Grinding Gear Games will soon be celebrating eight years since the launch of its Action RPG Path of Exile, which at first was dubbed the spiritual successor to Diablo 2, but eventually became its own thing. On October 22, shortly before the eighth anniversary of Path of Exile, GGG will be launching the newly announced Scourge League, which is going to bring several anticipated changes to core mechanics and quality of life improvements to the game. Game Rant was given a preview of what Path of Exile: Scourge entails, from new Skill Gems to Passive Tree Masteries, including everything that the upcoming League has to offer in terms of gameplay and rewards.
Path of Exile: Scourge will feature an item called Blood Crucible that players can slot in their inventory that will be filled with the blood of the monsters and enemies slain, eventually reaching a certain threshold. Once that happens, players can jump into a parallel reality - the Wraeclast from this timeline is plagued with demons called The Scourge, and the objective for players is not saving the world, but rather something far more appropriate for Path of Exile: loot. There will be new types of currency to change Corrupted items - the Tainted Orbs - and items that can be Transformed into Corrupted versions of themselves via the Blood Crucible, gaining a detrimental property and a beneficial one.
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Path of Exile: Scourge's Transform Function and Tainted Orbs
In Path of Exile: Scourge, the theme of Corrupted items is strong, and the Transform function can make some gear shine in a lot of ways. Each item can be Transformed up to three times, which increases the odds of a better corruption. Great results include an extra arrow to Bow Skills, for example, or maybe a free Keystone to pair with specific builds, but players should be wary of the detrimental effects and look for ways to minimize their impact, such as having lower Chaos Resistance while using Chaos Inoculation. Another common detrimental effect for items is to gain extra stat requirements, which can make them harder to use unless the character is already prone to having lots of Strength, Dexterity, or Intellect.
Because Path of Exile players wouldn't normally be able to modify Corrupted items outside of a few specific bench craft options, GGG is introducing crafting options in the form of Tainted Orbs. There will be Tainted Chromatic Orbs, Tainted Jeweller's Orbs, and Tainted Orbs of Fusing, which will all allow players to normally craft items even after they've been Corrupted. This also ties with the upgrades for the Blood Crucible, which can be unlocked like regular Passive Skills but require a great number of kills in the alternate reality, and the benefits range from those that apply to the Transform action to general Scourge gameplay.
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New Unique Items, Atlas of Worlds Changes, and Past League Improvements
As is customary with new Path of Exile Leagues, Scourge introduces several new Unique Items, some that were revealed during the stream and others that will be revealed at a later date. However, those that were revealed during the live stream are quite big for the game's meta, and they include the Mageblood Unique belt and the Uul-Netol's Vow Unique amulet. Mageblood is likely one of the best items in the whole game and a contender for the extremely popular Headhunter, thanks to how it lets players keep their Flasks up at all times with no action required. Uul-Netol's Vow is another extremely powerful addition, as it grants an extra link to any Skill Gem socketed in body armors coming from any Support Gem slotted in the amulet.
The Atlas of Worlds is undergoing huge changes as well with Path of Exile: Scourge, as its regions are going down from eight to four. Not only that, though, as GGG is also removing a bunch of maps in order to bring the total to around one hundred different maps, excluding all of the Unique ones from the count. These are very welcome changes that are based on the community's feedback since up to now it has always been very difficult and tiring to complete the Atlas for numerous reasons, as map sustain in the endgame, and it also inherently reduces the number of required Watchstones to 16.
As for past Leagues, with Path of Exile: Scourge GGG is adding new ways to challenge Uber content in the game. The first is Uber Breach, which can be accessed by placing a Flawless Breachstone in the Map Device. These new Breachstones can be acquired in Maven encounters, and they are much harder than regular ones. The second challenge comes with Blight-ravaged Maps, where monsters are much stronger and the area level is always 85. Furthermore, these Maps can be anointed up to nine times, and they can be a source for the new Scourge Uniques.
