[2019] What We're Working On

Last week we posted an outline of our development plans for 2019. We also wanted to keep you up-to-date about what we're specifically working on at the moment.

Earlier this week, we deployed Patch 3.5.2 which addressed many of the remaining bugs with Betrayal. Since then, we have been doing server and client hotfixes for remaining issues. We are keeping a close eye on bug reports and will continue to fix things as they crop up.

Next week we're starting the press tour for 3.6.0 where we'll show journalists what the upcoming expansion includes. We expect to announce full details on approximately February 14. We can't wait to show you what we've been working on since Betrayal.

The finishing touches of the PlayStation 4 version are almost done, and we're going through the relevant certification and approval processes. It's looking very likely that it'll launch alongside 3.6.0, or even before it with a Beta. We'll let you know more information as we get it!

ExileCon planning progress is going well and we hope to open up ticket sales as soon as we have worked out the subtle logistics of pass types, whether and where there's a party, etc, etc. This is likely in the next couple of weeks (which would give people a decent 9-10 month buffer of time to prepare!)

Remember to check out the community race event that Kammell has arranged this weekend!

We are just over a month into the Synthesis League. As we look ahead to the remainder of the league, we wanted to give you an indication of what to expect and give you a general scope of what the team is working on.

Later this week, we're planning to deploy a small patch on PC that includes a few bug fixes as well as some backend changes that won't affect players but will improve infrastructure.

In just over two weeks we plan to announce the full details of an end-of-league event that we expect to begin around the 10th of May. We are currently investigating whether this event will be possible on console. It looks likely so far. This is likely to be something in the vein of either a Mayhem/Turmoil pair or Flashback. We always love to see community highlights from these events and can't wait to see what shenanigans you get up to!

We are currently planning to announce our 3.7.0 expansion between the 17th and 24th of May although we will give you a firmer indication of the timing as we get closer to the announcement. We'll go into more detail about its exact contents when we announce it, but can confirm that there is a significant balance focus on Melee and a League of a simpler scope than the last few. Our internal playtest version of the new league is much further along than leagues normally are at this point in the development cycle. We're hoping it'll be a new fan-favourite.

The current end date for the Synthesis League on PC is Tuesday June 4th at 10am NZDT. This may change as we get closer to it but we will let you know. Synthesis will end on console when the 3.7.0 league is launched.

We are also considering ending Synthesis on PC when the 3.7.0 expansion launches so that people can continue to play right up until launch if they so wish. We are very keen to see how the community feels about this before we go about changing it. Let us know your thoughts! Related to this, we are interested in feedback on whether players would prefer that we have leagues run up until when the next one starts on PC, rather than ending a few days beforehand.

We're now in the second week of Legion and we're still really pleased to see how much people are enjoying the new content. We want to keep you in the loop about what we're working on and what to expect this week so we've prepared a news post that addresses some community concerns and outlines our update coming later this week.

This Week's Patch

We currently have a patch scheduled for Thursday that should include our next batch of improvements and bug fixes. These are still subject to change as we continue development and testing but below are some of the high priority issues we expect to address in this update:

• Legion Monsters cannot be frozen and corpses cannot be destroyed once slain.


• Players not getting Fortify if they Shield Charge with a wand.


• Bladestorm's initial hit doesn't actually hit.


• Adding Orb of Horizons to the Currency Stash Tab.


• More client crash fixes.


• Rebalancing audio for some skills that are currently too loud.


• Item filter alerts are too quiet.

NOTE: If you believe you're experiencing a bug, please report it in the Bug Reports forum with as much relevant detail as possible. The QA team checks all reports that are made in this forum but are not able to reply to every thread. Please also check the Known Issues thread before posting to see if an issue is already known.

Other Issues

The following issues will ideally go into this week's patch but may end up in a later patch instead.

• Increasing visibility of the Legion reward symbols.


• Improving signalling of Legion encounters and Generals.


• Flame Dash is double casting when only used a single time.


• Performance problems associated with water.


• More client crash fixes.

If you don't see an issue that pertains to you listed in this post, don't fret. This post only includes the highlight/most frequently talked about issues. If you want to make sure your issue is seen, please make a bug report using the method described above.

pathofexile.com/trade

Our official trade website has been slow and occasionally unresponsive since Legion's launch. This is partly due to an unusually high number of Path of Exile players on the servers. We've added more servers to deal with this part of the issue.

There was also a bottleneck in the website's traffic which when uncovered, also revealed another issue with an essential service related to the website. We've band-aid fixed these for now and are working on better solutions to enable the site to handle this kind of workload in future. We will keep you updated as these improvements come in.

Server Issues

We're investigating reports of server and connectivity issues. We are working to resolve two confirmed issues - degraded server performance affecting the Japan and Singapore gateways and another widespread issue that is causing unexpected disconnections during peak time (approximately 11pm-4am NZST). We're working to resolve both of these urgently. There are several other reports we are investigating, including connectivity issues between users and several of the EU gateways.

It is somewhat tricky to definitively say what is and isn't a server issue as many things can seem like server issues when their root causes are elsewhere. We are investigating all reports and will work as quickly as possible to resolve issues that we can confirm and are within our control. We are also continuing to work on fixing any remaining instance and client crashes.

If you believe you're experiencing server issues, please share your experiences here with a WinMTR report attached so that we can assess what's happening.

On-kill Effects and Legion

We're aware that many players are feeling frustrated that some on-kill mechanics don't currently interact nicely with Legion, including the explosions from Gratuitous Violence on the Gladiator's Ascendancy Skill Tree, in addition to a few other Ascendancy skills. We are beginning the process of enabling ones that can be enabled and will make a list of those that can't be enabled due to technical limitations. This is quite a complex development process so we don't have any specifics to report just yet but will keep you updated as the work continues on these.

Thank you very much for all of your feedback and support in making Path of Exile the best it can be. We really appreciate it!

We're now in the second week of Legion and we're still really pleased to see how much people are enjoying the new content. We want to keep you in the loop about what we're working on and what to expect this week so we've prepared a news post that addresses some community concerns and outlines our update coming later this week.

This Week's Patch

We currently have a patch scheduled for Thursday that should include our next batch of improvements and bug fixes. These are still subject to change as we continue development and testing but below are some of the high priority issues we expect to address in this update:

• Legion Monsters cannot be frozen and corpses cannot be destroyed once slain.


• Players not getting Fortify if they Shield Charge with a wand.


• Bladestorm's initial hit doesn't actually hit.


• Adding Orb of Horizons to the Currency Stash Tab.


• More client crash fixes.


• Rebalancing audio for some skills that are currently too loud.


• Item filter alerts are too quiet.

NOTE: If you believe you're experiencing a bug, please report it in the Bug Reports forum with as much relevant detail as possible. The QA team checks all reports that are made in this forum but are not able to reply to every thread. Please also check the Known Issues thread before posting to see if an issue is already known.

Other Issues

The following issues will ideally go into this week's patch but may end up in a later patch instead.

• Increasing visibility of the Legion reward symbols.


• Improving signalling of Legion encounters and Generals.


• Flame Dash is double casting when only used a single time.


• Performance problems associated with water.


• More client crash fixes.

If you don't see an issue that pertains to you listed in this post, don't fret. This post only includes the highlight/most frequently talked about issues. If you want to make sure your issue is seen, please make a bug report using the method described above.

pathofexile.com/trade

Our official trade website has been slow and occasionally unresponsive since Legion's launch. This is partly due to an unusually high number of Path of Exile players on the servers. We've added more servers to deal with this part of the issue.

There was also a bottleneck in the website's traffic which when uncovered, also revealed another issue with an essential service related to the website. We've band-aid fixed these for now and are working on better solutions to enable the site to handle this kind of workload in future. We will keep you updated as these improvements come in.

Server Issues

We're investigating reports of server and connectivity issues. We are working to resolve two confirmed issues - degraded server performance affecting the Japan and Singapore gateways and another widespread issue that is causing unexpected disconnections during peak time (approximately 11pm-4am NZST). We're working to resolve both of these urgently. There are several other reports we are investigating, including connectivity issues between users and several of the EU gateways.

It is somewhat tricky to definitively say what is and isn't a server issue as many things can seem like server issues when their root causes are elsewhere. We are investigating all reports and will work as quickly as possible to resolve issues that we can confirm and are within our control. We are also continuing to work on fixing any remaining instance and client crashes.

If you believe you're experiencing server issues, please share your experiences here with a WinMTR report attached so that we can assess what's happening.

On-kill Effects and Legion

We're aware that many players are feeling frustrated that some on-kill mechanics don't currently interact nicely with Legion, including the explosions from Gratuitous Violence on the Gladiator's Ascendancy Skill Tree, in addition to a few other Ascendancy skills. We are beginning the process of enabling ones that can be enabled and will make a list of those that can't be enabled due to technical limitations. This is quite a complex development process so we don't have any specifics to report just yet but will keep you updated as the work continues on these.

Thank you very much for all of your feedback and support in making Path of Exile the best it can be. We really appreciate it!

We're over half way through the Legion league and we're incredibly happy with how much the community have been enjoying it. As you continue to complete your personal league goals, we wanted to give you a heads up about our upcoming timelines.

As we mentioned, on August 17th PDT, we'll be hosting the last of our ExileCon Race Event Qualifiers! This race will dictate who our fourth and final challenger will be in the ultimate showdown at ExileCon later this year.

