Path of Exile: New Challenges

At the end of the Path of Exile they had 8 challenges and gave out t-shirts to anyone who could do them all. 61 people managed to do them, which seems like a pretty small number. The game went live with 8 new challenges and only ended up giving out only 23 t-shirts. This despite it being a released game and therefore presumably having a larger user base. I wasn't playing in the beta so I don't know if the challenges were a lot harder the second time around or not, but some of them seemed really insane. One required farming a stupid amount of money (every person I read about doing it was a _hardcore_ player and still had to borrow a lot of the items) and the one that really put me off required getting very lucky on a character capable of killing a really powerful, really rare spawn.

Another set of 4 month leagues brings with it another set of 8 challenges. An initial glance through them makes me think this time around it going to be significantly easier than last time around. That may not actually mean it's viable, but it doesn't seem as out of reach as the last one did. But then some of it revolves around mechanics I haven't seen yet, so it may actually be silly hard. What do we have?

Carried over from last time there's an achievement for using all 24 currency items and using 33 of the vendor recipes. I didn't get either of these done last time, but only because I didn't bother to do the last bits of each one. I could have easily bought the stuff needed to do it, but I was waiting for a good time to do them where I could actually use the results. But if I'd just needed them done, they were done. Definitely trivial in my eyes.

In a slight twist from last time you no longer need to level every class to level 65. Now you need to level 2 characters to level 90. One in softcore, one in hardcore. This is way harder than the last version. Getting to level 90 in hardcore is not trivial. Only 675 characters hit level 90 or above in the nemesis league last season. My highest character last season was level 84, and that was in softcore. That said, this seems... Doable. Hard, yes, but not impossible and I can see the steps to get it done.

There are two achievements for doing the new stuff in the leagues. The softcore league is for opening a strongbox with each of the affixes. You can use reroll currency to get new affixes, and you're going to be running into an awful lot of these boxes getting up to level 90. The annoying part is you need to be the one who physically opens the box, being in a group when Tom opens a box doesn't give credit. It's possible one of these affixes is stupidly rare, but it seems really easy at first glance. The hardcore one is for killing all of the unique invaders that can show up in zones. I haven't played any hardcore yet but it sounded like these were linked to zones and therefore you could grind the ones you're missing. So it sounds easy too.

The final three achievements are related to the expansion content. Clear all the corrupted zones, kill the final boss, and collect all the corrupted items. Most of which only drop from the final boss. The corrupted zones are all linked to real zones so they can all be farmed. So it's just going to come down to how often you can run the final boss for the loot, or if you can buy the ones you're missing. I have no idea if this is going to be feasible or really expensive or what, but at an initial glance it doesn't seem unreasonable.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say I think they'll be giving out significantly more than 23 t-shirts this time around. Will one be headed my way? That remains to be seen, but I'm not ruling it out!