In the Scourge League, players can also find Unrelenting Emblems, which can be used like regular Timeless Emblems, with the exception that they create more challenging and rewarding Legion encounters. Delirium is also getting changes in the form of the Simulacrum's number of waves increased by ten, and the rewards past 20 waves are better and include multiple Unique items, making for a great challenge for all players. Finally, Delve is also getting changes, starting with a rebalance that makes even earlier depths yield better loot and be much harder, and this still scales the further down players go. Other big changes include an increase in Sulphite cap, more common boss encounters, and how players can interact with Delve at any time by being taken to a level-appropriate area instead of tier 1 Maps.
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Passive Tree Changes, the Mastery System, and New Skills
Path of Exile's Passive Tree is one of the most iconic aspects of the game, as it allows players to level up their characters in a unique way, while also customizing their builds and what they do. GGG is making two key changes here - it removed niche stats to make getting specific clusters easier and less expensive, and move those niche stats to the new Mastery System. The way this works is quite simple, and it makes every cluster of passives with a notable contain also a set of Passive Masteries, which can be acquired by taking that cluster's notable. Essentially, this system makes each cluster more rewarding if players spend more points in it, and it allows for more contained traveling in between nodes, for a more efficient customization experience.
There are also several new Skill Gems in Path of Exile: Scourge, including Energy Blade, Temporal Rift, Tornado, Poisonous Concoction, and Link skills for party play. Energy Blade is all about making melee weapons deal a lot of extra lightning damage based on the character's Energy Shield, opening up a new niche for Path of Exile players. Temporal Rift is likely one of the most unique and useful skills to be added to the game, and it restores the character's status to what it was four seconds earlier, including Life, Mana, Energy Shield, and the character's position. This is incredibly powerful for map control and resource manipulation, which will be infinitely valuable in endgame content.
Tornado is a strange skill that synergizes well with builds that can either shoot or cast a lot of projectiles after casting Tornado itself, as the skill absorbs them to deal more damage to enemies. Poisonous Concoction stems from the state Explosive Concoction is currently in after being introduced in Expedition, and it scales damage based on Life Flasks. Lastly, another very interesting addition comes from Link Skills, which are multiplayer abilities that serve the purpose of promoting different playstyles in parties, and they are conceived to make up for the nerfs to stacking Auras to empower the whole team. Links can be very good to share specific buffs with friends, but they can also be lethal - in fact, when allies affected by them die, so does the caster.
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Game Balance, Guild Hideouts, Expedition Changes, and Currency Stacking
Of course, Path of Exile: Scourge comes with a plethora of balance changes that GGG listed on its website in a new format, describing the problem and what the solution is. This covers many subjects dear to the community, like the aforementioned Aura stacking method and how Flasks work after the initial changes made in Expedition, a few months ago. All of this is largely based on community feedback, too, making them very requested changes.
With Path of Exile: Scourge introducing Link skills, it was also the best time to make changes to Guilds and add Guild Hideouts to the game. One of the most anticipated changes is that players will now be able to place or retrieve any item from Guild stashes simply by clicking onto them while pressing control, as they normally would for their inventory and regular stash. Another major change is that all decorations are now free and in unlimited quantities to all players, which means that making a cool is much easier, even though purchased decorations are excluded from this. Then, Guild leaders can now create a Guild Hideout and use it as a social space, decorating it as they please, and allowing players within the Guild to use the shared Map Device as their own.
Path of Exile: Scourge is also adding Expedition back into the core game, albeit with changes to its internal economy and items stacking. A big issue for players last League was that they had to manually pick up each and every League-specific currency drop, which was a chore in and of itself. GGG stated at the time that changing that would mean breaking the economy of the game because the items could be sold, so the solution now is to make them drop in stacks but be for personal use only.
This change to how currency drops in stacks also applies to the regular currency that can be obtained in the game, greatly reducing resource gathering times while in any activity, even time-gated ones. Picking up a single Portal Scroll or a single currency shard was never fun nor a rewarding thing to do, and this is now fixed so that each click can feel much better than before. This is a common solution for other ARPGs that have to deal with trades or ladders, making GGG's decision a good one. Ultimately, Path of Exile: Scourge tries to mend the mistakes and errors of judgment from its predecessor, while also making the game a lot better in many regards.
Path of Exile: Scourge is available on PC starting October 22, and on console starting October 27.
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