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Hi, I'm Jonathan Rogers, Game Director on Path of Exile 2, and welcome to GGG Live.
We have a huge amount of stuff to share today, so it's going to be a good one.
Twist traps are enabled on today's livestream, so you'll be able to claim the Red Queen's
font hideout decoration by following the instructions below.
Okay, so with that out of the way, time to roll the trailer for Path of XL2, Return of
the Ancients.
Those in darkness.
Once they don't.
Now, return.
We came before, rise again.
Hold the first eat it.
You've become one!
I'm ready, Royal! To the king!
I'm going to kill you!
Don't lie, Kitsya Last!
Continue the search. See what you can find.
To face us, is to face oblivion.
So as you can see, there's just so much going on in Return of the Ancients, it's hard for
even us to keep track of it all.
Now we promised that this one was going to revamp the in-game, and I'm very excited
to talk about it, but first we've got to talk about the League, so to do that I'm going
to hand things over to Mark.
Hi, I'm Mark Roberts, Game Director on Path of Exile.
Now, for those of you who are new to Path of Exile,
each time we release an update, we also release a new league.
Not only do we have a new economy,
but we also introduce new content through the campaign,
which gives you a fresh play experience
right from the start of the game,
as well as new mechanics, storylines, and in-game bosses.
In the Ruins of Elderly, you will encounter a man being attacked by the Undead in Clearfield.
After saving him, he introduces himself as Pharaoh, a young blacksmith, trying to bring back the ancient art of Esomite runesmithing.
He has been collating his discoveries in a tome, and is keen to show you how runesmithing works.
By inscribing symbols on these ancient Esomite remnants, you can create all manner of old magics.
Unfortunately, on doing so, the corpses of the nearby undead are revived and infused with some of the latent power, making for a difficult fight.
After defeating these monsters, Farrow realises that Runesmithing is a dangerous business,
and he is going to need the help of someone a little more...marsherly inclined to discover these secrets.
He lends you his time and asks that you note down anything you discover when you return to him.
In each area in the Runes of Aldo League, you will find a Remnant, and as you approach it,
you will notice that some symbols are already present, and some are waiting for you to fill them in.
Depending on which symbols are already present, you will have different options for which items you can create using this magic.
For example, if you combine Tempest and Lightning, you can create an Orb of Augmentation.
But be careful, the symbols used to craft the items also empower the monsters around
the remnant, who will be revived as undead to fight again with different properties
depending on what runes you used.
So, if you use a fire rune in your recipe, the monsters will be empowered with fire.
Or, if you use a moon rune, lunar beams will rain down as you fight the monsters.
After the fight, break the remnant to receive the item you crafted.
As you get higher level, you will start to find remnants with more slots for more runes,
allowing you to craft rarer items.
As the number of slots increases though, more waves of monsters will be added, with each
wave being empowered by more and more of the runes.
And this can get pretty dicey, because some of the runes can have powerful effects.
Like the Oath Rune, which will cause one monster to be nominated as a leader, spawning waves
of minions.
The leader itself will be invincible, but killing its minions will deal damage to it.
Some recipes can get pretty large, requiring 6, 7, or even 8 runes.
But don't worry, you won't have to remember them.
Pharaoh's rune crafting book will record all the options, allowing you to simply pick
which one you want to craft, given the existing runes that are already on the remnant.
To expand your knowledge and to allow you to craft more items, Farrow has asked that
you keep an eye out for signs of Runic Magic around Reclost.
He wants to document anything you find in order to rediscover the secrets of Esamite
Runesmiths of old.
The first of these can be found in Oghan, and reveals to you an ancient secret buried
deep underground.
The runic magic which the Esimites believed to be their own is actually of Cal Guren origin.
Thousands of years ago, the Cal Guren's came to Ray Class to find sources of Varicium,
a metal on which engraved runes allow control over reality.
Pharaoh is determined to learn these ancient ways and gain mastery over them.
If you can bring him more Varricium, he'll be able to use it to smith power into any
armor granting you Runic Ward, the power harnessed by the Calgurans since ancient times.
Runic Ward is a new resource that protects you from death.
Should you run out of life, your Runic Ward will kick in, sustaining your body until your
life can return.
It effectively acts as an extra life pull.
Of course, should you take enough damage to run out of that, you will still die.
Every single piece of armor in the game can be upgraded this way.
Even Uniques.
Some are just a strict upgrade, giving Runic Ward with no downside.
Others are more extreme, sacrificing defenses to get a much larger amount of Runic Ward.
There are even some that add new modifiers to Unix entirely, making them much more viable
for high-level play.
But the Calgurans use Runic Ward for more than just a defense.
It can also be used to power many other magics.
Instead of using gems created from corruption, the Calgurans used Runes of Power and fielded
them with Runic Ward.
Many of the options available from Remnant Crafting are new types of Calguran skills
that exclusively spend Runic Ward to wreak havoc.
An example is Triskellion Cascade.
Using it will cause your next spell to be triggered multiple times in a Triskellion pattern.
You can use it with skills like Ice Nova that you cast from yourself,
or with something you target at a distance, like Comet.
There are also skills to modify existing effects using Runic Magic,
like Frostflame Noether.
Using this skill on a pack of burning enemies will transform the Ignite into Frostfire,
both burning them and building up Freeze at the same time.
You have basic buffs like Hollow Shell that guards all nearby allies,
to more complicated mechanics like the Mark of Repulsion
that creates a mark capable of pushing away all nearby enemies.
Instead of spending mana, like skill gems do, all these skills cost Runic Ward, and unlike gems, they don't have a colour.
This means that they don't care about their tribute requirements, or what kind of weapon you use.
These skills are designed to be used on any class, and so often interact with mechanics that apply across many characters.
By combining different runes together, the Calgurans were able to support their runic abilities, and you can as well.
There is also a set of runic supports that can be combined with regular skill gems in interesting ways.
Concussive runes allows you to add these concussive shock waves to any skill that stuns.
While runic confusion lets you spend ward to directly empower the damage on any skill.
Now, there are other quests during the campaign too, that unlock even more interesting crafting methods.
Buried deep in the jungle in Act 3, you can find the Mystic Refuge,
containing even more secrets for Farad to learn from.
Using this knowledge, he gains the ability to reforge unique weapons.
With this technique, many low-level unique weapons can be upgraded to do significantly more damage.
Now, we've been able to take a bunch of Uniques that had interesting modifiers, but were not in-game viable,
and give them a bit of a boost to get there. And it's not just low-level Uniques.
All Kha'Gur'in Uniques are able to be Runeforged this way too, and they can do some pretty interesting things.
like Serl's Grit, a new unique which when rune forged can get one of several
different outcomes. Now there is still so much more that you can craft with
remnants. There are also 100 new runes as well as many other new crafting
currencies. This is the runes of Eldr after all and some of these runes have
quite powerful effects. For example this elemental conversion rune will convert
put all the existing mods on a non-unique weapon from one element to another.
Using it, you could combine a weapon with all three elemental damage mods into a single
element, making a weapon with massive amounts of cold damage.
There is also a rune that lets you destroy your rune sockets to turn them into a dual
socket on your item.
And there are even crafting meta runes that can unlock new types of mods when used with
regular crafting.
For example, this rune of Chrono Mouncy will unlock a set of time related mods to be crafted
on your boots.
Once placed inside, use regular crafting orbs to attempt to get new mods by cooldown speed
or increased skill effecturation.
You can also create a new type of currency called Alloys.
Using regular metals alloyed with Varysium, new modifiers not normally available can be
directly crafted onto your items.
Using imbued alloy could improve your ailment damage for example.
There are honestly so many options here that unlock all sorts of crazy crafting projects,
so I think people will be experimenting with these for a long time.
Once you get to King's March in Act 4, Pharaoh finally meets Danag, a real Calgurian runesmith.
And riddled with excitement, he wants to learn how to merge modern Calgurian techniques
with the ancient knowledge that he has found.
From here on, Pharaoh joins in the Calgurian expeditions that Danag has been leading.
With the ancient knowledge that Pharaoh brings to the table, the Calgurian expeditions that
Danag has been going on will change significantly.
For those of you who haven't played it, the Expedition League mechanic involves carefully
placing explosives, uncovering the buried dead, and recovering Virisium from them.
By choosing where to place the explosives, you can choose which kind of challenges you
would like to face, or rewards you would like to claim.
But unlike before, Expeditions now contain the remnants from Runes of Eldr, allowing
you to do some specific crafts along the way using the new League crafting mechanic.
One very important difference from the simple remnant encounters though, is that the empowerment
that the remnants grant apply to every monster down the explosive line for the rest of the
encounter, stacking together.
This can lead to some pretty extreme situations.
If you stack too many remnants, you might be in for a fight beyond your abilities, but
But the rewards can be very worth it.
Each mod on the monster is improving the items that they can drop.
Once you get to the endgame, you will find that the Atlas has changed substantially.
To the south, you will now find the coastline of Rayclust, with the ocean beyond.
Kingsmarch has not fared well after the Cataclysm, and lays in ruins.
Dog Shop has been destroyed, but he is much more concerned about his wife, Gwennan.
He would like to launch an expedition deep into the ocean to find her.
And this begins a new major mechanic for expedition, exploring the ocean.
Previously, a logbook was a single encounter.
Now, using a logbook, you can send ships to explore an area of the ocean to the southeast.
covering a range of islands to begin your search for Gwynan. You can hop from island to island
doing many new encounters. There are islands with expeditions, grand expeditions,
new bosses and all sorts of other unique things to find.
Eventually, you will find the island that Gwennon has been holed up on.
It turns out that she has found the tomb of an ancient Calguran, Medved.
While she appreciates you coming to her rescue, she is still keen to blow open the doors
of the vault and take whatever you can find inside.
It's just a shame that Medved isn't as dead as you previously assumed.
Now after you have defeated Medved, you will find another logbook, and this time you can
use it to choose which direction you want to explore.
The ocean is vast, and contains a huge number of new islands to find.
With each logbook, you can explore one sector, and you can go as deep as you like.
There are all sorts of interesting objects to uncover, and dungeons to explore.
Many of the islands have expeditions with totally new mechanics.
So for example, here is a volcanic island with Voltaxic Sulfite.
Blowing up the Sulfite will unleash extra waves of enemies, but there is also this wall
with a suspicious light coming from behind it.
On blowing it open, a giant ogre comes out, and he is determined to eat as much Sulfite
as possible.
The more Sulfite mounds that you have blown up, the more empowered and the more rewarding
he will become.
These islands contain all sorts of little secrets that you can find and blow up.
Free trapped wisps, blow open brook doors, even raise ancient precursor technology.
And of course, more bosses.
There are more and further vaults to blow up, and one of them in particular is pretty
important.
The Tomb of Utrid, the Star Drinker.
Utrid was responsible for calling down the Medias of Orissium, which the Calgurans used
to power their ancient magic.
And upon defeating him, he calls down a truly gigantic one into the ocean nearby.
On visiting it, you find that it is shrouded by a strange energy emanating from the Virisium
Corp of the Meteor within.
There is something growing in there, and it can't be anything good.
In order to gain entry, Danak suggests that the Triscallian Flame, an ancient Calgurian
artifact that can absorb and cancel the effects of Varysium magic could be used to enter.
But to find it, you will need to locate the Tomb of Oroth, leader of the Knights of the
Sun.
Defeat him and gain access to whatever Eldritch Nightmare is growing inside.
Now, we're not going to spoil the box, but one thing you should know is that the Varysium
that makes up the core of the meteor is of a quality that has not been available for millennia.
Bringing this to Faro and Denig should allow them to forge some objects of power,
the creation of which has been lost to time. So that's the league, and there is a lot going on.
To sum all that up, there is a new encounter with over 30 new monster types and over 30 new
rune modifies to enhance them. You can create more than a hundred new runes to craft your gear,
as well as dozens of other new currency items. And there are new quests added to the campaign
to unlock even more new crafting options. Rune Forging Armours,
Upgrading Uniques,
dozens of new Calgaryen skills and supports, tons of new islands to discover by exploring
the ocean, five new bosses including a new pinnacle boss, and a bunch of new uniques
to top it off.
But there is still a tonne more to come.
It's time to talk about the massive changes to the in-game.
But for that, I'll hand it back to Jonathan.
Now as Mark hinted at before, the Endgame Atlas is very different now, and the ocean
to the south is the least of the changes.
The entire area around your starting location is now teeming with new questlines and things
to discover.
Will you investigate the strange forests to the west, the cracks in the earth to the
east, or perhaps visit the ruins of a vile city in the north?
The Atlas now has fixed points of interest at specific locations, giving you specific
objectives that are easy to find.
Before though, no matter which objective you choose, going to towers to see what's out there is always a good idea.
The first time you do that though, something new happens.
The earth shakes.
And a gigantic fortress rises from the earth.
A remnant of the ancient precursor civilization.
The cataclysm of the beast has caused an ancient protocol to be invoked.
Should corruption ever take hold to this degree, the world must be scoured and purged of corruption.
You will need to make your way into the fortress and activate the gates.
Gain the keys to reach these ancient precursor weapons,
and to summon them.
But this will be no easy task.
The fortress has many areas to explore and many new things to find.
You will power up ancient machines.
Fight new and deadly foes, discover many new areas, and uncover some dark secrets.
Now the Fortress is the first of the new full in-game storylines that we're
adding in 050 and there's a lot going on with it but not only that, it has some
pretty cool new mechanics as well. The areas inside the Fortress are special,
many of them have new mechanics or rewards that they grant. Like this map
where all the rares are contained in Essence Crystals.
Or this one, which replaces all monster packs in the area with strongboxes.
Or this one, which spawns in his merry spirit that always moves on from a rare after you kill it,
allowing you to chase it through the entire map.
Now, just like the normal areas of the Atlas, you'll need to fight the map boss of each
area to complete the map.
But unlike a normal map, the ones in the fortress each contain precursor nodes after the boss,
and activating these nodes will give you points for the new and improved Atlas Passive Tree.
Now we had an Atlas Passive Tree before, but it was one of the areas of the endgame that
just wasn't up to scratch.
The Atlas Tree now works quite a lot differently.
We've significantly upgraded the kind of mechanics that you can find on the Atlas Tree.
Like this one that gives a chance to make rogue exiles you fight retreat from combat
and move to an adjacent map.
Before you fight them again, they'll upgrade their gear and come back with a grudge this
time.
There are also a lot of nodes that combine mechanics together in new ways.
this one which lets as Merry Spirits possess strong boxes. All the regular monsters that
come out of them are touched by the spirit, and the rares are all possessed, giving you
some incredible loot potential.
You get points from every single area you complete in the Fortress, and unlike before,
that means you can allocate to the entire Atlas tree. Yes, this whole tree can be yours.
This change is pretty important, since it allows us to be able to create many types
of bonuses that we wouldn't have been able to create before.
Like this one, which gives a chance for cities to be invaded by another faction, and can
even allow it to contain two faction leaders, allowing you to get two crisis fragments.
If we'd done this kind of thing on the old tree, we would have wanted to spec into it
before running a city map, then unspec out of it before running anything else.
With full allocation, we can have cool bonuses like these.
Now obviously we still want to make sure that you have choices that define your in-game
Atlas build.
So many nodes in the Atlas tree are now multi-choice.
Everyone will get the node, but which bonus you choose to use is up to you.
Do you want your powerful boss maps to contain more essences, summoning circles, or rogue
exiles?
But there's also nodes that contain more unusual things.
So for example, on this node you can choose.
Do you want to give a chance for shrines to instead be given to the map boss in the area,
Making them more challenging, but dropping special loot?
Would you rather give a chance to be given a shrine buff before entering boss arenas,
making for an easier fight?
Now I could probably nerd out about cool stuff from the tree all day, but we should probably
get back to the fortress.
Now, one of the really important things we wanted to do was make it so that all of the
boss fights in the endgame are now accessible with a questline.
That means that to fight the Arbiter of Ash for the first time, you don't need to get
lucky by finding keys.
They will be in fixed locations and there's a quest to get them.
But the Arbiter of Ash is no longer the pinnacle of Path of Exile 2.
For that you'll need to travel into the very centre of the fortress.
An incredible challenge awaits you should you choose to go there.
After the storyline you still unlock keys for pinnacle bosses in the usual way, exploring
the world and finding the keys required to get to them. But we have added a lot more
interesting things to find out there as well. There are now all sorts of mechanics that
can spawn on maps in the wilderness. For example, some maps might spawn as a rogue-exile hunting
ground containing multiple rogue exiles who are there to hunt rare beasts. You might come
upon them in the middle of a fight and be able to take out both of them. Or a map of
champions that makes all the natural inhabitants of the area into magic monsters. Or this one
that causes all shrines in the area to release as merry spirits when used.
Once you have explored and found your keys you can return to fight the pinnacle and the
fortress again, but this version of him will be harder, and not only that, you will have
new unique rewards as well.
Each time you fight him, you get the ability to activate one section of the fortress, and
any maps that you didn't finish there will be automatically completed, giving you all
the Atlas points.
So if you're the type of player who doesn't want to explore the fortress and instead just race out into the infinite atlas
You still have a way to get all those points
So that's the origins of Divinity storyline
It's a huge amount of new content with a ton of new areas five new bosses including a pinnacle with a bunch of new unique items
But not only that it also completely revamps the atlas tree and includes a ton of new map mechanics
That you can find both inside and outside the fortress
But this is just one of the new storylines
So let's talk about the next one now, Masters of the Atlas.
Now earlier we talked about how the Modiculus nodes in the tree allow you to still have
an in-game Atlas build, but we didn't think that was quite enough.
You have an Ascendancy class for your passive tree, why not an Ascendancy class for your
Atlas tree?
Well, that's where the Masters of the Atlas come in.
Throughout Ray Class there are many opportunities for those with the skills to find them.
Atlas Masters are willing to train you in these skills if you are able to help them in return.
One such master is Jado, a member of the Order of the Jinn, an organisation that secures
powerful artifacts to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands.
Jado will send you on missions to investigate strange occurrences on the Atlas and recover
the artifacts causing them.
And for each one you recover, he will gain more trust in you and teach you more ways
of the Order of the Jinn.
At level 1 you could choose to massively increase the chance for rare and unique chests, or
make it so that all map bosses drop an additional unique item.
Or make corrupted waste stones have an additional modifier, but at the cost of making them
send you to a totally unknown location.
Each mission you complete for Jado will unlock another row of abilities, and give you another
point to allocate letting you choose how you want to specialise.
But there are other masters too, for example, Hilda.
Hilda is a member of a guild of monster hunters.
She will send you on missions to assassinate specific deadly creatures around Ray-Class
and harvest their parts.
In exchange she will teach you her monster hunting skills, like this one, which adds
a 25% chance to upgrade any map boss to a powerful version, or this one, which makes
his Merian Spirits no longer possess rare monsters, making them go for the unique bosses
in the area instead.
You might notice that many of the effects on these are both upsides and downsides,
so Hilda for example can make it so that you only get one attempt when fighting pinnacle
bosses, but in exchange for that they always drop two uniques. Because of that
we wanted it to be easy to swap between them depending on what you're doing. As
you unlock each master they will appear on the side of the screen. Simply click
whichever one you want to use to run the map and all the bonuses you have selected
for that master will be activated. This allows you to have a few different
strategies that you can quickly pick between depending on what you're running
at the moment. Now one thing that's been pretty obvious is that the end game leagues
be created when launching Early Access in 010 were not really up to the stand of the
leagues we did since then. Fate of the Vile and Rise of the Abyssal just have a lot more
going on than Delerium or Expedition for example. We wanted to do a serious upgrade to all of
these mechanics before we do our 1.0 release, and so that's what we've done. All four of
the leagues we launched in Early Access have been upgraded with not only new quest lines,
but new mechanics, new crafting systems, new Uniques, and new Pinnacle bosses. One of
So the really important changes were made to all the leagues is that you can now find
them on the Atlas in specific locations, and each one has a quest line that will lead
you there to being able to complete the league along with its Atlas tree and its Pinnacle
boss.
This is true even for the leagues that we didn't do major redesigns to, so let's use
a bus as an example.
When you first encounter one in the endgame, you'll get a quest that leads you to the
east where you will find these mega abyss cracks in the earth leading away from the
well of souls.
All the maps along the cracks will contain abysses with special properties, and mapping
along these cracks will close the atlas scale of abysses, giving you points for the abyss
atlas tree.
At the end of each atlas abyss, you'll find an abyssal depths, with the boss fight for
one of the abyssal factions, giving you a guaranteed way to fight them.
And after completing all three, you'll get a key for the Well of Souls, allowing you
to fight the vessel of Koolimac.
This kind of thing makes an endgame league so much more friendly for new players, giving
giving people obvious goals and a guided experience to complete them.
Alright, so let's talk about the first of the upgraded leagues, Delirium, and its new
storyline, The Hare and the Raven.
As you may remember, during Act 4 you are tricked into releasing an ancient entity from
a kardoye prison known as Tangmazu, the Raven Trickster.
Tangmazu delights in breaking the minds of those who step through his mirrors, and when
touching one, he will attempt to destroy your mind with twisted abominations generated from
your worst fears. In Return of the Ancients, the first time you approach one of his DeLarum
encounters in the endgame, you will find Aldermatics locked in a trance. His mind is trapped
in one of Tangmarzu's delusions, and you will need to free him.
Once free, Aldermatics demands that as you cause this problem, you should put it right.
He asks you to travel west to the Withered Willow, the location he believes that Tangmazu
first gained his powers.
But be careful, as you travel there, the Raven Trickster will attempt to break your mind.
Each map around the Withered Willow features Delerium encounters.
Now this is more than a simple quest upgrade, the mechanic of Delerium has been overhauled
and expanded.
At the bottom of the screen there is now a bar that indicates how deep into Delerium
you are.
You can see which direction leads deeper by looking at the fog, and the deeper you go,
the more challenges you will face.
By looking at the bar, you can see how long you have until the delirium ends.
And you can also see special encounters that you will face if you're able to go deep enough
into the fog.
At the end of the bar is always the boss of the map, but we now have a variety of other
encounters that you might find as you explore the horrors of your own mind.
For example, you might encounter a purple mirror shot that when shattered will cause
all the enemies to become more nightmarish.
After hitting this, you'll notice the Deleurium demons are enhanced, significantly more powerful,
larger, and scarier in general, along with more rewards.
Or should you encounter a red mirror shard, you'll be sent into the depths of your mind,
and must escape it while fighting off hordes of your worst fears.
If you are able to do so, you will gain a powerful amulet with two instilled notables
on it.
Once you reach the Withered Willow, Elder Maddox discovers that a shard of the mirror
is missing.
You will need to track down Tamazu and restore it if you have a hope of discovering how to
defeat him, and that means entering the Raventrixters' mirrors in an attempt to locate him.
Each area around the Withered Willow contains Dilarium Encounters, so that's a good place
to start.
As you do Dilariums, some of the special encounters will drop Liquid Emotions.
Normally these Emotions can be used to install Amulets to add notable passive buffs to them,
but in return of the ancients, Emotions have a new function as well.
Each one now has the ability to add crafted mods to Jules, allowing you to add specific
mods to an item slot that can be quite difficult to roll.
For example, liquid despair will allow you to add critical hit chance, while liquid suffering
will allow you to add movement speed or air of effect to your jewels, but there are many more.
Once you've done enough delirium encounters, the location of a grand mirror, an entrance
into Tengmazu's realm is revealed, but it won't be that simple to enter.
Using his powers, he reflects the matmos for a ridiculous and powered fight, then destroys
the entrance into his realm of madness. In order to find him now, you'll need to let
the insanity fully into your mind. A strange fruit is left behind which you can consume
to fully embrace the madness in an attempt to reach the Raven-Trickster's realm.
Consuming the fruit will cover an entire area of the Atlas and Fog, and every map you do
You and the fog will get progressively harder and harder as you explore the deeper reaches
of your mind.
At some point you enter a new layer, a simulacrum of your memories twisted and perverted by the
raven trickster.
Should you be able to complete the simulacrum, Tangmazu will believe that you are worthy
of a true challenge, and will let you take the remaining shard of his mirror, allowing
you to enter his realm of madness back at the Withered Willow. If you dare to face him,
it will be a fearsome challenge. So, that's the new storyline of Delerion. As you can
see, it's not only a questline, there are new mechanics, new crafting options and new
boss fights. But one question you might have is, what happens after? Well, once you've
Completed the story, Grand Mirrors will start appearing on the Atlas sometimes after completing
Delirium encounters.
After doing the Grand Mirror, you can select where on the Atlas you want to do your fruit
induced drug trip and get another key to fight Tang Mazur.
