On April 7th, the developers from Grinding Gear Games released the latest update for Path of Exile on PC & Mac and subsequently on Xbox and PlayStation consoles on April 13th. Titled Crucible, it introduced the Crucible challenge league, nine new Vaal Skills, Atlas Gateways, over ten new Unique Items and much more.
Hopping into my favorite Diabloid on the update day after work, I was faced with queues of 60k+ people, a crazy amount of lag and frequent crashes that kept going for the next 2-3 days. Apparently, the developers did not expect that players would flood the new league with such enthusiasm.
Fortunately, the team quickly took measures to support the game and turn the situation around.
Let’s take a quick look at the cool stuff introduced in the latest update:
If you are someone who is interested in the story of PoE and what makes it tick, you are in luck! In the update, players get some new juicy lore about the ancient titans who once shaped the primordial surface of Wraeclast;
One of the main mechanics of the Crucible league is the way to forge the power of the titans into your weapons using the Crucible Forges scattered around the world. Beware, you will have to fight your way to using one of those! The longer you direct the power into your weapon, the harder the battle and greater the reward becomes.
If that is entirely not enough weapon personalization for you, the Crucible update also added a way to embed passive skill trees into your weapons that uses experience from Crucible Forges.
Since the update is all about the forges, players also got access to a new high-level area Forge of the Titans. Additionally, Crucible introduced Atlas Gateways, new unique items, improvements to Breach, Abyss, Passive Tree Masteries as well as changes to the Ascension classes: Pathfinder and Saboteur.
All in all, it is an impressive list of changes and additions that will give something to enjoy both to new players and veterans alike. However, let’s leave the list of changes for the official site and move onto what the game is like after the update rolled out.
A bit about Path of Exile if you are not very familiar with the game or are just looking to get started: PoE is a clone of Diablo but better and is a successor to Diablo 2 in its best traditions. It is a very well thought-out game that can easily suck you in for hundreds of hours.
As a Diabloid, PoE is a very interesting game and one that is complex to the max. The talent tree is something terribly beautiful and beautifully terrible at the same time. You can seriously turn your character into whatever you want: a marksman, a miner, a mage, a totem specialist or a mass debuffer if you so wish. The tree gives you a free reign to fashion your hero into whatever you want… but you’d do well to decide early on what you want to play in the endgame.
Just choosing random talents on the fly is a sure way to delete your character a couple dozen hours down the way, since by 9th or 10th Act of the main plot you will be getting suffocated due to a poor build. Hundreds of builds can complete the story of the game, a hundred will be able to take on the Atlas, dozens on the Bosses. And as far as the Uber bosses go… I haven’t been able to kill one in the 3 leagues I have played. Guess it’s time for me to change up my outdated playstyle.
Character builds and everything related to them is an incredibly important part of the gameplay process. PoE features hundreds of skills and their variations: cursed, distorted, enhanced, etc. Their synergies and combinations, working in tandem with other skills or on their own, all of that requires at least a tacit understanding.
There is even a special program for compiling a character build: Path of Building. Those interested can set up talent branches, skills, gear, cluster gems and whatever else that you wish. It will allow you to check your stats and estimate damage, defensive capabilities and more. The most important thing is to figure it all out on your own or take someone else’s build for review.
To say that the character creation scope is wide is to undersell it by a great margin. Trying out different links, a variety of gear or Legendary items… Min-maxing your character can take dozens of hours and thousands of variations before you settle on something.
However, while it is a great selling point of the game, it can also be its main drawback. Character building in PoE is a highly abstruse and complex matter that can scare away new players. The lack of standard builds that could serve as a learning rope is a headache. The sheer number of skills will allow you to turn a simple witch into a necromancer, marksman or even a grunt that will be charging through the hordes of enemies in a whirlwind of blades, blowing up bosses on the way.
The secondary PoE variety comes with character equipment and a number of cluster gems and the sheer number of in-game currencies: spheres that change the number of sockets in your armor, the color of those sockets, the connections between them; spheres needed to completely reforge an item, change some digital values, prefixes, affixes, and so, so, so much more.
One of the more stable and commonly used currencies are the Chaos Orbs. The official Path of Exile trading website gives you a chance to buy or sell anything, swap between currencies, purchase rare items or even especially powerful uniques.
When it comes to the link mechanics and colors, all skills are divided into 3 branches: strength (red), agility (green) and magic (blue). They can all work in synergy. The links represent the connections between sockets which provide amplification and communication in skills’ work. For example, in my own armor it is the summon of the skeletons, their damage increase, greater number of projectiles fired by the skeletons and so on.
You can enhance auras, debuffs, strikes, shots, summons, and so on. Your imagination will be delighted with the sheer number of available combinations. In my playthrough, I’ve met another player that with a single button threw down 3-5 ballistic totems that fired poisonous rain and explosive arrows. The poor enemies were pierced to shreds in seconds. There is a great variety of available builds… Alas, not all of them are viable for endgame.
