Grinding Gear Games, the studio behind Path of Exile, have just concluded their content reveal stream for the game's upcoming league, Affliction. We've put together all the big changes coming to PoE when Affliction launches on December 8. Let's talk about the Affliction League, as well as some pretty major changes coming to the core endgame! If you want to watch the entire stream, you can do so here.

The Affliction League

Something moves in the mists, something sinister. A Vaal affliction has covered the Veridian Wildwood. Put a stop to the Affliction and gets lots of loot (the ancient juice of the Azmeri!), lots of power, and cute wisps! Here are the basics of how it works:

  • Find portals into the Veridian Wildwood in the outer world / maps, surrounded by mystical blue wisps.
  • Enter the Veridian Wildwood, a place that is masked in proper darkness.
  • The wisps form an aura around you, removing darkness as you delve deeper into the forest. At some point, you'll run out of wisps and will be forced to leave.
  • Follow the trails of wisps of other colors (purple, gold!) to uncover secrets in the dark wood: NPCs, treasure, rare monster packs.
  • When you return to the 'real world', any wisps you collected in the Wildwood will return with you.
  • These wisps disperse to random monsters in the area and juice them up. More than one type of wisp can affect a monster, increasing both loot dropped and difficulty.
    • Blue Wisps (Primal) add Item Rarity to monsters.
    • Wild Wisps (Purple) add Item Quantity to monsters.
    • Vivid (Gold) wisps add Currency Items to monsters.
  • It's worth nothing these wisps seem to work pretty similarly to Sentinels, from the non-core Sentinel League. They also share names and colors with the types of seeds you can find in Harvest.
  • The Wildwood portal always appears at the start of the map.
  • You you die in the Wildwood, you cannot go back in.
  • In group play, the map owner is the one doing the exploration.

Affliction Ascendancies

Affliction is also adding another tier of Ascendancies to the game! These are class-agnostic. You can put 8 points into each one, and they will work simultaneously with your class Ascendancy. You can swap one Affliction Ascendancy for another by finding the NPCs again. You get your first 2 points when you meet the NPCs the first time.

  • Warden of the Maji - an Ascendancy that focuses on Tinctures, a new type of item that is slotted into the Flask bar.
    • Barkskin - an Aura Reservation skill on the Maji tree that increases armor. As you take damage, the bark falls off, reducing armor and increasing evasion. Over time, the bark grows back, removing evasion and increasing armor.
    • Only one Tincture can be applied at a time.

  • Warlock of the Mists - A corpse-centric Ascendancy that also offers some unique curses.
    • Ravenous - a skill on the Mists tree that shows you what type a monster is under its life bar (Beast, Undead, Eldritch etc.). Consuming a corpse with this skill gives you a damage buff against that type of monster and grants reduced damage taken from them.
    • Special Corpses can be bought from the Breaker of Oaths (the NPC associated with this Ascendancy) that can be used in boss arenas, such as Eldritch or Construct corpses. Throw'em on the floor and consume them!
    • Three new curses to choose from: Giving minions life degen and causing them to explode on death, reducing big monsters' damage, or spawning hostile phantasms when hitting an enemy, allowing you to trigger on-kill effects.

 

  • Wildwood Primalist - A very utility-centric Ascendancy with lots of flexibility for customization.
    • A Warcry ability that opens chests and may make enemy corpses drop additional loot.
    • An extra backpack for a little more inventory space!
    • Charms! Buy Charms from the lady associated with this passive tree. They have powerful randomly-generated mods and can be socketed into the Wildwood Primalist tree.

Core Game Improvements - Ultimatum, 100+ Reworked Gems

There's lots of exciting stuff to break down here. Let's start with Ultimatum!

  • Ultimatum is coming back to core!
  • It has been fully rebalanced, introducing several new affixes that can show up during the encounter.
  • New Ultimatum Unique items (see below).
  • Metamorph is being removed from the game, and Catalysts are being added to Ultimatum's loot pool.
  • Ultimatum is receiving its own passives on the Atlas passive tree skill.
  • Each Ultimatum has a set amount of 10 rounds, with the 10th round being a fight with The Trialmaster.

First, some changes to Heist:

  • Alternate Quality gems are being removed.
  • Heist is receiving new Replica Unique items (five), and rebalances to old ones.
  • Rebalancing of Heist-exclusive base types.
  • Heist blueprint types will no longer determine a specific type of reward. All rewards are mixed together.

 

Now, Transfigured gems!

  • Transfigured gems will be different versions of the gems we know, with very different effects compared to their normal counterparts (see below).
  • Many gems will be receiving a buff to their Quality effects' effectiveness.
  • The Labyrinth's Divine Font is now a 'gemcrafting device', instead of an enchant-bot that rarely gives you something useful.
  • The Divine Font has a lot of varied crafting options!

That's quite a boatload of stuff coming to Path of Exile! Stay tuned as we talk about Path of Exile 2, and look through the patch notes. How did you feel about the Affliction announcement? Let us know in the comments below!