[2019] Synthesis Week 1: What We're Working On

As we mentioned earlier this week, our Path of Exile: Synthesis launch has been hugely successful in terms of player numbers and the response from the community. We have a small patch planned for later this week and we want to keep you in the loop about what we have planned. Additionally, we included several improvements in yesterday's patch. Check out yesterday's patch notes here.

We have the following improvements planned for this patch:

At the end of Memories most of the items that dropped during your run are gathered for you and dropped at your feet once you've left the Memory. This currently doesn't work for items that you've attempted to pick up inside the Memory while your inventory was full. This should be fixed in this update.

Items that drop during Memories will respect their original item allocation when dropped near Cavas at the completion of a memory.

We plan to add the ability to delete Memories from your inventory list directly. This means that if you obtain one that you really don't need right now, you no longer have to plan it, run it and then delete it.

There will be a larger radius of no monsters around the start of each Memory.

Glove Enchantments do not currently work. We will be fixing this.

When you unveil Veiled Modifiers it should always unlock the correct modifiers.

We've also fixed various client and instance crashes.

We are working on the following things but they have not yet been confirmed for this week's patch:

There needs to be more of a delay before the decay starts moving at the beginning of a decaying Memory.

Players are sometimes unable to return to Distant Memories from the Memory Nexus.

We are working on preventing an issue where players sometimes get stuck on Memory bridges.

Herald of the Obelisk monsters can spawn dead in the airlock section of a placed Memory.

We feel that Synthesis encounters in the first few areas can be too difficult so we are working on balancing this further.

Fossils and Essences should work on Fractured items, but this was disabled at the last minute because we found some problems. We are working on fixing these but are not sure if it'll be ready for the Thursday patch.

Betrayal Intervention encounters causing lag and client freezes for some players (especially those with non-solid-state drives).

You need to be able to easily toggle map modifiers on to read them when you want to, but to be able to have them off in busy areas so they don't cover a lot of the screen.

There are a couple of key feedback points that currently do not have a plan to change and wanted to address:

Distant Memories can sometimes spawn on top of or beside planned Memories, which ruins the plan. This is a tricky one because the obvious solution of not having Distant Memories spawn on or next to your plan both introduces something akin to Sextant blocking and also means that you are getting fewer rewards near the path you actually intend to take. We feel that if we made this change that it'd both encourage blocking abuse and also reduce the rewards that players actually receive. Having said that, we know that the current situation of plans being invalidated feels bad. The solution needs more consideration.

Many players have suggested that we allow Memory Fragments to be rotated. This is something we specifically considered in our first design session and intentionally did not allow. The league has been designed and balanced around the fact that the Memories cannot be rotated. If they could be, then everything would be trivialised.

We are tracking feedback very closely and aware that this list is not comprehensive. We'll keep you in the loop as we work on things and discuss plans within the team.