Around August 20th PDT, we're planning to announce our 3.8.0 expansion! The broad scope of this release is a new challenge league (whose name is not on the list, but should be), various improvements to older master content (things like making Sulphite and Betrayal state shared between all your characters in the league), some systems changes we're not yet ready to hint at (which should improve some areas that the community have given us vocal feedback on (not trade)) and all the usual new items, archetypes, gems and so on that you expect from a Path of Exile expansion.

We expect the Legion league to end on PC at 3pm September 2nd PDT. For console players, the league will end when 3.8.0 goes live.

Our tentative release date for the new expansion is September 6th PDT. Keep in mind all these dates may change as we get closer to release but things are looking good so far. We will keep you posted as these dates approach to let you know if anything changes.

The third week of the Blight League just started and we wanted to give you a small update about what we're working on at the moment. While we don't have a big patch scheduled for this week, we're still planning to fix some of the remaining issues by deploying client-side hotfixes.

The following crash fixes are ready and will be deployed as soon as possible:

• Fixed a client crash that could occur when using Shield Charge if you leveled the gem up while it was being used.


• Fixed a client crash that could occur when using Leap Slam with the Harlequin Leap Slam Effect on Predictive Networking Mode.


• Fixed an instance crash that could occur when using Mines.


• Fixed an instance crash that could occur in the Act 6 and Tower Map Brutus and Shavronne encounters.

The common crash with Vorici Betrayal encounters is still being worked on, as well as the cases when the Blight portals spawn too close to the Ichor Pump.

Last Friday we talked about the current performance situation in Blight. The team has been actively investigating the high priority issues we listed in that news article. We'll give you more details about the changes we're planning to make in order to improve the performance by the end of this week.

We're almost at the middle of the Blight League! The majority of the issues reported by our community were resolved and most of our developers are now working hard on the 3.9.0 and 4.0.0 expansions. However, we're still continuing to monitor your feedback and develop patches with fixes and improvements. Today we'd like to give you a small update about the fixes we've been working on recently.

Here are some of the issues we're planning to resolve soon:

• Changing the Display adapter when in-game sometimes causes a client crash.


• Rogue Exiles killed by Pestilent Strike do not grant credit for a Challenge.


• Carrion Golem can cause Auras to get deactivated.


• Respawn in town when dying in Uber Elder area.


• Bosses such as Malachai and Graveyard Map bosses sometimes failing to transition to the next stage of the fight after being frozen.


• Fog of war on the Delve Map sometimes hides distant connected nodes.

In terms of performance, we're planning to deploy changes that would improve the performance of water in-game, spectres of Flame Sentinels and several support gems, such as Multistrike Support, Unleash Support and Blastchain Mine Support.

The changes mentioned above as well as a variety of small fixes will go live in future updates (some of them will possibly be deployed next week).

Thank you for your continued feedback!

Update: We've also received a lot of questions from players asking about a community event during the current Blight League. We do not plan to run an event like Mayhem/Turmoil/Flashback in 3.8.0 because it would take too much development time during a busy period while we're working hard on the 3.9.0 and 4.0.0 announcement builds.

It's been five days since the launch of the Conquerors of the Atlas expansion and the Metamorph Challenge League! The team is continuing to go through your feedback and reports, as well as working on patches with improvements. In this news post we want to give you an update about some of the issues that we are working on fixing as soon as possible.

These are the issues which have been fixed internally and are currently being tested:

• Players with AMD GPUs sometimes crashing when encountering Tane Octavius.


• Crash with Pestilent Strike being used on a Metamorph.


• Crash when throwing dynamite in the Azurite Mine for Windows 7 users.


• The Watchstone Altar can cause loot to be trapped inside of it.


• Placing a Metamorph Sample in the Anoint Items UI causes a client crash.

The following issues are still being worked on and have high priority.

• Citadels sometimes can't spawn on the Atlas.


• Issues with migrating characters from SSF.


• Issues upon converting Legacy maps into new versions in the Map Stash Tab.

For ongoing updates, keep an eye on the Known Issues List. If you find any errors, please report them in the bug report forum where they can be processed by our QA team. They're not able to reply to every thread but rest assured that they do see and process all reports that come in.

Thank you again for your continued feedback!

The second week of the Metamorph League has begun. It's also the start of the holiday period at Grinding Gear Games and many of our developers are finally getting some rest and relaxation after an incredibly busy year. This week is also one of the busiest weeks for gaming in the year, so some of our developers have staggered their holidays until later so that they can be around to maintain Path of Exile while their colleagues take some time off. In this post we'd like to outline our plans for the remaining weeks of this year.

Here is a list of high-priority issues that we're working on at the moment and are keen to fix as soon as possible:

• Not enough eyes are dropping in the Metamorph encounters.


• On Windows 7, the game consumes too much memory.


• Non-boss unique monsters in maps are able to drop Metamorph organs.


• Sirus' storm can sometimes appear at the entrance of Oriath.


• Metamorph bosses can't be frozen.


• Various rare instance and client crashes.

You can find the rest of the known issues here. We're also continuing to review your feedback regarding the Sirus fight and will be making necessary improvements where possible.

Thank you for your continued feedback!

We're now in the fourth week of the Metamorph league! Most of our devs are back from their holidays, well-rested and ready for another busy year of development. This week we're planning to deploy a big 3.9.2 patch. Its patch notes will likely be released tomorrow. In the meantime, we have prepared a small list of additional issues which have been resolved and will be fixed live in a hotfix very soon (before the main patch).

• Specific Atlas Regions can end up in an incorrect state after migrating from SSF.


• Releasing Legion Generals during Legion encounters can cause a client crash.


• Instance crash in Mao Kun unique map.


• Instance crashes when interacting with the Betrayal content.

We'll continue to monitor your feedback and develop patches with fixes and improvements. Thank you for your feedback!

We want to give you an update on what's been happening behind the scenes since our recent manifesto about upcoming Delirium Improvements.

Paralysing/Wasting/Eroding/Diluting Touch Debuffs

These debuffs have been reduced substantially, down to 3 seconds. This change is already out on the live realm.

Monster Damage

We've gone through all Delirium monsters and assessed which ones need to be less deadly and have made those tweaks. We've made the following changes in this regard:

• Reduced the difficulty of Delirium monsters at each mist depth (while increasing the drop rate of Simulacrum Splinters as part of the same rebalance).


• Reduced the chance of Delirium modifiers appearing on monsters by a significant amount.


• Reduced the damage that Rage monsters deal by 20%.


• Disgust's mortars no longer deal damage on impact.


• Reduced the damage of the stationary volatiles created by Disgust's mortar skill by 30%.


• Doubled the proximity range at which Delirium objects which spawn monsters are triggered.


• The decelerating projectile that explodes, fired by Spite monsters, can no longer fire multiple projectiles.


• Reduced the chance of Malice monsters exploding when they die at higher levels.

These changes went live in Patch 3.10.0d which was deployed yesterday.

Past Content Within Delirium

At the moment the current plan is that with Abyss, Breach, Betrayal Raids, Blight, Incursion and Legion encounters, the Delirium mist will pause until the encounter is complete or abandoned. In these cases, all players in your party must be within a certain radius of or within the encounter. Delirium mist will also pause if the entire party leaves the instance (allowing players to stash or trade).

For other past content the plan is to pause the Delirium mist for a set amount of time upon defeating a Harbinger, Metamorph, Bestiary Red Beast, Essence Monster (the main rare one), opening a Perandus Chest or opening a Strongbox.

It's likely that these changes will make it into the next patch, which should be out today hopefully

End Delirium Keybind

This should be in our next patch. Don't forget, it's turned off by default, so you'll need to go to the options to turn it on.

Rewards

We are in progress on making it so that deeper monsters within the Delirium have a greater impact on filling the reward meter. This should be implemented in our next patch.

We've also revised the rewards that you'll receive from Delirium encounters. On reaching the third reward, a second bar will appear. That second bar will start with one reward, meaning, you'll have three rewards (first bar) + one reward (second bar) on reaching the third reward.

That second bar will fill in tandem with the first bar. Meaning, when the first bar reaches four rewards, the second bar will be at two rewards.

On reaching the fifth reward (on the first bar), a third bar will appear. That third bar will also start with one reward and will fill in tandem with bars one and two.

The reward types chosen for bar two and bar three cannot be the same as bar one to ensure an increase in the variety of rewards.

Additionally, we've reduced the likelihood of receiving Generic, Weapon, Armour and Trinket reward types.

The Awakener Fight

We have some improvements coming for this. There was an issue where Sirus could teleport too frequently and block the walls in the fight. During the first three 'throne dismounted' phases, the Apparition would use its skills too frequently. This was also not intended to be applied to the lower Awakening Level versions of the fight. We've improved this and returned his skill cooldowns to how they were previously. Should be live in our next patch.

Visibility

To improve the visibility within the fog we've reduced the Delirium's mist color grading which means it should be much easier to see what the area would look like without the mist. This change has been implemented internally and just requires testing and review. It's likely to go out with other visual improvements next week.

Improving Delirium Monster Visuals

In a similar fashion to how nemesis monsters look orange and bloodlines monsters look purple, we're adding visual effects to four categories of Delirium monsters so that they can be identified quickly - among these are monsters that use on-death skills.

