The mysterious boat league has been a deep reduce little bit of lore in Path of Exile’s neighborhood for one thing like ten years now. “Redacted” discussion board posts, bits of fishing lore on gadgets faraway from the sport, and hinty posts from the legendary former neighborhood supervisor Bex (we miss you!) have resulted in a playerbase frothing on the mouth for it to lastly occur. With PoE’s newest league, the Settlers of Kalguur, we have lastly bought it—and it is a doozy.
The three.25 patch for Path of Exile launched final week, and it is already being hailed as among the best ever. A information put up from the Grinding Gear Video games workforce on the Sunday of launch weekend mentioned that they had a brand new file peak of 350,000 gamers, content material creators have been glowing, and anecdotally I’ve by no means seen my pals so excited for a league.
There’s just a few the explanation why this league is particular. The primary is an enormous rebalancing of the abilities within the recreation, specifically an enormous hit to some overbearing meta builds like Detonate Lifeless and a big buff to melee expertise as a complete. Melee has lengthy felt like a second class citizen within the recreation, so this can be a welcome change. They’ve additionally changed an ascendancy wholesale, eradicating the Raider and changing it with the Warden, which focuses on juicing up elemental illnesses and leveraging tinctures (the Wildwood is again!).
The second is the league mechanic itself. Settles of Kalguur, like many leagues earlier than it, options nearly a wholly new recreation inside the sport. This time as an alternative of a tower protection or a roguelike, we have got a metropolis builder. Chat with Johan, the King’s Hand initially of Act 1 and he’ll introduce you to your new residence, Kingsmarch. Defeat occasions within the marketing campaign or maps to accumulate sources, then assign staff to construct new services, harvest ore, disenchant gadgets, or go on boat voyages to commerce for loot. Boat voyages!
This provides a complete new incentive construction to the sport and makes every thing just a bit bit extra enjoyable. Chasing down the correct sources to stage up your metropolis could be very satisfying, and the rewards are nice. Early on the boat buying and selling can get you uncommon gadgets with good stats to make use of whereas leveling, and in a while whenever you unlock extra buildings you are able to do all types of superior issues.
There is a recombinator constructing for the gamblers who miss Sentinel league, unimaginable weapon enchants like a inbuilt Nimis for two-handed swords, and NPCs who will run maps for you, offering passive revenue. There are such a lot of goodies hiding on this system it is not possible to record all of them right here, and I am positive there are extra we have but to even uncover.
One other huge change to PoE that comes with the league mechanic is the introduction of gold as a foreign money. Now, I’ve written up to now about how sensible it was that Path of Exile did not have a fiat foreign money underpinning its financial system, largely as a result of the truth that foreign money orbs doing issues gave them intrinsic worth. With this in thoughts I appeared on the introduction of gold with an enormous serving to of skepticism, however they’ve finished a superb job right here. Gold is not tradeable with different gamers, and exists solely to work together with the league mechanic. Monsters drop gold now, and you need to use it to stage up your buildings, pay your residents, and put up purchase/promote orders on the trade. By gating the league mechanic with gold on this approach, it pushes gamers again to mapping, reinforcing the core gameplay loop.
The foreign money trade itself often is the greatest structural change in 3.25, and is a large reduction for these of us who get sick of getting 100 home windows open whereas jamming maps. In Kingsmarch you may pay a small quantity of gold to place up a purchase order or a promote order, rapidly turning all these fossils, essences, delirium orbs, and anything you may think about into helpful chaos orbs or divines. As an alternative of getting to attend for the handfuls of AFK gamers on the commerce website to answer your inform a few single indigo oil, simply throw up a fast purchase order and seize it instantaneously.
Now, leaguestart wasn’t completely with out points. Console gamers had a rocky launch, largely on account of them attempting to make it sync up with the PC launch for the primary time. An exploit that was discovered by utilizing a very labyrinthine mixture of scarabs and different instruments and resulted in an enormous inflow of divines into the financial system. Fortunately GGG nipped it within the bud fairly rapidly, however the preliminary harm made some significantly excessive finish issues nearly not possible to accumulate early on.
One other factor that is bought gamers feeling slightly unsettled is the change to drop charges throughout the board. Adjustments have been made in 3.24 to the way in which scarabs and amount work within the recreation, largely to attempt to curb a number of the true excesses that gamers have been capable of cobble collectively within the extremely endgame. This resulted in much less loot dropping basically, however we largely did not discover as a result of 3.24 had a juicy league mechanic to make up for it. With out a system like that in 3.25, issues have felt slightly sparse.
These few quibbles apart, Settlers of Kalguur is shaping as much as be an all timer—a reduction after the relative dud of Necropolis, which I bounced off of in a short time. I am excited to juice up a Molten Strike Juggernaut for the primary time since Delve league and get killing some pinnacle bosses, possibly take a flip down within the mines for outdated time’s sake. With the steadiness adjustments it looks like there are infinite potentialities, and a bunch of high quality of life adjustments like loot distance, auras reapplying robotically on demise, and the foreign money trade imply the sport has by no means felt smoother. Login dude.
