"Exile, you have wandered far to arrive at the shores of my lake, a hidden realm. I have overseen for longer than time itself. These waters harbor deadly secrets. Wraeclast is reflected here. Reassemble it as you see fit, but the mirror distorts reality. Beware the image that strikes back. The lake calls to you, exile. Will you endure, or will you drown?"
Dear exiles, exciting news here! Path of Exile 3.19: Lake of Kalandra is coming! This league will launch on August 19th (PDT) for PC and Mac and on August 24th for consoles. Now we will show you all details that GGG has announced about this expansion.
The Kalandra Challenge League
In the Kalandra Challenge League, you will travel to the mirrored lake that granted Kalandra her powers of reflection. We want you to experience the story for yourself, so I'll avoid spoiling the details here. When you get to explore the league next week, you'll find out more about Kalandra and her motivations.
Your experience with Kalandra so far is probably of her coveted mirror, which duplicates items by reflecting them. The lake itself has the power to reflect entire encounters from elsewhere in Wraeclast. As you explore the lake, these reflections emerge from its mirrored surface.
Sometimes these reflections are encounters with hordes of monsters, and sometimes you'll encounter extremely powerful foes reflected from elsewhere in Wraeclast. Often reflections involve league content, such as this encounter with a Harbinger boss.
As you play through the league, you'll occasionally encounter a set of columns protruding from the ground with a mirrored tablet on top. This tablet invites you to construct a custom set of encounters at the Lake of Kalandra, offering a series of different reflections to place in whatever layout you wish. Each of these reflections represents an encounter that you must defeat when you next travel to the lake. Once you have assigned a reflection to every location on your mirror tablet, which will take a few areas, you can open a portal to the Lake of Kalandra itself. There you will get to experience these reflections of Wraeclast as Kalandra manifests each encounter you have chosen. But as you push farther out onto the lake-shrouded waters, you will find each encounter to be more difficult but more rewarding. This difficulty value counts up by one for each location away from the entrance of the encounter.
Players wanting the best rewards will try to engineer tablets that have long, winding strings of encounters, reaching very high difficulty values by the end. To do this, there are occasional options that can be chosen which allow you to move and swap the entrance, reflections, and water tiles on the tablet.
Additionally, as you progress through the league, you'll be able to unlock special abilities that let you manipulate the options you have available on each tablet. If you don't like any of the choices available to you, you can earn the ability to skip picking one entirely.
The next ability is even stronger. It lets you reroll the list of options so that you can immediately pick another one.
Finally, you can earn the ability to exile a choice entirely. For the rest of this tablet, that choice will no longer appear.
Once you reach maps, you'll be able to itemize your mirror tablets so that they don't have to be played immediately. They can be stored for later or traded with other players.
As you visit the Lake of Kalandra to attempt your mirror tablets, there are many types of rewards you can find. An encounter that is based on a past league grants the rewards from that league, but with extra juice so that you're not missing out on bonuses you'd have obtained if your atlas tree applied to the lake.
Other encounters that aren't based on past leagues yield a reward chest that rises out of the lake when you complete the encounter.
Certain reflections grant you access to a new variation on rare items exclusive to the Kalandra Challenge League. When you complete the encounter, you'll get access to some reflecting mist, which presents you with a difficult choice. It generates a rare ring or amulet with an unusual set of mods. Some are very high, and some are very negative, which hurts your character. The item is then duplicated with a reflected copy having inverse mods. Negative ones are now positive and vice versa.
The amount that all of these mods are scaled up is based on the difficulty of the encounter you just completed. You may only pick one of these items to keep. It'll often be a tough choice, with each item having its own strong pros and cons. But sometimes, you'll be offered an item where the negative mods aren't downsides for your build, and the juiced-up positive mods are very attractive.
There are also some special new jewelry-based types that you can rarely receive from this process. One rare and difficult encounter rewards you with an advanced version of this crafting process. It allows you to bring your own ring or amulet, distorting and reflecting it with the same process described before. The mods are scaled up in value, and some are randomly negated. The reflected copy has the inverse set of negations. It will certainly be tempting to gamble with some of your best jewelry to try to double the values that really matter for your build and negate the ones you don't care about.