We've created some of these effects and applied them to the appropriate monsters and now we are reviewing this to make sure they look right and have the intended effect of clearly indicating what kind of danger you should prepare for.

We are also adding a charge-up explosion to Delirium Volatiles, similar to existing volatiles. We have changed the Delirium-specific Volatiles to be more Red (less blue). The spawners that create them now have a colour distinction from the other spawners. We've also made them larger, and they have a notable cast before they explode, instead of instantly exploding on contact. They now behave more like the Volatile Flameblood Nemesis Mod variant.

Essentially, almost every mod on Normal and Magic Delirium monsters has visually changed. We are still iterating on these so they are likely to come sometime next week.

Monster On-Death Effects

We've substantially reduced the number of monster on-death effects that can be encountered in Delirium. As discussed, we've made them pack-based (live in 3.10.0d) and we are also improving how they are visually represented so that players have a better chance to counter them. Some of them are also getting an obvious wind-up similar to Volatile Flamebloods that'll make them easier to handle but still potentially challenging.

Performance Issues

Our performance investigation so far has identified two regressions in 3.10.0.

The first is that some shaders were not gathered in our internal process. Many of these were fixed in 3.10.0c and this will improve in upcoming patches. (The Awakener suffers from the same problem and we'll fix it as soon as we can.)

The second is that an issue where the graphics driver was being overloaded by shader uploads was exacerbated by the increase to use more CPU cores in 3.10.0. We expect a fix for this within a few workdays.

Players should make sure they have the Nvidia/AMD Shader Cache turned On in their respective graphics control panel.

Depth Meter

We are really keen to get the other Delirium improvements which have the biggest impact on general gameplay out before we look into this further, therefore we don't currently have an update about this but it remains on our radar.

We'll keep you updated next week as we continue to make progress on the remaining improvements we've outlined above. In the meantime, be sure to keep an eye on the patch notes for more information about other small bug fixes and improvements. Thank you so much for your continued feedback and support.

Next week we plan to deploy Patch 3.11.1 and will preview its patch notes next week. In the meantime, we wanted to provide some general indication of what we're working on in the immediate future. While not all of these changes will be in next week's patch, we'll aim to get as many of them in as possible.

In case you missed them, we've already released several small updates with improvements to Harvest. You can find them here, here, here, here, here and here.

General Harvest Improvements

• We're working on a new reward item that can drop from both Harvest monsters and the Final Boss. There are several variations of it that you can receive randomly. It has a limited number of uses and can be placed within your garden to produce more Lifeforce from nearby plants, create luckier crafting outcomes, or provide a chance to generate additional crafting options for each of the ones you planted. We're brainstorming other stuff it could do also.


• The colours of growth meters on plants have been improved so that it's easier for colourblind players to differentiate between Wild and Primal plants. We are also investigating changing the UI artwork of these so that you can tell the difference more easily without relying on colour.


• We've added stairs to the terrain around the Sacred Grove's portal to improve its accessibility.


• Increased the number of seeds that drop in maps, particularly mid-tier and rarer seeds. You now receive a lot more seeds from the highest-tier maps.


• Harvest Crafting options will be sorted by their tier rather than their Lifeforce cost and will also be grouped together by their crafting type.

Improvements to Final Harvest Boss Fight

• The final boss fight will guarantee that you receive a few of the new reward item mentioned above.


• Improved various mechanics to enhance the feeling of the fight.


• Adding debuff icons to signal when the boss' debuff has been applied to you.


• Adding a progress percentage value that indicates how close you are to the next boss respawn.


• Improving various visual components of the fight.


• Improving the boss' AI so that it's less likely to move onto ground effects and more likely to leave them.


• Fixed various bugs associated with this fight including the boss being able to get stuck within vine walls.

Vulkan Beta

We're continuing to steadily improve the Vulkan Renderer and would ideally like to get it out of Beta prior to our September launch. Please continue to send reports to us on the bug report forum and we will continue to fix them as soon as possible.

Thank you for all of your feedback since Harvest's launch. We really appreciate it.

Quick note - the improvements to seed drops may be deployed today.

Last weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Heist. Since its launch, we've received lots of feedback about various aspects of the new content and we wanted to give you some insights about what to expect. We are preparing various server side fixes that we'll deploy as quickly as possible. Since these don't require realm restarts they are fairly easy for us to push through with fast turnarounds.

We are also planning a restart patch for later this week. This patch ideally includes things like some bonus Heist bosses and quests and the ability to use Heist monsters as spectres.

Before we proceed in this post, please understand that we are working on much more than this post covers. In order to document every small fix or improvement that we're working on, we would have needed to slow down the development of these in order to communicate these changes (essentially taking key developers away from their duties to help put information into a post).

However, we do want to communicate at least some of what's happening so you have an idea of what to expect.

Choke Points in Heists

We are reducing the number of rare guards that can gather behind Heist doors. Some monsters will release their skills in a staggered way so that you are not being hit by many skills simultaneously. Fewer monsters in these choke points will have their abilities ready to go as soon as the door opens. This should make these encounters more manageable and less about being blasted in the face with damage.

Slaying Monsters Increasing The Alert Level

We killed this. It's not a thing anymore.

Opening Chests vs. Alert Level

We are planning to rebalance opening chests in Heists and how they affect alert level. Opening chests in reward rooms will raise the alert level by a lot less and the chests on the main path will raise it slightly more. This both normalises the results and achieves a lower average level of alert generated by chests. This is likely to happen alongside a more broad rebalance of these chests, the alert level and their rewards.

I Want To Store More Grand Heist Items

Totally. You're supposed to be able to portal out of them before the alarm goes off but right now there's an issue which means you can portal back to town into the wrong instance and lose your portal and therefore lose access to your Heist. We're fixing this.

The Rogue Harbour Waypoint - I don't like running

We hear you. We'll find a way to make this more efficient but don't know exactly what it looks like yet.

Rogue Behaviour

There are various issues with the way that NPCs behave during Heists. There's one issue in particular where Rogues are not prioritising their specialist skills when ordered to do so and can sometimes be distracted by other issues. We are working to refine how they behave which should resolve a few other Heist issues (like being locked out of Grand Heists).

New Skills Feedback

We've seen various bits and pieces of feedback about the new skills but we would like to get even more. If you have feedback about the new skills, please reply to this post so we can review it. Including specifics is great.

Can We Have a Prompt Before Leaving Heists?

Yes, there will be a prompt if you attempt to portal out of the Heist before you enter the combat zone. This along with fixing the issue where you can portal back to the wrong town instance should help a lot.

Crafting Bench Doesn't Grey Out Unavailable Mods

We have a fix for this.

Quest Items Stuck In Inventory After Failed Heists

We have a fix for this too.

Crashes, Instance Crashes and Performance Issues

As per usual, we are monitoring these closely and fixing issues as quickly as we can.

Explode on Death

Two Heist monsters explode on death. The more problematic one deals too much damage which has, and is again being, reduced, made conditional and will have its visual telegraphing examined.

"The launch day went quite well with just a few small hotfixes to address minor problems"

This is a great meme but we acknowledge that there were issues with the launch. It wasn't perfect by any means. We're sorry about the issues that have prevented people playing the content smoothly and we are working to fix them as quickly as we can.

What's the timeline?

Basically ASAP for everything but we will keep you updated by previewing the patch notes for any of the upcoming patches as quickly as we can. We'll also tweet about the restartless patches so that you are aware of them as they come out.

If you have any reports, please share them on the bug report forum. We check every report we receive but aren't able to reply to them. Thanks for all of your support and feedback. We really appreciate it.

Last weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Heist. Since its launch, we've received lots of feedback about various aspects of the new content and we wanted to give you some insights about what to expect. We are preparing various server side fixes that we'll deploy as quickly as possible. Since these don't require realm restarts they are fairly easy for us to push through with fast turnarounds.

We are also planning a restart patch for later this week. This patch ideally includes things like some bonus Heist bosses and quests and the ability to use Heist monsters as spectres.

Before we proceed in this post, please understand that we are working on much more than this post covers. In order to document every small fix or improvement that we're working on, we would have needed to slow down the development of these in order to communicate these changes (essentially taking key developers away from their duties to help put information into a post).

However, we do want to communicate at least some of what's happening so you have an idea of what to expect.

Choke Points in Heists

We are reducing the number of rare guards that can gather behind Heist doors. Some monsters will release their skills in a staggered way so that you are not being hit by many skills simultaneously. Fewer monsters in these choke points will have their abilities ready to go as soon as the door opens. This should make these encounters more manageable and less about being blasted in the face with damage.

Slaying Monsters Increasing The Alert Level

We killed this. It's not a thing anymore.

Opening Chests vs. Alert Level

We are planning to rebalance opening chests in Heists and how they affect alert level. Opening chests in reward rooms will raise the alert level by a lot less and the chests on the main path will raise it slightly more. This both normalises the results and achieves a lower average level of alert generated by chests. This is likely to happen alongside a more broad rebalance of these chests, the alert level and their rewards.

I Want To Store More Grand Heist Items

Totally. You're supposed to be able to portal out of them before the alarm goes off but right now there's an issue which means you can portal back to town into the wrong instance and lose your portal and therefore lose access to your Heist. We're fixing this.

The Rogue Harbour Waypoint - I don't like running

We hear you. We'll find a way to make this more efficient but don't know exactly what it looks like yet.