But this time, the fight will be quite a bit harder, and only that, the fight will be able
to drop a bunch of new Unix that were not available in the questline version.
We'll show some of those later.
After doing a Grand Mirror, the decision of where to spread the fog can be important because
there are some potent emotions that only come from certain map bosses affected by delirium
this way. Like all emotions, they can craft special mods into jewels, but these potent
emotions can create mods that you can't get any other way. So for example, potent liquid
melancholy is an emotion that can only come from human bosses, and allows you to add a
variety of on hit effects. Also, you might want to try instilling amulets of these emotions.
You could have some interesting effects, with some powerful notables that do not normally
exist on the tree.
Like Storm's Rebuke, which makes Armor Break boost your cold and lightning damage.
But also notables from a clearly deranged mind, like Kalm's Blessing, this skill allows
you to ancestrally boost fire spells after using a Warcry.
How about using an Ancestral Flame Blast?
Now just like before, you can also upgrade the League by getting points for a dedicated
Delirium Atlas tree.
But this now works in a much better way and has much cooler effects.
The maps in the Delarium area of the Atlas give you a Delarium Passive Points for completing
them, so it's easy to see how to progress.
Some nodes will add new types of Mirror Shard encounters to your Delariums.
Like this one, which will pause the Delarium for some amount of time, allowing you to more
easily get to higher depths.
Or this one, which adds extra Delarium Modifiers to monsters when you pick it up.
There are also nodes that can add new types of drops, like this one which modifies simulacrum
encounters to add special liquid emotions which can craft time lost jewels, and nodes
that apply to the Atlas mechanics of the league, like this one which causes the grand mirror
to spread delirium fog over a larger area of the Atlas, potentially containing multiple
simulacrums.
Alright, so that's the changes to delirium.
The core mechanic now includes a bunch of new things to find, new monsters to kill, and
has new mechanics on the Atlas.
It also has a new crafting system for jewels, and over 20 new unlockable notables for amulets.
Not only that, we have a new pinnacle boss with a bunch of new unique items, and a massively
upgraded Atlas tree just for Delerium.
But there's still a lot more to come, so let's talk about Breach next.
When you first do a Breach in the Endgame, you'll find Aelith, one of the Keepers of
the Flame.
An ancient order of monks dedicated to preventing the Hiveborn from entering the world.
As you seem to be a keen slayer of demons, Eilith would like to recruit you to the Order,
and asks that you travel to their monastery to the south.
On the way there you'll start to encounter more breaches, and will notice one of the
first changes to the breach mechanic.
You still have to kill monsters as fast as you can to keep the breach open, but now you
can visibly see how much time you have left to keep it open, and how each kill extends
its duration.
Once you've reached the monastery, you will learn more about the keepers.
In the 25 years since the events of Keepers of the Flame in Path of Exile 1, the war with
the Hiveborn has not gone well, and they have managed to establish a foothold in the world
nearby.
A gigantic area has fallen to the scourge, and the Keepers are unable to get inside.
Inside the monastery is the Genesis Tree, a powerful asset to the war effort stolen
from the enemy and gifted to the Keepers by the dreamer himself.
Using the tree, Aeloth could create a breach stone and penetrate the Hiveborn foothold,
but without Hiveblood, the tree has withered.
To get Hiveblood, you will need to take advantage of another new mechanic of Breach.
If you can keep the otherworldly portal open for long enough,
the Breach will stabilize and will enter a new phase.
The Hiveborn will send their toughest miscreations to defeat you,
and the Breach will not close until you can annihilate them,
dropping Hiveblood that you can use to restore the Genesis tree.
In some cases, you may even attract one of the deadliest foes the Hiveborn can offer,
a Marshal of Zest.
These monsters also drop womb gifts, and if you take these to the Genesis tree, they
can be used to craft items to help you in the war against the Hiveborn.
Given that 25 years have passed since the beginning of the war, the tree has grown and
withered many times, but with each cycle it learns and expands its abilities. When you
first open the Genesis tree, you will notice these holes into which you can place your
worm gifts. Each worm gift can be used to create a different type of jewelry and must
be fertilized with hive blood. So for example, you can place this amulet worm gift into the
tree and it will give birth to a random rare amulet. But the Genesis tree is capable of
much more. As you continue to feed the tree, its branches will regenerate and allow you
more and more control over what kind of items it will birth. So for example, this branch
of the tree will allow you to control which base types of amulets can be birthed. And as
As you go deeper, it will even allow you to create new bass types that you can't get
anywhere else.
Like this one, which gives you an entire spirit skill for free.
Or this one, which has a rune socket in it.
To the left and right are branches that will let you control which mods the amulet can
get, including making sure that they're high level, or controlling which specific mods
that they will always have.
With 15 points to allocate, you will have to choose wisely how you want to specialise
your crafts, but it's worth noting that this tree doesn't have any cost to respect it.
You can enable or disable the nodes at any time by clicking on them.
On rings we've also added some really interesting new crafting options as well.
You have a bunch of new base types like these, but you also have entire new classes of mods
that can be added.
The right hand branch of the ring tree adds an entire new set of castor mods to rings.
From basics like extra elemental damage for spells, or more niche options like this mod
that increases the rate you gain seals for Unleash.
Even on the left hand side you can unlock an entire new set of mods for minion characters.
This stuff is actually pretty important, because casters and minion builds didn't have as many
slots with interesting item crafting compared to attack builds.
The Genesis tree narrows that gap.
There are also trees for belts and currency.
I won't go over them too much here, but there are all sorts of goodies in these too.
Are you being able to create new Catalysts for Jewels?
Or about the good's lightning damage?
Once you've done enough Breach Encounters, you may finally get a Worm Gift Cable of Birthing a Breach Stone.
And you can then use it on the Hive-Born Incursion.
Once used, the true extent of the Breach Demon's foothold becomes clear.
They have not only transformed the land, but constructed huge sky hives as well.
When you enter the outskirts of their realm, you will discover breach hives.
Using the power of the Keepers of the Flame, these otherworldly structures can be burned
away when walking through them, but for each one destroyed, more of the Hiveborn will attack
when you attempt to purge the Hive.
These encounters are particularly rewarding for Wombgivans,
so you'll want to do as many of these as you can.
But your real goal are the Sky Hives deeper into the domain.
These twisted creations are securing the Demon's entry into our world.
Inside the very center are the Breach Lords, Tool and Ash, and you will need to defeat them
if you want to get rid of the foothold once and for all.
Now, once you've completed the Quistline version, there is still more to do.
You will find other Breach Domains on the Atlas randomly in your travels.
For each one, you will need to find a Breach Stone, destroy the Sky Hives,
and defeat the Breach Lords.
And doing these encounters is what will give you access to Fight Zest, the existing Breach
Pinnacle Boss which you can access by communing with the Dreamer himself inside the Monastery.
While completing the questline for Breach, you will also be gaining points for the Breach
Atlas Tree, and there are a lot of cool new options here.
This node will cause Breach Hives to spawn outside of the Hiveborn Domains on the Atlas.
And this one will give Eilith additional abilities that you can use while attacking a Hive.
Like this one, which causes all Hiveborn in the next wave to be magic, drastically increasing
their difficulty and exchange for way more items.
There are also nodes that allow you to control your rewards, like this one which adds a set
of new lineage supports to the Martial of Zest.
Or this one which lets you control which Womb Gifts you will get.
There's also some nodes that affect the Genesis tree, like this one which will cause Zesh
to drop his head, which when returned to the Genesis tree will grow a grassling orchid
on the side of it.
You'll have to experiment to find out what this thing is good for.
Putting rings on its fingers seems to make it happy.
So that's a rundown of what you can expect from the new Breach quest line.
There's a new stabilization mechanic for breaches,
Hive Encounters,
and Hiveborn Incursions on the Atlas.
But you also have a huge new crafting system, and new bosses as well.
Alright, so let's talk about the Writer the Nameless storyline next.
When you first complete a Ritual on the Endgame, Ifa, a lost spirit, will appear.
She appears to need your help, but isn't able to communicate more than a few words,
beckoning you to come to the Wildwood.
Like the other leagues, Ritual now has a place on the Atlas to call home.
The Wildwood could be found to the west.
When you first arrive there, Ipha's spirit will guide you in,
where you will discover that inside the Wildwood, spirits can take physical form.
Ipha has been bound to this place by the King and the Mists,
and requests that you free her,
but in order to do so, you will need her body currently in possession of the King.
To reclaim it, you will need to gain an audience with him.
Inside the Wildwood there are many ritual encounters to complete.
Like before, in each area triggering rituals will resurrect the nearby bound monsters to attack you,
and killing the monsters will give you tribute.
In addition, each ritual you do in the area will add the monsters from the previous ritual,
making the encounters much more challenging the more rituals you complete.
Once you've completed them, spend your tribute to get items.
Now an important change to the rewards of ritual is that all the items in the reward window
window and now Unix or Omens, making this league's rewards much more valuable than before.
In order to gain an audience with the Nameless King, you need to sacrifice tribute to him.
Any remaining tribute you don't spend can be sacrificed this way to fill up this bar.
Once you have enough tribute for an audience, return to the Wildwood to divine his location
with the Nameless Shrine. His location will be revealed deeper in the Wildwood,
and you will need to make your way to him, kill him,
and get Eve his body.
Using her body, you can attempt to release her spirit,
but this is when you learn about the true threat of the League.
The Wildwood is built on top of an ancient prison.
The King in the Mists didn't gain his power out of nowhere.
He was granted it by an ancient being of darkness known as the Bodak,
and the Nameless King's use of this power has been causing the prison to weaken.
In order to prevent the Bodark from entering the world, a champion will need to enter its prison and beat him back,
but those with a name are unable to survive there.
In order to do so, you will need to transfer your name to another with a new mechanic in the Ritual League, the Rite of the Nameless.
The Rite will begin in a nearby forest. At first it appears to be a regular ritual encounter, but that will soon change.
The final ritual of the area will include the map loss.
And defeating him will give you a piece of the effigy on to which you will transfer your name.
But the ritual is still not complete.
Once the map boss is defeated, the Atlas will open, and you will need to pick another adjacent map to continue the ritual.
During the Rite, each adjacent map will have different rewards to tempt you.
So for example, if you go in this direction, you gain significantly more tribute.
tribute, but if you go in this direction, the Unix in the reward window will turn into
currency instead. You can also sometimes get offered specific items that will be added
as rewards, so in this case, you'll have to choose if you want to get 5 Chaos Orbs or
a Mage Blood, a difficult decision I'm sure.
Now as this is one continuous ritual, the encounters in the next map won't start from
scratch. They contain all the monsters that were gathered from the rituals of the previous
map as well, making them harder and harder. And that includes the map boss too. You will
need to defeat both map bosses in the final encounter for your next effigy piece. And
it still doesn't end there. Pick another map, another reward, and add another map boss to
continue until the ritual of the Nameless is complete. It will take 5 maps in all and
will be an incredible challenge. But once complete, you can return to the Wildwood to
perform the final right. Transfer your name to the effigy, adorn the crown of the Nameless King,
and enter the prison. Now of course, once the Pinnacle Boss is complete, the league doesn't end
there. As you do rituals on the Atlas, you can continue to give tribute to the King and the
Mists for another audience. Pick another forest to begin the right of the Nameless once more,
and this time with a harder pinnacle boss and new unique items to find. Of course
we've also significantly upgraded the Ritual Atlas Tree. Get points by
completing maps in the Wildwood and you'll be able to unlock some pretty
cool nodes. Some of them affect the right of the nameless, like this one which
extends its duration. You thought finding five map bosses at once was hard? How
about six? Or this one which makes maps during the right have more reward mods,
often having two. You also have nodes that allow things to combine with other
content, like this one, which gives a chance for rituals to be created inside summoning
circles, adding a random boss to the ritual encounter.
There is even a node which adds a new type of possible ritual, the audience with the
queen, which causes the bride of the king to sometimes appear.
Okay, so that's ritual.
But let's have a look at what this means for endgame content as a whole for Path of
XL 2.
When you include the expedition changes made by the league, we have a total of 5 new endgame
storylines, each of which has a hub, crafting systems, areas to explore, NPCs, and a pinnacle boss
as a capstone, not to mention the masters of the Atlas storyline as well. But more importantly,
you now have immediate quests as soon as you arrive at the endgame, and goals with obvious
progressions that you can see how to finish. Each endgame questline has a progress bar that you
can pop out from the side of the Atlas screen at any time that shows you how far through you are,
and buttons that will take you to the hubs for them. Overall, it's just a way better endgame
experience, with a significant number of fun objectives to complete.
But just in case you didn't have enough goals, we did have one other thing that you might
want to complete this league.
These are called challenge leagues after all, where are all the challenges?
Well, players of Path of Exile 1 will be used to the fact that each league comes with a
series of challenges that you can complete in order to prove that you are indeed the
best.
We haven't done these yet in Path of Exile 2, but it's time to change that.
If you're able to complete them, you'll earn pieces of the Knight of Elder armor set.
the challenge screen will show you a series of eight challenges. After completing each one,
anyone in chat or in the forums will be able to see your prowess. In addition,
you'll get a statue to put in your hideout showing anyone you trade with how many challenges
you've completed. You'll earn the first piece of the armor set after doing two challenges
and the full armor set after completing all eight. So that covers all the content you'll
encounter in Return of the Ancients. But what about some new tools to fight against these
new pinnacles with? Well, we also have some new ascendancy classes as well, but to introduce them,
I'll hand you guys back to Mark.
As Jonathan said, we have two new classes to show you today.
The Spirit Walker and the Martial Artist.
Let's start with the Huntress's new class, the Spirit Walker.
The Spirit Walker has developed an affinity with the Asmarian animal spirits.
She is able to infuse the power of multiple spirits at her choosing.
On the bottom part of the class you will find parts for each wisp you would like to commune with.
They are Primal, Vivid, or Wild.
Each one can give you different abilities that align with the Stag, Owl, or Bear.
Each ability gives you a method to become possessed by wisps of that type and a new ability
when you spin them.
The Stag allows you to summon Stampede to a new attack.
The Owl grants bones in the form of their feathers, which adds extra projectiles and
enhances the projectile speed of your next skill.
And the bear simply summons a giant bear companion to your side.
The bear will maul, slam, leap, and do intimidating rolls to debuff your enemies.
Now you can specialise more into each of these wisps, but if you want to combine all three
of them, then a new hidden power will be unlocked, the power of the Sacred Wisps.
This note is free and enhances the quality of all three of your Spirit Animals.
Your bear will take some of the damage you take and grant you life regeneration.
Your stags will become more aggressive, leaping towards enemies, and your owl-empowered skills
will leave a trail of soaring ground behind them.
But that's not all.
The Spirit Walker has other powers beyond Wisps, such as Idolatry, which can give you large
bonuses for using idle socketables in your equipment.
And this one, which is my absolute favourite, the Spiritwalker having a tune to self with
nature can gain the ability to tame beast bosses, opening up a whole suite of very
cool options for your build.
Maybe you tamed the mighty Silverfist in the Jungle Depths.
Or maybe a three-headed chimeral beast in the chimeral wetlands.
Or then there's a giant frozen owl beast, Raka'a, the frozen talon.
There's so many choices.
You're going to have to experiment a bunch with this one, and I'm very excited to see
what bosses you all choose to have as your trusted boss companion.
Next up, we have the Monk's Near Ascendancy class, the Martial Artist.
After decades of training, he has mastered three of the seven hollow techniques.
Channeling Hollow Form Technique allows the Martial Artist to create illusions of himself,
which then use a skill of your choosing.
Perfect for turning skills with less area of effect into ones that can obliterate packs
with ease.
If you don't find yourself overly vulnerable while channeling, you might want to take way of the mountain,
which causes you to be covered in stone when you immobilize enemies, mitigating large amounts of damage.
This can even enhance your attacks too. By hardening your weapon in stone, you can deal even more damage.
After taking hollow focus technique, you can manifest your spiritual energy into objects, in this case, bells,
which will appear around the Martial Artist and can be shattered by any of his attacks,
even ones from the Hollow Form technique earlier.
Hollow Resonance technique furthers that by adding a manifested bell to your back,
which rings each time you deal a critical strike, damaging all enemies around you.
Through all the Martial Artists' thorough training, he has mastered the flow of internal spiritual energy too,
energy 2, and his engraved runic tattoos around his meridians.
By doing this, he can gain the benefit of extra runes.
Just open your inventory and add the runes.
There is one that counts as a helmet, two as a body armour, one as gloves, and one as
boots.
Finally, your hands.
The ultimate expression of a master of the martial arts.
way of the stone fist will cause your gloves to become a new base type when equipped.
Each modifier on the original pair of gloves has an equivalent more powerful and more impactful
modifier.
For example, these gloves add some physical damage, coal damage, lightning damage, some
resistances and life gain on hit.
Now, when I equip these they become literal fists of stone and not only grant me a bunch
more evasion and energy shield, they now also grant a lot more damage, some maximum resistances,
and a significantly higher amount of life gained on hitting enemies.
With all the different rune combinations you could do, and the different modifiers and
gloves, there's a ton of different build options, and we're looking forward to seeing what you
can come up with.
Now, with so many new bosses in Return of the Ancients, of course we want to have a huge
number of unique rewards. There are some pretty cool things in here, so we wanted to show you a
few of them. Twisted Imperian is a two-handed mace made from the purest of Varicium combined with
the beast's corruption. It converts all of your mace's skills fire damage to cold, and visually
does so too, turning your volcanic fissures into glacial ones. This mace also comes with its own
built-in skill, Starborn Onslaught. Using Glory, you can leap backwards, throwing your
mace at the ground, creating Varicium Fissures, before calling behind it a storm of cold metallic
bolts from the stratosphere. Next, we have Eventide Petals, an amulet that not only grants
Runic Ward, but also comes with its own Reservation skill, Midnight Zenith. This skill causes your
critical hits to grant arctic petals that hover around you.
Once you have acquired enough of these petals, they will be consumed, creating a floral ice
crystal near an enemy.
Then destroy that crystal to do devastating cold damage to everything around it.
The Raven's Flock is a staff perfect for minion characters.
Not only does it grant spirit reservation efficiency and minion damage, it also allows
your minions to inflict gruelling madness on hit, slowing enemies and making all other
slows on them more powerful for maximum crowd control.
That's not where this item shines though.
It grants a skill called spiraling conspiracy.
This skill causes a flock of ravens to circle you, dealing damage over time to anything
near them.
Killing enemies, or just by standing near unique enemies, causes the flock to grow,
larger and larger. For you POE1 players, you can think of this just like a Raven Righteous Fire.
That's not all however. These ravens are also minions, so they fully scale with minion damage
and come with their own command skill, Mad Flight. This command skill causes your flock to create a
tunnel of deathly damage between a set of illusory mirrors, obliterating anything in between.
Horror's Flight is a pair of gloves instilled with the purest of fear.
Equipping these causes your enemies to become terrified of you.
These gloves cause you to gain stacks of fear incarnate when you kill enemies.
To aid in your killing, these gloves also come with the skill, Crushing Fear.
This is similar to the monk skill, Killing Palm, except it deals chaos damage, and the
The amount of damage and area of effect scales drastically based on the power of the enemy.
As you use this, gain your stacks of fear incarnate, which increases your culling threshold,
meaning enemies become easier and easier to cull, even to the point of being able to instantly
kill some monsters from full life.
Sylvan's Effigy is a scepter for those wanting to run companions.
It allows you to have any number of companions of different types, instead of the normal
restriction of just one per type.
But what makes this call is the Asmaryan Wolf Companion it comes with.
This is a persistent minion that bites foes to maindan, leaps to cause bleeding, and even
howls to buff nearby allies.
Additionally, it comes with the Command Skill Eternal Hunt, which when used it will howl,
Calling on the spirits to manifest spectral wolves to ambush all foes around you.
Liminal Coil is a crazy wand.
It allows you to apply as many curses as you please, but those curses will have no effect.
What's the point then?
Two reasons.
Firstly, your spell is getting a bunch of extra physical and chaos damage for each curse
on enemies.
Secondly, is the skill it grants called Coiling Bolts.
This skill is a projectile spell that fires coiling physical and chaos projectiles with
every cast.
What makes this skill truly special though is that it will split and chain through every
cursed enemy, causing an absolute ruckus.
See for yourself.
Periphery is a unique bow, which utilises all the powers of the Asmaryan spirits by
by dealing damage of all elements, and all elements can cause all ailments.
The coolest thing about this bow however is the Azmerian Swarm skill.
These are minions that are summoned when you kill enemies.
They will pursue all nearby enemies, damaging them and inflicting a debuff on them that
boosts your elemental damage even further.
Watch as you mow enemies down and the swarms of Azmerian Wisps aid you, melting enemies
one screen at a time.
The ore-dained is a new spear, mastering in physical and lightning damage, with high critical
strike chance too.
This spear allows you to leech life not only from physical damage, but lightning too.
It also creates a fragment of Divinity nearby periodically.
What are those?
Well, this spear has the skill Righteous Descent, which is an epic, divine leap, aided by angelic wings.
If you use the skill when a fragment of Divinity is nearby, it will become empowered,
dealing significantly more damage, gaining massive area of effect, and bypassing its cooldown.
When fighting a boss, let a bunch of the fragments spawn, and then just unleash your divine havoc, obliterating them.
Last but not least we have a new unique jewel, Voices. Voices is simple, it consumes one
jewel slot to add more. There are versions that add 2 jewel slots, 3 jewel slots and
for those who are absurdly lucky or rich, one with 4 jewel slots. Equip it and notice
the slot to pair next to your character's portrait in the center.
One of the things we are concerned about is how long it takes for experienced players
to replay through the game in each new league.
As we learned from Path of Exile 1, one of the things that can really help is having
elements in the campaign that tell you where to go, if you know what to look for.
We'll cover just one example per Act for Acts 1 to 3, but there are many more than
just these.
For example, Hunting Grounds in Act 1 is a large sparse area, containing multiple entrances
and landmark encounters.
Here's an example of some of the changes we've made here.
Finding a ritual encounter in this area isn't too difficult.
Now after completing it, a trail of locusts will lead to the entrance to Freethorn.
follow it and find the source of the evil. You might also find corpses of dead animals,
killed and pecked at by the crowbell. You'll notice a trail of blood leading away from
them. Follow the trail and it will lead directly to the boss.
We even put a signpost on the road to tell you which way to go to find Ogham Village.
In Act 2, in the Mastodon Badlands, you need to find the Lightless Caverns and track down
the Abyssal.
Now to make this quicker, in the level you'll find these cracks.
Just follow them, and it will take you right to their lair, allowing you to find and unlock
the Well of Souls.
In Act 3, the jungle areas have camps of explorers to sell you items.
However, they are now even more useful.
By talking to the explorers, they will point towards the next area.
Not only that, but it will also reveal it on the minimap, so you can know exactly where
to go.
These are just some examples.
We plan to do more and more of these over time in order to streamline the experience.
Now, as this is an endgame expansion, it makes sense that we would work on Atlas QOL.
We've added a search box that updates live as you type.
Have a specific map you want to run?
Now they will be much easier to find.
If there are multiple maps, Hitting Enter will move you from map to map.
Now making a character build in Path of Exile 2 can be pretty complex, and instead of designing
a build yourself, many players enjoy following online build guides.
We have a pretty awesome community that has built many tools over the years for designing
builds, but we wanted to improve the experience of following them, so we are introducing a
new build guide system directly into the game client. Here's how it works. Community creators
who write build guides can now create a new file format, a build file. Once downloaded,
the builds appear in the in-game client, and selecting one will show you everything you need
to know to make that build. So you can see all the passives you need to allocate,
ascendancy points you need to take, skill gems you need to equip,
and recommendations for all the support gems you need to use as well.
For items, the build designer can specify which uniques to use in each slot,
or if needed, just add some notes to the item slot to say what kind of item you need.
In fact, build creators can add notes to just about any of these areas, allowing them to explain different trade-offs in context, or just give more info about how these things should be used.
They can also give level ranges to each element, allowing recommendations to change over time. Great for builds that need to respec after they reach a certain level.
Now, all of this is written in a standardized build format that creators can use, and we
imagine that a lot of community build tools will be updated to add support for this format.
Now that we have Trademarket searching built into the in-game client, we have added the
ability to price check items you can find more easily.
Control Alt clicking an item will now search for it on the Trademarket, showing you the
current prices.
For rare items, it's handy to exclude some mods, so we added the ability to enable and
disable each mod so you can see what effect each one has on the price.
Next up, we're going to be talking about the new supporter packs for Return of the
Ancients.
Today we're launching two new series of supporter packs, the Blood Reaver and Divinity
packs.