If you're very lucky, you may find a special league-exclusive unique ring at the lake. Kalandra's Touch mirrors the effect of your other ring.
The Kalandra Challenge League has something for everyone. It's an out-of-area combat league where you build your own sequences of encounters. It lets you fully dictate your desired level of risk and reward and fully customize what content you play. It features a powerful crafting system and valuable rewards and offers a glimpse into the lore of one of Path of Exile's most iconic characters. We can't wait to play it with you next week.
Endgame Improvements
In every expansion leading up to Path of Exile 2's release, we'll be improving Path of Exile's end game with new content to explore and new ways to customize your end game experience.
In the Lake of Kalandra expansion, we're introducing Atlas memories. They aren't a league feature. They're part of the core game, affecting Standard and persisting once the Kalandra League has ended.
In maps, you'll very rarely find a memory item that represents a set of memories that an NPC has about their past. Something special happened to them while exploring maps, and you're able to experience those events for yourself.
Let's have a look at a couple of examples. In this Atlas memory, Kirac tells you about the time that he stumbled across a staging ground for a Harbinger invasion of Wraeclast. Each successive map you play in the sequence has more and more Harbinger portals and invaders that you must deal with. This is a memory of Niko's, where he entered a sequence of maps that were entirely consumed by permanent breaches like a Breachlord's domain. He survived to talk about it, but will you?
Right-click a memory and apply it to a completed map on your atlas. It'll mark out a series of adjacent maps that the Atlas memory will span. When you next talk to the relevant NPC in your hideout, they'll tell you about their recollections and will allow you to start exploring the memory.
Each map in the sequence is provided for free by the NPC, and you'll be able to roll it like usual before running it. Because these maps are memories of the NPC, they're not affected by your atlas tree. However, the content is generally as difficult and rewarding as a fully specialized Atlas tree would cause it to be.
Each successive map in the sequence gets harder and more rewarding as the memories intensify. While memories are tradeable, they're also very rare and valuable, so you'll probably want to complete them yourself if you can.
For players who love lore, Atlas memories help expand on the backstory of key NPCs. For players wanting to try out different league mechanics at quite high levels of juice that they haven't specialized their atlas for, memories let them do this without a bunch of respeccing. And for everyone else, Atlas memories are a great way to earn some valuable items if you're strong enough to complete them.
The Lake of Kalandra expansion also contains a new unique map that I'm quite excited about. The Trialmaster is back. This boss from Ultimatum and, more importantly, the unique items he drops have been sorely missed and will be making a return as the Tower of Ordeals unique map in Lake of Kalandra. This map can be created by completing difficult endgame Vaal content. We have not forgotten about the rest of Ultimatum and have a specific plan for how it will return in the future.
Whenever we're improving Path of Exile's endgame, we take every opportunity we can to add new variations of rewards that you can find. We don't want to say too much about how these are acquired, but in this expansion, it's possible to very rarely find special foil versions of any pinnacle boss unique item. These have the same stats as regular ones but are certain to be highly prized by collectors or wealthy players wanting to show off.
New Unique Items
The Lake of Kalandra expansion contains 14 new unique items. In addition to the Kalandra's Touch ring that is exclusive to the Kalandra Challenge League, we have introduced a new endgame pinnacle boss reward, a supporter unique, the Tower of Ordeals unique map, six new Grand Spectrum jewels, and even some leveling uniques.
The first we're showing you today is Soul Ascension, a pair of gloves designed by Zizaran. They drop from the Uber Elder. Soul Eater is a very powerful buff, but it is usually hard to obtain in boss fights. This unique item grants you the ability to gain stacks of Soul Eater when you hit a unique enemy but also makes you lose those stacks if you aren't near one.
Ghostwrithe is a leveling unique which allows you to play as an almost pure energy shield character during the early parts of the campaign. We'll reveal the other new unique items in this expansion over the next week.
Unique Item Rebalance
Path of Exile has a lot of unique items in its core drop pool. Over 700, in fact. We feel that there are two big problems with unique items at the moment. The first is that you find too many. And the second is that they're generally pretty useless when you do. Sure, there are some powerful end game or build enabling uniques that feel amazing to find, but the majority of unique items found throughout the game are rarely actually useful to you.