Rogue Behaviour

There are various issues with the way that NPCs behave during Heists. There's one issue in particular where Rogues are not prioritising their specialist skills when ordered to do so and can sometimes be distracted by other issues. We are working to refine how they behave which should resolve a few other Heist issues (like being locked out of Grand Heists).

New Skills Feedback

We've seen various bits and pieces of feedback about the new skills but we would like to get even more. If you have feedback about the new skills, please reply to this post so we can review it. Including specifics is great.

Can We Have a Prompt Before Leaving Heists?

Yes, there will be a prompt if you attempt to portal out of the Heist before you enter the combat zone. This along with fixing the issue where you can portal back to the wrong town instance should help a lot.

Crafting Bench Doesn't Grey Out Unavailable Mods

We have a fix for this.

Quest Items Stuck In Inventory After Failed Heists

We have a fix for this too.

Crashes, Instance Crashes and Performance Issues

As per usual, we are monitoring these closely and fixing issues as quickly as we can.

Explode on Death

Two Heist monsters explode on death. The more problematic one deals too much damage which has, and is again being, reduced, made conditional and will have its visual telegraphing examined.

"The launch day went quite well with just a few small hotfixes to address minor problems"

This is a great meme but we acknowledge that there were issues with the launch. It wasn't perfect by any means. We're sorry about the issues that have prevented people playing the content smoothly and we are working to fix them as quickly as we can.

What's the timeline?

Basically ASAP for everything but we will keep you updated by previewing the patch notes for any of the upcoming patches as quickly as we can. We'll also tweet about the restartless patches so that you are aware of them as they come out.

If you have any reports, please share them on the bug report forum. We check every report we receive but aren't able to reply to them. Thanks for all of your support and feedback. We really appreciate it.

Last weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Heist. Since its launch, we've received lots of feedback about various aspects of the new content and we wanted to give you some insights about what to expect. We are preparing various server side fixes that we'll deploy as quickly as possible. Since these don't require realm restarts they are fairly easy for us to push through with fast turnarounds.

We are also planning a restart patch for later this week. This patch ideally includes things like some bonus Heist bosses and quests and the ability to use Heist monsters as spectres.

Before we proceed in this post, please understand that we are working on much more than this post covers. In order to document every small fix or improvement that we're working on, we would have needed to slow down the development of these in order to communicate these changes (essentially taking key developers away from their duties to help put information into a post).

However, we do want to communicate at least some of what's happening so you have an idea of what to expect.

Choke Points in Heists

We are reducing the number of rare guards that can gather behind Heist doors. Some monsters will release their skills in a staggered way so that you are not being hit by many skills simultaneously. Fewer monsters in these choke points will have their abilities ready to go as soon as the door opens. This should make these encounters more manageable and less about being blasted in the face with damage.

Slaying Monsters Increasing The Alert Level

We killed this. It's not a thing anymore.

Opening Chests vs. Alert Level

We are planning to rebalance opening chests in Heists and how they affect alert level. Opening chests in reward rooms will raise the alert level by a lot less and the chests on the main path will raise it slightly more. This both normalises the results and achieves a lower average level of alert generated by chests. This is likely to happen alongside a more broad rebalance of these chests, the alert level and their rewards.

I Want To Store More Grand Heist Items

Totally. You're supposed to be able to portal out of them before the alarm goes off but right now there's an issue which means you can portal back to town into the wrong instance and lose your portal and therefore lose access to your Heist. We're fixing this.

The Rogue Harbour Waypoint - I don't like running

We hear you. We'll find a way to make this more efficient but don't know exactly what it looks like yet.

Rogue Behaviour

There are various issues with the way that NPCs behave during Heists. There's one issue in particular where Rogues are not prioritising their specialist skills when ordered to do so and can sometimes be distracted by other issues. We are working to refine how they behave which should resolve a few other Heist issues (like being locked out of Grand Heists).

New Skills Feedback

We've seen various bits and pieces of feedback about the new skills but we would like to get even more. If you have feedback about the new skills, please reply to this post so we can review it. Including specifics is great.

Can We Have a Prompt Before Leaving Heists?

Yes, there will be a prompt if you attempt to portal out of the Heist before you enter the combat zone. This along with fixing the issue where you can portal back to the wrong town instance should help a lot.

Crafting Bench Doesn't Grey Out Unavailable Mods

We have a fix for this.

Quest Items Stuck In Inventory After Failed Heists

We have a fix for this too.

Crashes, Instance Crashes and Performance Issues

As per usual, we are monitoring these closely and fixing issues as quickly as we can.

Explode on Death

Two Heist monsters explode on death. The more problematic one deals too much damage which has, and is again being, reduced, made conditional and will have its visual telegraphing examined.

"The launch day went quite well with just a few small hotfixes to address minor problems"

This is a great meme but we acknowledge that there were issues with the launch. It wasn't perfect by any means. We're sorry about the issues that have prevented people playing the content smoothly and we are working to fix them as quickly as we can.

What's the timeline?

Basically ASAP for everything but we will keep you updated by previewing the patch notes for any of the upcoming patches as quickly as we can. We'll also tweet about the restartless patches so that you are aware of them as they come out.

If you have any reports, please share them on the bug report forum. We check every report we receive but aren't able to reply to them. Thanks for all of your support and feedback. We really appreciate it.

At the beginning of next week, we're planning to deploy another patch (with a short server restart) which includes more improvements for Heist. While we prepare this patch for deployment, we wanted to give you some insight into what it contains.

Alternate Quality Gems

We're implementing fixes for various Alternate Quality Gems that weren't working correctly.

• Alternate Quality Gems can now be supported by gems which match the bonuses granted by their Alternate Quality.


• Divergent Heavy Strike (x% reduced Knockback Distance) can no longer cause enemies to be pulled towards you when the gem has greater than 20% quality. At 20% quality, the skill will not provide any Knockback effect.


• Fixed a bug where Alternate Quality effects on the following gems didn't work as intended: Anomalous Slower Projectiles Support (Projectiles from Supported Skills deal increased Damage with Hits to nearby Enemies), Phantasmal Rallying Cry (Exerted Attacks deal increased Damage), Divergent Seismic Cry (Exerted Attacks have a chance to Knock Enemies Back on Hit), Phantasmal Raise Zombie (Minions gain a portion of Physical Damage as Extra Chaos Damage), Phantasmal Blade Vortex (increased Damage while you have 5 or fewer Blades).


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Flameblast's Less Cast Speed effect was not displayed.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Sunder had the wrong quality effect. It now grants increased Physical Damage.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Fire Penetration, Anomalous Brutality Support and Anomalous Vicious Projectiles Support didn't display their quality effect range when at 0% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Anomalous Barrage Support and Anomalous Pierce Support didn't display their quality effect range if the gem had 10 to 19% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Arc's secondary chains dealt damage as if they had chained the maximum number of times.

Rogue Behaviour Improvements

We've improved the overall behaviour of Rogues and fixed problems where they were not prioritising their jobs over combat or other situations.

We've also increased the range in which you can move from your Rogue before it interrupts the task they're performing.

Remaining Heist Boss

We're introducing one more Unique Heist Contract which leads to Freidrich Tarollo the Slave Merchant, another Heist Boss.

Mac Improvements

This patch includes some Mac-specific improvements as we continue to get closer to our official Mac launch.

These are fixes for things like keyboard input failing, gateways not displaying their server latency, improvements to patching, images not displaying and the client crashing after being minimised alongside general client improvements.

Other Fixes

We are also working on various instance and client crashes which will be hotfixed as they're ready. We'll share a preview of next week's patch notes prior to the patch going live. This preview would cover more small changes outside of those detailed in this post.

PlayStation 4 Crashes

We don't have any updates to provide here unfortunately but we are getting a lot closer to narrowing this problem down.

Stash Tab Folders and Affinities

These are still making good progress. In terms of deployment timeline, we're looking at one week as an optimistic estimate and three weeks as a worst-case scenario. The variance in time depends on how much more iteration will need to take place during testing.

At the beginning of next week, we're planning to deploy another patch (with a short server restart) which includes more improvements for Heist. While we prepare this patch for deployment, we wanted to give you some insight into what it contains.

Alternate Quality Gems

We're implementing fixes for various Alternate Quality Gems that weren't working correctly.

• Alternate Quality Gems can now be supported by gems which match the bonuses granted by their Alternate Quality.


• Divergent Heavy Strike (x% reduced Knockback Distance) can no longer cause enemies to be pulled towards you when the gem has greater than 20% quality. At 20% quality, the skill will not provide any Knockback effect.


• Fixed a bug where Alternate Quality effects on the following gems didn't work as intended: Anomalous Slower Projectiles Support (Projectiles from Supported Skills deal increased Damage with Hits to nearby Enemies), Phantasmal Rallying Cry (Exerted Attacks deal increased Damage), Divergent Seismic Cry (Exerted Attacks have a chance to Knock Enemies Back on Hit), Phantasmal Raise Zombie (Minions gain a portion of Physical Damage as Extra Chaos Damage), Phantasmal Blade Vortex (increased Damage while you have 5 or fewer Blades).


