Path of Exile 3.18: Sentinel Details - All Content and Changes
In the wake of your power, something has arisen. Dark sentinels, hungry for a share. But these cruel constructs can be harnessed. Take them, bind them to your will. Test and tinker. Combine and reconfigure, and together you will find your fortune. Some sentinels are powerful, others are dangerous. But in a world with shifting stars, monstrous new threats, and valuable treasures, you will need them. The sentinels await your command.
Exciting news! Path of Exile 3.18: Sentinel is coming. I'm sure you have a lot of questions, so the professional PoE Shop will share all content and changes about the upcoming Sentinel Challenge League with you.
About Sentinels
Sentinels are ancient constructs that have been unearthed across Wraeclast. In this league, you will collect these Sentinels and attempt to harness their great power. But this symbiosis is not without risks. Once deployed, a Sentinel follows you, watching and waiting for you to enter combat. As you encounter enemies, the Sentinel will fire a beam that doesn't damage the enemy but empowers them. This amplifies not only the difficulty of the foe but also the rewards that it yields.
There are three classes of Sentinels that you will find as you kill monsters in this league.
1. Stalker Sentinels
Stalker Sentinels will follow you for around thirty seconds, empowering dozens of monsters before they dissipate. This is like a build-your-own breach or delirium effect because you control what monsters you're fighting when you deploy the Sentinel, and through various means, which we'll describe shortly, you're also in control of how much the monsters are empowered.
2. Pandemonium Sentinels
In contrast to Stalker Sentinels, Pandemonium Sentinels are designed for mass area-of-effect and typically only fire one shot. But this shot counts, chaining between monsters to affect an entire screen full of foes at once. This class of Sentinel can be very dangerous because it empowers so many enemies at one time.
3. Apex Sentinels
The final class, Apex Sentinels, can only empower rare or unique enemies. They fire fewer shots but have a much larger impact on difficulty and reward.
You start with a single slot to equip a Stalker Sentinel, but as you play through the league, you can eventually unlock two more Sentinel slots so that you can have one Sentinel of each class equipped at a time. Each class of Sentinel can be deployed once per area that you play. You'll quickly develop various strategies for when each class of Sentinel is best used, for example, saving your Pandemonium Sentinel for when you're surrounded by monsters or using your Apex Sentinel on the map boss or league content that spawns several rare monsters.
With a full loadout of Sentinels equipped on every map, you'll get to empower bosses of your choice, juice up an entire screen at once with a button press, and choose the part of the map where it's best to empower a series of dozens of monsters.
Sentinels cannot be damaged by monsters in combat but do gradually deplete their internal power supply each time you use them. They can be found as you play and are incompatible with traditional Wraeclastian crafting techniques. However, new Sentinels with different properties can be assembled from the depleted husks of others that you have used until their internal power supplies run out.
You can find magic Sentinels that have mods on them. These mods can augment the base properties of a Sentinel, extending its duration, making it empower monsters faster, increasing the number it can empower or even the degree to which the monsters are empowered, affecting both their difficulty and rewards.
Some mods will add specific drops such as Path of Exile currency items, essences, or unique items to monsters empowered by the Sentinel, but at the cost of increasing how difficult the monster is to defeat.
You can also occasionally find rare Sentinels that have more than two mods on them. These are generally quite a lot more powerful than normal or magic Sentinels if you find the right combination of mods.
The Sentinels you find as you explore Wraeclast will become more powerful. Some particularly powerful ones with special properties can only come from the process of assembling new Sentinels from depleted ones.
About Sentinel Controller
While the Sentinels you find will generally get better and better as you play through the league, you can also upgrade the behavior and properties of Sentinels through your Sentinel Controller. The Sentinel Controller is like a runic circuit board. It's what powers your sentinels and allows you to customize them. There are specific nodes for each of the three types of Sentinel, so you can customize the properties and behavior of all of them or potentially focus on your favorite base types.
As you play through the league and kill more and more enemies affected by your Sentinels, your controller will gain power. You start with four units, which is enough to power your first Sentinel Slot and your first Runic Node. By the end game, you are able to work up to 30 power units, which is enough for almost half of the controller to be powered at once.
So, how do you choose which runic nodes to power? You do this by connecting them together with filaments. Power flows from the top of the circuit through the filaments until it is all in use by the nodes you have connected. You can set up filaments in advance, and they'll automatically be used as more power becomes available. Moving filaments around have no cost. It's basically like a planning tool that gradually gets activated as you gain more power throughout the league. So you're not locked into a specific plan and can respec for free at any time.
Some powerful runic nodes require two filaments and hence allocate more of your power when activated. Additional sentinel slots, for other types like Pandemonium and Apex Sentinels, for example, require three filaments and hence three power units each. While it's almost always best to have all three slots powered so you can use all three sentinels per area, there are niche strategies where you want to empower specific sentinel slots in order to have more power for additional runic nodes or so that you can fully specialize in just one or two sentinel types. Just to reiterate, you can change your allocation as much as you like, so feel free to experiment!
This powerful runic node allows Pandemonium Sentinels to be used an additional time in each area. While this is a pure upside, you should plan around the fact that you'll be running their charge down pretty quickly if you use this node. This runic node prevents your Stalker Sentinels from empowering normal-rarity enemies. While this seems very powerful at first, because you'll just be empowering magic, rare or unique enemies that benefit greatly from the boost to item drops, you should be aware that unless you have a large source of special enemies, you'll be fighting against the flight duration of your Sentinels and will probably want to build around increasing their duration.
While the Sentinel Controller lets you specialize how the different classes of Sentinels behave, it's generally not necessary to have to modify it for each new Sentinel you equip. The runic nodes you have chosen represent your overall strategy for each class of Sentinel and rarely need to be tweaked if you swap one Sentinel for another.