In the Lake of Kalandra expansion, we've made a lot of changes here. We have reduced the overall drop rate of uniques throughout the game and have rebalanced and overhauled over 100 existing unique items, with an emphasis on uniques in the core drop pool, including leveling uniques and some endgame uniques. You're going to find unique items less frequently now, but when you do, they're going to be a lot more punchy.
Nycta's Lantern has been completely changed from the ground up. Previously it was trying to allow you to play a hybrid attacker and spell caster, but it didn't really work very well. With the new design, it's a lot more elegant and delivers on this goal by simply granting more damage and the Battlemage effect so that your weapon damage is added to your spells.
Thousand Ribbons is an example of an item where we merely needed to tweak values on the existing mods to make it a lot better. We want mod value rolls to matter more, and this item now showcases that well. If you find a high-rolled one early on, you're probably not replacing it for a long time.
Malachai's Simula was trying to deliver the blood mage fantasy by allowing you to spend life casting your spells. This was meant to be special because the Blood Magic keystone was far away from the Witch's starting location on the skill tree. Unfortunately, this item wasn't really powerful enough to justify its use. It has now been overhauled, and alongside Blood Magic, it grants a powerful multiplicative damage boost.
With over 100 uniques rebalanced in this way, your play experience is now punctuated by quite large bursts of power when you find one. We'll continue to examine the power level and rarity of more unique items in subsequent expansions.
New Skill and Support Gems
The Lake of Kalandra expansion includes three new skill gems and one new support gem.
Alchemist's Mark is a new mark skill. Igniting or poisoning the marked target creates burning or the caustic ground underneath them, based on the damage of the strongest ignite or poison on the enemy. The damage of the ground effects also scales with curse and mark effect, providing a nonstandard way to scale your build's damage. Hitting the marked target also refills some of your flask charges. This new skill opens up an extra source of damage for igniting, or poison-focused characters, especially for ignite builds that want an alternative to Flame Surge or poison builds that cause fewer, higher damage poisons. This high-level build uses Flame Blast, with 100% of the damage converted to chaos to inflict huge poisons on enemies. When Alchemist Mark is cast on an enemy first, that enemy drops caustic ground when it's poisoned, scaled by those big Flame Blast poison hits melting everything into a puddle.
Galvanic Field is a new shock-themed spell. When used, you gain a buff granting a small bonus chance to shock. When you next shock an enemy, the buff is consumed, and the enemy becomes energized, repeatedly zapping themselves and nearby targets, a lot like Ball Lightning. If the energized enemy dies, then the energy sits at its location and continues to zap things. Galvanic Field's area of effect and zap damage scale with the strength of the shock on the target. While Galvanic Field is great for any build that shocks, you can even fully build around it and use a skill with increased shock effectiveness like Arc to shock enemies and kill them with a ball of death.
Lightning Conduit is another new shock-themed spell. A wave propagates out from the target location, causing lightning bolts to strike all shocked enemies in a large area. The damage is scaled by the strength of the shock on each enemy. Lightning Conduit cannot find itself in shock and won't hit non-shocked enemies at all. So the challenge with this skill is to find a way to consistently apply powerful shocks to your targets to make the most of Lightning Conduit's high damage potential and area of effect. This high-level build uses Wave of Conviction to shock enemies before casting Lightning Conduit until they're obliterated. For longer fights, it can employ Galvanic Field to create a constant source of lightning damage.
Last but not least, Overcharge Support is a new support gem that causes supported skills to deal less damage but makes them inflict much stronger shocks and grants them a higher chance to shock. Overcharge lets many different lightning skills create powerful shocks. Use this to take advantage of the shock's large damage multiplier or to activate Lightning Conduit and Galvanic Field.
Revamped Content
As Path of Exile expands, we often revisit previous leagues, reworking them, so they stay relevant and engaging. In Lake of Kalandra, we are targeting three such Leagues. Archnemesis, Beyond, and Harvest. The larger context here is that we've been reexamining what role rare and magic monsters have in Path of Exile.
