look at how Xbox One compares to PS4. Immediately, we can see a very similar representation of Slayers and Tricksters, though slightly less than on PS4. There are minor differences in the remaining ascendancies, but nothing that is easily explainable. Perhaps Xbox players, given their extra experience with the game, are more willing to experiment with different build ideas.



Legion has been a very enjoyable and successful league for both us as developers and for you, our players. We've really enjoyed watching the meta develop and evolve. It may have been slightly more lopsided than we'd have hoped, but we think that people will certainly have had fun nonetheless. What are your expectations for our next league? Will we see the rise of new classes to the top? Our announcement of update 3.8.0 is set to be revealed tomorrow at 2pm PDT. Thanks for sticking with us and stay safe Exiles!

Legion was a very well-received league. In addition to receiving an abundance of positive feedback from players, and engagement with the league's content continues to be high.

As Legion's primary goals are focused on the encounters and the end-game area, it is reasonably straightforward to integrate into the core game.

We are adding Legion encounters as map content with a 10% chance to occur (similar to Breach or Abyss). Only one Timeless Monolith can occur from this chance, however there may be additional ones in an area from other sources.

We've decided to leave it out of the campaign content (pre-map levelling) as the campaign is already very busy and this content would be a lot to stack on top.

Handily, the Legion mechanic was one that could be comfortably integrated into existing game elements almost immediately, rather than requiring a lot of extra work. Thus, Legion can also be accessed through the following sources:

• Sextant Affixes
  
• Legion Scarabs
  
• Delve
  
• As a room in the Temple of Atzoatl
  

In Betrayal Safehouses, Vagan will give rewards based on Legion, including Legion Scarabs and Timeless Splinters. You'll also find Legion rewards in chests hidden behind walls in the Azurite Mine.

We also plan to add a Zana mod for Legion encounters at the Map Device in future releases (but not for 3.8.0).

In Legion we experimented with end game content that could be played endlessly. Players responded very positively to being able to play the Domain of Timeless Conflict content indefinitely if their build was capable of doing so. This will remain when Legion is added to the core game.

We will, however, be adding a diminishing return for rewards from monsters from the encounter. The intent here is to normalise rewards somewhat, so that every player experiencing this content gets good rewards, and character power doesn't have as significant an impact on how valuable Domain of Timeless Conflict encounters are.

To that end, we have increased the rewards for the first cycle of monsters, reducing them each revive cycle. Rewards from Legion Generals will not diminish, but the rewards from other monsters will diminish. We will not be adding a diminishing return for experience gained from the ongoing encounters.

The basic Legion chest and encounter rewards will largely be the same. Breach rewards will give fewer Breachstones, in part because they were a little too common, but also to keep these two sets of special map encounters separate. We want most of your Breach splinters to come from Breach!

Additional Incubators have been added, increasing the variety of rewards they can offer.

We enjoyed making Legion. Thank you all for playing and making the Path of Exile community so vibrant. We look forward to showing you the upcoming league in a couple of days.

The fourth and final ExileCon Qualifier Event starts this Saturday, August 17th, at 2pm (PDT). Players will compete in a Standard Solo-Self Found environment to be the first to kill Kitava in Act Five. There will be a death penalty - if you die, you'll not be able to move or do anything with your character for 60 seconds. You also won't be able to select 'Revive at Checkpoint'. The event is fixed seed, so every racer is contending with the same layout but the minimap won't be revealed. We've also made this event voided, which means your characters and their items won't be transferred to Standard League at the end of the event.

The winner of this event will receive a VIP ExileCon package and an opportunity to compete with tie23he, dsfarblarwaggle and Leaf in the ExileCon race finale. The top five kill times will be awarded with a microtransaction package.

Registration opens 30 minutes before the event begins and everyone is welcome to participate! You can register for the event by clicking the 'Join' button under the character selection screen.

In addition, we're holding the Super Stash Sale where we're discounting each type of Stash Tabs! Everything has been discounted, including the 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! Press M in game to view the full selection of discounted stash tabs.

The sale runs all weekend and ends at 9PM August 19th (PDT) If you need some extra points, we recommend checking out the Legion Supporter Packs, before they leave the store next week. Thank you for your support!

If you're unable to join the ExileCon Qualifier Event but don't want to miss all the action, be sure to tune in to our official channel at twitch.tv/pathofexile! Have a nice weekend and best of luck to our racers!