About Power Core
As you use Sentinels in combat across many maps, they eventually run out of charge and become depleted. But they don't need to be thrown away when this occurs. You can find Power Cores that let you assemble a new Sentinel with a full charge. This process disassembles two existing Sentinels and creates a hybrid of the two, with their properties combined together.
Right-clicking a Power Core opens up the assembly screen. If you insert two Sentinels and click the Assemble button, a new, fully-charged one will be created.
This process is a complex and unpredictable one that can either inherit properties from the input Sentinels or potentially produce new ones that weren't based on either of them. For example, the base type of the Sentinel could be either the left input sentinel, the right input sentinel, or an entirely new one that can't spawn naturally and can only come from this process. The same applies to its modifiers - you generally get a mix of modifiers from the two input Sentinels, but sometimes they have their tiers upgraded or entirely new mods added, occasionally including ones that are exclusive to the assembly process. The end result is that you're usually getting Sentinels that are similar in function to the depleted ones you have combined but occasionally mutate in new ways, producing results that unlock more power and possibilities.
The best Sentinels in the game will come from lucky combinations of depleted Sentinels that have just the right mods. It's also possible to assemble two Sentinels directly into one of many valuable unique Sentinels.
Specialized Power Cores exist, which influence the assembly process to increase the chances of various interesting outcomes occurring greatly. They don't guarantee anything but are worth considering if you're trying to hit unlikely assembly results.
About Sentinel Locker
You may want to accumulate a small collection of depleted Sentinels so that you have options to assemble together. That's where the Sentinel Locker comes in. It's a free object that you can place in your hideout that allows you to store stacks of each of the Sentinel Currency items as well as a tab full of each of the three categories of Sentinel. You can also store Sentinels in regular stash tabs, and they can be freely traded with other players. The Sentinel Locker's Affinity for Sentinels will also work with regular stash tabs while this league is active. These have powerful, static properties, but because they cannot be combined with other sentinels, there's no way to recharge them once they become depleted. They are essentially limited-use items with powerful effects.
Let's look at a few examples. First is the Basilisk. This is a Pandemonium Sentinel that augments its wide area-of-effect blast with a petrification effect. Any monsters caught in the blast are turned to stone. Rather than being primarily useful for raising the risk and reward of combat like other Sentinels, this one is incredibly useful as an emergency button in combat. By activating The Basilisk, you can freeze most of the monsters around you in place, letting you take control of dangerous situations. Second, the Unique Sentinel, The Hollow-Eyed Skull, is a Headhunter in Sentinel form.
There are also a set of unique Sentinels that are designed to empower specific named Atlas map bosses. If you activate one of these Sentinels while fighting that boss, it empowers the boss into an extremely dangerous version that is very, very rewarding if you can defeat it. The highly-empowered boss fight is further scaled by whatever mods are on the map that contains it, so you'll want to be pretty careful with what mods you choose to use. On the other hand, its rewards are scaled by reward bonuses on the map, so if you are able to defeat one of these bosses on a juiced map, you will certainly be greatly rewarded.
About Recombinators
These highly-empowered map bosses are the best source of Recombinators, a new type of endgame currency item that can be found in the Sentinel league. Recombinators allow you to apply the Sentinel assembly process to two pieces of equipment of the same item class, combining them together in unpredictable ways. This process can also rarely imbue your items with exclusive modifiers that don't normally spawn on that type of item. While the recombination process involves significant risks, you could combine the best parts of two rare items together, maybe get a lucky exclusive mod spawn, and end up with one of the best weapons, armour pieces, or jewellery in Path of Exile.
Sentinels can be deployed while engaging in other league content, so you can juice the risk and reward to quite crazy levels. For example, you could enter a Mirror of Delirium, trigger a Breach and deploy your Sentinel at the same time, causing the monsters to have three significant modifiers to both their difficulty and rewards. There are only a few specific areas that Sentinels can't be deployed in, mostly for technical reasons, and those are unique maps, pinnacle Atlas bosses, and the Simulacrum.
Atlas Endgame Improvements
In addition to the Sentinel Challenge League, this expansion further improves on the new endgame introduced in Siege of the Atlas - wide passive tree and pinnacle boss fights. The new endgame was designed to give you ultimate control over what kind of content you want to play and how difficult and rewarding you want it to be.
This expansion introduces 20 powerful keystone passives to the Atlas tree. As you know from the regular passive skill tree, Keystone passives are usually dramatic and build-changing, with both upsides and potential downsides. Each Keystone can completely change the way you play Path of Exile's endgame, and GGG has designed Keystone passives for many different playstyles and situations.
The second big change is that GGG has introduced these clusters of passives that grant you even more control over what endgame content you encounter. As you know, you can encounter many different types of past league content randomly within maps. These new passives allow you to prevent content you don't enjoy from appearing randomly while simultaneously causing other content to spawn at a higher rate. Aside from the obvious convenience of only encountering the past league mechanics that you choose, this system is great for target-farming specific content that you have juiced on your Atlas tree.
Thirdly, GGG has created incredibly difficult and rewarding uber versions of seven pinnacle boss fights which can be accessed via six new keystone passives. These fights are designed to challenge the absolute best Path of Exile players, and suffice to say. They are brutally difficult.
Six new keystones create uber versions of Path of Exile's pinnacle boss fights: Venarius, Sirus, The Maven, The Searing Exarch, The Eater of Worlds, The Shaper, and The Uber Elder.
Here is the end of this post. You can watch GGG's official announcement to see more details about PoE new league. And welcome to mmogah.com to buy cheap PoE orbs to hold your new path. We are waiting for you in the game!
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