Each tier contains the pack's full face value and points, alongside several exclusive
micro-transactions. As always, the micro-transactions in these packs are purely cosmetic and do
not affect your character's power or progression in any way.
The Blood Reaver series of supporter packs contain six exclusive micro-transactions.
Let blood fuel your bloodshed. The Ex-Sanguinator weapon effect draws the blood of enemies
of Slain and funnels it into your weapons. Turn the appearance of your endurance, frenzy
and power charges into orbiting globules of blood with the Blood Reaver charges.
While your charges are active, these blood orbs will grow in size when you absorb more
blood from nearby enemies.
There are options to have pure blood charges, or charges that still display which kind of
charge they are at their core.
A taste for blood doesn't negate a taste for style.
The Elite Blood Reaver armor features crimson levers and golden accents to set yourself
apart from uncivilized leeches. It also features a back attachment, fashioned out of the wing
of a colossal bat. Alongside every bloodreaver is their trusted gargoyle pet. In true gargoyle
fashion, they take the form of a stone statue when you are idle, leaping into action when
you're on the move again. What good is immortality if you don't have a vast mansion to come home
to at the end of the day. The Eternal Blood Reaver Supporter Pack contains the Blood Reaver
Manor Hideout. This exquisite two-story estate features an organ, a grand dining table,
and cages for your visitors. You can alter the walls to create as many or few rooms as you like.
Last but not least, the Servant of the Manor, eternally bound to the Order of the Blood
Reavers. This henchman will manage your store, so you can spend more time spilling blood.
The Divinity Pack series also contains six exclusive Micro-Tent actions.
Call on Divinity to aid you in eluding enemy hits with the Divinity Dodgeroll effect.
As you sprint, actual divine lightning wings will form out of your back,
leaving a trail of Radiance as you engage or escape from combat.
For situations that are too dicey, call on the gods above to send down the Storm of Divinity portal
to create a safe passage for you to retreat through.
Adorn yourself with the Knight of Divinity armor set.
A highly revered attire, only bestowed to those deemed worthy for the divine cause.
Equipping the Divine Surge character effect empowers you with a storm of divine energy.
Using skills causes the storm to burst from your character,
spilling raw Divinity into the area around you.
The Arbiter of Divinity Wings are the final piece remaining to emphasise the force
divinity has over this realm. This ancient precursor machine was found locked away in
a highly guarded vault. Its original purpose is unclear, but it has been altered to fuel
your maps using the pure, everlasting divinity within the statue. The pillars surrounding
represent how many portals you have left for your map. This map device also tracks your
progress as you complete the new origins of divinity storyline added this expansion.
Additionally, all micro transactions from the Supporter Packs will be made available
for use in Path of XR1.
On Release Weekend, we will also be releasing the Return of the Ancients Mystery Box, which
will contain two armor sets, a set of map devices for your in-game adventures, a new
tracking scroll that records the amount of currency you've gained from the currency exchange
or your shop, and much more, like a set of finisher effects and affinity stashes.
It's not all, however.
The Fragment Stash tab is finally coming to Path of Exile 2.
And with it, comes some Tabception.
Inside this one tab, there's a tab for your various Boss Key Fragments.
There's also a tab for all your Precursor Tablets, with each type of Tablet getting
six tabs of storage.
Finally, there's a tab for your Gin Barriers and Inscribed Automatoms, both of which get
their own six tabs.
a lot of tabs. So that's everything in 050. This is by far the biggest update we've ever
made, the P1 or 2. New in-game storylines, pinnacle bosses, crafting systems, items,
sentencing classes and so much more. Now because this update contains so much in-game content,
we're doing significantly more testing than usual. For that to happen, we're taking a
little longer than usual between the announcement and the release. 050 will be released in three
weeks on May the 29th, with the patch notes being released on the Friday before that on
May 21st.
But there's just one more thing to talk about.
Now that the endgame is up to scratch, we have to start talking about our plan for 1.0
release.
The feedback we've had during Early Access has been critical for making all the improvements
that we've been making to the game.
At the same time, we had to create enough endgame content to make an ARPG that can call itself
a successor to Path of Exile 1.
Well, with 050 we now believe we have reached that point, and so this is going to be the
last full-size league during Early Access. That's right, the next big update is going
to be 1.0. Now normally we would do our next big content release in August, but in the
run-up to full release our plans take a little longer on this one. As big as 050 is, 1.0
is even bigger, so we'll be launching 1.0 this year sometime after XLCon. But that doesn't
mean we won't be doing updates in the meantime. In this final phase we have a lot of things
to pause throughout the game and balance to improve. I'm sure there'll also be feedback
about the new end game that we need to incorporate too.
The difference is that the focus is not going to be on adding more content like the previous
updates, it's going to be on improving what we already have.
But we still want to encourage people to try out all the balance changes and improvements
that we're making, so we're going to be running a few event leagues during this phase alongside
each update.
Think remixes of existing mechanics or features.
And speaking of ExileCon, don't forget to pencil it in on the weekend of November 7th
in New Zealand.
ExileCon is a gathering of our players, and a chance for us to showcase everything we
working on for both Path of Exile 1 and 2. And this one will be particularly important
for us, since we finally get to unveil some of the coolest content that we've been working
on for a while now, with Act 5 and 6. Tickets for the in-person event are currently sold
out, but don't worry, all the announcements and talks are going to be streamed online
for all of you to watch. Now I'm personally so excited for this. This is the year that
Peoe2 comes out. The campaign is finally finished. It's been 8 years to get here, but we're
We're finally near the finish line, and with that, it's time to move on to our live Q&A.
It's a down for a nice long Q&A again, once again today.
We just had a teaser for Return of the Ancients expansion, and it's complete overhaul to just
every single thing in the endgame, complete endgame overhaul.
The Ruins of Al Dua League with a frankly somewhat confusing amount of crafting and systems
and things in it that kind of keeps going, and then we've got like the Cal Guren skills
that work across weapons, the extra-looking ascendancies and some insane uniques and all
that sort of stuff. But honestly, it's kind of easy to talk about what's not part of 0.5,
so with that very elegant segue, let's do that first. So I think some people definitely
had an expectation or a hope that there was going to be a new class or a new weapon type
here.
Unfortunately, it's just the case that making a class is something that takes longer than
a single cycle. So, yeah, it was never going to be on the cards for a 5-0, unfortunately,
So it wasn't even though it was moved in this game?
No, no, it's just positive.
It just isn't something that we can do in that short amount of time.
So it's going to have to be the next one before we're able to get.
Last time you guys teased like the Druid and the Huntress beforehand.
Exactly. So it's kind of funny seeing everyone like this.
Probably the mistake we made was having a sword in the teaser for the next...
Oh, that was a good one.
Yeah, yeah. So no one thought about that, but yeah, it's just kind of funny.
It is a shame that it seems like you guys have kind of, well,
You keep raising the bar on yourself as far as the design is concerned.
And it's not like we're not working on it in the background, right?
Like that is definitely happening.
Yeah, I've been seeing a little bit of work out on there.
We're simple people from New Zealand, like swords.
They're advanced technology that we haven't worked on.
OK, yes, let's go.
You still don't understand.
We're just going to learn how they work.
Just like get on the map, aren't you?
There's a straight line.
There's like some metal.
These are complex things.
We'll have to figure out there.
But yeah, do you care to speak at all?
Like kind of what your plans are in that regard as far as the classes?
I really shouldn't just because you know it'll spoil the reveal for that.
But not exactly, we're kind of hoping towards getting like from 0.5 onwards, you know, in
the lead up to Exocon in terms of that, so you're hoping to get like all of the classes
in the game, just want to see more or something like that.
Well, so I think that's what the main focus is going between 0.5 and 1.0 is going to be
more about like improving what we have, like polishing everything.
And 1.0 is where you're going to get the like, you know, the big new content update, you
That's going to include the X5 and 6, it's going to include class stuff, it's going to
include all that sort of thing.
Because really ultimately the main goal of early access is make sure that all the systems
that we have in the game are good.
So we need to make sure the end game is good, we need to make sure that all of the skills,
just the way that combat is, is good and all the various things.
Even stuff that isn't good yet, like a tendency trials, there's going to be stuff that we
need to do before 1.0 to get to get good.
And so long as we get that stuff, then I think people trust that we know how to create an
act at this point.
So that isn't exactly something we need to test, per se.
So really what we need to do now is, assuming that people are happy with the in-game that
we've released in 0.5.0, that will mean that we've kind of checked all the boxes of stuff
that we need to know.
And yeah, there's still stuff that we need to improve, and that'll happen between 0.5.0
and 1.0.
But yeah, that's the main thing we need to be sure of.
And then once we've got that, it's like now we can get the big update, the ridiculous
update that is 1.0 really. And I heard you mentioned that recently as well that you don't
feel like you really need to get the last acts in for testing. No, no, I mean, we know how to do
that. It's one of those things that, you know, like, look, people saw in before, like, we know,
you know, we know what we're doing when it comes to that stuff. It's just, you know, yeah. So that's
the same as obviously to get like those last acts in the finish the story and how it'll come out at
launch. In 1.0, exactly. That'll be the launch. Conclusion to the story then. Yeah, exactly.
So you have done, though, one extremely gigantic update here for A-game.
And it seems like you've done a lot all in one expansion.
And you've got this plan to kind of do a little bit of some other stuff in the interim.
So why did you go for this route of trying to do so much all in one,
instead of spreading it out over, say, a couple of expansions?
So in retrospect, maybe we should have spread it out.
But honestly, the reason is because we wanted to actually make it so that, like,
we wanted to deliver a patch where, like, this is what we expect the end game to be.
Like this is the template for what it leagues look like when they're in endgame and that kind of thing
And I feel like if we're just done a couple of them, it wouldn't have really got that across
Yeah, like it needs to be like that. Yeah, once again, this is what endgame is, you know
And it really is fulfilling a lot more of what we had hoped for and who's a feeling like a world that you can explore
You know that there's things everywhere and that kind of stuff that we had wanted for and the other thing as well
It was just like a few
Things about the one in the current endgame, right? It just didn't really give you goals in the right way
But you get to endgame you don't know what the hell to do and a lot of players just leave right there
You know, there needs to be the case when you get there like there's objectives
There's things, you know, that feels like there's actually a storyline there
That's kind of stuff in order to entice players to actually go further than the campaign actually get into endgame
So, um, yeah, I think that if we hadn't done all of the
Leagues at the same time it just wouldn't really have kind of gone across or really going for there
It sounds like the plan now is to be able to focus on a little bit more polish in the yeah
So, um, yeah, I mean we plan to have some more leagues
But they won't be like content like mega expansion type leagues
Like it's more like kind of like the one month event type things that we've done
And that's really just because we want to be able to we still don't want to do mid-league nerfs
And so to be able to do all the balance changes we want to do is there's a huge amount of balance still to do
You know in order all that stuff you still need to have it like an economy reset
And so what we'll probably do is like yeah more event stuff like remixes of existing content
But also adding stuff with stuff's missing. So for example, like we still have a lot more unique to me to make especially a mid-game
Unique so that kind of stuff
Like we now believe we've got the standard of where unique needs to be in PE2 in terms of like, you know
And then it's like way more than what you need in PE1 in terms of being like to reach the standard
And so now that we've got that we can expand on that get more unique sort of your mid-game ones that kind of stuff
You know, so there's stuff like that that'll be coming in
the sort of updates between now and 1.0, but
Yeah, like it isn't gonna be the kind of like, you know mega content craziness that we've got
I like to do that for a photo frame.
And we have a lot to dive into, whereas endgame things,
while people watching live get your questions in the chat
for all of that, in the meantime,
I want to ask you folks about the new league,
the Ruins of Aldur, which this is like an expedition rework,
but it's also its own separate league.
This encountering remnants, I'm covering these ruins
throughout this storyline in the campaign
and then into endgame.
And I was like really like, it's a lot.
there's a lot of crafting and items and reward types
and systems and stuff going on here.
In fact, Jonathan, you showed me this rather unhinged
looking spreadsheet, like, oh, these are just like
random rewards or something, but then you showed me
this spreadsheet, like, that's like the recipes
of all the different runes combined together
to make different things.
Yeah, yeah, we probably put too much thought into it
that a lot of things needed, but like, oh,
we have to make sure that like if it's an iron rune,
like what kind of stuff would be, you know, creating that,
like, you know, this is something like,
the recipes have a lot more structure to them,
and I just think a lot of that players
wouldn't even think about that,
they're just seedless to pick for item, you know,
there's something I really think about, but there is some thought put into that of like what things
gonna go to what recipes and one way to look at this is this league has the most spreadsheets we've
ever made. The other day I was I was looking through all that we have this gig it's called
egg it's called like ferricium crafting or something yeah I was looking through all the tabs
and I was like I went to I was on that like the 60th tab and I was like heck is this I was reading
all this stuff and it said like Mark's ideas and I was like I don't remember coming up
with any of us. There's just like pages and pages and pages of crafts and stats and just
like I was honestly I've lost the plot a little bit with respect to how many just like different
things were made and like it's honestly just been crazy.
Some of the rune stuff is like also super bizarre. Like I don't even really understand
that rune that's got to do with Unix. Like what's going on with that?
It's called Ulroth's Legacy and it's a rune that you can place in Esermite and Calgurion
Uniques to destroy the Unique and it takes one of the mods off of it and creates a unique
rune with a slightly modified value sometimes because obviously and then you can put that
in the same item classes of a different item.
I don't know about this system.
This is so many crazy crafting things going on, but it was kind of like, well when we
were designing the league, we were like, okay, we've got Kalkirans, like what kind of crazy
crafting and magic systems would Kalkirans have?
Like there would be different than the stuff that's going on in Rayclust.
And so, you know, they're all magic systems based around like this star metal that they
have for a semen and then they like, you know, like the words give it power and so on.
So we're just kind of thinking, we're using that as an inspiration for all the different
crafting things, you know.
Blue shapes.
Yeah, all the blue shapes.
Blue shapes.
There's just a lot of little nuts on there.
Yeah, we went differently.
So many crafting things like in fact, there's like, there's even more crafting stuff.
We have an entire crafting benches that we have designed that practically like 80%
implemented and then discarded.
It's just like a huge amount of stuff.
We can do this as some other way.
Yeah.
So like, cause I saw that there's like, oh, you can, you can bench craft a thing
and then it changes the unique and it has a new modifier, but now we also got a
ring that steals modifiers as well.
No idea.
Why not?
Why not?
You like making more work for yourselves these days.
It seems to be a running theme. I keep I keep saying this dear like why do you do this?
Like what do you do? Yeah, I mean I could say you have to like either one now
And you always have to look at all the modifiers on gloves
100% so yeah because of because of that monkey Tennessee now every unique we ever make that's a glove unique
We have to design extra mods that it changes to another axis on that all these new runes we've added all of them
Remember that shaman that has that whole bonded modifier on every room that we need to also
Does that apply to the ones that come from your next later
TBD.
TBD.
We are going to try to do it, yes.
The idea is all of them will work, yes.
That's like, there's some really unusual ones too,
because there's runes that are designed to just be putting your night into Metacraft and then be replaced.
I'm really proud of that one, actually, because I really like the way that we...
I think doing Metacrafing in a more understandable way, I reckon,
is the one that everyone had.
So, yeah, you put the item in, you can start rolling different mods,
but then you can take it out again by putting another rune on top.
And I guess there's going to be maybe some process where you put one of those in dual craft and then put another one in
Do another crap. I certainly want to get it back. It's pretty crazy. We've got like
Chronomarcy mods on birch you got like a berserking themed one for helmet
There's like a kind of decay
Damage over time one for gloves and there's a few others there
So we've kind of tried to theme them as well
Yeah, that's like even a different thing to what we've had in the past with meta mods
Like that's not just shaping how we access the current modifiers, but rather new
new modifiers are entirely getting out of Titans.
I mean, we also have that new modifiable thing going on with Breach as well, where,
you know, with the new minion set of mods and the new cast of set of mods on rings and
stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah.
But the thing that's part of the reason for this is because we really wanted to make sure
of it.
So one of the things we're in the sort of early design phase of this is we're kind of like,
every league needs to have something that you're going to keep, like, if you want to
grind Justice League, that there's a thing that, like, a reward that, like, you can keep
on, that keeps on giving, if you know what I mean?
Yeah.
on doing this economically. So therefore every league has to have some kind of crafting system
that you can engage with for a very long period of time. And like we didn't quite have that,
because like some of the leagues sort of had that a bit before, but now we want to make sure
that every league definitely has some of those lines. So you know just a reason to keep going.
Yeah, people can absolutely, we find like a niche, a service they provide the community
or whatnot, which I quite like to see, especially the breach tree getting real deep cuts on some
of those things that you can do there and now with the ruins and everything as well.
So, for the, back to the Rune Spell door, you're not actually needing to like find those
runes that you're inscribing on those encounters, right?
Because I wasn't quite there on how that works.
So, thematically, that's how it works, but in reality, the way that you'll engage with
it is when you find a rune that's sort of inscribed on a thing, then like all the recipes
that relate to that rune will be displayed, except for that there's a few hidden ones
that you have to do some quests to get, so there's some more quests throughout the campaign
and also some stuff in Endgame that you can do to unlock a few more recipes.
Yeah, you're not rolling physically. You can't, these sorts of things are around.
No, no, no, there's nothing like that. So effectively, like you're just picking from
the book every time. So like if you want to just look at this as like, you know, walk up to the object,
there's some recipes, just pick which item you want. That's effectively how you can engage with it.
But thematically, there's kind of more stuff going on the way that the recipes form and
what we just had to put in stuff. So you showed that these remnants then,
this new remnants system, obviously, it shares the name of remnants from Expeditions themselves.
and it endgame and actually replaces the remnants. So you are still finding these standalone remnants
from the League mechanic, like in maps as well as expeditions. Correct. So every area there'll be
a remnant and you do the sort of standalone remnant mechanic, but then when you do expeditions,
all the what used to be called remnants there have been replaced by these remnants, which
serve a similar purpose because they both give you an extra reward but also make the monsters
harder. And even just making the monsters harder in itself, by the way, does add more
variety to the monsters so like the more runes that you are adding to the fight the more rewards
you're going to get so it's worth doing even aside from the reward that you're picking there's
still like extra juice that you're adding to the monster as well. We've effectively got a more
unified monster mod system now and so anytime we're pretty much adding monster monsters be it
now runes and we've even updated delirium mods to apply to the same system they all go through
the same they all add there's like a you know rarity xp life etc columns and so we're just trying
trying to make sure that there's a, you know, whereas before, like system over here, system
over here, system over here, they're different reward axes, and we're just trying to make
sure it's all difficulty equals reward.
Right.
That's the key thing.
Like we always want to make sure that whatever the difficulty we're adding, we're always
adding rewards in kind.
And a lot of the stuff in PeoE2, I mean, it's been quite hard to balance it, but it's one
of those things that, you know, if you get it right, then it feels right.
And if it doesn't, then you kind of don't know why things feel off and like why things
is like this thing's too hard and that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
On that topic actually, so each of these runes has its own different modifiers that it does
to make monsters harder.
Is that something you can kind of engage with?
You're like choosing the recipes?
So when you're choosing the recipe, you're also choosing what mods effectively go on
it because each rune that you're inscribing effectively comes with the thing that the
monster is going to do.
So there are different situations where you might want to decide to like pick something
easier because you don't particularly like this mechanic where it means you're missing
on whatever item there's in that recipe.
But the goal there is that the rare of the item, the heart of the runes are that will
be the rune modifiers that will be added to the monsters.
There's some pretty, like in expeditions and what we're now calling grand expeditions
because as what people knew as the log books, the log book is now exploring the oceans.
You get the cool things where, okay, let's say there's like 12 remnants and you want
to get them all on the detonation chain. Each remnant you do, you do the fight and then one
of those runes is passed on to be additive with the next. So it doesn't manipulate. So
effectively the monsters have the mods of the remnant and then all of the next remnant
monsters have one of those runes as well as all the ones they had. So every remnant is
harder than the next getting more and more and more mods and you can imagine if you go
go down 12, you know, you can have technically up to 22 extra mods, which you'll notice
is the reason why we don't display a whole bunch of lines of text up and we instead have
the bar of actual runic symbols.
Seeking a mouse over those or something, can you, like, to see more signs of it?
You meant to be able to, but probably not right now.
There's this thing that we will do later, which is this pause rework.
I'm going to just spoil it now because it's like one of those things that we're going
to do.
The intention for fricking ages has been, we haven't had time to do it yet, that when
you pause the game, you can mouse over all of the different things and like find information
about them. So the intention would be to like be able to expand all of that stuff, like
so look at all buffs and explore like what exact stats they give and that kind of stuff
if you want to do that. We've just been planning on doing it for ages but didn't get around
to it. I've been really keen on that. Do know when you are, the runes do say what they
do on the remnant and the one that moves on to the next remnant is has an extra icon
It's not actually moving on all of them because I was gonna say because it's kind of like each remnant has a lot of modifiers
So it's not yeah, what so let's say
You know a remnant with five runes. Yeah, one of them have a symbol above it
And that one forwards onto the next remnant and so you can do a little bit of
I'm a crazy encounter the next one is maybe not as bad. He like oh, maybe if I just make it through that
It'll be okay in the next part of it
Yeah, but then you and so the order of them kind of matters as well
And then like okay, let's say you're obviously that the each remnant gives a reward
There's a little bit of a more, you know, if you're a you know, a juicer sort of speak
You're gonna want to do a thing where you're like, okay
I want to get as many ruins as possible and so you want to kind of do things like avoiding overlaps
You want to make sure the last remnant has the most amount of ruins probably and there's always like different little things
You can think about to try an expedition there is yes
And it's the kind of thing where people are like I'm gonna try and squeeze the most amount of rewards out of these out
Or if you just want to just go blow up a bunch of stuff, also that's completely fine.
On that note, extreme archaeology is still a thing with this new system, then?
Giant explosion?
Not in the direct sense.
How do you mean?
Well, not with grand logbooks.
Right. Well, not the regular encounters in maps.
Yeah, I believe it's on one of the master nodes.
Oh yeah, cool.
I need to double check that because I can't be sure, but I believe it is.
Yes, we are.
Yeah, that was always the thing for regular expedition encounters.
But like obviously you don't want that in a Grand Expedition because it's like well okay
I'll get one percent of the island I guess but
Yeah for the regular ones that should be there
But cool if it's not there is it's fine though
Like the there's also a sort of hidden amount of work that we sort of glossed over there as well in all the like logbook
Islands like what what used to be called logbooks, but now the Grand Expedition Islands
Like we put a lot of effort into like making a bunch of unique islands with weird shit
Like you know like every one of them has got like unique things to find and blow up that like kind of weird
It's not just a bunch of generic maps of it submissions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they're actually got a lot of effort put into them
And there's you know, every one of them has it has two to three things that only spawn there
But you know that are interesting. So yeah, there's like this cause it's quite a bit there, too
Like it's kind of like we didn't want to spot you made them because it's like it's quite fun like Friday
Oh, maybe this will explode. Maybe they'll explode. There's like things like that
There's even like
There's like special log books you can find now that a log book is just click it to
You know reveal a section of the ocean. Yeah, we have one that you can get that
you can turn on and then when you click it's all of the
Islands revealed have extra modifiers on them like expedition themed modifiers
So like more explosives, more radius and a whole bunch of stuff like that, you can get in late game.
Yeah, I guess kind of somewhat filling the role of how towers work and the rest of the atlas as well, but for the islands.
Like maybe a wee craft of maps.
Well, but then you also have ones that reveal like guarantee, you know, Olaf will be there, for example.
So it's like a little bit, which is a way to trade for like being getting Olaf kills.
I think of course.
You can't always just trade for the Pinnacle Boss keys themselves, but he's not the fake
Pinnacle anymore.
And you are actually using regular Waston so you can kind of juice up the expedition
maps that go around the Grand Expeditions now.
Exactly.
Yes, you can.
Potentially, quite a bit.
That's pretty juicy.
It seems, I think you've kind of mentioned Jonathan that it feels a little bit like
Delve in some ways.
Yeah, it is a little bit.
So the Explorers are supposed to feel that way because it's one of those sort of infinite
expanses that you can go down. I still want to make proper delve one day, but at least
we've got this.
You don't have to run around the islands reading all those giant blocks of text anymore, hoping
to not get some.
You remind me actually, so with the runes, is there modifiers like Immune Defy Damage
and Cartelage from them and stuff like that?
They just go on and on.