1. Archnemesis
The introduction of Archnemesis modifiers as the monster mod pool prompted quite a lot of discussion about how often you should encounter rare and magic monsters, how difficult they should be to kill, and how rewarding their deaths should be. Previously, league content made fights hard by spawning a lot of rare monsters. A whole lot, in some cases, 6 to 8 times the normal rate of rare monsters.
Now that we have better mods available to make fights against rare monsters individually challenging, we've gone through the whole game and normalized the rate that monsters are spawned. Some leagues had quite large reductions in spawn rate. You won't encounter situations with dozens of rare monsters on screen at once anymore. Alongside this reduction of how many rare monsters you'll face, we have improved their rewards and made sure that they scale with both difficulties of the encounter and any item, rarity, or quantity bonuses that you have.
During the campaign, you'll only encounter one and two mod rare monsters. The two mod encounters are a bit harder and have better drops.
In maps, you'll stop encountering one mod rare monster entirely. You'll mostly encounter two and three mod-rare monsters. It'll also be possible to encounter four mod rare monsters again. Not only are the innate item drop bonuses scaled up significantly on monsters with many mods, but we have made these challenging encounters rewarding in another way too.
About a third of the more powerful Archnemesis modifiers now use a special reward conversion system. For example, if you defeat a monster with a Corruptor mod, all of its drops become corrupted.
The Solaris-touched mod converts all of its item drops to maps. The Kitava-touched mod will cause the rarity of its drops to be upgraded by one tier. So magic becomes rare, and rare becomes unique, and so on.
If you're lucky, you can find these conversion modifiers on both the third and fourth mod of a rare monster. This causes them to stack together. So if you kill a four-mod rare monster with both the Entangler and Kitava-touched mods on it, its heavily juiced drops will also be converted to jewels with their rarity upgraded by a tier. Due to the high amount of inherent item rarity that four mod rare monsters have, this may result in several unique jewels dropping.
This conversion system is fully compatible with your item rarity and quantity bonuses, as well as the drop bonuses from all other Archnemesis mods. Going forward, we want to make sure that a lot more item reward mechanics scale with your character item bonuses. Get your magic find characters ready. As a result of this system, when you do encounter a rare monster with many Archnemesis mods, you are well rewarded for the difficult fight.
We have also been listening to feedback about the Archnemesis mods that can spawn on magic monsters. Too many of them had external visual clarity issues like death effects. We have toned these down on magic monsters, so more of them are stat-based bonuses that aren't so spammy. Encounters that spawn a series of magic monsters now make sure to preserve the same Archnemesis modifiers between the monsters rather than rolling a different one for each monster. This will further help keep the game state understandable in hectic situations.
2. Beyond
Beyond was introduced in August 2014, initially as a hardcore-only challenge league. It's eight years old now and certainly has several issues.
Firstly, the art. Have you ever really taken a close look at it Beyond demon? It is literally a bandit from Act 2 dunked in red paint.
The second issue is its balance. The number of magic and rare monsters spawned is so much higher than the rest of the game. And whatever problems that resulted before are magnified now that rare monsters are meant to be more difficult. Beyond also spawns way too many unique bosses, which causes its own set of issues.
In Lake of Kalandra, we've given Beyond much more than a fresh coat of paint. The Scourge has taken over the realm of the Beyond demons. The old bandit Beyond demons are gone. Summoning monsters from Beyond will now summon Scourge monsters and bosses.
We have completely rebalanced the rate that Beyond monsters and bosses spawn so that it's appropriate for the modern Path of Exile. The new Beyond monsters can now occasionally drop the Scourge league's tainted currency items that allow you to modify corrupted items.
3. Harvest
We've also completely revamped how Harvest crafting works. Rather than being presented with a selection of crafting options that must be used immediately, you now receive itemized, tradable life force of the appropriate color.
This lifeforce can be used later in your own time at the hot-crafting bench in your hideout. Its crafting options are now priced in terms of this itemized lifeforce currency.
Tier four bosses are now encountered much more frequently and can drop a key to fight Oshabi. She yields special lifeforce, which can be used for a specific set of crafts.
