Path of Exile: The Forbidden Sanctum expansion is just around the corner and it’s going to bring massive changes to the game, especially to Eldritch Altars, Archnemesis monster mods, and the Atlas Tree.
Eldritch Altars
For those who are new to Path of Exile, Eldritch Altars appear randomly on maps that are witnessed by the Searing Exarch or Eater of Worlds. These present you with choices that have an upside and a downside. For example, Eldritch Minions might gain increased cold and lightning resistance, but this can come with a 1% to 2% increased chance of gaining Eldritch currency items as well.
However, the GGG dev team said that the Eldritch Altars are too rewarding in their current state, so they’ve made some tweaks. First, certain rewards like duplicate gems and influenced items will no longer be offered as part of the choices. Instead, these things will naturally be more common during the map run.
Furthermore, these altars now explicitly state what items you’re going to get. Rather than getting an increased chance of getting basic currency items, it will now state that you’ll be getting a specific currency, such as a Divine Orb or a Chaos Orb.
More importantly, items that are usually not too important in the endgame are removed from the reward pool. These include Orbs of Augmentation, Orbs of Transmutation, and Blacksmith’s Whetstones.
Archnemesis Mods
One of the most problematic things in Path of Exile is the monsters with Archnemesis mods. These modifiers turn trivial encounters into needlessly challenging fights. What’s worse, most monsters with Archnemesis mods don’t even give better rewards, so fighting them is wasteful.
Fortunately, the next expansion features essential changes for this aspect. One of the most notable is that monster mods now only do one specific thing. Magma Barrier, used to provide monsters with additional fire damage and fire resistance, now only envelops the monster with a magma barrier and nothing else.
Atlas Tree
The Atlas Passive Tree in Path of Exile allows you to tweak certain aspects of your maps to be more rewarding. However, this caused an issue where most people would spec into one type of content and then change back to a more general build. This is quite resource-intensive since you would have to spend a huge number of Orbs of Unmaking to do so.
To address this, the developers have removed the Atlas passives that specifically increase the number of rewards that can be gained from pinnacle bosses, such as Shaper, Elder, The Searing Exarch, the Eater of Worlds, and the Maven.
Instead, the said pinnacle boss encounters are rewarding by default without the need to specifically put Atlas passives for such content. According to the devs, this change was made so that you can engage with these pinnacle bosses at any time.
So, what can you say about these changes?
Path of Exile: The Forbidden Sanctum launches on December 9.
