Path of Exile's Scourge expansion pits you against an invading army of demons

(Image accredit: Grinding Gear Games)

In Path of Deportee's next quarterly league expansion, Scourge, the goddam continent of Wraeclast is coming under military blockade by a demonic army from a parallel timeline. And, naturally, you'll also be competent to venture into this extra-doomed parallel world to smash demons so you rear reforge your weapons in their rip. At this rate, Way of life of Exile's Wraeclast is ne'er loss to make a Top 10 fantasy island getaways.

Like all of Path of Exile's seasonal expansions and leagues, players wish need to roll a fresh character to encounter a new NPC—a refugee from this parallel, ill-starred timeline where demons have rudely taken over and redecorated with a lot of fire and eldritch tentacles. This survivor entrusts you with a diabolical artifact, the Roue Crucible, and tells you to keep up it safe away embedding it in your flesh. Which course you'll do because nobody on this celibate has ever backed low from a bad idea.

The Scourge expansion is easily ane of the biggest Path of Exile has seen in a while.

The Crucible works a bit like the Horadric Block from Diablo 2, only fueled past murder. It allows you to re-forge already rare items with corrupted satanic upgrades, offset by penalties. These 'scourged' items can follow through the process nine-fold times, re-roll it with higher tiers of positive and negative traits from each one prison term. You just need to grind up some demons to cause IT work.

After charging the Crucible with spilled monster-blood, players can insistence a push to warp to a parallel hell-version of the area you're in for a quick rampage. It looks precise cool (in a bolshy, glowy, lava and tentacle-filled kinda way) and is inhabited with thousands of demons. Beat them up, harvest their putrescence and heart it into the equipment you want to climb. Rinse, repeat, and perhaps harvest several new 'spotted' currency items in the demon universe that'll let you reconfigure the skill-gem slots in your freshly profaned gear patc you're at IT.

The Crucible also gains live and levels up, letting you pick from a variety of perks to neuter how it behaves, giving you additional incentive to keep using information technology and experimenting connected items you might take up otherwise discarded. And of course there's more to the league, with troika distinct factions of demons to fight, each with their own bosses and special plunder. Desolate content extends substantially into Path Of Exile's sprawling Atlas Of Worlds endgame, which is besides where this enlargement's other John Roy Major slab of satisfied lies.

Interdimensional travel: abridged variation

There'll be less acquirement points exhausted on arrival cool perks and more on notably upgrading your character.

As seems typical with the last few expansions, Grinding Gear Games stimulate once more reworked the Atlas, the attribute-hopping adventure players go connected after completing the main story. Rather than being a major pass (that's coming in the next expansion), it feels like they're tightening it up and turbo-charging it a trifle. There are now fewer mapping nodes to work your way crossways, split crosswise four regions, retired from the previous eight. Attrition Gear say this will halve the grind to reach the final assail of endgame content.

Even though the grind is reduced, that's not to say at that place's less to neutralize the Atlas. Far from it. Scourge brings a whole bundle of extra tough 'Uber' challenges to the table, including ex gratia ultra-rocky versions of the Breach, Blight, Legion, Delirium and Dig out leagues. There'll be big fights, remixed and more frequent knob fights, and or s new rewards for players with builds min-maxed enough to fishing rig these challenges, which bequeath payoff players with approximately extremely powerful new unequalled items.

And OH, what builds they'll cost. Devastate also brings a revamp to the game's intimidating-looking inactive skill tree, adding a major sunrise have: masteries. All notable (examine 'construct-defining') passives are linked to a similarly themed Mastery time slot on the grid. After claiming that notable inactive, you can spend additional skill points to pick additional, related perks from the mastery one-armed bandit. Simply put, there'll represent little skill points spent on reaching cool perks and more on notably upgrading your character.

Treasured: time direction skills

It wouldn't be a Path Of Expatriation expansion without a bundle of new active skills, likewise. There's a handful of fun skills that could make over whole new character builds. Energy Blade lets you channel your energy screen into a powerful lightning-element melee weapon. Profane Rift lets you rewind prison term by four seconds, returning you to your previous position with whatever stats you had at the time. Guide a big hit or cast something that drained whol your mana? Just rewind!

Tornado is an especially fun looking skill. It summons a big, slow-moving orientating tornado that does damage complete meter. The Tornado also picks up the properties of any projectiles you fire into information technology, in case you require to create your own all-consuming fire twister. Be unpretentious, you do. Toxicant Concoction adds some other skill to the development alchemist archetype, letting you throw the corrupted table of contents of your health flasks to trade some beefy AoE poison price, with damage grading with how potent the healing flasks are.

There's also a whole new ready of six Link skills organized for co-op. These connection 2 players with a visual leash that allows them to share various justificative or offensive buffs, with the thrilling trade-off that if one connected player dies, then their partner does too. Anyone who loved the dynamic of the Heavy and the Medic in Team Fortress 2 is probably going to take over some fun here. These new skills should help offset the coming nerfs to Aura skills, which were previously the go-to buffs for co-op players.

These are just the expensive features of the Scourge expansion, which is easily 1 of the largest the game has seen in a while. There's also been some sweeping balance changes, more or less quality-of-lifetime improvements to guild hideouts, and a major rework to how personal hideouts work. Now players are free to decorate their personal space however they see fit, untethered by the old Favor system where you had to steal decor items. Perfect for fans of The Sims Beaver State Quail-like Crossing that woke finished and chose violence.

While I'm excited to nosedive into Scourge and the new Atlas endgame, there are a yoke small flies in the ointment of this expansion. Ravag marks the first gear expansion where Grinding Gear is removing big content from the endgame. To make room for a slightly revised set of Expeditiousness events connected the Atlas, the Perandus league from early 2016 is being retired. Studio heading Chris Mount Wilson also confirmed that this will become standard moving forward-moving—the weakest and least liked leagues will Be tapping dead to make board for fres content in the Atlas.

As Scourge is such a major expansion (featuring a league, an endgame rework and some major supine and active skill tweaks), Grinding Gear also had to put on on hold their plans to revisit and upgrade the earlier acts of the campaign. Chris Wilson was incisive to assure me this was a working transmutation in priorities, and they'll be looking at ways to update Number 2 onwards with the start of the next season. Number 1's supernumerary enemy variety and meaner bosses made for an stimulating time ab initio of the last league. It seems we've got plenty to look forward to earlier the release of Path Of Expatriation 2 following yr, which will be rolling out As a gigantic free enlargement to the game.

The Track of Exile: Nemesis expansion launches as a free update on October 22nd.

Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/path-of-exile-scourge-expansion/

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Path of Exile's Scourge expansion pits you against an invading army of demons | PC Gamer - mercersheill