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Flameblast's Less Cast Speed effect was not displayed.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Sunder had the wrong quality effect. It now grants increased Physical Damage.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Fire Penetration, Anomalous Brutality Support and Anomalous Vicious Projectiles Support didn't display their quality effect range when at 0% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Anomalous Barrage Support and Anomalous Pierce Support didn't display their quality effect range if the gem had 10 to 19% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Arc's secondary chains dealt damage as if they had chained the maximum number of times.

Rogue Behaviour Improvements

We've improved the overall behaviour of Rogues and fixed problems where they were not prioritising their jobs over combat or other situations.

We've also increased the range in which you can move from your Rogue before it interrupts the task they're performing.

Remaining Heist Boss

We're introducing one more Unique Heist Contract which leads to Freidrich Tarollo the Slave Merchant, another Heist Boss.

Mac Improvements

This patch includes some Mac-specific improvements as we continue to get closer to our official Mac launch.

These are fixes for things like keyboard input failing, gateways not displaying their server latency, improvements to patching, images not displaying and the client crashing after being minimised alongside general client improvements.

Other Fixes

We are also working on various instance and client crashes which will be hotfixed as they're ready. We'll share a preview of next week's patch notes prior to the patch going live. This preview would cover more small changes outside of those detailed in this post.

PlayStation 4 Crashes

We don't have any updates to provide here unfortunately but we are getting a lot closer to narrowing this problem down.

Stash Tab Folders and Affinities

These are still making good progress. In terms of deployment timeline, we're looking at one week as an optimistic estimate and three weeks as a worst-case scenario. The variance in time depends on how much more iteration will need to take place during testing.

At the beginning of next week, we're planning to deploy another patch (with a short server restart) which includes more improvements for Heist. While we prepare this patch for deployment, we wanted to give you some insight into what it contains.

Alternate Quality Gems

We're implementing fixes for various Alternate Quality Gems that weren't working correctly.

• Alternate Quality Gems can now be supported by gems which match the bonuses granted by their Alternate Quality.


• Divergent Heavy Strike (x% reduced Knockback Distance) can no longer cause enemies to be pulled towards you when the gem has greater than 20% quality. At 20% quality, the skill will not provide any Knockback effect.


• Fixed a bug where Alternate Quality effects on the following gems didn't work as intended: Anomalous Slower Projectiles Support (Projectiles from Supported Skills deal increased Damage with Hits to nearby Enemies), Phantasmal Rallying Cry (Exerted Attacks deal increased Damage), Divergent Seismic Cry (Exerted Attacks have a chance to Knock Enemies Back on Hit), Phantasmal Raise Zombie (Minions gain a portion of Physical Damage as Extra Chaos Damage), Phantasmal Blade Vortex (increased Damage while you have 5 or fewer Blades).


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Flameblast's Less Cast Speed effect was not displayed.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Sunder had the wrong quality effect. It now grants increased Physical Damage.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Fire Penetration, Anomalous Brutality Support and Anomalous Vicious Projectiles Support didn't display their quality effect range when at 0% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Anomalous Barrage Support and Anomalous Pierce Support didn't display their quality effect range if the gem had 10 to 19% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Arc's secondary chains dealt damage as if they had chained the maximum number of times.

Rogue Behaviour Improvements

We've improved the overall behaviour of Rogues and fixed problems where they were not prioritising their jobs over combat or other situations.

We've also increased the range in which you can move from your Rogue before it interrupts the task they're performing.

Remaining Heist Boss

We're introducing one more Unique Heist Contract which leads to Freidrich Tarollo the Slave Merchant, another Heist Boss.

Mac Improvements

This patch includes some Mac-specific improvements as we continue to get closer to our official Mac launch.

These are fixes for things like keyboard input failing, gateways not displaying their server latency, improvements to patching, images not displaying and the client crashing after being minimised alongside general client improvements.

Other Fixes

We are also working on various instance and client crashes which will be hotfixed as they're ready. We'll share a preview of next week's patch notes prior to the patch going live. This preview would cover more small changes outside of those detailed in this post.

PlayStation 4 Crashes

We don't have any updates to provide here unfortunately but we are getting a lot closer to narrowing this problem down.

Stash Tab Folders and Affinities

These are still making good progress. In terms of deployment timeline, we're looking at one week as an optimistic estimate and three weeks as a worst-case scenario. The variance in time depends on how much more iteration will need to take place during testing.

At the beginning of next week, we're planning to deploy another patch (with a short server restart) which includes more improvements for Heist. While we prepare this patch for deployment, we wanted to give you some insight into what it contains.

Alternate Quality Gems

We're implementing fixes for various Alternate Quality Gems that weren't working correctly.

• Alternate Quality Gems can now be supported by gems which match the bonuses granted by their Alternate Quality.


• Divergent Heavy Strike (x% reduced Knockback Distance) can no longer cause enemies to be pulled towards you when the gem has greater than 20% quality. At 20% quality, the skill will not provide any Knockback effect.


• Fixed a bug where Alternate Quality effects on the following gems didn't work as intended: Anomalous Slower Projectiles Support (Projectiles from Supported Skills deal increased Damage with Hits to nearby Enemies), Phantasmal Rallying Cry (Exerted Attacks deal increased Damage), Divergent Seismic Cry (Exerted Attacks have a chance to Knock Enemies Back on Hit), Phantasmal Raise Zombie (Minions gain a portion of Physical Damage as Extra Chaos Damage), Phantasmal Blade Vortex (increased Damage while you have 5 or fewer Blades).


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Flameblast's Less Cast Speed effect was not displayed.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Sunder had the wrong quality effect. It now grants increased Physical Damage.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Fire Penetration, Anomalous Brutality Support and Anomalous Vicious Projectiles Support didn't display their quality effect range when at 0% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Anomalous Barrage Support and Anomalous Pierce Support didn't display their quality effect range if the gem had 10 to 19% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Arc's secondary chains dealt damage as if they had chained the maximum number of times.

Rogue Behaviour Improvements

We've improved the overall behaviour of Rogues and fixed problems where they were not prioritising their jobs over combat or other situations.

We've also increased the range in which you can move from your Rogue before it interrupts the task they're performing.

Remaining Heist Boss

We're introducing one more Unique Heist Contract which leads to Freidrich Tarollo the Slave Merchant, another Heist Boss.

Mac Improvements

This patch includes some Mac-specific improvements as we continue to get closer to our official Mac launch.

These are fixes for things like keyboard input failing, gateways not displaying their server latency, improvements to patching, images not displaying and the client crashing after being minimised alongside general client improvements.

Other Fixes

We are also working on various instance and client crashes which will be hotfixed as they're ready. We'll share a preview of next week's patch notes prior to the patch going live. This preview would cover more small changes outside of those detailed in this post.

PlayStation 4 Crashes

We don't have any updates to provide here unfortunately but we are getting a lot closer to narrowing this problem down.

Stash Tab Folders and Affinities

These are still making good progress. In terms of deployment timeline, we're looking at one week as an optimistic estimate and three weeks as a worst-case scenario. The variance in time depends on how much more iteration will need to take place during testing.

At the beginning of next week, we're planning to deploy another patch (with a short server restart) which includes more improvements for Heist. While we prepare this patch for deployment, we wanted to give you some insight into what it contains.

Alternate Quality Gems

We're implementing fixes for various Alternate Quality Gems that weren't working correctly.

• Alternate Quality Gems can now be supported by gems which match the bonuses granted by their Alternate Quality.


• Divergent Heavy Strike (x% reduced Knockback Distance) can no longer cause enemies to be pulled towards you when the gem has greater than 20% quality. At 20% quality, the skill will not provide any Knockback effect.


• Fixed a bug where Alternate Quality effects on the following gems didn't work as intended: Anomalous Slower Projectiles Support (Projectiles from Supported Skills deal increased Damage with Hits to nearby Enemies), Phantasmal Rallying Cry (Exerted Attacks deal increased Damage), Divergent Seismic Cry (Exerted Attacks have a chance to Knock Enemies Back on Hit), Phantasmal Raise Zombie (Minions gain a portion of Physical Damage as Extra Chaos Damage), Phantasmal Blade Vortex (increased Damage while you have 5 or fewer Blades).


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Flameblast's Less Cast Speed effect was not displayed.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Sunder had the wrong quality effect. It now grants increased Physical Damage.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Fire Penetration, Anomalous Brutality Support and Anomalous Vicious Projectiles Support didn't display their quality effect range when at 0% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Anomalous Barrage Support and Anomalous Pierce Support didn't display their quality effect range if the gem had 10 to 19% quality.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Arc's secondary chains dealt damage as if they had chained the maximum number of times.

Rogue Behaviour Improvements

We've improved the overall behaviour of Rogues and fixed problems where they were not prioritising their jobs over combat or other situations.

We've also increased the range in which you can move from your Rogue before it interrupts the task they're performing.

Remaining Heist Boss

We're introducing one more Unique Heist Contract which leads to Freidrich Tarollo the Slave Merchant, another Heist Boss.

Mac Improvements

This patch includes some Mac-specific improvements as we continue to get closer to our official Mac launch.

These are fixes for things like keyboard input failing, gateways not displaying their server latency, improvements to patching, images not displaying and the client crashing after being minimised alongside general client improvements.

Other Fixes

We are also working on various instance and client crashes which will be hotfixed as they're ready. We'll share a preview of next week's patch notes prior to the patch going live. This preview would cover more small changes outside of those detailed in this post.