More traditional modifiers and then there's a set at the top, like there's one called
power rune which is the rarest it takes every mod and makes it tier 2 you know
so there's some metery ones and then there's the one something we showed and
there's one that causes all monsters spawned by the remnant to share a life
pool so which is actually crazy and very satisfying the funny thing about this
is that if we'd been in normal livestream where we're just doing a league
like so much more of the stuff we probably would have delved into because we
had so much in-game stuff like other things as well. Yeah exactly
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's tons of like hidden stuff like I can't believe you glazed over this thing
We're like a rune steals a unique one
System you showed off exactly exactly
Another one another one of those we cut for time was the ability to upgrade runes that there's a single upgrade of rune
That's already in your
In your gear like a perfect perfect rune of any any rune can be upgraded past the normal level that it could normally go to
Using one of those like school the master work room
So, yeah, there's all sorts of stuff.
What you can then do in Cursion, extract and trade.
By the way, just to be clear.
There's a lot of Cursion, there's some extract stuff.
Yeah, so you can trade those, the upgraded ones if you want to.
Oh, yeah. And you've got another category of ones that absolutely can't be removed,
and I seem to know with that either.
Yeah, so that's like the George's Socket thing and something like that.
Almost like the Barling and Adam thing that's done.
This is where you're going to get the weird economy,
where the upgrade item is for some reason cheaper
cheaper or something than the
rune that's taken out of that.
Either way, some weird someone's extracted a perfect rune
because that's like an abnormal thing you had to do in Cursion.
And the upgrade item is like for some reason going to have a weird
price differential to the rune.
I mean, it's always like a wild economy.
I mean, not to mention just like a hundred new rooms in general.
That's kind of like rather a lot, isn't it?
Yeah, it's a lot of use.
It's a hundred and sixty.
Yeah, a hundred and sixty.
But it is the runes of Elder like you know.
That's right.
We didn't know some runes of Elder.
Exactly.
Just be Elder League otherwise.
And that's not even, that's not even all.
There's the alloy crafting too, which is like,
we're going to make a version of Bear since crafting
because of course, you should do it right.
Exactly.
Yes.
Do you view this league just as like,
it was a crafting focus league from the outside?
I mean, we knew that, I mean, the Ressiem stuff,
like they're known as like a,
a whole culture of blacksmiths and like doing stuff right? So they're gonna, yeah they're
gonna, they're gonna do some crafting. Do you think there is like a too much for crafting
options or is there some way that this is like kind of segmenting out that makes it
feel like, like it's still manageable? Well I'd like to think it's manageable, honestly
I find the rude stuff, I mean you can always add more, more socketable type things like
this, but every time you find one it's like it's just a thing in itself. And by the way
this is one of the reasons why we set away from like too many crafting bench type things,
we've got like mega lists. Yeah. It's like, it's honestly way cool to find like find an
item and then like okay now this is a physical thing that I've got so yeah like
that yeah I mean if you'll notice the Vericea metallurgy one we have the rune
smithing rune forging whatever the names we ended up going with it's just here's
your input here's our output exactly so that one can be simple you don't need to
have the giant I think one of the giant lists a part of what scare people off of
from crafting as well yeah so yeah I think doing it the way we've done it here
is honestly honestly more new player friendly than the kind of the giant
unless you feel like you need to understand when you see it.
And of course, as these things go core, we'll see what works,
we'll see what doesn't work, we'll see what worked in end game and didn't,
because again, once the things are core, how they appear in the campaign,
you don't know, maybe these things work really well in the campaign
and need to be pulled into a system that's more campaign-friendly
without having to have remnants in every area and stuff like that.
So it's always nice to keep an eye on that and see what works,
what's good for onboarding, what's good for campaign progression,
what's you know all of that kind of stuff I mean honestly all of this stuff if
you're using it all you are gonna be significantly more powerful on the
campaign we have a bunch of you know those kind of purple ruins those
powerful ruins appearing throughout the campaign that you can get from the
remnants as well and like that was that even in the live stream some of them
some of them were I think but like you know there's the room for bows that
gives you you know 50% chance for an additional arrow and like that it's not
Like that's end game, that's just early.
Now of course you're gonna get the thing of like,
do I wanna use it early or do I wanna save it till late?
Cause it depends on how many you get and all of that.
But like, you know, the power is there
if you need to use it and if you want to use it.
So it's kind of up to you.
And if they're abundant enough, go free.
But to go back to your original question as well,
we do sort of wanna make sure
that each of the crafting systems does like have
specific domains most of the time.
So in the case of the breach one again, you know,
like that's about jewelry crafting.
if you're into these things.
And in particular, you've got the caster
and minion stuff as well.
So you're kind of looking at that and you're like, okay,
like if I need to cast, create some minion jewelry,
then this is the league I'm playing.
But then if I'm not having to create that,
then I don't have to necessarily understand that one.
So we do try to, we're trying to make sure that
it's not like for every single item slot
or every single use case,
you have to know about every crafting system.
Like there are specific ones
that can help with specific areas.
Yeah, okay.
And you can look into that.
And that does divide it down a little bit more.
So I get a bit more of that.
That's kind of the intention.
This was actually one of those things we discussed way back in the early days of PEWII 2,
about how we would differentiate crafting in PEWII 1,
is like try to have a little bit more segregation of the different crafting systems and different item slots.
Yeah, exactly. So you've also got this other crafting system in this,
because we're not finished with that list.
So you can use Rune Forging to upgrade items, including unique items to increase their base damage,
or give maybe some armor's new rolls with ward and things like that as well.
This is like another route to modifying Unix, which you've been doing a little experimenting a bit more and a bit more with over time.
And this has an ability to change affixes on Unix as well, right?
Correct. So the changing affixes part, I believe, is mostly the Calguran Unix, where it does that.
Like, is that not correct?
Can you tell what is a Calguran Unix?
We are going to add a way for you to tell what is a might Calguran, because Val for the other one as well.
For the weapons, it's mostly about increasing the base damage to make it so that a lot of the unit can actually be something you can use in the endgame.
Because, yeah, there's obviously a lot of uniques there that are interesting, but it's not a viable friend game because they just don't have the damage.
So that's kind of like one of the main things we're solving.
And then for the armors, it's all about, you know, being able to make that ward versus other defense trade off as well.
Well, the Kal'Gur'in Unix, what we've tried to do is have that,
because most of the Kal'Gur'in Unix are in-game, most, right?
Yeah, it's just, you know, drops from Allroth, drops from the New Pinnacle, a few others.
And we've tried to have multiple outcomes for them, and you know, I get to pick.
So, for example, there's a shield, a new shield being added, and it is a strength deck shield,
deck shield so armor evasion and it comes with raised shield and it has some mechanics
around that. In the Varicium bench you can put it in, you can craft and it can turn into
a full airspace, a full evasion base with parry or a full strength base with raised
shield. So you can, if you'd want to get away from it being hybrid like that's just one
example. Now you might have to get a few of them to get the one you want. But for all
All of them, that's kind of the idea is that some are just mods, some are a bit more transformative.
You know, there's just like, okay, there's a weapon and one of the outcomes might be
that it's just higher damage, slower speed.
One of it might be that converts all of its damage to lightning, like it's got a tempest
theme.
One of it might be that, you know, there's like just a whole bunch of different stuff
like that and like some of them are a bit more niche, some of them are a bit more spike.
But the idea is that there's generally we're going to try and aim for three different outcomes
for every Calgaryen unique. There are some other niche cases and I don't want to like
spoil them because by the way, there's more crafting things. I'm just going to tell you
because they're secret. I'm getting all my secrets in, but I hope people can find them
out and enjoy it. But yes, there are some other things as well. There are a bit more
there, you know, one that isn't so secret, but like, there's kind of the
questions of like, what happens if you, you know, try and add runic ward to
something that has no defenses to begin with.
There's like weird things, where it's like, what happens when you convert nothing into something?
I don't know, you know, so...
5 by 0.
There's some other weird cases as well, so, yeah.
Interesting.
Well, there's going to be a lot of exploration and tinkering, and it seems like a long tail
of discovery for this league as well.
Yeah.
Months in, people might be still discovering stuff, that's pretty exciting to hear.
With the Unix in general, like, I think the miscrafting ability to modify Unix, change
how they work a little bit, has been pretty popular.
Do you feel like, are you worried at all about, like, losing the identity of Unix, or what
What makes them unique?
What is the feel of the unique?
Or do you have kind of like an idea of how you can maintain them?
I think that it'll be possible to break that, but I don't think that we have here, because
at the end of the day the uniques are still like each serving a specific purpose, and
that is different from reyes and how they work, you know?
So I think it is okay.
What I wouldn't want to do is just be like, oh, now a bunch of rare mods can spawn on uniques.
Like I'm not a fan of that at all.
So as long as we're not doing that, I think it's okay.
I mean, we do push the boundaries, though.
Even just the fact that uniques have socketables that go in them kind of changes things a bit.
But I think a lot of the time when you do that, you're not really looking at that as
like the unique has got random mods, it sort of feels more like it's just an extra place
for things to go in your character.
So I think it still works in terms of the flavor of what a unique is supposed to be.
Yeah, it feels like a separate layer.
Yeah, I guess a lot of the time you are changing one unique modifier for another unique modifier.
That's like a twist on the original concept.
So it still retains identity quite a lot there as well.
So kind of like transitioning.
Oh wait, first I did want to ask about the Ruinic Ward thing.
So Runec Ward obviously has undergone a bit of a redesign,
a bit of a concept change here.
So now, Alia, under your life, how did you arrive at this design?
What's the reason for it?
Well, once again, we're thinking, OK,
we want to be able to make a badgex system that
feels like it's fundamentally different than what you'd
have on Rayclust.
We were trying to think, OK, we, how do I say this?
So, I feel like I've lost myself here.
But, yeah, like, it just, I guess it is really just coming,
you know, something that feels a little bit different.
And we wanted to make colorless skills, right?
We wanted to make it a thing where these skills
can be used across classes.
So all of those skills we want to be able to use.
But, so we didn't really feel like we would be able
to use an energy system that wasn't independent
of the existing ones that we had.
Right, yeah.
And so then we were like, okay, if we make something here
where you get to be able to trade some level of defensiveness
or offense because you're spending effectively part of your life pool, then we'd be able
to make a system there, but we probably couldn't have used life because if we'd done that,
there's so many other things that are going on with life that wouldn't have really been
able to work, so hence, you know, ward.
I mean, it's just a completely different thing than what ward was in Peer-E-One.
We just sort of used the term, but it means something completely different.
I mean, I think it's just a significant upgrade from Peer-E-One's, just like kind of one-shot
energy shield.
I mean, that was like hard carried by Unix.
Whereas this is a way more, you know, just applicable system.
You can just have a little bit of it and you're just happy to have a little bit of extra life effectively works way better in the campaign, works just as more of a isolated system and doesn't need to have like, okay, here's now four unique mechanics and now my ward is a build, which is fine.
If it's all in game, that's fine. But like you were talking about having something in the campaign here a full league in a system
We want to engage with and get some you know borrowed power out of via these skills and whatnot. And so yeah, it just works a lot better
One thing I should mention with the ward is that in the early base types
It's usually strict upgrades like if you're like during the early in the campaign
You're not trading off anything you just get extra bonuses
But as you get into the end game, that's where those bases start to be like, okay in order to have more ward
we're going to be trading off your other defenses and that means that when we finally do potentially move it into core
It's gonna be like it'll be a question like do I want to go for like it's not gonna be something mandatory
Because if it had just been always additive it would have been that every single person needs to put water in every single base
Stop and we don't want to be that way in the end game. We want to be once it gets there
It's like a choice of like, you know, do I want to engage with the story not want to so that's kind of an important consideration
We've actually also handcrafted every outcome
So every single like you know generally how you would expect this kind of things to be done
I am this here's the formula it converts
We've just gone and said nah like
Let's do it manually for everything
Which means it was a metric amount of metadata that every every base that we had has to have the war
We're encropted want room and in game you get some cool stuff where base type a might
become very very heavy on runic ward where base type B might have just a
little bit and some are in the middle and some sacrifice a bit more defense
where others don't and and then the same with the Unix you're getting like crazy
different outcomes where you know it's a similar thing it's like you know what
does Calum's heart gonna do what's Brastome gonna do there's like different
kind of things that people are gonna play around with and is it worth and the
good thing is you can of course see the outcome before you do it with these
non-random ones on armors, yeah. I didn't realize that. When you have both the
slots, if you mouse over the right one, it will show what you're gonna get,
except for like those Calgary and Unique how it comes, like I said, so that's a bit more special.
But most of the time, yeah, you can see what you're gonna get, so if you just like,
oh no no no, I don't want to lose that armor, then don't lose that armor. Just don't.
You know? So, but yeah, there's some crazy stuff, you'll get some runic ward
stackers, you'll get some people that just have a supplemental amount, just to
stack maybe just enough to use a skill or just enough to use a support, and you'll
people who are just trying to spam the skills as much as they possibly can. You have some people
have low amounts stacking higher region of it and like all kinds of stuff is the goal. All done
via you know the the metallurgy, the runes, the different skills like the whole suite is there
so there's just all kinds of stuff you can do. Yeah and on the topic of the Calgurian skills
this is especially because this is like something you get asked all the time is like oh can we have
more weapon diagnostic skills. Things that kind of like blur those boundaries a little bit now
that you've got those established, what's the design process of the goal or how you're
going to pursue it?
So it's a little bit tricky because we have to make sure that these things are going to
be used across classes.
I don't want to just be like, okay, this one's only for one particular character and these
are going to span them.
That means they tend to need to work with things like existing debuffs and existing
buffs.
that generates, like, so, they've got various things that, like, they just play with all
of those different mechanics.
So, you know, like, the example we gave in the presentation of, like, converting fire
to frost fire, like, that kind of thing, like, there's a lot of different builds, a lot of
different character classes that'll be able to play with that.
And ideally, that means that it can just open up the different, like, you know, like, different
ways to be able to synergize between different mechanics all over the place.
And then, yeah, because they spend ward rather than, it's another resource, it means that,
you know, there's no issue there either.
Yeah, potentially still into any build
and don't have attribute requirements.
That's the other thing, of course.
They don't have strength index and attribute requirements.
They just have level requirements.
So that way, you know.
Calgurans are a little bit more
a heat of ray costs times, it seems.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
This is a bit more of a technological magic, isn't it?
Yeah.
It's cool that this, it's often the case
when we add these things that can feel a bit shallow,
like it can feel like,
here's this whole new magic system,
but only there's this little amount.
Whereas here, I feel like we've actually gone,
here's this whole magic system,
like here's the, and here's a taste of it,
and like in some cases, like sure, 25 skills now,
we'll see what happens later, you know?
And like, there's things to expand on,
unless they're, of course terrible in which case,
they never existed, you know what I mean?
But I mean, for the long-term help of the game.
But you get this thing where it's like,
it really feels like with respect to the Calgary
and magic, the Calgary and technology,
we're just like getting further and further
really learning more and more about what how these people gain their power, how it's different from
everything you know on Ray Class, and like it's so honestly being just quite cool and like Runic
Ward as I said it feels way more than just like it feels pretty core like it doesn't feel like
this like just secondary thing not that you have to do it it's not mandatory but it feels cool when
you do engage with it which is like yeah very cool and I wouldn't say we've gone this deep into like
like an extra resource system and thing like any league ever before, not in this regard.
So yeah, it's like usually just like some map thing you collect pedals or something.
Yeah.
It seems a bit more engaging than that, a bit more fundamental character builds.
Okay.
It seems like that's something you would probably want to keep long term then as well.
Like as long as it works for me.
Yeah, I mean it works for me well.
If people like it ultimately.
Since we're talking a lot about gear, just kind of zooming out to a bit broader picture,
some outstanding issues from our last meeting.
I can salt the minutes here.
Plus skills is often brought up as something that's,
has a very high level of impact on your gearing choices
and can fail for some, I think, a bit restrictive
as just because it's so much stronger than other options.
We can have a bit of a conversation about that.
I can't remember what we finally decided on there.
Yeah, it's one of those dexterity-like conversations.
Yeah, yeah, this is wild.
I think we are trimming a few levels off the top.
Yeah, that's right.
And more so, more so, we're trimming some off the top
moving some of it up so that there's still a high-level mod.
But doing that for the weapon mods,
but there's more to do here, for sure.
I would say that given this league in particular,
I remember we started it, and we were like, here's
all the things that we've discussed we need to fix,
we need to do all this.
And then it was like, oh, and here's the 8,000 other balance
runes and crafting systems and everything
we want to do and new classes.
And it was like, ah, new versus existing,
having a bit of a conflict and we were so I wouldn't say we got to do as much of
the balance fixed up to a lot of the stuff we've discussed previous that we
wanted to do here but as you were talking about the start of the Q&A like
that is and what Jonathan said is that is a lot of what we want to do you know
while we have the team making the acts yeah that's a different kind of balance
we don't have you know you're not adding ruins and crafting systems to the acts
in the same way right?
Which means that those designers are a freed up team.
Yeah, so a freed up should be able to work on all those kinds of larger balance concerns.
You pretty much do some balance leagues between them.
Yeah, exactly.
And we do have a big list of stuff we want to change there.
It is a list.
Which isn't to say that we didn't do some balance for this.
I expect you to do almost none on this one, given this.
There's different some.
There's some important ones too.
We'll cover a few of those.
We've got some chronomats of stuff.
We're doing a bunch of stuff, but honestly, it's just as much as we can, to be honest.
Like, you know, we're not sitting idly not doing it. But yeah, like I understand that there are there's a few things
Which I assume you're gonna bring up a couple others that are left unresolved
And hopefully maybe one of them's resolved we'll see
Well, the next one was the rarity
Reprising our earlier discussions on rarity from the last Q&A. Yeah, you were saying you were saying that you were eager to at some point remove
Rarity from I am interested in doing that
It's still a question of what we can replace it with but there is one other change to talk about around that that is a bit
more subtle, and I don't know whether it will matter or not. But one of the things we identified,
I mean, the thing people often say with rarity is they just don't want to give currency.
Yes. That's like a common thing that they'll say, like people who say they want to keep
rarity and often say, oh, but it should start what you could just remove the currency from
it and then it'll be okay. So what I was thinking, what we're thinking about is like, there's
a sort of market dynamic that goes on in P1, but hadn't been going on in P2 so much, where
people couldn't really respond to, in PWA2, to the market by picking the rewards type
that they would like to get as much.
So in PWA1, it's like if currency is becoming more valuable, you can respond to that by farming
leagues that give you more currency.
And if your needs are becoming more valuable, then you can respond to that by farming more
unique and that kind of stuff.
So there was a little bit of an aim here to make it so that the league's a little bit
more like, by picking what league you're also picking, more of what types of rewards you
want to get a little bit better, which can mean that if there's a gap in the market,
you can fill it that way. And that should result in like more, we're getting total
economic economists here right now, but it will mean that people can respond to the price
signals that the market is giving them by farming the correct thing to like get the
thing that like the market is valuing more right now.
So you're actually seeing that phenomenal difference between the two games on like the
economic statistic level?
Well, I think it's not so much looking at the system as we're realizing that like without
the ability for players to do that, it can mean that you can get endless inflation and
one thing because people aren't able to respond to that by effectively getting more of that
thing to drive the prices down again. So that kind of stuff actually can matter. And so
one of the things we have been doing is making it so that, yeah, like, like, here's a league
you can farm more to get more of this thing. And like, even with regard to something, I'm
like breach, because you can pick, like, you know, there's mods are picking what type of
womb gift is going to drop more often. You'd be like, Okay, if currencies more valuable
at now, I'm going to pick that one. That's the young have that tree be the one that I'm
getting more of. And so it's like giving a little bit more control over what the rewards
are or should actually lead to a bit more price stabilization here as well. We'll see
Yeah, that works. I don't know whether that's actually one of the things, but it does seem
related to the fact that in Pewee 2, since Rarity effectively boosts everything, I mean
that, yeah, like that mechanic wasn't letting it be one of the levers that people could
like, use to respond to the market that way.
Yeah, exactly. You were just going to do it because it was clear.
Sorry guys, we're turning into an economist all of a sudden.
I like it.
I like it.
That's one of those things.
I think it's just, ignoring the whole economy aspect, it just gives players agency to target
what type of loot they want anyway, right?
That was not just straight up, just better for like,
here's what I need, here's what I want,
I'm gonna go get it, and here's the different levers
I have to be able to achieve that,
be it via choosing a different league,
be it by choosing different multi-choice Atlas tree things
within that league, be it by picking a certain master
and taking a certain Atlas master skill
that changes the rewards of one of the leagues.
Like there's many different axes here,
which is very, very cool to just be like,
All right, we're gonna try and get the best out of the Unix today,
or I'm gonna try and target fund this or that,
and like, it's just a win, even if you're just like,
I don't care about inflation and all of the trade
and all of that, like it's just, it's just good.
So win, win on that regard, hopefully.
Assuming you can't get that.
But in saying that, it doesn't necessarily mean
that we're like happy with how, you know,
item find stuff is, like, there's still one.
Yeah, correct.
Yeah, it sounds like you still need to get it to replace that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Even if you can find one of those.
It's one of those things surprisingly hard, you know,
alongside leech, alongside decks and various other things like the forever topics that
always seem to come back and haunt us every time.
Yes, keep your wake at night. Since we're talking economy and inflation, is that something
you guys are kind of like interested in looking at it in some way? Like sinks for exaltsal
divines or kind of managing that sort of stuff? Or are you just kind of like, let's see what
happens?
This is a weird one because a lot of some of the perceptions that people have about like
each thing means can be backwards from what people expect. But yeah, I do think that it's
going to that's going to come down to that sort of ability for people to respond to the market.
I think that's going to help. But as I said, we'll see if it doesn't help with that stuff,
then we'll we'll visit and see what happens. Thanks for exalts is an inevitability for
sure. It will occur at some it just kind of has to. Thanks for divines.
I don't know, find major blood, see what happens.
I was like, you have something to look like. I don't know how you do.
Good luck.
Wait and see with that.
On the topic of crafting, with all this new stuff, are there any changes to the existing stuff of crafting?
Like how the crafting systems work, the currency's work?
How happy have you been with the introduction of Greater and Perfect Orbs?
I would just say that Greater and Perfect are two, especially Perfect, it's just too common.
Like we're probably going to have to necessarily transpose the Norgs.
Yeah, and effectively, it's sort of having a problem in that kind of early in the end
game crafting is like probably a little bit too easy.
So we'll probably know if the drop rates of some of that stuff a little bit.
I think it's probably just a little bit too far, not to make them impossible to find.
Mostly transmute and augment.
Mostly transmute and augment.
So it's just making it a little bit too easy.
Yeah.
I guess the outcome of that is that they become the norm like immediately right?
Sure, sure.
So there'll probably be a change there.
Yeah, like I think that was just being a little bit too easy to progress in that early in-game part there
Okay, all right now. I'm gonna hit you with I usually do this at the end but right now a surprise QOL UX round
So you've got this in-game build planner, which is an awesome addition very excited and kind of surprised that you did that as well
It's a huge leap over what you tested in the past that kind of went away for a while
Which was like the ability to plan yeah, yeah, so I guess that's the reason why that went away since you had a bigger
bigger project in mind
I'm curious what we take a different angle on this what don't you want to do with this?
Like where is the line of where you don't want to sit because this is something that helps like plays a lot of freeing game
right
Well, some people have asked us like you know
Are you going to suggest builds like this GGG gonna be like there's some builds to play and I can think I don't want to be doing that
I do want to leave it to the community to decide what is that stuff?
So that means we're not gonna be like what I don't want it to be is like, okay
You like join the game for the first time and they get in the games like pick a build, you know
That isn't how it should work like it needs to be that
Most I know that a lot of players want to follow build guys and that's actually fine
We want to give us as good a tools as we can for that
But at the same time like I still want the the desirable theory of the game to be that you join the game
Have you never played it before you just explore and find the stuff that's interesting
Yeah, so you know
But then like if you've already going to a website to find a build guide then at the point you've done that like we might
As well made that as easy as possible for you to do and follow and all that sort of things
So we've actually made sure to keep it hidden unless you know to do it
You don't open your passive tree and it's like load load files and you like
We didn't put it in the live stream because we weren't like a hundred percent sure that would be there
but it is being worked on right now that there's gonna be like a one-click solution for
Putting a getting a build from a community website, right?
So the idea is like, you know, a community website can can put a like a link and when you click the link it will just add it to your account
Like a filters like what? Yeah, exactly like the filter, right?
So then it can just add it to your account and that way you don't have to screw around with files or anything
That's important for console players as well because they obviously can't put files on the console
So yeah, basically they'll be able to you know, edit their account just like an item filter and then now it's gonna appear there
Trust and all right now. You have to you have to have a real trust in your filter creator
because they could just hide mirrors.