We have rebalanced all Harvest crafts for the new system and have removed a bunch of filler crafts and some ones with deterministic outcomes that were incredibly RNG gated before.
Some crafts that provided access to exclusive content like the special Offerings to the Goddess have been removed because these items can now be found in more appropriate locations elsewhere in the game.
The result of these changes is that when you complete a Harvest, you aren't presented with 30 crafts that must either be used immediately or unsafely traded to some player you found on a community Discord server. It also means that every bit of lifeforce you receive is going towards a craft you actually want to use on one of your items when you're ready to use it. Your interaction with the Sacred Grove is now far simpler as well. Just enter, pick your plots, defeat the monsters, and get on with your mapping.
Like with Archnemesis and Beyond, we've also addressed the monster composition of Harvest's fights so that it doesn't contain too many rare monster mods and so that it is of appropriate difficulty for its rewards.
In addition, the rewards for Harvest now scale with map quantity and pack size, incentivizing you to juice your maps. Previously, the crafts you received were not scaled up at all if you played a harder map.
Balance Changes
There are plenty more changes that we will include in the full patch notes that will be posted after this Livestream. But on the stream, I'd like to talk about a few specific areas. Minion itemization, Exalted and Divine orbs, and the Trickster Ascendancy class.
Historically, minion builds have not been particularly reliant on the stats of their items. Most of the power of their minions came from the skill and support gems. This led to a few problems.
Firstly, it gave them a bit of a free ride compared to most other character builds. And secondly, it meant that it was hard for minion players to actually specialize their character to be really, really good.
We want to solve both of these problems in this expansion. Path of Exile is a game about items, and that means that you will now be strongly rewarded for finding items that make your minions better. It also means that, like with other builds, if you find good items, you'll be far more damaging and survivable than before.
We described a variety of minion changes in last week's Character Balance manifesto. Today, I want to show you the new base item types we've added to help your minion itemization.
We've added a new ring-based type, the Bone Ring. This ring has implicit minion elemental resistances and can roll minion-related modifiers.
We've added level 20 and 50 versions of the Convoking Wand called the Calling Wand and Covening Wand, respectively. Like the Convoking Wand, these new base types can roll minion-related modifiers. Some new minion-related mods have been added to the pool available to these wands, and some existing mods have been adjusted or made more common.
We have repurposed the bone-themed spirit shields so that they have minion damage implicit mods rather than spell damage and can also roll minion-related mods.
Alongside the stability of existing unique items, there's now quite a lot more base type support for minion characters, and good mods on those base types can stack up to some pretty large bonuses for your minions.
I also wanted to discuss two of the rarest currency items in Path of Exile, Divine Orbs, and Exalted Orbs. These actually have the same drop rate, but Exalted Orbs are worth so much more in trade because there's no easy vendor recipe for them and because they're consumed when you craft certain meta mods onto items. Out of these two currency items, we would actually prefer the Divine Orb effect to be rarer so that unique items with good rolls matter more. And so that players can Exalt craft their items more frequently.
We are making two changes that will impact this. Firstly, we are changing the cost of crafting meta mods so that they cost Divine Orbs rather than Exalted Orbs. Secondly, we are changing the six-link vendor recipe to grant 20 Orbs of Fusing rather than a Divine Orb. This change will result in Exalted Orbs being far more available for crafting and Divine Orbs less available for rerolling mods on items. It'll certainly be interesting to see what the defacto trade currency becomes next league.
Next, I'd like to talk about the Trickster Ascendancy class. We haven't been happy with the state of this Ascendancy class recently. While it used to be quite powerful, we moved its defining feature, Ghost Dance, onto the main passive skill tree. Since then, it has had a confused identity and hasn't met the power level of the other Ascendancy classes.
In this expansion, we have reworked the trickster with a focus on establishing thematically appropriate defenses and ways to manipulate speed.
One Step Ahead allows the trickster to manipulate time in an interesting way. Enemies are slower than normal and cannot have their action speed raised above this value, such as through an acceleration shrine. Conversely, the trickster is faster by default and cannot have action speed lowered below this value, effectively making them immune to effects that lower action speed such as freeze, chill, or Temporal Chains.