PlayStation 4 Crashes

We don't have any updates to provide here unfortunately but we are getting a lot closer to narrowing this problem down.

Stash Tab Folders and Affinities

These are still making good progress. In terms of deployment timeline, we're looking at one week as an optimistic estimate and three weeks as a worst-case scenario. The variance in time depends on how much more iteration will need to take place during testing.

Over the weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Expedition! We've been really enjoying watching the community play through the new content and conquer the challenges that lie within. We have deployed many hotfixes and a restartless 3.15.0b patch so far, and have more coming! This post provides more details.

A lot of players have tried to derive our player concurrency numbers based on the data shown for Steam users, and have expressed concern that fewer people played this expansion than the previous two. To be transparent, the number is that 23% fewer players joined us at launch compared to our all-time record, and this is something we were prepared for. In addition to the normal variance between releases, we completely understand that Path of Exile had a lot of changes in 3.15 and this is definitely unnerving to some players. Thank you to everyone who has tried it out so far. We're really enjoying reading about your experiences playing with the recent changes.

Since release, we have released the following patches:

3.15.0 Hotfix 1

• Applied a tentative fix to a new graphical T-posing issue.


• Fixed various instance crashes.

3.15.0 Hotfix 2

• The Reaper created by the new Summon Reaper skill gem now has better survivability at all levels.


• Fixed a bug where the bleeding damage modifier on Summon Reaper wasn't applying.


• Fixed a bug where The Reaper would sometimes try to consume non-minions.


• Fixed a bug where Boneshatter's self hit didn't trigger when-hit events.


• Fixed a bug where Unearthed Zombies could be revived by Necromancers into a broken state.

3.15.0 Hotfix 3

• Allowed Expedition Vendor Reroll currency items to drop from Excavated Chests as well as Runic Monsters.


• Fixed an exploit where PvP-only characters could try to buy items from the Expedition vendors.


• Fixed an instance crash related to Instilling Orbs.

3.15.0 Hotfix 4:

• Fixed a bug where some instilled flask mods could remove grace period when entering new areas.


• Fixed an instance crash.

3.15.0 Hotfix 5:

• Fixed a client crash that could occur when using Forbidden Rite.


• Fixed an instance crash related to Lion's Roar.

3.15.0b (from earlier today):

• Applied another tentative fix for the graphical T-posing issue.


• Fixed a bug where Divergent Eye of Winter did not have a description for its alternate quality effect.


• Fixed a bug where non-unique Iron Flasks were not dropping.


• Fixed a bug where you could not sell items to Tane in Tane’s Laboratory.


• Fixed a bug where mini life bars were not shown for allies on full health.


• Fixed a bug where the audio for player footsteps was too loud.

Soon:

• Added the missing affix name for the "Chance to avoid being Stunned during Flask Effect" mod.


• Added display for quantities of Expedition Currency in vendor windows.


• Fixed a bug where the art for Alternate-art Flasks was not displaying.


• Fixed a bug where the labels for Delve Chests and Azurite were not displaying.


• Fixed a bug where Skin of the Loyal was unable to roll blue sockets.


• Fixed a bug where gaining or losing modifiers that change the effect of Freeze on you, such as from an Aquamarine Flask, would not immediately update the effect that pre-existing freezes were having on you.

So far today we have been discussing a variety of community feedback and have either explanations or changes planned for a number of topics, which are listed below. Please note that this is not a complete list yet - we're still discussing many other topics but this is the set we are ready to talk about. We'd much rather get this first post out now rather than wait for it to be an exhaustive list.

Can the Merchant Vendor Windows show you how many Runed Artifacts you have?

Yes, we are working on making it so that the vendor window displays how many artifacts of the relevant type you have available for trading with the Expedition merchants. We'll release this feature as soon as it's ready (but it may be a few days).

Expedition Vendor Refresh Currency is too Rare!

The team are discussing increasing the rate that you find vendor reroll currency items for Rog, Tujen and Dannig. Gwennen's was already 4x as high as the others and is in a good place. We'll probably have a value for this decided by tomorrow.

Also, we are discussing increasing the stack sizes of vendor reroll currency items and all Expedition currency in higher maps. This should make playing in hard maps more rewarding than trying to farm specific campaign areas.

Were the Mana Cost Multiplier changes on Support Gems too Extreme?

Yes, they were too extreme. Based on feedback and data, we are reviewing the mana cost multipliers again and will be reducing many (but not all) of them. While this will ease the impact on your mana by a moderate amount, the goal is still that mana matters a lot more than it did before.

Are there any Changes coming to Ailment or Curse Immunity?

Ailment Immunity granted by flasks is being increased from 1 second to 4 seconds. Staunching Flasks will make you immune to Corrupted Blood, if they remove Corrupted Blood from you. Arctic Armour will grant Freeze Immunity. Aquamarine Flask is being buffed from 40% to 60% freeze reduction. The map mods that curse the player no longer apply the curses with increased effect.

I hate Goatmen. Tell me some good news.

We're nerfing Goatman Leap Slams and Molten Shells in the late game.

Why does Expedition have Twenty types of Currency?

We thought it would be helpful to explain how we ended up with so many currency items in Expedition:

• Each of the four vendors needs their own type of currency. If we had one unified currency that works across all vendors, then the correct behaviour would be to determine which of the vendors technically has the best expected value, and to spend all of your currency with them. As it stands, there's incentive to use each of the different novel trade methods and not ignore any.


• Each of the vendors needs several tiers of currency. We experimented with just one tier internally, but this basically became a gold system. By having multiple tiers that do different things and have uncertain exchange rates between them, we get all the advantages of Path of Exile's currency system and avoid the dangers that having gold would cause. Here's a very old news post from over 10 years ago that describes our philosophy here!


• Each of the vendors has a separate currency for rerolling their inventory that differs from the ones that you spend buying things from them. This is intentionally different so that you have competing scarcity - sometimes rerolls bottleneck you and sometimes purchasing items does. Again, trying to prevent the bad consequences of having something similar to gold.


• Dannig exchanges his artifacts for ones from other vendors, giving you a limited ability to smooth out temporary shortages in currency availability. Also, all the vendors will wait for you if you have to go and come back with currency later.

This results in twenty currency items for use at the vendors, which does feel like a lot. However, because you can immediately stash them into the Expedition Locker after an encounter, the variety of currency types doesn't really cause additional inconvenience. Regardless of whether we had one type, four types or twenty types, you'd still have to pick up a few items and stash them.

We feel that the gameplay benefits described above (plus the ability to immediately stash them in the field) justify the number of currency items that the league uses. Having said that, we hear you. There are too many types of splinters in Path of Exile. We will be mindful of this for the design of future releases.

Where is the Mystery Box?

We expect to release it tomorrow morning! It's slightly late this cycle because one of our team members had a family emergency, but that's all resolved and everyone is fine.

Quick PSA about how Remnants Work

We quickly wanted to clarify this because some players misunderstood it. Sorry for not being more clear!

Remnants are detonated in a sequence (as your chain of explosives reaches them). When one is detonated, its effects apply to the monsters unearthed by that blast and all subsequent blasts. This is one of the things you need to consider strategically while planning where to place the explosives. You do not need to wait until all explosives have gone off before you start fighting the monsters.

There are many more topics that we are going through that our discussions haven't reached yet. In the interests of communication, this post represents where we're up to so far. We felt it was better to post this now rather than wait a few days until everything has been discussed. We'll let you know as we decide more stuff on other topics. Thanks for the ongoing feedback!

We're just under one week from the launch of Path of Exile: Scourge and have been closely monitoring feedback ever since. We've deployed a number of hotfixes including the most recent 3.16.0b patch and wanted to let you know what else was on our radar.

Here are the patches so far:

3.16.0 Hotfix 1 Spoiler

• Fixed a bug with Energy Blade where it could delete the player's weapon if they logged out in town after activating it.


• Fixed a bug with Nightgrip unique gloves causing the player to take more damage than intended.


• Fixed a bug introduced in 3.16.0 where the Duskdawn unique staff granted "Critical Strikes deal no damage" instead of "120-150% increased Spell damage if you've dealt a Critical Strike recently". This fix affects existing items.


• Fixed a crash that could occur when loading hideout templates containing pets.


• Fixed a client crash that could occur when entering Vaal Side Areas.

3.16.0 Hotfix 2 Spoiler

• Fixed a bug where remaining portals for Zana missions were closing earlier than they should.


• Fixed a common client crash occurring with Scorching Ray.


• The Scorching Ray fix is client-side, you will need to restart your client for it to apply.

3.16.0 Hotfix 3 Spoiler

• Fixed a bug where players were sometimes unable to return from side areas or missions within maps.


• Fixed an instance crash.

3.16.0 Hotfix 4 Spoiler

• Fixed a bug where Merveil, the Siren was not spawning Golden Statues.


• Fixed the Scholar's Mod on Flasks from being able to incorrectly roll % Increased Charges per use instead of Reduced.

3.16.0 Hotfix 5 Spoiler

• Fixed a bug in Scourge League where the Blood Crucible could mistakenly upgrade an explicit mod on unique items. We also plan to fix existing items that were affected by this.

Our 3.16.0b patch was released yesterday and it includes a variety of improvements to Scourge monster damage as well as fixes to a variety of bugs.