So hopefully the build creators.
So April 1st your build creator just completely just changes your build and randomly for a day.
The documentation for how to do the build files should be going up to day-ish.
And that means that what I'd expect to happen, although obviously it's up to them,
like the various community projects like path of building and that kind of stuff,
to all adopt that and make it so that you can export
and build from those tools.
And then the creators can create websites showing those off
and that kind of thing, and that kind of stuff
is what we'd expect.
It just improves the actual physical act of having a build
guard and implementing that and using it for people who are.
That's awesome.
And if we also find that build creators are interested in adding
notes to more places, we try to get everything we could think
of, but there might be places where you're like,
because the idea is anywhere where a creator
wants to be able to say like here's some more tutorialization that they want to add.
The idea is that they can kind of do that.
So, you know, that's the sort of...
I can tell people to upgrade their lifelights for life,
last that year or more life.
Yeah, for sure. Exactly.
Like the example we netted.
Yeah, I love it.
It's very true.
People overlook it.
Yeah, yeah.
So, another one from Outstanding Minutes is the mouse and keyboard and controller hotspot.
I know, and it's becoming a running joke at this point of like,
be promising at every league and then not delivering it.
And the annoying thing about it is that it's one of those things that like, like someone
will work on it for a while.
This is a surprising amount of code to do to change it.
But then every time it's like the guy, like someone will work on it for like, you know,
a month or something.
And then they'll be like, oh, sure, we've got this urgent league UI that needs doing
and they get derailed.
But I promise this time, this time is the time that we will get this all done.
I took him for the fragment tab.
Sorry.
Yeah, it's actually legit.
I'm also not sorry.
It literally was.
Sorry, because the Fragment tab, kind of, I want it and I need it.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, I think there was a bingo card that you saw, you're like, people, so many people
want this.
Yeah, so the Fragment tab.
So you can actually bring bingo card makers.
Yeah, I guess so.
I guess so.
Hot Popping was on there, so I had my hand over it.
I was like, look, they got the Fragment tab.
I see.
I see.
Really what I mean is, I want the Fragment tab.
Another one that I haven't mentioned before, but revisiting, is visibility issues.
So skills, I think, are being designed to look as cool as possible under normal circumstances
all the time, like the artist I imagine is working on them in that situation.
But then they can become extreme on end game builds, right?
You're writing like 10 extra projectiles and screens those days, we're scaling and
attack speed.
So I think like the input example is explosive grenade, phenomenal looking skill, immensely
satisfying.
Sounds, visuals, mmm.
But now we've got like grenade, nova projectiles with totems firing at multiple.
Yeah, you can't get pretty extreme.
You can't get pretty extreme.
You gotta put your sunnies on, man.
It's funny when I'm streaming, you can see the face.
It's like, I want to be a toxic grenade.
It's one of those things where, like, you know,
over time, ideally, we're able to just improve the situation
with regard to effects.
And we do have some systems for limiting this kind of stuff,
like to prevent certain particles from spawning.
I was wondering if like some sort of dynamic calling effect.
We do have stuff like that, but it's one of those things
that it's easy for it to get left till the end,
and they're not done because the effects are obviously
optimizing for what looks good.
And whenever your, like, you know, if a fixer has come to me, like, hey, what do you think
of the skill?
It's not like, I tend not to be like, okay, now let's see it when there's like a bajillion
of them, you know, like, and like, that's one of those steps we should probably take
at some point.
It's like, like, we do have systems for it.
It's just, you know, a matter of like spending time working on it.
And it's the kind of thing that just over time.
It honestly is a time problem.
Yeah.
Like we do, it gets tested internally.
It does get reported.
There are issues, tasks that are made and they say, help my frame rate, help my eyes.
It does say that, and 100%, and then it's like,
I could optimize this, I don't quite know how,
and a few people have to collaborate to do it.
We do fix the worst cases,
like when they're really, really bad at doing it.
Before you see them, ideally.
But there can also just be cases where it's like,
we didn't realize that a build would be created
that could get to this level of insane.
Well, yeah, when the expensive grenades were added,
there wasn't a way to do all this stuff.
Exactly, so then,
And these things, sometimes it is the balance
that's the problem, right?
And then so that can be a bit tricky when it's like,
how do you know is this an engine task,
an art task, is it a balance task?
And that's the funny thing about it as well,
because all of those sorts of issues
have to actually go to a game designer.
Because they're the ones who can decide
is this even acceptable in the first place.
And that's like a sort of a very tricky thing.
So like we did do some nerfs in O4,
or I believe to some of the grenade spam stuff
that you could do.
But then I believe there were some other mechanics added
that come back again.
So you know.
Yeah, it was like slight nerf.
and then way more.
It happens.
It happens.
But you know, yeah, we'll resolve them over time.
We will get it better.
And just to reiterate, because in the past,
we'd asked about the idea of transparency sliders
or partners.
I'm not a fan, honestly.
I think it does fundamentally ruin something there
that I'm not, you know.
So that's like the...
I'm trying to fix it so that you don't have to think about it.
That's not a setting you need to do.
Yeah, for sure, always. Every time. Hard route, that's the best route.
The last one I have, maybe, unless there's some extra channels in there, is you guys are looking to get full Steam Deck verified sometimes?
Yes, yes, I was talking about that earlier. So, yes, so this is a...
There were a few things around the UI that made it so we couldn't get Steam Deck verified, like UI says.
So we've actually added a lot of options for UI scaling in different areas now.
in areas now.
So pretty much everything, like hovers versus, like,
all these different areas are now scalable,
all the different parts of the UI.
And that means we can now have defaults for Steam Deck,
we can now go, OK, hey, Valve, can you
Steam Deck verify us please and get all that stuff.
And we're testing on the Steam Deck now,
like we have Steam Deck stuff internally.
It's a thing we're taking seriously,
because we know there are a lot of people who
want to be able to play on the deck.
So yeah, it is now a thing that we're doing.
I really want to make sure that by launch especially,
but it's like a perfect experience.
Are there still some performance issues
of the end game on Steam Deck?
Like it's still not quite there that we need to work on.
But during campaign, it's fine.
I'm not going to play grenades on Steam because of that.
So there's like a few things there we still need to do
to improve.
But yeah, in terms of like the experience of the main
experience and all that stuff, it's way better now.
Great news.
Excellent.
I keep saying in the chat, I'm just going to ask you.
But people are asking, like, tell me about marriage blood.
But like quite clearly.
We're not going to tell you what magical art you have to find magical art.
You have to find magical art.
I mean, you did drop some extra hints there, kind of subtly, but maybe you can re-watch
the Q&A and kind of like find out what those hints are.
I know how to tease a teaser unique.
I mean, this is like, outside of a headhunter or something, this is like one of the most
like chase long awaited items.
And the tricky thing is making sure that people actually like it as well because we
don't want to disappoint people.
Yes.
That would be that.
It's going to be insane though.
It's going to be insane.
Yeah, it is.
I'm filming the trail and you make sure that mage blood on the screen for a second
You put that text there
I don't care do it
Excellent, there's one few to look forward to
Before we jump into the end game, let's do a little bit about campaign leveling
So it's a pretty nice signposting tricks addition there. Yeah. Yeah in one case completely literally signpost
It's one of those things that I, like, so we do understand that if you're a
repeated playthrough like you need to be that it can be efficient and yeah we
were thinking about like what is what is better in POE 1 than POE 2 in this
respect and we're thinking there's just like people just learn a lot of tricks
but then we're like are there even enough tricks in POE 2 to learn like you
know like we want more mastery things like we want it so that if you're paying
attention you actually can work out hey like this thing leads to that thing
lots of stuff. So yeah we are just going nuts on it, right? Because it won't actually
affect the time it takes for a first time player to play through because they're going to
know what it means. And that's the secret, isn't it? Yeah, that's the secret source there.
In some cases we have shortens and stuff like for example at the end of Act 2 there was like
two areas of the cart, you know, the far end cart. Now there's just one, you know, the one
that there is like very slightly longer than one was before so like it doesn't feel like a
complete compromise of that but like it is definitely shorter than what it was and it's just
stuff like that all through the game and there's some counterintuitive things
that we've done like in some cases you want to take an area and that was linear
and actually make it non-linear but with wayfinding right? Because if something's
linear there's literally only one path to go like entirely depends on what your
clear speed is to get from one end to the other whereas if something is not open
but then you've got things that point you where to go it's like if you know what
those are and I can get through it faster but if you don't know what they are it's
still like an area that's going to take a little bit of getting a little bit of
So things like that can actually be something counter-intuitive that you can do.
Because a lot of people just assume that if you want to make it shorter the way to do
it is just make it a little smaller.
But that would compromise the first time experience.
So it really is about how can I make it take you less time while also not making it take
you less time if you were playing for the first time.
Even the jungle ruins now, the big old quadrilla is now in the direct center of the game.
level. So that means you can always find them easily, right? You can find them, you know,
you know, northeast, southwest, you just know it. And then obviously you can find the camp
here's another way, you know, there's always different way. And many of you find the venom
crypts, you escape out the other area. There's an extra exit in the venom crypts that comes
out directly next to the exit of the area. So if you want to go down through the venom
crypts, it's actually can be a faster way to find the exit zone. There's like a shortcut
through there. So here's an interesting one. All the snakes, this is one people probably
one notice I'm gonna tell you all the snakes will go towards with the venom
crypts are all the snake all the snake yeah they're going home they go towards
it so if you see a snake that's the way that the baby is like everywhere just
little little things like that it's like cute a little bit a little bit of stuff
with monsters as well like there's and the venom crypts again towards the
boss room where there was the shaman making the whole venom potion now you
get more of the humanoid monsters of that tribe.
So that was an area, it was really hard to find that final place that it was.
But now that you know, like, oh, if I find those type of monsters, that means I'm getting
near the place where the, you know, we're at time.
We've done that in a few places.
So like, yeah, a density of monsters increasing, or more so, the other types of monsters phasing
out as well.
So an introduction of an abnormal monster, or one that's not natural to the rest of
the area.
Or, in some cases, one that's natural to the area, and then you get to a section where
now only those monsters are there and all the other monsters aren't spawning. For example,
the snakes in Keath, right, around Kabbalah's section, the boss there is only Serpent Clan.
You don't get the other monsters. So if you want to find Kabbalah, then you run in the direction
where there's more snakes. Yeah. You know, like that kind of stuff. So yeah, I don't know if we'll
get it all perfect in one go, but we're going to be doing a lot more just that sort of stuff all
through the campaign. Definitely got more to do and we're just going to keep going. Excellent.
Also, what we're finding is it's just adding more flavour to the areas. It's adding more identity.
It's adding more interesting things. It's just an upgrade overall on every axis.
I had a little bit of hands-on time and I was especially a fan of the Ogham Village change
because now you actually just come in and there's an obvious cobblestone road there
and if you follow that you get to the blacksmith.
Oh, it was so annoying to find before.
And it actually makes the zone feel a lot better as an actual centre.
Now it actually feels like a village, like a town. It doesn't feel like just a random maze like it was before.
before. So it actually did more of a believable realistic area. So good stuff. On the leveling
topic, something that comes up somewhat often is this idea of like, so you've got new skills
getting unlocked all the way through into like late act four. And I always thought of
this personally as like a good thing, right? Like even a nice steady progression of new
stuff to play with. But recently I saw some interesting people actually don't like this.
That's the idea that you sometimes spend hours leveling a build that just isn't your build
Like you play all the way through dark 4 or on some other build that you don't want to play until you get until you get
You know you're top to your ice skill there
So I have to imagine you're like a fan of having that like long tail of progression
But so there are other reasons why you kind of like want this spread and how do you feel the idea of compressing
I don't know maybe the main skills down to the first 30 levels or something. That's actually not something that I've had
Come up before in terms of being a problem like that. So that's very interesting to think of that
I've seen I prefer the the slow unlocks personally. That's my style. I prefer
It's certainly for the first time player you wanted to be that you kind of get that like yeah
It feels like your build is still progressing as you get through the game
So but it is interesting of course to think if you want to just speed through and you want to play a certain build
Even even unlike the
experimentation level so like you know when you respect to a character at end game
It's like just trash. It feels bad generally to do that because you didn't have that evolution of that
And I feel like it maybe if you're swapping over at level 52
To your main to your actual build then that's gonna get the skill
And you don't actually really have much of that progression evolution of your build to the test
It might be more of a matter of just swapping where some skills are given
I think it also can also be that we're not necessarily
It's not necessarily clear when we're creating the build like what some skills might end up being ones that are feel like main skills in that way
Yeah, I mean, so it's probably likely that the that that's
like one of the issues there is just like moving around moving things around where they start.
Yeah, it's just that we don't want something that's like too flashy to be something you get
really really early because otherwise it feels kind of strange in the power curve like you
didn't feel like that level of progression of like the skills get more effect so.
Imagine like it's pretty okay to have things like those glory skills and stuff like that
right down the bottom there.
Well certainly, I mean the last row tends to always be the sort of ultimate type things that
like in theory those are not things that your entire build is like made around so it's more
Yeah, the examples that I get see brought up usually aren't that sort of thing
But rather like I was that I still the shoots protectors everywhere that round the spinning one
Is it winter or is that I have winter I went to that's the one
Yeah, I've been to this an example I see get right because like it is on that last year and it is kind of yeah
It's not really like I actually see this one. Yeah, that one honestly might be able to come down
All right, so that's something to do
There's some tweaks to the levels. There's some reorganization. There's
I mean, I could see a thing where also once we have a full campaign in place, maybe there's
a point where we're like, okay, you want every skill by, and then we come up with a new point.
But I honestly suspect the rear-wrenching is the solution there.
Nice.
That's good to hear.
I think that would be good for these people.
I feel like they don't get to play their builds for a long time there.
Carrying on with the topic of skills, builds, and balance, we have the two new ascendancies,
which you seem to be getting a little bit like with the classes,
they're following a similar trajectory
of getting a little bit more,
a little bit extra, a little bit more high effort each time.
So, yeah.
As we kind of learned from PE1, like I've seen it,
and, you know, we have changed some,
but as soon as the classes are kind of like just forever things,
you know, we obviously have a whole alternate classes league
and so by that, which is cool.
But, you know, we don't,
on rare occasions would be,
I was gonna change the balance,
kind of what the skills are, but who those characters are and their identity are that most of them are going to remain fixed for like a long time.
You'll get rebalanced as you'll get changes like obviously, right? We've done that a lot, but like, you know, I wouldn't expect the dead eye to despawn anytime soon as an identity.
If ever, just by the way, just...
And so like they just need to be high effort and they need to be, you know, something that we are...
We are like something that comes up a lot and you'll notice it in these two like now
for every single beast boss, the spirit walker, yes, we have to make a tamed version.
This is all I keep saying like what every modern gloves, which we just added a bunch
of alloys and this you know, it goes on and on.
We have to do some maintenance.
But the thing is, as I said, these are these are forever classes.
These are identities.
These are very important.
And so it's like always very worth it.
So now it's a bit of a rant here about those beasts, because it's come up a bit recently
where I'm like, what is a beast?
Is that are the new pinnacle bosses beasts?
And I'm just like, oh no, what's going on here?
What are we doing?
Like, you know, like, something, you know, there was a shape-shifted one who tends to
do a werewolf, a beast when they're in shape-shift form.
Oh, exactly.
So, you know, well, you're going to tame the count, is that what you're telling me?
I mean, second phrase, yeah, maybe, or maybe because it's cool, you know, or maybe specifically,
no, I don't know, I don't know where we're getting with that, the point is it gets a
little bit complicated, it's like, where does it end, and you know, how much you're talking
about, you know, visibility, how much of your screen are you willing to have been to get
like, a critical boss, and thing is like changing the scale is not actually as trivial, like,
Yeah, I was like, I thought you were making smaller, but then I saw like the giant bird boss. I'm like, nope, that looks like a normal sized boss right there.
I think that's fun. But, you know, we did limit it to one. We did internally have people running one with five for a while, and it wasn't a little bit off, a little bit out of control.
But, um, yeah, it's, it's, um, it's, it's quite fun, but I'm so excited to just sit, how, how honestly, it's such a weird thing to say.
I'm so excited for how much work we've created for ourselves in the future.
I'm very glad to hear that. That was good. That was the right mindset, I think. Excellent.
So with the team beast thing, like that, you, when you get your first to see that team beast gem
is actually a high level though, like, is this something you, uh, yeah, we do, we do everything
that we're going to do about that. Um, yeah, there's a solution I believe that we have for that one.
Yeah, right. But, uh, yeah. And we're just being an idea of being a big single beast. And a lot of
the time, like, I don't know that bosses compared to say like aura beasts don't have a bunch of
utility stuff on them. Like that one sure will be some, but not as much exactly. So I
imagine you want these to actually be things that kill stuff. So how do you make the big
single minion work?
We have like, honestly I think it might have even been, we've tripled the damage I think
of Team to Beasts, just FYI. We're doing a few changes around that because we want
like damaging companion builds outside of obviously just Wolf Zerg to be more of a thing. So you
we're doing a bunch of changes to, for example, we're trying to give them a longer revive time.
The idea behind the revive time on that, which I know sounds bad, but I'll just let me explain the
thing is that with obviously an undead build, you generally have a swarm. And so the revive
time is a little bit lower and the assumption that things are dying and reviving more frequently.
Companions should be a bit more, you obviously have one or two and you have a lot fewer of them,
them, they're more significant. So they should take longer to revive. And so there's like
uninvested aura companions. And when they die, you should feel that more like you should be
having to invest into them to keep it alive. On the other end, we're making them do away
more damage. So they're more of just an aura bot. And then for the bosses in particular,
what we've done is gone through and for every single one of them have gone, okay, are you
good at stunning? Are you good at freezing? Do you maybe they have, you know, the primed
for stunting, maybe they have, we're trying to just really give each of them something
that can complement their themes a bit.
So it isn't just a question of just taking the bosses, it isn't just like, all of them
are actually like, designed, you know, and to know what they can be.
Crazy, so it's even more of a...
Yeah, it's more like taking a creature that's got existing animations and be like, now we
have to complete the AI and everything.
Adding about two new passives for companions, a few bunch of uniques, some of, I think we
that showed one or two today.
But yeah, playing into that arc type a lot more, for sure.
It's definitely way more fun to play.
Lately, it's running around with your mini zoo.
It's kind of fun.
Awesome.
On the martial artist, the fists of stone
that converts glass, you showed that working with a rare,
and that was quite spicy.
A lot of Unix don't have modifiers that are
like actual regular modifiers.
So does this work on Unix?
Certainly does.
crazy. Why not? Why not? Every, every unique glove from now on, you're going to find some
way to convert them. Does it affect the, does it affect the mods that go on the runes
that are in the, they're in the item? I don't think it affects socketed mods, no. It's
going to affect every explicit mod. We talked recently about vile corruptions and whether
or not, it does or doesn't, so TBD. But yes, it does affect Unix. It is intended to affect
all Essence mods and all of that, but honestly, you will go as far as we can with these until
we try not to touch them.
Yeah, because you've got the Rune modifiers that come, that have their unique modifier
pulls now, so I guess you're doing those too.
I was just trying to think of some Unix to talk about, but I can't remember a whole
lot of specifics.
Yeah.
It's one of those find out things.
I guess so.
I'm wondering what happens if there's like a pair of unique gloves like Grants of Skill
or something like that.
What are you going to do with that?
We generally don't touch the skills.
I can actually stay there so you can still use it.
Yeah, exactly.
That's interesting in its own way.
Or, like, you know, we're not, having to remake a skill for this is a little bit in the, okay,
I'm talking about creating work for ourselves.
That's like not, that's not a bang for buck win.
So like making up a new skill or a skill for this,
and that's a tier and that's a line
that would have to be very special to cross.
So maybe in the future, but not right now.
Yeah, right on.
So normally patchments would be right out of this Q&A,
but thankfully we're not holding it hostage today
as that's coming out a week before launch.
Yeah, so it still needs to be that it's a week before launch
because there's still too much
that will change between now and the future.
Yeah, usually going right up until then.
And if you've got them now, they'd be inaccurate
and then you get disappointed or even happier who knows,
but too much would just change and, you know,
but maybe we can speak like on the bigger picture intentions,
which to some extent we've already been doing a bit,
but like our classic another minutes from previous,
you know, we've done some bust on renovation
and it's a new mechanics here and there.
Is there any additional love for those on the card
in some way or defenses in general discussion?
Defeater, so we looked at a couple of things
that the first thing we identified,
because I'm all about like just reviewing
that the fundamentals is we're like, okay,
We at some point in one of our many millions of spreadsheets,
we're like, okay, here's obviously you,
you have an expected amount of how much defense does someone
have at a certain point in the game.
Now that we have obviously enough players,
enough statistics, we went and then had a look
and we were like, oh, people are way low,
especially at say between interlude, act four, mid game,
early end game, people's defenses are significantly lower
than what we had deemed as what we wanted them to have.
And you can look at that in a few ways.
You can say, well, okay, people aren't upgrading gear
as much as we wanted or expected.
People aren't upgrading,
I wouldn't say want expectors, definitely more of the thing.
People aren't maybe taking as many defensive passives
as we had expected, et cetera.
And there are obviously many reasons for that.
Some of them are garbage.
But at the end of the day, right,
we balance the game for people to have this much
of a defense way, this much EHP, and they don't have it.
So let's get them to have that amount as our play.
So instead of obviously changing,
you can either change monster damage at that point
or we can give people more defenses.
So we are generally buffing all of the base types
on all of the defensive gear on all armor and evasion,
I should say, up to the end of end game
because like peak characters, there's a lot.
You can get a lot.
So like we've taken some of the outliers
are the things that make the end-to-end game characters have a lot of those defenses and
kind of brought them a bit down so it shouldn't be worse it should just be the same but relative
to Reyes they could be a little bit worse. Yeah, this is mostly from Act 3 onwards, right?
Pretty much, yeah. So more armor and evasion is the start point. You know we've done a whole
bunch of other stuff like I mean Energy Shield has this thing where it has too much recovery
available like too easily for recharge and like we've done a few things a lot of them
outliers not necessarily all of them so we've done a bit of changes to a whole bunch of stuff
but in particular we're also doing like like the deflection equation is honestly kind of not good
enough it's too rewarding for little invest very little investment and then there's like a kind of
weird thing in the formula that I was trying to figure out in the other day but and then
for investing beyond that it's kind of like well not worth it. The passive tree nodes are too weak
it's there's all these clusters there no one cares about well mostly. There's other things like the
armor applies to elemental like there's a bit of it generally it isn't weak but you know I wanted
five clusters for it I wanted you to be able to actually invest in it if you were in different
parts of the tree. Currently there's only like three nodes that granted in the strength section
it's not not enough and then all the way through to like things like the hybrid section of the
passive tree where normally you have armor on the strength section over here you have evasion in
the deck section and then combined you should have both of them on the nodes and you do armor and
evasion and then you have a big rant here then you have things where like okay all the armor and
evasion notables are like kind of hyper conditional some of them don't even grant armor and evasion
And so there's just like a ton of work across the board.
And then those secondary defenses don't generally
have hybrid nodes, which they should.
So if you're now playing hybrid, you
have to double invest in the secondary axes.
And so there's just all kinds of just like, honestly, what
I would establish is fundamental problems going on here
that just need to all be addressed.
And when I look at all of them, I'm like, well,
they all are just buffing it.
So that's great.
Awesome.
except for like a little bit of energy shield problems, which, and I mean, you know,
other hybrid going more northeast, like the,
we looked at all of a pure evasion versus pure evasion with a thousand energy
shield or more kind of thing as in a ghost dance user.
And like the differential in power of using ghost dance with one KES is just
out of control. And I know everyone will be like, oh, I'll make everything like
that. That's how this works. We're not going to do that.
So like Ghost Dance needs some changes, but then also playing hybrid without that needs to be brought up
So yeah, there's a whole bunch and then also I mean the highest death rate just to be clear and by 300%
Is Armouries?
Which I don't have an exact plan for yet, but that needs a lot of love doesn't get piece of the puzzle
Yes, and it's obvious right you look at it and you're like obviously but it's
I don't exactly know what the solution is yet, but we need to do some more love there
But like generally speaking yes where there's a couple of OP outliers
And but everything should be getting raised up for average player
Especially mid game early in game without having to and you don't have to the only way to play it shouldn't be this one very specific
No to take this very specific skill use this very specific
No to use this very specific unique and just trying to make it just more broadly like investing in defenses no matter what feels good
And we're not there yet. So anyway giga rant covered a lot of things there
But anyway, I saw a few questions about it in chat. It does surprise me a little bit. I thought
there was a more of a consensus that life on the tree was unpopular as it was kind of in part of
things I won and it was always deemed as like a tax like, oh, I guess I got to pay my life,
no tax. But I'm curious how you obviously removed life from the tree in P2 effectively.