Spellbreaker ties together spell suppression and energy shield in a powerful way. Spellbreaker grants some spell suppression chance, which is an effect that reduces damage taken from spells. The skill also starts your energy shield recharge half the time you suppress spells. Since Trickster characters tend to have a high evasion rating, you'll be evading some hits and recharging on others, meaning that your energy shield recharge stays active most of the time. Spellbreaker also further improves defenses by reducing the damage you take from suppressed spells while on a full energy shield.
For those that want a different way to recover energy shield, the powerful Soul Drinker notable passive is no longer exclusive to forbidden jewels from the Uber Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds. Any Trickster can now allocate this skill.
Polymath provides more bonus damage life, mana, and energy shield on kill for each different type of mastery you have allocated. It reinforces the idea that a Trickster is a jack of all trades and will lead to interesting decisions when planning your passive tree, trying to fit in as many different types of masteries as possible.
Overall, the new trickster is intended to be the Shadow's answer to the Champion, but faster. He should be an exciting option for players who want to get a lot of evasions, energy shield, and recovery out of their Ascendancy class while still being able to melt enemies.
New Supporter Packs
Alongside today's Livestream, we're launching two new series of supporter packs. The Knight and Rogue Packs. Each tier contains the packs' full face value in points, plus several exclusive microtransactions. These packs are only available during the Kalandra League and will leave the store forever in three months. Every microtransaction you are about to see is entirely cosmetic and does not affect your character's progression or power.
The Knight Pack series contains six exclusive microtransactions, including the full Knight Master Armour Set.
1. The Aetheric Mana Flask releases a burst of mana upon activation, then draws in energy from the environment as your mana refills.
2. The Hoarder's Stash is a stash skin that can be used in your hideout. As you place items in the stash, they hover above it until you're finished before being sucked into storage.
3. The KnightMaster Armour Set - while wearing its helmet, your actions are periodically duplicated by an ethereal copy of yourself.
4. The BloodScouring Cloak absorbs blood as you slay monsters. It tracks your killstreak and cleans itself off when the slaughter ends.
5. The Ring of the Victor causes a podium to rise up underneath you when you are standing still, elevating you above other players.
6. The Warlord's Lieutenant Portal summons a warrior spirit who will greet you, cheer you on, and commend you on your actions.
The Rogue Pack series has six exclusive microtransactions, including the Rogue Stalker Armor Set.
1. The Beast of Burden Pet visually carries your items for you, becoming more laden with bags and packs the fuller your inventory gets.
2. The Collector Serpent Shield covets the treasure you find whenever you pick up an item. The serpent darts out to grab it.
3. The Rogue Stalker Armor Set - while wearing its gloves, critical strikes cause blades to appear and slice at your enemies.
4. The Corpsebloom Footprints cause exotic plant growth in your wake. The plants especially love corpses and will seek them out and grow in larger patches around them.
5. On the other hand, the Undertaker's Amulet inters corpses for you, burying them and marking their location with gravestones.
6. The Unstable Explosives Back Attachment is not for the faint of heart. As your life gets lower and lower, it gets closer and closer to exploding. And when you die, your party members will certainly feel it.
As I mentioned before, these packs are exclusive to the Kalandra League and will leave the store in three months. They're available right now at pathofexile.com/purchase, and they directly fund the ongoing development of Path of Exile 2 and Path of Exile 1 expansions like Lake of Kalandra. In addition, the supporter packs introduced with the Sentinel expansion are leaving the store forever in one week. Now's your last chance to purchase them. And we greatly appreciate your Support.
Speaking of things leaving the store, the Kirac's Vault Pass for Sentinel is only available for the next few days also and will leave the store forever when the league ends. There's no penalty for purchasing the pass late in the league after you've wrapped up your map completion. So if you're pleased with where you got to in maps in Sentinel and want to lock in your unique skins, it's not too late to buy your pass.
Conclusion
The new coming league of Path of Exile 3.19 is very much worth expecting and playing. We can't wait to see you in Wraeclast on August 19th.