Scourge Improvements

• Upon encountering a Boss in Nightmare, the drain of blood from the Crucible is now paused for 5 seconds.


• The Tainted Mythic Orb can now unpredictably upgrade Corrupted items to Unique items even if their item level is lower than when it would normally be able to drop. Prior to this change, the orb would fail to apply to the item if there were no valid Unique items to upgrade to.


• The damage of Ravenous Bloodshaper's Blood Orb and Spike Barrage skills has been decreased.


• The damage of Demon Herder's Vomit and Beam skill has been decreased.


• Reduced the number of Monsters with Proximity Shield that can spawn in some Scourge encounters.


• The Corruption Absorbed progress bar now displays underneath items stored in the Blood Crucible, without you having to hover over them.

Other Improvements

• The damage of Baranite Thaumaturge's ground explosions has been decreased. This change does not affect Baranite Thaumaturge Spectres.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where Item Filters would incorrectly assign Weapons and Jewellery a BaseDefencePercentile value of 0 rather than 100.


• Fixed a bug where the colour of sockets on the Skin of the Loyal Unique could be modified.


• Fixed a bug where Zana's Fortune Favours the Brave Map Device option would fail to open a Map.


• Fixed a bug where Watchstones could sometimes fail to drop from a Conqueror's Citadel.


• Fixed a bug where it was not possible to open portals to a Betrayal Safehouse or the Temple of Atzoatl from within a Guild Hideout.


• Fixed a bug where the "20% chance to Avoid being Stunned" Resistance and Ailment Protection Mastery was not granting Stun Avoidance.


• Fixed a bug where some Redeemer Influence Amulet Modifiers were providing reduced Mana Reservation Efficiency instead of increased. This fix applies to existing items.


• Fixed a bug where the Guardian's Challenge Divination Card sold by Zana did not have a price.


• Fixed a bug where Mansion Contracts sold by Whakano did not have a price.


• Fixed a client crash that occur when using Spectral Shield Throw with Vanishing Dyeapplied to an equipped Shield.


• Fixed a client crash that could occur with the Automaton Divine Ire Skill Effect Microtransaction.


• Fixed a common client crash.


• Fixed two instance crashes.

There are a variety of other topics that we would like to talk about that we have listed below.

Standard Map conversion
Currently, if you have maps in your old tab that, upon upgrading, turn into another map that you don't have enough room for, the entire tab upgrade fails. We will improve this system so that overflowed maps are given to you in a remove-only tab. This will mean the rest of the conversion will work as intended. We can't give a specific timeline on this just yet but it's a priority to resolve this before 3.17 launches and hopefully much sooner than that.

Ballista Totems
There is a bug where Ballistas used via Totem Support only have -45% damage taken instead of -80%. This will be fixed in an upcoming patch.

Elemental Overload
There is an issue where Traps, Mines and Totems currently have no way to take advantage of Elemental Overload. Also, Cremation currently doesn't activate Elemental Overload. We have a change for this on the way. Separately, there is another issue where Elemental Overload is not reflected on the tooltip for DPS. This will also be fixed.

Scourge Feedback
We've been monitoring all feedback related to Scourge and have a few improvements coming which we will outline below. We are aware that the bulk of players' feedback around Scourge revolves around the rewards it provides. We don't have any updates to provide regarding this but we are reviewing the feedback and discussing it.

Some players have reported that it's not obvious enough when the Blood Crucible is full. We're making both the sound effect and visual effect more obvious to help with this.

We're looking at updating two of the possible Scourge Map modifiers, specifically the "Only Shift into Nightmare on Killing a Rare or Unique Enemy" and "Shift on reaching Full Resource, Killing Enemies Drain Resource" modifiers. The former modifier implies that it is activated on every Rare or Unique kill, and will have its description updated as well as being changed to activate more frequently. The latter modifiers will be modified so that there is a slow Scourge Blood drain over time, so that there is still some time pressure for finding bosses while having a lower Blood drain from kills.

Missing Patch Notes
In our 3.16.0 Patch Notes, we unfortunately missed two notes: one related to armour-based shields and one related to the Veiled Modifier Damage Over Time Multiplier Bow Craft.

Here is the missing patch note for armour-based shields.

Problem:
Tower Shields provide significantly more armour than the armour/evasion of other shield types, making them a no-brainer for non-crit Shield builds.

Solutions:
Reduced the armour provided by the top end shields, but raised the average defence of other shields so the difference in base defences isn't as extreme. Skills that scale off these stats will be rebalanced to account for these changes.

Here is the missing patch note for the bow craft.

Quivers now have additional tiers of Damage Over Time Multiplier. In order to be consistent with other item slots, bows now use one-hand Damage Over Time Multiplier values.

We apologise that these patch notes were missed. We'll continue monitoring feedback around Path of Exile: Scourge and making adjustments where appropriate. Thanks so much for all of your support and feedback!

The first week of the Siege of the Atlas expansion is well underway and we wanted to take a moment to give you an update on what we're working on.

Archnemesis Feedback

We're keeping a close eye on feedback regarding the Archnemesis League. If you're interested, we talked more about the thought process behind the recipe system here. Thanks for all of your feedback and suggestions, we will continue monitoring them.

Upcoming Fixes

• Added stash tab search functionality to items influenced by The Searing Exarch or The Eater of Worlds.


• Fixed a bug where public mapping parties were not visible in the Karui Shores or your Hideout via the Noticeboard's Public Parties tab or Social menu. Note that it is normal behaviour that you will only be able to see public parties while they are in a map.


• Selling items to Kirac.


• Fixed an instance where Death and Rebirth was not able to be completed.


• Fixed a bug preventing Shift+V from undoing Expedition explosive placements.
• Fixed a bug where some Helmet Microtransactions would cause heads to disappear.
• Fixed a bug where crafting options for bows were using values for one-handed weapons instead of two-handed weapons.

Other Notable Issues We Are Aware Of

Sound Issues
There have been a number of miscellaneous audio issues reported which we are aware of and working on fixing, such as missing dialogue and loud death sounds.

Blighted Maps Not Opening
We are still investigating this and will have a fix on the way once it is resolved.

Change the Gem and Flask Stash Tabs to be sorted alphabetically
Currently, gems and flasks in each sort category (i.e. Level or Quality) are being sorted in an inconsistent order. Most-recent gems are being stored on the left side, whereas most-recent flasks are being stored on the right side. We're looking at changing this so they're sorted alphabetically after they've been sorted by their Level/Quality rather than by order placed so that it's more intuitive and consistent.

Add slots to the Fragment Tab for re-rollable Searing Exarch, Eater of Worlds and Maven Invitations
We're working on a way for the Fragment Stash Tab to have the ability to store the craftable invitations from the endgame bosses.

Add a new stat to Blighted Maps to compensate for the removal of Awakening Objective bonuses
Our plan for this is to add a new stat to the existing Blighted Map Notable on the Atlas Passive Tree to compensate for this. We'll provide more details on this when we've confirmed how we want to approach this.

Archnemesis inventory doesn't update search highlights when mod positions are swapped
We are still investigating this issue and will prepare a fix once we have a solution.

Hotfixes

These hotfixes have already been deployed, though if you're still experiencing issues please continue to log bug reports as necessary. We also recommend keeping an eye on the Known Issues thread.

Hotfix 1

• The Map Device now indicates if you can't use it (due to not being the party leader) prior to you putting a map in.


• Fixed a bug where the Hyrri's Bite Vendor Recipe did not work with its new item base type.


• Fixed a bug with the Gem and Flask Stash Tabs where newly-inserted flasks could not have price notes set.


• Fixed a bug where the new Sharktooth Quiver granted Life Gain on Hit that didn't actually work.


• Fixed various client and instance crashes.

Hotfix 2

• Fixed a bug where specific Blood Monkey Chieftains would fail to generate charges for allies.


• Fixed a bug where some auras would not be removed when certain items were removed.


• Fixed a bug where Lilly Roth sometimes couldn't be invited to your hideout.


• Fixed a bug where bow damage nodes on the Passive Tree were not applying.


• Fixed a bug where the Atlas Passive Tree could show a "Reset all Passives" button that affected the regular Passive Skill Tree.


• Fixed a bug where the Passive Skill Tree mastery stat that makes increases and reductions to projectile speed also apply to bow damage was calculating them incorrectly.


• Fixed client and instance crashes related to Arc.

Hotfix 3

• Fixed a bug where Invitations could be split using Beast Crafting.


• Fixed a bug where Forbidden Flame and Forbidden Flesh Jewels could have invalid or legacy Ascendancy notables. Existing ones in this state have now been fixed to become valid notables from the same class.

Hotfix 4

• Fixed a client crash occurring in Archnemesis League.

Hotfix 5

• Fixed a bug causing an unintended increase of monster density in the Betrayal Laboratory.


• Fixed an instance crash.

Hotfix 6

• Fixed a bug where some Synthesis and Shaper Atlas Passive Tree nodes were not working when allocated.


• Fixed a client crash.

Hotfix 7

• Fixed an instance where the A Call to Arms quest was not able to be completed.


• Fixed a bug where your first Maven Invitation for the 10 boss encounter was not guaranteed to drop after collecting 10 bosses. For players who missed this guaranteed drop, it can be obtained by completing any Tier 14+ Map while having 10 or more bosses collected.


• Fixed a bug where daily Atlas Missions were based off of the most-recently-completed Map tier, rather than the highest-completed Map tier.