What led to that decision and how do you feel about it now? Kind of like 0.5 of the way in?
Again, I personally prefer it not being there. I think it makes the decisions of what I'm
taking on the tree more interesting and where I'm pathing.
To not have it.
I think, yeah, to not have it, I think that that will increase over time. I think I'm
less penalized for hunkering down in a certain section as opposed to having to get the minimum
life percentage threshold by going to certain spots. I think it allows you to be a bit more
free, but I also understand why people are asking for it, especially like I see a lot
of people comparing life and energy shield where it's obvious right they're both your
life pool, but energy shield should be compared to armor and evasion and obviously they're
asymmetric so I can understand how that can't be so trivial. And I can also understand that
when people are dying to a thing and they don't necessarily understand why, the answer
as I need more life. And I get it. But that can not, that it can be that the problem and
the solution don't have to be the same thing. Like, there's an obvious path to the solution
when you're dying, you're running out of life. But it can be that there are other ways to
solve that problem. And when I look at the defenses and just identify fundamental problems,
how much of that problem will be solved by just fixing those fundamentals.
I'm gonna make those juicy to take and actually...
Yeah, so I'm not ready just yet to like, you know, but that it doesn't say the things like these are off the cards for sure
Yeah, I know you've been...
But if the defences are bad, then we should fix the defences first and then see if it's good enough.
Really, well, I'm just gonna follow the trail of bad.
Until and then and then we'll see.
The reason why we don't want to do it is really we just want to make it so that okay
If you don't know to pick life, then you're just gonna suck and this is a thing that Pee Wee One has, right?
If you don't know that you have to take life, if you don't know that you just die and we want to try and remove
Like noob traps, right of just things where like okay, like the things you just have to know
And so ideally we can get to a situation. We just don't you know
I think it's not even rather solve it with the more immediate options. So
For example, if you're dying a lot and you're like I need more life
Here's the cluster 12 passive points away. It's like, okay
So I've got to level 12 more times to now feel a bit stronger.
I would rather just immediately go, if you need more life,
then the way to get that should be itemization solutions,
like you should be doing it on your gear.
Because, and that should be something
that is readily available via things like essences
or various crafting systems.
Like, I mean, Runic Ward kind of is that in a way.
It's like, I'm dying.
Okay, let's add some Runic Ward.
Now I'm probably gonna die less.
So I understand it's more of like a campaign,
newer player problem kind of thing,
but I don't like, you know, I need to be tankier now
because I'm dying, I can't overcome this boss.
It's all good, I'll be able to solve it two days from now
if they're playing only like an hour or two a day.
So I also just want to make sure there are immediate solutions
to these things as well via itemization.
So it might be even that we need to look at that more.
I mean, okay, I am looking at that more recently.
I was like, damn, a lot of these runes
that are ongoing your armor,
just because we're doing the martial artist and you get this rune sauce I was like okay in game
there's some chase stuff but these ones in the campaign are just kind of sad like there's some sad
like obviously resistances are fine I got no issue with that but some of these other armor runes I'm
like well that's just this okay I put that in and now I'm like just I'm what 2% tank here like
what am I even getting out of this like I want to make sure that so I was looking recently and I'm
like we just need to buff all these armor runes like those were meant to be problem solvers for
holds in your core stats throughout the campaign.
So even just things like that, where it's like, yeah,
you should be able to just get a lot more of that
just by using Defend to armor slot runes,
as well as adding new ones,
because honestly there's kind of a thin selection
and it just ends up being like resistances in most slots
until end game again.
Even still sometimes just resistances there as well,
depends, but yeah, obviously we're adding 160,
so that's a big difference,
but I wanted to make sure there's a lot more in the campaign
and the campaign ones are buffed as well,
So, I don't know, there's heaps going on here.
It's like hard to reel nail down to a single problem
and a single solution.
And I know there's like the easy way out
and with Sprite, we don't like necessarily the easy way out.
And I don't wanna have to make these kind of compromising
decisions that I feel like have made a very good upgrade
in many ways when we have just fundamental problems
left, right and center still.
So we'll just be fixing them and that's part of again
this lead up like we can't, we need to address
a lot of these fundamental balance concerns by release, right?
This is why we're wanting to do these intermediary patches
and here on out, just like make everything better,
plug all the holes, get everything good.
Cause it's really hard to do that when you're adding
a hundred new systems and crafting systems at the same time.
You're like, okay, we're making holes faster
than we can plug them.
And it's obviously not that dialing most of the time.
It's like pretty, things are pretty comfortable,
but it's obviously my job to make these good.
And so I look at them with a lot more self-criticism.
But at the end of the day,
we will get it pretty damn good, if not, perfect.
That was just never perfect.
We were talking about yesterday,
how do you make the passive skill tree good for launch?
Like how do you get that?
What are the problems with it?
Cause it's something that like,
you're adding more and more cool stuff to it.
But at the same time,
there's still people that just kind of like don't like
the passive tree for some reason.
It's often a lot of different reasons, like the size of it, the travel nodes, the downside
nodes.
It takes a lot of massaging to get the tree into a good kind of state, and it's a really,
really tricky detail work as well, like the difference of just like one node here, one
connection there can make a huge difference to quite a lot of stuff.
Yeah, it's just...
I'll identify, as I said, issues with the defences, there's issues with lack of interesting
mechanics and some, and some of those is just due to the absence of classes, but you'll notice the
parts of the tree that have two classes for the start point have just generally a lot more going
on because there's a lot more stat design mechanics design and stuff that's happened. So you know
that's the thing that expands and as you get more ascendancy classes, as I said we're doing the
spirit walk, all of a sudden companion stuff's going to be a lot more fleshed out. So this is
It's the stuff that's just gonna happen over time anyway,
but we're gonna do a big push to try and fill in
all those gaps, fix the, there's obviously just like
a bunch of just terrible clusters.
As I said, there's notable armor and evasion notables
with no armor and evasion and like, yeah,
they have a stat, but why can't they,
they have like a immune to ailment thing,
but why can't they also have armor and evasion?
Why must it be only one or the other?
And there's all kinds of just things like that
kind of everywhere and it does take time,
it does take a lot of like really fine,
Work of going through and tweaking everything and iteration after iteration after iteration
But it'll be alright. I think some of us feel a little awesome what you need to do the passive tree
But we will correct in that conversation with you you seem pretty confident that you know exactly what you need to do
Like I'll give me a day. I'll fix this section
I mean, I did literally
Give me a day and I'll fix one of the slices and
It won't be perfectly fixed because again, it's but it'll be you know twice three times four times as good
But like getting a day is not exactly entirely trivial, but that's all right.
I am confident we'll get there though. I have no doubt in my mind that I see a road to success there.
So it's just a matter of getting there. And yeah, it takes time and I don't want to make things worse in the meanwhile as well.
So obviously knee-jerk, reactioning, everything in, and sometimes stuff you can't come back from or makes it very hard to come back from can be very dangerous.
but I would say that like if there's any criticisms after 1.0, which there always will be, like of
course you can't, there's always going to be some finer than others, some broader, you know,
it should be significantly less core issues by that point of hopefully the majority of all of
them are addressed. So yeah, hopefully we do a couple of a couple of cool eventy league economy
resets between here and for release, you know, we'll do some substantial
passive tree updates as well at the same time. That way we can get a lot of feedback
and testing, right? I'm not just gonna take a shot in the dark without people
being able to get their hands on it. So, which is similar to why we're doing, you
know, doing the in-game now is very important because you need a lot of
testing and a lot of eyes on that for quality, for just making sure people
really enjoy the end game after 10,000 hours, not just you know how it looks at the start.
There's a lot of time there and obviously the player base is capable of testing this at a
significantly faster rate than we are and so that's the joy of being able to try and get
all the stun before the release and have it be as flawless as possible. Excellent. On the build meta
side of things, one of the ones that came up was fire and ignite builds but kind of like
damage over time builds in general. In particular, it's kind of like absence of the pure damage over
time build. Like it seems to be always better to scale the hit damage and treat things like
ignite as an add-on. And there seems to be various other problems with ignite as well in terms of
like scaling. It seems to be always correct to go like stacking or in some cases people are saying
like, well the best way to play ignite is chaos damage. So how do you guys feel about kind of
excited, that sort of thing? Those keystones are always going to have that level of like one way
as quantifiably better than the other in an interesting way. But yeah, this obviously is not
fully fleshed out or fully right like you can tell while playing this and we do
want to do more. It was number three on my I had my like top five here's the
things I want to fix so like defenses was number one. Number two I had I think I
actually had some stuff to do with some minion stuff which I mean we've done a
lot of itemization for but I didn't get to do as much as I wanted. You know we had
the Ascendancy classes in there, had Chronomancer in there and I had you know
There was like some gym-ling stuff in there and we had chaos hits and you know by correlation
Archon we had ignite like these are all in my I was saying top five isn't our top 10
list I guess.
That's more than five.
But you know like they're all up there and so as soon as we actually get to Hall Ass
and start fixing all the balance, more than we you know have been able to with this patch
given that it's kind of the same resources trying to ensure endgame is good and trying
like there's a quite a bit of overlap there and with all the crafting systems in the league like
the same resources that are going to be looking at all of these so as soon as we can get to you know
as soon as we're like back focused working on the campaign with our core like content monsters
pipeline etc and you know thus doing less systems we can have those guys come in and just like
start fixing all of these balance systems. Is it um is the intention to get to uh there being
builds that are like the pure.feel like where you don't really have the up front hit damage
so you do find bars and it's just pure ignite that sort of thing.
Oh like the whole spreading wildfire ignite fantasy 100% needs to be a thing where you're
just doing like you know there is the thing where like when you take away hits things
can lose a lot of satisfaction but there is a different kind of satisfaction of just watching
the world burn around you or decay around you so you know you trade one for another
and different players have their different preferences but a hundred percent that is something that we want to support
We had a bunch of keystones in mind for enabling it. We had different supports that we thought we could try to enable it
It's just a matter of being time to execute it
So I would be very very surprised if it doesn't come in one of these interim patches between here and full release though for
At least some degree with that wanting to get things right for 1.0. There's
I'm feeling that like 1.0 is like where you get to establish like here's the baseline of what the game is supposed to look like
and that's what you're saying within game indeed. So I kind of wonder about like how you feel about
a few things and how close they are to where you want them to be for that for that games
foundation thing. One of them is the pace of combat, especially in in-game maps across the
build spectrum. So like from the from the lore and build to the really high end builds that are
just currently like 100 meters to be three. It's a really tricky question because like people get
such different experiences here. I mean like there are definitely a few like part of the issue
that we have, is that people often judge things by watching streamers who are often playing
something that's completely cracked and out of control, and so people don't get an understanding
of what the average player is actually experiencing.
And it can even affect our designers in some ways, because when you look at people and they're
just completely trivializing things, it's easy to forget that the average player is actually
taking it longer.
And when I say average, the true average is way worse than you might expect, and it's
the number of minutes that it takes them to kill bosses and so on.
It's easy to look at it and be like, oh yeah, everyone's killing bosses in five seconds,
but really there's a lot of people out there who aren't.
So do you feel pretty good about the lower end of things, but less good about the higher
end of things?
Well, I mean, there's things that need to come up as well, for sure, but it's more
just that like, okay, there's some things that are a bit out of control on the top end,
like some of the stuff going on with triggering and it's a bit out of control.
And so there's stuff like that.
And like, as I said, I think a lot of people will judge the pace of combat from things
like that.
Um, so, you know, yeah, but I guess that's the ultimate comes down to if you have a
mage blood or equivalent, you should be cracked.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
So I think I've seen before that the ideal situation is the first time you fight a pinnacle,
it should be a pretty damn tough fight, but then after that, you're getting more stuff.
You like the post pinnacle content of getting uniques and like pretty like leads to like
craziness and then you feel like a complete God.
But you do want to get to that point.
It's just that, you know, like the, there's just, there's just a,
by the way, every, I've, I haven't made a change in that regard, by the way,
which I know will be nice for some people, every boss where you've had to farm for
the fragment and go through 60 maps and you've finally got there,
does now have infinite attempts.
Once you've earned it, unless you decide to log out and,
I still, we did that in 040.
We did it for some things in 040, yeah.
It's just, it is a, it is, it is across the board now.
If you've done all that, you can try, well, you can try it, you can die 150 times and
keep going, but of course if you just like let your instance time out and die, then it's
a different story.
So if you go to bed, you know, sorry, my bad.
Go to bed to be dead and failed.
I would still love to be able to do that.
So I said if you log back in like the next day, you're still there and can't be able
to do it, but that's a slight technology gap there for the map right now.
I know that's just it's the whole um the reason I bring that up is because that whole like oh
I don't want to fight the pinnacle yet because I might fail it you know and some worse or fight
being one of the boss and then what that really leads to is that you only do it once you've ever
prepared yeah so like first yeah that's that's the reason I was kind of lame yeah it's not what
you want you want to go in early and have a have a not feel bad all the first time no yeah for sure
Yeah, exactly.
But I guess what I'm trying to say there is that I think that like, that the pace of combat
is correct in many instances, it's just that there are some things that then lead to that
being bananas.
But then you still want it to be bananas after the point where you've done that.
So, you know, like, yeah, it's just a question of the power progression needs to be right.
It sounds like anything.
You just want a wide spectrum and just tuning some certain points of that.
There's crazy things you see where even when you go and ask a lot of our designers, you're
like, how long do you reckon the average boss fight takes and you specify a boss?
How long do you reckon the average, I don't know what's a random boss, that killing the
forsaken sun takes, let's say?
And like honestly, I would say my experience at this point with understanding how to gear
my character and build my build at that point, you know, sometimes it's honestly eight seconds
and sometimes it's 20 seconds and it's like, is it ever really more than that?
And then you get that with all of our, obviously a lot of our designers play and lots of people
And then you go and actually look at the stats and you're like, oh, it's a hundred and nineteen seconds average
That's two minutes. That's what we intended for it to be
Yeah, and so the average across every and that's the average
Which means there's some people taking four minutes and whatnot and so it's actually like oh that
Okay, the numbers are not as bad and yeah, it turns out of you know what you're doing and you are good and you play a lot
You you kind of kill things quickly
I know a lot of people might be like oh you should have that be flatter because what the hell an eight second fight's not
not necessarily fun, right, you know, engaging with any mechanics and stuff. And some people
were like, no, if you're that powerful, you're that powerful, and if you know what you're
doing, have it be that fast, right? So it's a bit of a thing where some people want the
way less variance between character power, but also then that feeds into the end game
of, yeah, you want characters that feel like gods among gods, among gods, right? Like,
you can do that, but it is again, just comes back to who, you know, do you have item X,
item at Y, item Z of different kinds. So when things are too cheaply OP, as in almost
free, and I don't mean economically, I mean like as in you just your general time to earn,
generally that has to come down. And I think that really is the message overall of like,
you know, if it costs you a lot, then yeah, you can be a god. If it didn't cost you very
much, maybe that's going to be something that we wouldn't consider nothing. So leech.
And us triggering the state of recovery, especially because like really fast life recovery tends
to lead to situations during combat.
The only thing that matters is the thing that causes instantly instantly.
So how do you feel about recovery overall?
So we're definitely unhappy with leech and this is one of those things where we attempted
to simplify it from Peewee 1 because Peewee 1 had the most complicated leech thing through
the universe.
And so we're like we're going to simplify it.
We're going to try and make it simple.
But unfortunately, the simpler thing has not led to a good result.
And so now leech is, yeah, like it's a bit of a problem.
So we are changing address at least.
Are we fine with telling people how it works now?
Like, we could go into it.
Yeah, that's fine.
Yeah, right.
So basically, one of the key things
that we're first changing is we're
going to a single source method of doing leech.
It means there's only one leech buff active.
So whatever is the biggest hit that you did,
like, you're only leeching from one place.
And that obviously then means that we
need to change all the balance of leech
and everything like that to make that work.
But it does mean that there's a difference between,
Like there's more of a thing with like life gain on hit versus leech is like a thing between like fast-hitting and slow-hitting builds like higher
higher hits are gonna lead to
To more leech for the other thing we're changing as well
And this is just kind of to like to retain the idea like so one thing we liked about what we had was that when you get more leech
Percent you do get more leech, but the thing is that the way that damage scales like it's just gets completely cracked at some point
And like you know gives you insane amounts so effectively what we want to do is add a
a a cap to the amount of damage that leech will consider when calculating how much leech you get
so i don't know what that number will be like i don't even know what order of main
suit it is right but let's just say that it's like a million or something right like i don't
know maybe it's less than that it's hard to see what the number is as well there is a there's a
goal of the kind of expected rate per second right so effectively there'll be a number that's
like a million or or the hundred thousand or some number right that'll be like okay like
after when we go to calculate leech we're first capping your damage to that
but yeah you're still doing the damage by the way but like you know just for the leech calculation
and then we apply your leech percent to that and what that will mean is is that it's always the
case that getting more leech will give you more recovery right like if you double the percent
on your character you get double the recovery um so there's no like capping thing like that but it
just means that yeah yeah exactly but then at some point like getting more damage isn't increasing
your recovery right and that's like the key thing that we need to um that's what you're trying to
So and I mean the intention really is to sort of get it so that you know like a typical character who's like investing in
Leecher actually cares
It's like they're they're able to recover their entire life over like three seconds or something like that
You know that's the kind of thing right and yeah
You could go further than that with like even more investment
But it's probably like not with welcome into other stuff and then like other characters while investing are gonna get less than that
That sort of thing but like you do actually have to you know
We don't want it to be so ridiculous that that's the only like source of recovery you would ever need
Yeah, because it's now capped we can give a lot more leech early. Yeah, well because that was kind of a bit dead
Yeah, if you're not leaving that for you only so much. Yeah, so then we get the buffers values
Obviously some people know about leech resistant monsters like a you know currently you leech less from a
White or magic monster than say a unique monster
Because the assumption was you're hitting many you are you're weighing now that's now you only get one instance
that's flat and then that means that leech will be more consistent between boss fights versus not
boss fights which is another thing I think a good thing like you kind of can rely on that and some
level but if you have all the affixes you know you got some investment you could do between 20
maybe up to 40 50 percent of your life recovery per second that's where your enemy is obviously
still pretty fast but and then we're removing some of the instant leech just because obviously that's
then bypassing that.
It's funny though, because I remember you coming to me at one point and you were like,
either we can nerf like all these skills by 10 times, or we can nerf leech.
Like that was the thing you were saying.
It's part of the just like damage, begets, recovery, which also gets energy triggering
and like it just feeds into itself and then you have characters getting 3 million percent of their
life per frame, you know, while triggering.
This is part of the metascript scale equation.
It's infinite triggering per frame and it's just like, what are you supposed to do?
And hence the 200 million DPS, like infinite comet, infinite recovery and immortality builds, you know?
The leech explanation sounds like complicated and it kind of is on the back end,
but the player facing side of it is now just that you get a leech percentage and that's the only affix.
Yep. And you get more of it, you get more.
Well, most people, yeah, you get a mod and now your life starts recovering.
And more importantly, and better than before, but also importantly, doubling it doubles
the amount of life you're getting.
Yes.
So like, yeah, there's a lot of calculation going on to achieve that, but the one player
face thing that is important to know is that there is a point beyond which getting more
single hit damage is not going to increase the amount of recovery you're getting.
Yeah.
At some point, obviously, getting damage gives you damage, but at some point, getting damage
will is less valuable than getting more leech investment if you are simply wanting leech
investment.
Interesting. All right, there's obviously going to be some adjustments there for people to
know. For sure. It's a big change.
With metac skills and custom print comments and things like that, and their interactions
with these various things. For sure.
Yeah, so that's going in 0.5, this stuff for people to figure out.
Yeah. Cool.
Go test it out. It's all fully changed internally. Feel free to go over and look at it.
All right. And with that, so like I mentioned, the part of the core problem ultimately is
that you are, aside from the meta skill stuff, if you're recovering so quickly, then things
have to kill you very quickly.
Does that allow you to look at things that are killing very quickly, then once you start
to feel like recovery is getting a bit more under control?
Well, part of that, I think that folds into the whole defenses and everything thing.
Like outliers are outliers for sure.
I mean, obviously some stuff is intended to mess you up.
It's kind of the point.
But you know, it all falls into the same be it recovery, full life, one shots, the characters
having significantly lower defences than we anticipated, tools for getting more life
via runes, all of that falls into the same problem here of, yeah, if you're absent of
all of these tools and you don't know how to do the like very, you know, I guess the
meta strategies, then yeah, you sometimes will are just going to get obliterated by things.
So I'm just hoping like, obviously that leeches the case of bringing down the top end, but
I think more the defences bringing up the defensive tools like a body armor ruins,
etc.
Runic ward, everything, all of this is going to help contribute to ideally things feeling
more fear.
And of course, as expected, though, if anything's just like one shotting you and you don't
think the telegraphing's enough, you just let us know because like, you know, it might
be on our radar but it might not be on our urgent radar and maybe we need to do something
about it. Like we have improved a lot of these things either via increasing telegraphing
or lowering damage. Like we had problems with the whole number of skills especially early.
I'll say the number of those is dwindling but they're still there and obviously we
might add some new ones on accident but you know just keep telling us about that stuff
a hundred percent. It's not the intention. The important thing is things feel fear less
so then damage one way or the other so you know if you're getting instakill by
something you couldn't even see coming that is a problem we're obviously adding
a ton of new pinnacles and all that and we're gonna do our best to get
everything as well telegraphed and as you know the correct damage output and
everything but you know we miss things and if things feel unfair just raise the
alarm. Alright with that we'll change topic a little bit to end game and I've
I've seen it getting asked a lot about a lot with Temple going core.
Is there any major changes there to have?
Yeah.
Temple snaking works as well?
We had to get rid of the snake strategy.
It caused a lot of problems.
We actually had a solution for the snake strategy.
The proper solution that we wanted to do right after the League launched.
It was actually a holiday and I was like, OK, I need to fix the stand-up snake strategy.
But the problem was the one that we came up with is that we felt like it would be a mid-league
nerf if we deployed it.
So we had like a few Band-Aid fixes, but it wasn't really the correct strategy.
And ultimately what this next strategy is, it comes about because there are rooms that the game wants to delete,
but it can't delete them because it would disconnect the temple.
And so what we've got as a solution to that effectively is that if that would happen,
then it would just create an empty room there that still connects it up, but isn't the room that you had there before.
And that just means that there's no incentive to kind of do those weird strategies anymore,
which should result in all of the weird, really broken stuff from happening.
And yeah, like you can kind of take it more at face value because you don't have to worry about this like particular way of organizing things to be able to
You know, it should be able to be able to do well and to be clear the current
Like snaking is resulting in what we deem as the 1000% unacceptable levels of unimproved
Yeah, the item drops out out of control due to that
But there was this there's always a situation when you've got this stuff
We're like we would love to nerf it but you can only nerf something like that if it hasn't gotten to out of can like out of containment
Containment before you know yeah because the moment that people feel like oh like 10% of the player base have like gotten one
Then I can't do it like you're pulling the ladder up behind them and that kind of stuff
It just doesn't feel good
So we just sort of have to let it be and the thing that sucks about it is that it can like read like make people's perception of what the correct
Level of item drops is to be incorrect and that can then mean that like when we don't have the like bananas temple
Like Luke going on that people like might not be as happy with that
but it'll be a thing there like you know one lead down the line after they've
forgotten about that part it'll be okay but yeah like that was it was out of
control we didn't love it that being said like there are also some did you
get the extra reward stuff for the reward rooms is that? Yeah we've done some
buffs of the reward rooms. So basically just like if you play it
conventionally there's some buffs to the rewards we don't like for the stuff
that was like pointless to do before so in particular the reward rooms that you
We get to kill on the architects, like those weren't good enough, so people weren't even bothering.
There was a strategy where people were using those to get quick at-zerry runs and stuff as well and we fixed that problem.
There's a bunch of algorithmic problems with how rooms get deleted or decide to get deleted or swapped should have been changed such that there's not like some of these weird, you know,
they got to the point of being honestly a little bit exploitative to the point, it's like, I hate that I have to do this thing.
We certainly don't want anything where people feel like I have to do this weird thing that I don't enjoy doing in order to get my rewards.
That's the key thing we want to do.
Because of course that will do it.
A couple cool things.
Atlas Tree now applies to the temple.
Cool.
Right?
Interesting.
The whole thing.
