Dear Exiles, exciting news! The new league will come next week. This release contains everything you've come to expect from a Path of Exile expansion release: a new challenge league, new skills, new items, metagame rebalances, and an endgame content update that will leave a lasting impact on Path of Exile.
Echoes of the Atlas
The Echoes of the Atlas expansion introduces a new pinnacle boss, a new way to fight many map bosses simultaneously, eleven new maps to explore, and new endgame rewards to earn!
You'll first encounter the new boss Maven in the boss arena of a map, where she will make the boss encounter more difficult, and watch as you do your best to defeat it. If you're successful, she'll give you her beacon, which lets you call her to any map in that region so that she can watch more fights. After showing her your boss-killing prowess, she will give you an Invitation to her realm, where she has prepared a special challenge. The Maven wants to push you to your limits and has fabricated copies of the bosses she watched your defeat. Except for this time, she wants to watch more and tougher fights, and her next challenge will contain four bosses. Then five, then six, and finally, ten. Completing the Maven's challenges offers the opportunity to acquire some powerful new rewards, including Atlas Passive Skill Points, craftable Watchstones, and even The Maven's Orb.
1. Atlas Passive Tree
You'll earn a new type of passive skill point that can be allocated on a special passive skill tree in that region of the Atlas of Worlds as you complete the Maven's Challenges. Each of the Atlas regions has its passive tree, and they generally have around 20 nodes to choose from.
2. Craftable Watchstones
Watchstones are an endgame item placed in the Atlas of Worlds to upgrade a region's map tiers and add new base maps to that region. Unique Ivory Watchstones provide special bonuses and can be traded. These unique ones are consumed after many maps are run. The Atlas expansion's Echoes introduces three new types of craftable Watchstones - Titanium, Chromium, and Platinum. The eventual goal is to replace all of your base quest item Watchstones with the new craftable ones over time as you upgrade your Atlas. Each of these three types of new watchstone has its special mod pool, but there's also a shared mod pool that they all draw from. You can't find or craft rare Watchstones. When combined with the Atlas Passive Trees, you can optimize what content you encounter and the rewards from that content.
3. The Maven's Orb
The Maven's Orb is an endgame crafting PoE Currency that can only drop from The Maven herself. When we apply a Maven's Orb to it, it randomly removes one of these mods and upgrades the other to become an elevated influence mod. In this case, it upgraded the increased intelligence mod to have +1 to socketed intelligence gems. The other influence mod was removed. Maven's Orb crafting is only going to be performed by the upper echelons of elite players and pushes the boundaries of the best possible PoE Items in Path of Exile.
4. Eleven New Maps
In Echoes of the Atlas, GGG has added eleven new types of maps to the Atlas of Worlds, covering a wide variety of environments. And, of course, each comes with its challenging boss fight. One of the reasons these new maps look so good is that the environment art, tileset, and level design teams working on them have been doing so much work on Path of Exile 2 recently.
Ritual Challenge League
"What drives you, Exile? Is it justice? Revenge? Honour? No. It is power. We felt your deeds, felt their shockwaves ripple through the void. You have our attention. Now you must keep it. Your limits will be tested. Break them. Do what is thought impossible. And the Atlas will follow. The stars themselves will bear silent witness. How far will you bend before you break?"
Whenever GGG releases a new quarterly Path of Exile update, they start a new Challenge League. The challenge league being released alongside Echoes of the Atlas is the Ritual League.
1. Improved Ascendancy Classes
Path of Exile has nineteen Ascendancy classes, which let you specialize your character further than the base character classes allow. In this expansion, every one of these nineteen classes are rebalanced and have significantly reworked three of them: The Elementalist, the Inquisitor, and the Deadeye. These changes aim to redistribute and simplify power so that Ascendancy passive skills perform stronger single functions more effectively.
2. New Skill Gems
Like improving Ascendancy classes, adding new skill and support gems to Path of Exile helps create new ways to play. In Echoes of the Atlas, there are two new gems that provide versatile ways for you to build powerful new characters.
3. New Unique Items
Unlike most items you find in Path of Exile that is randomly generated, unique items are extremely rare. Our design team has hand-created to offer new build opportunities. Echoes of the Atlas introduces ten new unique items, some exclusive to its new endgame encounters.
Harvest Returns
This expansion contains two such leagues – Harvest and Heist. In Echoes of the Atlas, as you play through maps, you'll now encounter a portal to the Sacred Grove rather than finding a seed cache. But it's not your Sacred Grove. It's an established one with a full complement of plants ready to harvest, fight and craft with. If you're strong enough to kill the monsters, each grove represents quite a lot of crafting opportunities, and you can save up to ten crafts for later use at the Horticrafting Station, which is now available in your hideout.
Heist Returns
In the Heist, players travel to the rogue harbour to hire a thief crew to help them plan and execute risky heists, working towards a thief's ultimate goal - pulling off a Grand Heist. Rogues level up their skills faster from completing Heists, Markers drop with larger stack sizes, and Quest contracts are now dropped for you at the next smuggler's cache as soon as that quest is available.
Here is the end of the new event. You can come to the Professional Gaming Shop MmoGah to Buy PoE Orbs to enhance your character. Have fun next week!