• Fixed a bug where defeating The Eater of Worlds or The Searing Exarch could sometimes fail to unlock their respective Favoured Map Slot.


• Fixed a bug where retrieving a Voidstone from Kirac did not unlock Voidstone sockets on the Atlas.


• Fixed a bug where the Ivory Temple Map could not be obtained through using an Orb of Horizons, or through natural map drops.


• Fixed a bug where the Deadly Nightmares Atlas Passive Skill was not working correctly.

Hotfix 8

• Fixed a bug which prevented the 'Shaping the Mountains' passive from working.


• Fixed a bug which caused Vaal Molten Shell to be removed by a single hit.


• Fixed a bug which could cause Voidstones to be socketed into invisible slots.


• Reduced the number of projectiles from the Bombardier Archnemesis mod and the chance for them to bounce off terrain.

Hotfix 9

• Fixed a bug where Skills granted from Ascendancy Passive Skills were not granted if the Ascendancy Passive Skill was allocated through Forbidden Flame and Forbidden Flesh.


• Fixed a bug where Boot Enchantments that cause you to take reduced Extra Damage from Critical Strikes if you've taken a Critical Strike Recently were not working correctly.


• Fixed a bug where Incursion encounters after the first in an area would not display the current room information on the Temple Map.


• Fixed a bug where Boss Invitations could sometimes not drop if your progress towards them was doubled.


• Fixed a rare bug where the Map Device in the Karui Shores could be unusable.

We hope you are enjoying the Siege of the Atlas expansion! We will continue to monitor your feedback for further improvements.

" Orange_17 wrote: Any update on the missing 'Non-Aura Skills Cost no Mana or Life while Focused' veiled craft? This craft is vital for Tornado Shot/Corrupting Fever builds, and it missing is very problematic for these builds.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3232472/page/1

We have a fix for this on the way that should be included in the next full realm-restart patch (as opposed to the hotfixes that can be deployed without the realm going down).

Over the weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Lake of Kalandra. The deployment was very smooth with no major technical issues and only some minor hotfixing required over the weekend. We reached a peak of 250k concurrent players. Today we have been processing feedback from the first two days of the league, and have a number of balance and content adjustments we plan to make to address much of this feedback. This post describes our current plan.

Archnemesis
There's quite a large jump in difficulty from the campaign to early maps as the number of archnemesis mods on monsters rises abruptly. This not only affects their average difficulty, but also how tanky they are. We are going to taper this up more smoothly so that it's a more gradual progression (and is unmodified in red maps). This will result in less difficulty and less life on average for rare monsters below red maps.
To prevent life values getting out of hand on special league monsters with archnemesis mods, we will also reduce the life bonus that each Essence grants a rare monster and reduce the bonus life that Red Beasts have. We will also review whether Betrayal content is spawning too many rare monsters.

Harvest
Players have commented that the quantity of Lifeforce (the new harvest crafting currency) yielded by Sacred Grove encounters is too low relative to how much the craft cost.
Harvest yield currently scales up (to around ten times higher) by the time you're in high maps with atlas tree specialisation, rewarding you for running higher maps, rolling your maps well and specialising in Harvest.
We will rebalance the Lifeforce yield at lower map tiers so that the league is more rewarding early on, without affecting its yield at higher tiers.

Players also notice that occasionally a Harvest encounter can now result in no Lifeforce dropping. This was because, in an effort to reduce the number of clicks after an encounter, the Lifeforce from beasts below Tier 3 had a non-guaranteed chance to drop (but was larger on average than it otherwise would be). This meant that you could occasionally get unlucky and receive none for an encounter. We are raising the chance of Lifeforce dropping so that it's less likely to receive none at all, while striving not to increase the average number of clicks needed by too much.

Lake of Kalandra
We are increasing the rewards from both league and non-league encounters throughout the Lake, particularly at higher map levels and higher difficulties.
We will raise the occurrence rate of (regular, not Ethereal) Reflecting Mist so that you get more choices of reflected rare jewellery as a reward for playing harder encounters in the Lake.
We're also investigating some Lake of Kalandra QoL like marking which rooms are completed on the Lake Map while you're exploring the Lake.

General Item Drops
Players report that general item drops feel a lot lower in this expansion. There are two changes we made in 3.19. The first is that the rate of encountering rare monsters from certain league content has been reduced, so you are fighting, killing, and receiving rewards from fewer monsters than before. This is partially offset by rare monsters in 3.19 now being more rewarding than they were before (the mods add more item quantity/rarity than before and there's the reward conversion system used for the more dangerous mods).

The second reason is that we removed a massive historic bonus to item quantity and/or rarity that applied to some league-specific monsters. We replaced it with a moderate (2-3x) increase to item quantity, to offset the fact that they often have more life than regular monsters and some cannot drop maps.

There have been no other reward-affecting changes that we are aware of, but we will investigate to see if there are any unanticipated consequences of some other change.

Our intention with these changes is to modify certain league content that was out-of-line with other content so that it has a similar reward profile. These changes are important, but we understand they have reduced overall rewards that players receive.

We are going to compensate elsewhere, but we don't want to just increase the raw number of items that are dropped. Most items are immediately filtered out. We want to increase the number of relevant items that drop.

Firstly, we are going to adjust the system that skews weapon/armour base types towards higher-level ones, so that players find items that are relevant for their level more often. This isn't an increase to overall item drops, it just means that you will find more appropriate rare items more often. Secondly, we are going to apply the same item consolidation approach we did to Act Bosses a few leagues ago to Map Bosses also. They will now drop fewer items, but of substantially better rarity. This will result in you finding more unique items from Map Bosses.

It's worth noting here that a widely-shared clip of a player opening an Arcanist's Strongbox and receiving no items has caused some of the concern about potentially bugged item drops. We believe this was caused by the change where common currency drop less frequently, but in larger stacks, which we made a number of leagues ago. We will fix this specific Arcanist's Strongbox issue.

These changes are not final, but we wanted to communicate our current thoughts immediately rather than wait until patch notes are ready later. The changes will be deployed separately, as they're ready, over the next few days. We will continue to monitor feedback and will investigate more areas for adjustment.

Later this week, we'll launch the Lake of Kalandra expansion on Xbox and PlayStation at Aug 24, 2022 8:00 PM (EDT) (This is displayed in your local time).

Yesterday we also launched the Kalandra Mystery Box, a new mystery box without duplicate microtransactions. Check out the contents in the trailer below or get yours here.



The Kalandra edition of the Kirac's Vault Pass will be available for purchase in a few days.

Thanks so much to everyone for your support and feedback.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the feedback and bingo cards.

To get straight to the point of the improvements to the league, here's what we're currently doing today in the studio. Our hope is to get each change out as soon as it is ready.

Area to Area or Map to Map gameplay:

• We will be allowing you to itemise corpses as they drop, so you can choose to collect the corpse or itemise it for free. As a result itemising corpses in all contexts will now be free, as opposed to the 1 Chaos Orb it currently costs.


• Each of the downsides from area to area will now display the increase to the amount of Collectable Corpses and Allflame Embers they cause.


• We will be increasing the amount of Collectable Corpses and Allflame Embers dropping relative to difficult mods substantially.


• We will be further increasing the amount of Allflame Embers dropping additionally to the above.


• We will be adding new Allflame Ember packs that are more rewarding.


• We will be revising the rewards and pack sizes from existing Allflame Ember packs in Endgame to make them substantially more rewarding also.


• We will be making the Devoted Modifiers more rewarding, notably the ones that are granting Currency Items.


• We are lowering the danger of the more dangerous modifiers especially at Endgame.

Grave-Crafting:

• You will now be able to select the Base Type of the item you want to craft.


• As such, we are removing some of the Crafts that allow you to influence Strength, Dexterity or Intelligence armour types, as they will no longer be necessary since you can just freely select the base type. Note that special base types will still need to be obtained through certain corpses, such as Atlas Base Types, and League Base types like Stygian Vise.


• We are increasing the chances of many of the rarer crafts like Fractured Modifiers and Mirrored outcomes significantly.


• We've removed the "Tiers" from most of the crafts. They'll now have the values of the existing highest tiers always. For example, instead of being able to get 200% or 500% increased chance for Lightning Modifiers, it will now always be 500%.


• We have taken all the crafts that affect the Modifier Rating and compressed it into a single craft that affects all modifiers, instead of being type specific. This will not affect existing crafts you have, those will stop dropping and the new one will start dropping once it's deployed.


• You will be able to directly use Coffins on your List of corpses in your Morgue panel instead of trying to find them within the Morgue.


• Ctrl+F will go to the Search (Currently must be clicked).


• We will be sorting crafts by their type, instead of by level, making it much easier to find crafts that affect a specific type of modifier, like Fire Modifiers.


• The grave-crafts that reroll Sockets and Links have been significantly buffed.

There is a lot more happening in between the cracks but instead of me getting into all of that I am focusing my attention towards getting the fixes ready faster as that's what is more important! I will update more as we are making more changes.

This is just what we're immediately working on and will do more as soon as it's needed and we have resources available. The long weekend here unfortunately cost us the capability to respond to larger changes as fast as we'd like and a huge lesson going forward is to make sure we don't deploy expansions on public holiday weekends as we don't have the personnel available to make changes as fast as we want.