We're obviously relevant.
There are some cases where obviously there's no summoning circles in there.
And obviously it has its own Atlas Tree now.
Now that it's core.
And its own entire quest line on the Atlas.
We can go there and do a thing and place where it physically is.
It's like you get all the points and there's parts of the tree that are blocked behind killing the architects.
You're getting like little unlocks and stuff like that.
There's supposed to be little districts in the city where like you kill the architects and now this district is unlocked and you can go in there.
There's just little things.
So exploring that, very nice.
Production, could I request a brief intermission for us so we don't have to rush the rest of the end game discussion?
You guys failed that? Just having a quick two minute break?
Sure, if that's what you're going to do.
We never did that before, but alright.
Now we're going to fall in.
We'll be right back, folks.
You
Firstly, I'm very happy to see that the world looks like an actual world now.
In Atlas, an actual map, it's where you'd go with a do exploration.
So is this kind of the goal for the outside when you were making this whole world map
style Atlas?
Well, okay.
I think that I didn't realize when we were making it the importance of having those fixed
locations, like knowing where things are, and like, so it's like, we wanted it to feel
like there was a world of stuff to explore, but I think that we did make a mistake in
not necessarily like realizing that, you know, it is important that you can get your bearings
and that kind of stuff initially.
So having the fixed points is even better than I expected, honestly.
I was a little bit worried, it would make it feel like too samey every time, but honestly
it's really cool.
All of those points of interest, I don't know if we really showed it how easy it is to get
to something, but it's usually to get to one of the league things, it's only like four
or five maps away from the sign location.
When I was first showing it to you when you first arrived, you'd just go, I started with
it just all fog of war there, and I'm like, okay, if you just go down the square a little
bit, then you get into the breach area, and you just go ride a little bit, then look,
there's abyss cracks here, and stuff like that.
So that's really cool.
And the other thing as well is just
like the fact that there's a giant ocean to one side
means you've just got your bearings and you're like,
OK, we're on the edge of the continent here.
This is where we are.
And we did even try to think, OK, well,
in the physical Ray-class map, this
is the direction in which all of the Xerries
temple and everything of Leir of Arles was.
So we're going to put it in that direction.
We try to have our bearings so that all those things
sort of like have some kind of real-world analog which is pretty cool and
there's even if you go far enough into the ocean you will find aureus which
has the beast is there you see it doesn't actually do anything like it's not
reasonable like we wanted it to feel more like
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we'll change later once we've got the rest of the campaign in, but, you know.
I believe in my mind though, you can just go in the ocean and as long as you pick the exact right direction,
it's gonna be pretty good.
Yeah, exactly. It's kind of already syringed at anything, but the fact that it's there.
But we do want it to feel like it is actually, it is ray-class that you're exploring,
that this is like, you know, things that are at least broadly where they're supposed to be,
and, you know, like, while it is, the, like, the bimes and stuff like that are all randomly generated,
like what maps are they randomly generated, like the initial layout of where the landmarks are is,
you know, it's like really, it's really nice.
a world first race to REF or something like that, because expedition race, so you can
get over there first. That's really cool. So I think before when you first started
Endgame, you just got a ran map, so that took dozens of maps for anything to kind of...
Yes, I agree, I agree. And now we want that to be way shorter. So, like, you know, the
first time you open the Atlas, like, you know, there's towers that rise out of the ground
and like, there's a quest marker right there to do that. But you don't have to do that,
right? You can go a different direction and you'll pretty soon you'll run into like
a breach or something, and then you'll be in NPC, you know, like, within one or two
maps they'll definitely be any busy telling you hey look over here and like you know
it'll appear in the fog of war you'll see there's a quest might be like oh right
something over that way you know like that's the kind of experience that we
want to have of like feeling like you are exploring like a kind of like I guess
it's more of a sort of it's funny because it's a little bit wet in a way it's in a
bit more like that sort of open world game design that you would get from a
kind of open world game except it's on a kind of like at this level so you need
to be thinking yeah but there's points of interest and stuff to find and that
sort of stuff and not only that but we did want to make the kind of the
the infinite part, like once you have done all the quest lines, the infinite part needs
to be more interesting too. So now what we have is all the leagues are adding Atlas mechanics,
right? Like so you've got things that, and I guess it's one of the other things I really
want to make sure people are aware of is like, all the leagues do have things that interact
with the Atlas in interesting ways. So like, you know, you've got the DeLarion fog thing,
we were spreading fog over and the, you know, the positions of things matter and where you
pick to do it will matter and stuff. Yeah, the actual of the cracks that close on the
else is really cool. That was one of those people thought I was a bit crazy when I suggested
that one. It's one of those things that's just really cool. It's fun to come up with
those kinds of mechanics for leagues and think about how they can escalate and so on. But
it also adds another deeper layer to everything too because one of the big issues we had with
all of the leagues was that they had their mechanic, but they didn't have, and here's
how the mechanic changes and how it evolves and like there wasn't kind of a lot of that
going on with those initial 010 Early Access leaks and it's really adding all that extra
depth that like makes like an actually interesting thing and like part of the reason why we identified
that is because like when we came to write a quest line for them well there actually
isn't enough here to write a quest line for them.
Yeah there's not enough.
Like there just kind of wasn't really stuff enough to it so it's like we have to add a
bunch more to make it so a quest line is reasonable to do and so the quest line actually sort
of drove in some ways like the making sure that there isn't evolution that happens
across the course of every league.
I guess that really does set the standard now for what you have to have to make a league
for PUE2.
That it's going to have things like that and mechanics like that.
It seems like you're really trying to min-max the bird coming here in particular, because
you leave the town, literally the second map as a tower, and then three, four maps after
that is the gate of the giant fortress.
Yeah, exactly.
We want you to get to that stuff quickly, right?
The funny thing is, what we said earlier about how the difference in amount of time
it takes for the average player versus what people believe is the average.
Like, it really does need to be that minimal number of maps to make that happen because
for some people, like, they're taking a long time to complete maps, right?
Like, you know, like, if it's taking like, you know, seven to 15 minutes in some cases
to a map, like, you don't want it to be multiple hours of gameplay to get to the first...
Even that's fast by the average.
Yeah, yeah, and it's like, we don't want it to be hours and hours later when you finally
get to one of these things.
So it really does need to be just a few maps.
And obviously, if you're a fast map runner, you're going to just blaze through that real
quickly.
You do need to sort of consider, you know, what that experience looks like.
If it's the first time, because a lot of this, this, this questifying stuff is for
people who don't even know what's in the endgame.
I don't know if you'd have the first time player before us.
You'd, you'd go in the endgame and say, is there even anything out there?
Like we don't even, you don't even know, right?
Yeah.
You need those kind of like a few guideposts to even get you started to be like, okay,
well, like here's some, actually some stuff that I might be able to find.
Yeah.
And even if you don't go like that tower into the fortress, you know, you go the way
you literally pick any direction.
Like, because that was the thing that surprised me the most when you were
showing me by kind of like revealing them up was like you literally can't pick a
direction and miss. Yeah, exactly. You will have something no matter which way you go.
Basically, it actually made like the Raycloss situation. Look, this Raycloss situation is crazy.
It looked pretty dire. You're basically surrounded on all sides. You look one side and there's like a giant breach of the troncanary.
There's like a different kind of bare side over there. You just wait to like five years from now.
There's now, whenever you add anything, you add a spot on that.
We're probably going to have to do a bit of rearranging to make sure that the view of stuff is close to the center,
or the ringer outside that, which has got some of the listenable stuff you can kind of snake out.
We had a weird Passive Tree situation, and there was stuff further out.
That is going to be wild, but it also helps solve that problem a bit.
Sometimes I have back in a play, like a game that's been around for a long time,
and the way that usually they're like 10 years worth of content is presented as like a giant menu.
Yeah, yeah, no, and it's definitely much harder to engage with that, but here it's physical places in a world
Yeah, it's kind of almost solved by the fact that you have to travel to them to start interacting with them in some capacity
Yeah, I would say so
But yet all of them do have events that will occur that will direct you there and like reveal it on the map and show you there as
Well, yeah, if you do find that and the you know, excuse me for get quests. We have a few things as well
They're like it's a lot
But I also don't want people to feel like I have to do all of it every time
Yeah, and there are different ways obviously we I think we mentioned the way to shortcut the fortress completion like if you just want to
Obviously, there's a big red tree of of nodes, right?
So you can go like we're a path of least resistance or the if you look this is if you're good
You know what you're doing. You're repeating good build
Like just beeline towards that go to that go to that go to that kill the bosses kill the pinnacle
Right, you've now done the quest line
And now just go out into the infinite and go in front or maybe go do one of the other leagues
or two of the other leagues, whatever, and then go out and farm.
And every time you then get a set of Citadels, you kill the thing,
you can then auto-complete a section of the fortress.
And complete all the maps and you're like, alright, sweet, there's my 15 points.
Allocate, allocate, allocate. And so you don't have to just like hunker down and sit in the fortress for like forever.
We were really concerned that what would happen is like you'd kill the boss and you're like, oh, now I've put all these maps in here.
in here like to just finish it off so we wanted to make sure there was a shortcut for that
stuff so if you didn't do all that stuff while you were going there so if you're a new player
and you're like you don't like burning through the tears that quickly that number of maps is
intended to be the number that you'd need to be able to do for like a sort of an average player
who hasn't done it before to be able to tear up to get to like you know to you know to get to
T5 to get into the this part of the fortress and then you do everything in that yeah exactly so
like it's kind of designed to be like you have the players who are normal but if you're if you're
If you're a player who really knows how to tear up really quick, then you can just beeline to the
quest objectives really quickly and get through that very quickly. And I guess one of the things
that we wanted to do as well, even just for the regular leagues, is like, if you're an actual
player, we sort of imagine it's like a night of gaming is what it's going to take you to do one
of the questlines. I don't mean like a half an hour, I mean like a solid night of gaming.
A few hours right you know like a gaming is enough to kind of get like a sort of a fairly reasonable player through one of those quest lines
Yeah, and then that's kind of your good that can be like your goal for the night
And then the fortress might be like a couple more initially
But yeah, but I mean for the good players
They're just gonna be able to yep
They can they can obviously get through the stuff really quick because they know how to burn through every map really quick and that kind of thing
So with the fortress, so how many roughly passes is there on that core Atlas tree?
It's more than 300, I believe.
OK, so that's like 300 maps within the fortress.
No, but it isn't because some of them give you more than one point.
Oh, did I?
Yeah, so we actually initially had it.
So the number of points on the tree
was the same as the number of points in the fortress.
But the problem was is that we found that the...
That's a ton of maps.
Yeah, it was the number of maps that was too many.
So we were like, OK, we need to do some things here
so that the Atlas tree can be bigger than what the fortress is.
Roughly no one is, like 100 or 150 or something?
You know, I actually don't remember what the number in there is.
But yeah, like we sort of wanted to make it so that it wasn't
There's a few options there as well if we want. If we want
we haven't yet, based on testing really is what is
technically, it doesn't have to be every map gives you a point
it can be the first X map to give you a point. Like as in technically you can fully
allocate the tree. It's just if we needed to do that
we've got a lot of levers to be able to flexibly just go okay this is my way to go.
It's a fortune to feel like a chore though, that's like really important.
It was like, that's what I was going to say, I was a little worried that that would be the case,
but you showed me that there's like, so there's these little icons on top of the maps and that wasn't all of them,
like what we're showing in the footage was actually, you hadn't done the list yet, it was like half of them or something.
But what surprised me, so these are adding like things like,
ah, you know, every rare monster in the map is an essences, or monster treasure, or you know,
there's also fighting each other, hunting and guns, all this other cool stuff.
And what I was surprised to learn was that these are actually all individual unique things like there's not they're not being repeated inside of the fortress.
Yes, yes, exactly. So all of those mechanics are things that yeah, like just as one off.
And so if you if you auto complete that part of the fortress, you're effectively losing that for this for this run.
But they do appear out on the infinite as well sometimes to kind of make the infinite farm part like kind of more interesting.
But this is like really interesting so like even in P1 as good as that end game is which is really really good is
It kind of takes like 30 40 maps before you start getting like stuff to being in your math all the time
Right those scarabs you got enough points, but here you're you've almost created like an end game atlas
Area of maps that you can do but that's pre loaded with
And then as you do that you're effectively then loading it more with the Atlas tree
Yeah, but when you do the infinite farm you've kind of got more of that stuff there
So when you run out of that, then you've got your passive tree full filled out and everything.
The passive tree does add a lot and of course you allocate all of it now.
So it's changed quite a lot how the passives work.
But we have had to do some work on the level design side to make it so that the maps can support more of the side of mechanics and so on as well.
Especially after juicing everything, it can be quite a lot.
Speaking of things like the completion, there's a few other little bits where people are like,
oh, I've got to do every league tree. Like, that's a lot, right? Because that's the same thing.
You don't want to be too chore-like. But reality is, there's a few changes around this. So let's say
you just, you do the fortress or you do the infinite and order completed after doing the quest
line, and then you do just delirium. Now, you can run three delirium tablets, and it will scale all
free and you can just go do that for the rest of your life. And the thing is people will be like,
oh, but Breach can randomly spawn and then I have to get the Breach Tree otherwise I'm not
investing in it. So yes, we have changed other's words. So effectively your area can support three
Leagues and the juice versions of it. And so when you put force three Delerium tablets, it won't
spawn other Leagues. So effectively by putting a tablet, but what putting a tablet in does is lock
what that league will be, thus preventing the other leagues from spawning, which means
that you don't have a situation where by not doing a certain league, you're losing out
on potential juicing because you've effectively made sure that you're going to get the specific
con that you want. So you can do that, or you can still leave it wild card by using the
DeLarion.
And Radiator, one of the players will wild card the leagues.
Can you still mix and match?
Of course.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, yeah, so you can still do a trick, exactly, right?
You could do Breach Breach Delerium, if you want two-thirds Breach, one-third Delerium.
You can do whatever.
You can combine it.
It's like a greater level of control over this than previously.
What it means is that if you just want to all in on one, you can.
If you want to all in on two, you can.
If you want to go three, you can.
If you want to get them all on wildcard, you can do that.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Part of this that I was a little bit worried as well that you were like, like the physicality
of the map is really cool, but I was a bit worried that the downside of that would be
that, yeah, you'd be removing this ability to focus on things.
Yeah, okay. In particular, I was worried about the Breachstone thing, because it's like,
oh, so if you want to use a Breachstone, you have to find one of those things on the map
to put it in. Does that mean you can only find the boss if you physically have one of
those locations on the map?
Right. But no, all of the pinnacle keys are all tradable, so you can do that stuff.
And if you have 20 of those keys, you can just do the boss anytime.
Yeah, exactly. So the bosses are all in the, so effectively each of the leagues has a kind
of hub where the league, and that happens in its physical location, and the hub is
where you use the pinnacle keys in order to fight the pinnacle boss, so that means that
if you want to do them back to back, you just go to the hub, 120 bosses, that's fine.
Once you've done the quest line one, you can then farm it as much as you want if you trade.
The other thing that we've done is, so Breach is unique in that regard because in order
to kill the penultimate boss to get the ticket to the ultimate boss. Yeah, you do need the
biome. Now you can buy the key after, right? That's completely fine, and you can buy the
breast stone, but that one is unique in that you do need to go find those biomes, or someone
has to go find those biomes. So that one is a bit unique in that regard, but for some
of these leagues also, for example, simulacrums, like you do deliriums, you get this grand
mirror, you apply the fog and there's a simulacrum in there. We do do still drop
simulacrum splinters and very a lot less of them and once you finally get that
item instead of that item now just going in the realm gate because that's gone
what that does is allows you to turn a map into a simulacrum on your outlasts
and so that will give you an extra key and so there are some ways the
expectation is that you complete the quest line and experience all that before
you complete a simulacrum but later in the game when you're farming there's
There's actually ultimate ways to get access to more of these.
And so we have that for a few other legs, I can't remember exactly which ones do and
don't because it's asymmetric, but yeah, some of them are like trying to counter that.
So it's the thing with breach where if we're finding a breach stone versus breach biome
imbalance, we can end to a thing where once you've finished the quest line, you can start
getting splinters towards pinnacles without necessarily having to do that, or maybe there's
some other mechanic where you can create a breach biome, you know, in the fog of war
that way. So mechanically create it, reveal one that definitely was there the whole time.
And, you know, go over there and do it. There are tools we have to be able to do all this,
but yeah, breach is relatively unique in that regard. The others are less problematic, but
you know, just try to have different ways. One of the things that is fun with those ones though
is that there's reasons generally to pick one area of the Atlas versus another. Like they're
kind of subtle, but like we should have tried to explain that with the DeLarion one where
there's certain emotions that only come from certain map boss classes. So what that means
is that you're like, okay, if I want to be able to get like this emotion, then I'm like,
I got to want I want to find this type of map to put it on. So then like, you know, there's
little hidden things like that, but I am actually not. So stuff like that that we can go to. And
And so yeah, picking where to do the right of the nameless can like, you know,
and where to do the do everything's like, ideally, that stuff should be something
you actually do have a little bit of think about, you know,
because it can affect the rewards a little bit.
Yeah, right.
Wow. Okay.
Now, it's impossible to say, like, put an hours of end gameplay estimate on
end game for part of the Big Zaw, because it's like you said, it's so variable.
But how would you say it?
Some of the in-game milestones for Pv2 now, like line up with maybe the milestones
from Pv1 that we're a bit more familiar with.
So like, for example, getting to the Fortress Pinnacle boss,
unlocking your full tree, so getting that full there of the, of the Atlas, if that's
the clear goal. Filling those nice new progress bars for the lean mechanics, like where do
those kind of pan out?
So it's definitely intended that the kind of, like completing the fortress is supposed
to sort of be analogous to doing Atlas completion in PeoE1, you know, it's like a kind of similar
thing, that you're, the similar type of goal.
It is almost like a PeoE1 Atlas on the map.
Yeah, yeah, you're a bit like that.
If you can get enough tears, it's 45-50 maps to kill the pinnacle, if you can, which is
honestly not that out of control.
Now that's not fortress complete, that's that main questline complete.
Like you think you've got a big square with two ramparts, you're just going up to this
thing, up over this thing, up, and then to the middle, and then out to the back, kill
this, kill this, kill the thing in the middle.
And yeah, you just follow this path, the shortest path to it.
If you can do it, go for it. It's fine. It's entirely up to you.
Which again, good players generally will be able to.
So like, yeah, 45th the issue there.
And as you said, the first, the Czegorat to the fortress wall, pretty short distance, like it's right there and then right there.
Let's say Breach. I'm just giving some examples just to give some people some context. Breach
is the closest biome to the Ziggurat, the closest start. So you just, you went tower,
what is it? Five maps over to Breach.
That's much better.
For four, sure. Then you do a few breaches. You don't have to do that many. She gives
you the first Breach stone. You use the Breach stone. You do, you can probably minimum one
One Hive, one Sky Hive, and then the boss.
Now this is the problem that we run into about here where I have level restricted the bosses.
Yes, I can actually do this too fast.
I'm just going to tell you to just do a tier-restricted.
Yeah, tier-restricted.
Not character level, yes.
Yeah.
As in you do need some waste over here.
So if you just go path, shortest path there, yeah, you're probably going to find you don't
have the waste zones.
But if you know what you're doing, you can obviously get pretty far pretty quickly.
And then you can kill, you know, the Breach Lords and then you can immediately do the
pinnacle as soon as because we have level, uh, waystone tear restricted the pen ultimates.
Um, but that's like Breach and the Fortress, whereas like, okay, over to the left of the
ziggurat, you've got Breach slightly further across as Delerium, so plus five maps, even
that maybe, Ritual, plus five on that, you know, like, plus five and then the, what is
eight, honestly, it's honestly gone, it's probably only like eight maps you have to do, nine maps or
something, and I'm talking like absolute if you're just zooming to the end.
And so like the early versions of the end game, the thing definitely burned me out and was just
like the sheer amount of time it took to just travel through maps. I was even like coming up with
theory crafts for ideas of like, well what if there was only these travel maps like really fast.
So it seems like there's just so much less of that now.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's the experience you're going to get if you know what you're doing,
right? If you don't it's going to take longer because you're like okay I need to be able to put up
for somewhat juicing it as much I'm not doing all that stuff. Well at that point yeah when you're
in Aps is when you're focusing on the actual content you're doing not like you've got all so
much because you don't have the experience with that anyway. Yeah yeah Kings March is a bit further
away it is being on the coast it kind of if it had put it too close it would have restricted the
other things that can go there so we've got like a sort of slightly longer lines that that's sort of
to shorten the distance to get to Kings March. Oh yeah it's not as many maps. Yeah so it's not as
as many maps as what it would be for the normal conventional distance. But yeah, there's a
couple of extra maps further than some of the others.
The cool thing is, because it's now questline, as soon as you get to Kingsmarch, you're given
the first logbook. So you just instantly like reveal a whole section of ocean.
You're getting what, 15 to 20 maps per logbook, give or take. You can, if you just want to export,
Let's say the logbook you placed didn't spawn the chase thing you're looking for.
You can just short his path to the edge and then reveal another and you can go
to the logbook and go up sideways.
It's just a big grid of squares.
A logbook's tradable thing, like if you want to blast through that.
The quest ones are not.
Which by the way, you get your first logbook.
It spawns a guaranteed island for the quest marker.
You complete that and it gives you your second logbook.
Because the start's questified, right?
So the first four, if we get through those bosses and stuff like that with the first four logbooks.
It actually takes you all the way to the boss as part of the quest.
Yeah, because now what we're doing is every single quest line takes you to the Pinnacle boss.
It's like there's no randomness in the ability to do that, you know?
Because it is the active league. In particular, the runes of Eldor Pinnacle is more maps than some of those other biomes.
because it's also is it doesn't have a tree, right?
Because it is the active league, right?
And it has just a lot more generally going on
and many different ways.
So it itself is a bit more, yeah, there's more going on.
But then when it's not the active league,
we can then, you know, get that to be more like,
wouldn't align with the others and that kind of thing.
Oh man, I'm so excited for this to play it so much.
But funny thing is though, like you,
I heard you talking about very recently,
this idea of like, it's actually good to have a quitting point.
uh... stepping off point and it seems to be tackling that problem so that was
another big thing when we were designing this initially is like so i mean and at
this point we were literally just looking at steam reviews and being like
okay like what like
on a more meta level like why do you get a situation with someone's like games
terrible four hundred hours played
but what leads to that you know what i mean
and honestly we're like one of the big problems is like there isn't an obvious
point to stop
and like eventually any any endgame is going to get boring eventually right
and it's like you didn't have a point of like you felt like you were done
If you've got a place to leave, then yeah, you're going to be in the games and it eventually
suck for you.
So like we have to be like we want to actually get you to feel like you're done.
And part of the way that you do that is you add more objectives that like have progress
bars we like you finish them and then you're like, okay, I'm done with this now.
And so whether or not you want to do all of them or not, the key thing is is that there
is a point where you finish the fortress, you've got all the points there and like there's
progress bars and like there is a point where you do, you know, you finish the league, there
is a point where you finish, you know, all of the other league mechanics around.
I mean, you know, and then, and then for other people, there's challenges, right?
Like part of the reason we wanted to add challenges in this one was to see, like, there's, there's
quite a lot of people who just like the thing that their goal for the league is to finish
the challenges and then I'm done with it, you know?
And so it's like, it's just, it's just another one of those things that Peer We One had that
can give you an objective for yourself so that, so that you know when to quit.
Because ultimately the goal is, you know, like we, we want you to play when you have
a great time, but we want when you decide to leave that you come back with a plan to
play again next league.
And so long as we can get you to that point without burning you out, then you're going
to be wanting to come back and play again.
So yeah, it's just one of those really important things that Peerichu just didn't really have
because it just kind of peed it out into nothingness, it didn't really have like this, now I'm done
with this now.
Ultimately it's just about having cool, cool goals, and you've got more clear goals for
that now.
It's probably like Fortress plus like a specific league mechanic.
Yeah, or maybe you want to do all of them, or maybe you don't, but the key thing is is
yeah, like you get to that point, you know when you're done with it and you know, we've
We've got those progress bars that can pop out the side so you can sort of see at a glance.
Here is my in-game completion of how much of that stuff they've done.
You also know, by the way, that when you do finish that progress bar, that you have seen
all the major content that the leak has to offer in terms of you've fought the Pinnacle
boss.
Yeah, there's more uniques you could get and more things you could farm, but that stuff
is really extra stuff that isn't really the core of the experience of that.