Speaking of endgame, the game features 10 Acts of the story, which basically act as a prolonged tutorial. It kicks off with the help window – the most useful tool in the game that will explain both the basic and the advanced mechanics. I strongly advise you to read everything carefully, it will answer most of your newbie questions.
Having finished all 10 Acts, you will move into the endgame content. In Path of Exile, it is represented by the Atlas which features Uber Bosses, the 16 levels of maps that will have you go through them and complete various conditions to proceed forward.
The Atlas is basically an almost endless endgame with preset locations that predetermine the approximate shape of the map, scenery and bosses, but the exact location of the borders, precise number and types of enemies, loot and other things are different each time. The Atlas locations open up gradually, from simpler to more complex.
But simply going through the same levels over and over again would be incredibly boring, even if they were randomly generated to a degree. So the developers came up with an ingenious solution by combining endgame locations with the item generation system. And so in PoE locations act as items that can be acquired or sold just like any other piece of loot. The great part is that they also come in different rarities and feature a bunch of random characteristics: two bosses? Cold damage done by the monsters? Completely filled with skeletons? Or maybe the mobs reflect a portion of the received damage back to players? Words can’t express the sheer number of players that died because they forgot to check the map for this property.
If you like the map you’ve gotten, you can open the portal and get to farming but if you don’t, there will always be those willing to buy it off your hands. Upon finishing a map, you will get a talent point which can be spent on a power-up of your choice. Additional missions, more items from bosses, getting copies of your maps, etc. can be leveled up in the Atlas talents.
Of course, this is a very basic overview of the system, without the mentions of the divination cards, entities, using fossils for craft, temples from the past and much more. In the end, all of it serves as currencies. There is no public money in the game. You can sell anything for anything when it comes to it.
A Temple map with interesting rooms? Sell for a couple hundred Chaos Orbs. The necessary fossils for one of the top farm builds? Put them up for trade and players will rip them off your hands like there is no tomorrow and ask if there is any more. Divination cards, oils, delirium spheres, fragments of the legion and more – all of that can be sold, bought or exchanged for another item.
I have to note that Path of Exile features microtransactions but they are purely cosmetic. There are tons of decorations for your hideout that will allow you to furnish your space however your heart desires. The game features various pets, wings, armor sets and skill effects. So if you’re tired of seeing an ordinary totem, you can always take on the appearance of another.
Customization of skins, companions and effects is astonishing, and you can even buy extra tabs for your chest. In the beginning you have access to only four of them. I advise waiting for sales and discounts before delving into your wallet.
When it comes to visuals, PoE is your ordinary dark fantasy featuring subdued tones, lack of flashy bright settings and solid level of graphics. The developers have managed to create atmospheric stylish locations using its quite dated engine. Which is surprising, considering that the game does not have something uniquely special, but it does manage to marry good style with a well-thought structure and a sprinkle of Maori culture.
I won’t say anything about the special effects from the abilities: there are a lot of them, sometimes entirely too much so, causing an entire apocalypse to erupt on your screen. Bosses are throwing bombs, mines are exploding, ice stars and walls are erupting, fire wells and summons flash, ballistas and toxic poisonous rain from above cover the ground so much that it can’t be seen anymore. Sometimes it is incredibly hard to tell what is even going on.
The soundtrack of the game is quite good. While the first three acts or so were nothing special, from that point on PoE came back with vengeance and can sometimes blow you away with its music accompaniment. Act 4 is my favorite when it comes to music, the following ones didn’t manage to cause as many emotions. However, the endgame (Atlas) music is back to being captivating, especially the League tracks.
Until recently, even powerful PCs could sometimes choke on the abundance of effects in the game and respond with lags and freezes, however, with the release of the Crucible league, the developers managed to do something incredible and the game stopped stuttering even during the most spectacular battles. Even during the DDoS attacks, the game servers continue running in stable ways.
As a result, if you are a Diablo fan that has been disappointed in Blizzard lately, you can for sure find a new hope in Path of Exile.
Pros:
- HUGE build variety
- Great endgame promises hundreds of hours of fun
- Does not require microtransactions
- Hardcore mode allows for some nerve-wracking exhilaration
Controversial:
- Trading – no general auction, everything is done through the official site between players who set their prices
- Co-op – it’s best to play with friends, the game’s community can be peculiar
- Plot – Path of Exile has a good storyline but quite a poor execution. The lore is quite common for a dark fantasy and is mostly told through drawn-out NPC conversations
Cons:
- Character building – if you intend on grinding some Atlas maps and farming for a few uniques, Path of Exile is the game for you. However, taking on the Uber bosses is a whole other story and level of commitment
- Grinding – prepare to grind for currencies, gear, skills, maps and more
Path of Exile is a massive game that simply cannot be described over the course of a single article. It might be daunting to try it out for the first time, considering the sheer scope of everything it offers, but it is worth it to dip your toes into the world of Wraeclast and see for yourself.