So, um, yeah, it's fun. And at the same time, the like for the people who never quit and the
The infinite of course want to make sure that stuff is better of course, but you know
Like yeah, but like it is it is still important that infinite outlasts significantly better
It is way better way more trace drops to get yeah, and major blood
You know like it's so much more crafting that you might want to min max like this just a ton
That's how they're going to go if I'm farm the land
And the not ocean.
OK.
You're going to go coming to Cali Firms.
We're talking about the infinite land.
You're going to go far the infinite land.
It's time to return.
That's a nice life of farming.
And then the next day, I'm going to go explore the ocean
and just log book, log book, log book, and do all of those.
Different choices, different axes.
That's also important and cool.
I'm going to go to Breach this day.
And the next day, I'm going to do Delerium.
and the next thing, I'm gonna mix them all, you know?
It seems super easy to change,
like whatever it is you wanna do,
if you wanna mix them up now,
so if you are focusing on Expedition,
like there's nothing now to stop you from
going and focusing on Breach for a while instead.
And of course, the fate of the Vile Temple, right?
Like it actually is unique amongst the others
and that it doesn't have an Atlas active mechanic
because the temple is its own whole building a dungeon vibe.
And so it still has a tree, it still appears in maps,
it has a tablet, all of that.
But instead of now doing the progression on the Atlas,
the meta-progression layer,
you're doing it in the temple, right?
Just without, with less snakes.
Excellent.
And the new Atlas Tree design supports this idea as well,
where this core full tree is a full completion thing,
which is cool, but also your initial reaction to that
might be to worry that,
oh, it seems like it's gonna remove some player decision,
but you have some specific things.
So that is something we're really worried about,
But I'll explain also that why we did it in the first place. So we had this problem where
Designing the atlas in a way where you don't want to constantly respect
Really handcuffs you in terms of what kind of nodes you can add because if you want to add a node
Which is like oh this cool thing happens when you're in forests
It's like well now if you're modern the forest you're like waste of a point right so effectively by doing for allocation
You can now say okay
I'm not wasting any points that they do different things in different locations
And it means that we can just be more interesting with the bonuses and they can be way punchier
And there can be way punchier.
Because we're not worrying about so much about the balance of that.
And so then when you're doing your initial progression,
when you're picking stuff, it's more about what stuff do I want now versus later.
But the issue with that is you can't add difficulty if you've got a full tree.
So we're like, and you still wanted the idea of having a build for your character.
So then we're like, OK, we're going to solve this in two ways.
One of the ways is we're going to add multi-choice nodes to the regular artist
tree so that those ones can be like, am I going to go difficulty,
or am I going to go more difficulty, more rewards,
am I going to do less difficulty, less rewards?
So that example in the stream of like, okay, for shrines.
Like, do I want the shrines to go on the bosses,
which is going to make it so that they're harder
with more rewards?
Do I want to make it so that when I go into a boss fight
to get an extra shrine effect,
thus making the bosses easier?
So you've kind of got that tweaking you can do.
And so on the regular Atlas tree,
you'll find things like that where,
where the design space there is,
is that there are decisions that you're going to want to make,
but not very often.
Right, so it's like, you know,
as my character gets more powerful,
maybe I'll flick that node from one mode to the other,
but it's not suddenly going to be changing all the time.
So that's that design space, but then for the Alice Masters,
this is the design space of things that I do want to change all the time,
because it depends on what like maps I'm facing.
But then we make it really easy to change because we've got that system where
the button on the side is pick which one.
So what that's actually most close to, in a way, is kind of like the
the Jesus Christ has gotten the name of even these, you know,
though you pick the modes when you run a map and P1, but you call that again.
Like there's that, like there's this thing for, like, um, X, X,
Yeah, that influence, yeah, that influence, yeah, exactly, right?
So it's, I can't remember any more than names of the shit, but it's kind of more
analogous to that in a way, because it's like before each map you might want to
consider what you're picking, and like depending on what it is that you're
doing there. So that's that design space, and so those things together, but that
thing there also has like, you know, like the choices that you're going to make,
your sort of Atlas build come down from there, your Atlas build loadouts.
Yeah, yeah, but with pre-configured nodes as a part of it, and way better than that
because like if you want to respect one of those, it's only a couple nodes.
And you can do that freely.
Yes, exactly.
So it's no longer the, by making that not be on the giant Atlas,
it actually simplifies that quite a lot in terms of being able to see.
That's not like, at a glance, you can see here's the choices that are important.
It's so nice not to be able to get...
As opposed to a million other little nodes that kind of don't really matter in practice.
So nice not having also just like, I suspect from a more player who's like,
you know, approaching it for the first time as well, just way less FOMO,
way less like, oh my God, I don't know, I don't know, this way, that way,
I don't know what's going on.
There's still choice of how you get there.
But even with the Masters and stuff, you don't have to have all these respect systems with
different currencies and gold costs and they're too cheap and not too cheap and all that.
And yet they're still built.
Like there's still Atlas strategies.
There's what tablets you're doing, what multi-choice you've taken on your league trees.
There's, I mean, even just what league you're running is in itself a build.
What like, I guess you have this kind of like, you could be, it's a bit of a meta strategy,
But even I really I'm going for forest biomes because this league with these nodes on the Atlas tree equals
You know some certain benefit when combined with the delirium and then you could be even doing things like
Well, yeah, as I said all the multi-choice
Maybe you run this master when fighting bosses and this master when fighting or when boss chasing this master when doing certain leagues of others
This master while logbooking
It's just like all kinds of stuff where it's like holy, okay, so you'd think by having the tree to be
for the allocation you're like oh there's no builds anymore and then it's like
hold on there's like the complexity there has been moved into a much more
tight place where you can sort of yeah one go so it's just a lot more manageable
yeah there's a lot better I think. What's the deal with like the sub trees with
in each master? Because they each have three tabs don't they? No no so each of those tabs is a master.
So basically yeah it's like one master is one of those tabs and then you pick like
the things you want for that master but then you change to a different master
That's like that that's the choice of master you're making for that map
And it's just one of the most you have this like there's the one that's like this one is active
Yeah, so each has the four rows which is their quest line unlocks each one one row and one point
You can take all of one row or you can take one of each row you had to be up there just all kind of key stony things that
Yeah, so yeah, there's a lot of even within that there's obviously a ton of permutations of things you could do
So, we've got our endless descendancies and all of that lined out.
So, the kind of like equivalent to your idea of your T16 plus endgame juicing now is like
go do the fortress, maybe complete like the couple leagues that you're going to focus
on, get your masters done.
So they have their course.
I guess they appear kind of like at certain points when you discuss something.
So, for example, you've got Hilda who's like sending you to kill like bosses, she'll pick
maps that are like a few maps away from the map you just did as like the place where she's going to
set her objective. So then it's kind of like you kind of do that like while you're doing other
things because like you know there's this you do have to visit her campsite first so I get to get
to get her. So there's like a place like right where the starting point where that is but that's
like then her mission can kind of be completed as you're doing other things. Whereas like other
ones have kind of like you know a little bit different. But Doriani is tracking down the
the corruption. Perfectly that quest of what you had as like V-Quest before is now just
like Dooyani's master quest. The places where the corruption bimes are is like hard, like
in the starting zone, we've put them in specific places and we questify going to them. Dooyani
can go, I'll go to this one and then go to that one and so on. So we've kind of got that
stuff but his quest line is kind of that. Seeing Dooyani's quest kind of like minified
into his little master thing now makes it seem like it'd be pretty easy for you to in
in the future make other leagues and two masters like that as well.
That was what I was going to say. Next, I was immediately like someone who's looking at this,
damn well knows we're going to be adding more of this.
Yeah, it's going to be more of them, for sure.
I think there will be more Atlas classes get added over time based on different new themes.
Like, because we've tried to have, okay, Jado, Order of the Gin, their whole thing is like,
you know, getting powerful artifacts out of the hands of the villains, you know,
and so you get a vibe there about what the types of nodes could be or should be,
where you've got Doriani who's like a powerful formative scientist.
So you can get, you know, you have all these different characters
and you have just the classic, I want to kill bosses,
Hilda, who's just trying to like kill powerful beasts.
And so you immediately can go, okay, well, you know,
not that this is confirmed,
I'm literally making this up as we go, but it's like,
well, you've got Pharaoh who's the rune seeker,
they're trying to learn blue shapes.
Maybe that's a must when he's not,
if it's core or not core, depending on how things go.
It goes on the atlas is a big thing, you've got these options now for how to integrate
things which, as exciting as this is to play now, I'm excited for the future of this.
It seems like it's much easier to see how it's planned.
We designed more than the masters that we've been putting in here, we just didn't get time
to do them.
We had some ideas there.
Excellent.
Good to see here.
So...
Yeah, so you guys could scroll down a little bit more on our Q&A, give me for the next
part.
Thank you guys.
So, with the traveling around the map, the tower still kind of exists, scattered around,
and does the grand project still exist as the way to kind of like teleport after you've
done any tower?
It does.
How does that work now?
works some way. There's a bit of a change. Not to like nerf it, it's just like, there's a way about
how it needs to work that I can't remember the exact specifics of, but yes, ultimately, yes, it
does. Excellent. Okay. If you guys ever considered like just making towers work like that in general,
I kind of love that thing. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Might help with some of the discussions around.
I know you're a big fan of like having nice variety in the atlas and certainly it's going to be a lot
of that because if you're doing like one of those breach areas, you're going to be like doing a variety
of maps in there. But for some people they want to just avoid certain layouts,
ultimately if they can. So in a way like you can path around maps a lot of the
time. And I guess the current project is one of those ways that you kind of dodge
those things too. So something worth considering. Has there been any look at
layouts for maps? Like, unlike layouts? There's always some of that work that's
been done. I'm not entirely sure how much of it there's here, but there's
definitely some. There's also a bunch of new maps, just like, you know, just like
just new maps in the pool as well and yeah I mean like but yeah there's always
work on that stuff and they address that stuff typically just like the level
design teams just sort of address that sort of stuff just the way it's happening in
the background they're just addressing things but that being said I don't want
people to believe that we're just going to devolve them to just like every map
is just a simple layout without any like like resistance at all it doesn't need
to on some level be some maps that are just like have like maps should have
some level of identity and like I wouldn't want to just erase it all and
just turn into a pile of swaps.
Olds watches all day.
Exactly, you know what I mean?
So like, I don't want people to think that it's like, oh yeah, everything will eventually
just become like a fricking circle or something.
You know, like, you don't want to have some level of interest.
You want some interaction with some maps a bit with certain leagues and others and, you
know, different things like that.
But yeah, obviously if there's maps that are just like nobody likes, like no single person
has ever keen to run ever, you know, then we might want to consider changing that.
Well, you do get rid of the slow lovers in Orgory, so.
Yeah, sure.
Um, rogue exiles are fun idea and there's some cool things for them here where you
get this like nemesis system where they can come back and hunt you down.
It's, it's not, it's the patterns expired on that.
Okay.
Um, that, uh, have exiles been made more substantial in general?
Cause they kind of push over.
It's like, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
That to make that a bit juicier.
Yeah.
Excellent.
I'm glad cause I was, I was like very excited for them, but they were like, oh, they're
kind of like, yeah, so that's good to hear.
Um, co-op progression.
I had grim expectations for how Coal Progression would work with this, but you've reassured
me that.
Yes, yes.
So the way that it works basically is that for the fixed part of the Atlas, when you
complete a map that would give you something like a passive point or something like that,
it actually completes it for everyone.
And because the layout is fixed for the parts of the Atlas that are important for quest
stuff, it means that, yeah, effectively you can all progress and co-op the Atlases at
the same time.
So you don't have to worry about that part, but as soon as you're in the infinite farm
area now you're effectively working on your own atlases just like how you were before so yeah like
some don't and I'll give some examples because you know the general just random map that gives
you know gives a passive point yeah your completes for everyone now if that's disconnected like let's
say I've been mapping and you join me on day two and now I'm just completing maps you have a
disconnected set of completed maps you cannot path from those they have to be connected to your home
to be a path. So you still got a path there, right? But they are completed for you.
So once you connect it up, you can skip over them. But the other thing is that
let's say you get to the delirium tree, you get to the
hub, you do some of the maps for the delirium, those will complete in multiplayer, but then you get to the grand mirror.
That one does not complete in multiplayer because
it applies the thing to your atlas that if it were to just complete, would
rob one of those players out of some sort of either quest or meta progression, which ultimately
yield a reward. So some maps shouldn't complete in multiplayer because then you have to run
them each on your own and then you apply your own mist to your own Atlas and then you can run all
those and those will complete together. Well if looks like that is that the entire party gets to
go around and do everyone's pinnacle boss I suppose at that point. Correct. So yes some do some don't
we're just almost all do like it's just a few cases where we need to make sure. It's judgment
calls where we don't want to rob you out of rewards right like because you happen to be playing in a
group and you're like damn it we should have split up and I or I should have left the instance before
you did that so that I got it twice you know we we're trying to make it that that's not you know
just stealing loot from you. We've got some kind of rapid fire random chat questions here mixed in
um some people have been asking about like the portals for maps so like the portal restriction
one portal for six modifier maps is that something you're like looking at or reevaluating or how do
you feel about that change now at this point? There was some discussion. I think we now have it be
minus one portal per two modifiers.
Oh, wasn't there something where the tablets
did something as well?
Oh my god, I don't remember.
I can't remember.
There was some change here.
Oh, this is actually, yeah, I wasn't expecting a change here.
There was a change here.
I just, we've changed some stuff.
But the whole thing of like, we don't
want you to run five mod maps all the time
because I just have an happenstance of dying.
Like, we've done some stuff around this.
Maybe we undid that though, because now we
have like Atlas nodes and the master for additional revives.
There was something about that, though.
I feel like we did something.
There is an Atlus node that gives you an extra...
We have the master for an extra revive.
Oh, the master does it? Okay.
Okay.
There's something here I can't quite remember.
The one that removes all the revives.
That's often what's mentioned.
One portal just feels like...
We are doing things around it.
I just can't remember exactly which decision we landed on.
But we did show it.
We did show...
I don't know if we put it in here, but on the...
I think on the website when you're looking at the
announcement page there's one there's a few nodes on there and one of them is an additional revive
oh great so it's like you could at least turn that on if you're running a certain class but I
think we have a have some ways to do this now but I can't remember how much we baked into the
inherent behavior versus just putting via the tree and or masters because we went through
like five iterations here yeah there's a question for ascendancy trials um so I guess there's two
questions here one is trial of the answer solver the third mystery the third one's not in this
expansion. No, but a lot of it too much content to do.
I assume that's one of those things that you want to have absolutely in and good for launch.
And yeah, I guess the second question is, the existing ones, is there any kind of plans to
improve them? We do want to improve them, they're not good enough. But we didn't get time this time.
Yeah, like we there's there's there's a lot that needs to happen.
All three of those are on the cards for before.
Should be, should be. But I wouldn't want anything put it this way. Anything that's in the game
right now I don't want anything that's in the game to be bad at 1.0, so certainly I would want to fix those other two trials before we get to 1.0.
The third one, I want to get it in for 1.0, we'll have to see how that goes.
I would say that's a coin flop.
Yeah, yeah. There's quite a lot to do there to make it good.
Doing that would compromise something else.
It would, 100%, and I don't think we will.
I think it's crusty, I'm very excited to see this mystery third trial.
I'd be afterwards, but it's really hard to say, of course.
It just depends, see how things go.
But the other two, we had a plan for,
we're like, oh, we're gonna fix everything in the end game
and those two are on our cards as well,
because technically we want to improve
the end game farm ability of them as well.
In particular, they've not really got,
like they're not something players really play
in the end game that much.
We want to improve that.
Like we want to get that to be a thing
that's like a viable league as it were.
Yeah, you want it to stand alongside
We wanted to do the core Atlas stuff first and then so because we were like okay
We can't do this and this and this and this and we already did we did that and then the and end of this
Kind of tape it off and those were two things were like let's do those in a separate patch a separate time and give them the justice
I might have tried to do too much for once yet, but you got it
You guys seem to like doing that anyway
one kind of on the topic for us here is
Bosses I cannot I will bosses always one of my favorite things and
And you guys are getting a little bit cracked with bosses are getting crazier and crazier.
I've seen like a bit more than I think I was tased in some of these boss fights.
Unhinged.
So I guess my first question is who is each of your favorite of the new bosses?
Because what 15 new bosses this one?
I mean, I reckon just conceptually that the one that's the ritual one, the big, the big
the bo-dak under the ground is just like really cool.
like just with the darkness and the yeah it's just like it's just it's just
really cool just like conceptually as I said like you know the way that the
I mean I don't know how much to spoil about that but like the way that you
know you bring you bring in some entities to help you with that and like it
you know the reviews the same thing with the mechanic of the lights and their
lots of stuff like it's just pretty cool and tale of light versus done yeah
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's just like, that's just a really cool one.
Yeah. Um, favorite.
I never picked favorites.
They're all you must pick a favorite of your children. Go on.
This children child, you look more than me.
I love that.
Well, it's a larium blossoms.
I mean, it's it's good finally having the
is it spoilery?
Go on. It's good having the strange voice.
Have a visit has a has a has a thing now, you know.
He's not so strange after all, he's more strange I guess, one of the two, anyway but like it's nice
that from a you know Delerium's been in P1 for so long, so it's like holy, holy, it's been this long
till we got you know a new pinnacle out of Delerium, but in the same sense so as a ritual and
obviously it doesn't really have any of the way of bosses and anything really so much and
at some point King in the Mist became it but that obviously wasn't you know that came with the
Affliction League and you know so it's like this um he's just a little guy it's just interesting
finally getting some some new capstones to some of these stories that have been around for like a
decade um which i think is real cool and honestly it's just nice to be able to reblake the King in
the Mist come on you fight him in act one no no he's like even from being like a pinnacle boss to
a big campaign plus now in Psygri, your bar has elevated that much.
And then you get again, you got Pinnacle of Ritual and it's King of the Mist again, and
wait, didn't that kill this guy in the first act of the game?
Yeah, he's a slide boss.
He's got a new skill.
It's just not good enough at all, obviously it's more than amped, I'm underselling it,
but it is clearly just not good enough, and so I wanted to be more, you know, ancient
with it, more primordial with it, like things that are just beyond your comprehension of
power and just like wholly we're on a couple of them look a bit mind-bending in that regard.
But not also just like, you know, OP human, you know, those are cool, you know, like technically,
Tang Mizzou is just an OP human, you know, and there's such a cool little storyline there and,
you know, I can't wait for people to like see that because there's actually a cool
story link between ritual and delirium, not that mechanically they're overlapped, and
you get to see, you know, some of the origins of how he came to be, who he is, and, you
know, you might feel a little bit sympathetic for him, or you're just like, nah, nah, I don't
like you, you just make me see crazy demons and stuff, or maybe I love that you make me
see crazy demons and stuff, I don't know, but I just love all of that, like I like that
we're finally putting a bow on some of these things, finally getting to the end of these,
Well, I wouldn't even say it's the end, right?
Like it could be the beginning of something new as well.
Like that's the whole point is, but um...
Something you'd be a bit more proud of, I'm sorry.
100% it's like, oh, it's a bit sad that just Old Roth,
that Old Roth guy that, you know, who,
as a character is called, but as a, you know, a boss fight,
it's just, it was clearly just a rip from Peer Wee One.
And, you know, it's like, here's this new thing in Peer Wee Two
with this new epic new how we make bosses
is obviously evolved over so long, and we're just taking this thing from several years ago,
and it's just the pinnacle. And sure, we redid the effects and gave it a fresh coat of paint,
but it's just not the justice they deserved. And so, yeah, that's, I would love like a mini
documentary, honestly, on like the process of how you make a boss now. Like, how does it actually
go? Like, how do you get from like the original concept or whatever to the boss now that has
like 40 skills and just crazy. There's kind of a few ways. Sometimes it can be driven from three
points, one can just be purely like narrative, let's see what we can come up with. Like the
campaign is way more narratively driven design of bosses, like we kind of know who is going to be
the final boss and story before we develop the boss and thus then it goes to concept and through
the art pipeline. That's probably a more standard pipeline. But honestly, I would say a good half
the bosses and for example, and you are not going to know this and it almost undersells it in a
way but the expedition pinnacle boss that the avarance of elder pinnacle boss
right that which some people saw some silhouettes of and whatnot but that
thing is like this giant massive horrific creature that's just like you
know resembling a spider and you know that was initially just a random mini
boss in act 5 that we were gonna do yeah and the area kind of evolved to the
point where that Boston fit anymore and so we were like well when we're
We're doing league design. We're often looking at some of the assets that we've got around and then like it can actually inspire design for some of the stories.
Yeah, like look at this.
So we sort of look at this like, oh man, like what if we looked at the mix between what if the rysium and corruption would have come together and mix and like what that was sort of result and like you see this and oh maybe that could be and then once you've got that you're like okay maybe if we change this model to kind of be more in line with that we can then like you know like look at this and be like okay like it sort of creates something.
sort of create something so having those constraints when you're designing a story and then like seeing
like some other stuff can actually really inspire quite a lot of creativity as far as like designing
the storyline as well as concerned. You go back and we're like you know like partly it's also
like it's too epic for this just random hack five areas and in between you know it's not a not a key
story boss I guess is what I'd call it and not that those shouldn't be epic but then you take it and
you're like all right let's let's make the limbs out of voracium let's add this let's add this add
add some magical power, we can do this blue glow here, add some more flesh, and by the
way, and then we tell the like the modelers like, by the way, we're going to 3x the scale
of it. And they're like, oh, geez, the resolution of the textures might not hold up. So they're
like, you know, there's all kinds of stuff that we have to do. And then all of a sudden
you've got this like, and obviously, when you make for something that big, you have to,
you can't, if it's already animated, you probably have to reanimate it, right? Because
the way it will move needs to be different.
Big things move forward.
Correct.
Especially if you want some telegraphing, that matters.
So, you know, it helps, but honestly, the way it comes about can just be, honestly,
just out of nowhere, you just have this thing and you take it from somewhere else.
You have the narrative and other times you just have like, I mean, our artists are just
working on stuff.
Like normally we're very, very reactive to player demand for what they want from mechanics
and balance and stuff like that.
We try to be.
And so we don't generally design leagues significantly ahead, right?
And generally, honestly, we do not know the next leak.
Just, we've said this many times before, we do not know it.
So, but obviously you need time for the artists to produce all that art.
And so, they're just making stuff.
They're just in there making cool stuff.
They're just making lots and lots of cool stuff.
And it can be sometimes we have a mechanic we want and we want art to support it, so
we look through our library of just ruckus.
And we find something that fits, or sometimes we're like, damn, we're like struggling to
come up with a theme for a leg here.
We look through and we're like, oh, what do we do?
All this, this, this, and this is the boss, and this is that, and then we just piece some
stuff together, bit of retexturing, maybe some, you know, and it just can kind of can
come together in that regard as well.
And so we have this just insane backlog library of art constantly being made for stuff that
we don't necessarily know.
And sometimes they give some direction, like for example, I know, and Jonathan's mentioned
And we are going to do delve again at some point, right?
So that's like, as soon as I hear that, I'm like, okay, I'm just going to tell the, you
know, concept artists, the character artists, and sometimes even the environment artists.
It's just like, we are going to do this at some point, make sure it's there, make sure
we're experimenting and thinking about what does it look like?
Who is now all of the crystal night warden, maybe his friends or his siblings or his
father or his, you know, you just start, you just start at expanding and just let them
start coming up with the real epic stuff and, and then it's like, what does the underground
now look like?
still, you know, they can, and they might want to experiment with things that's like,
do we want to change how azureite is represented? Because it might just look like ferricium
now. And you know, stuff like that. So we, we kind of have just stuff like that going
where it's sometimes directed, sometimes completely undirected, just going constantly.
And it just allows us to just really quickly then just grab some stuff out of the hat and
chuck it in and start, you know, assign it to either a mechanic or a theme and just unify
those three threads which is the art, the mechanics and the narrative which either can
come first. It's kind of the thing either could be the chicken or the egg and you know it's
kind of awesome and it allows us to just be like real fast.
Yeah awesome. Well you guys are absolutely cooking with this, can't wait to check some
of it out. We do unfortunately have to wait a little while but I suppose you might have
a few teasers and things like that for us over the next couple weeks to help make things
worse maybe while we agonize over this length that's very much the important
to it thank you both for the extended amount of time for a very large Q&A
it's been a good one, it's awesome, good bye. Yeah, good stuff on Jojo. First intermission,
yeah first intermission, woohoo! Not what a colleague right? Very excited. Couldn't make it.
Alright we'll see you guys next time thank you very much for watching. Thanks everyone, thank you. See you on launch.