Path of Exile: Sacrifice of the Vaal

Tomorrow at 4pm the Path of Exile expansion is coming out. They've put up the patch notes already, and it's sounding pretty sweet! The new softcore league has the added twist of bonus treasure chests guarded by packs of monsters which sounds pretty fun. The new hardcore league has other monster types invading each zone (including a unique boss in every zone) which should make the hardcore league more chaotic and scary which seems good.

There are also some changes to all game modes... There are going to be corrupted portals randomly showing up from time to time which sound like they'll work a bit like a map with a boss inside. The boss will drop corrupted stuff like skill gems that are better than normal ones or vaal shards that can be combined to go fight Queen Atziri who is the big boss lady of the expansion. There's even a race for the first 50 accounts to kill her in each league to get some skins.

There's a new type of currency which does something random to an item. Probably awesome like creating white sockets or changing the intrinsic bonus to something cool but it may be terrible (no examples have been given but the patch notes say there are some undesirable ones). The interesting thing here is no further modifications can be made to the item. So it's a way to cap off your stuff. I don't know how rare these things are going to be, but they sound cool. Apparently they can be used on skill gems to raise level or quantity above 20 which could be stupidly powerful.

They've also adjusted the power of the scion start to the skill tree. Details of how it's getting nerfed aren't out yet, but it's probably a good idea. Scions were just the best, after all. They're nerfing some of the life nodes and buffing some of the energy shield nodes so maybe CI will be good now that I've sworn it off.

This expansion doesn't look to be as fundamentally game changing as the Diablo III expansion, but Path of Exile started off in a better place. Randy asked on Facebook what my plan was between the two games and I'm definitely going with Path of Exile for the next couple of weeks and then I'll see if I want to swap over to Diablo III or stick with PoE or do something else entirely. Like play FFX HD. But I liked the ideas in the DIII expansion enough that I expect I'll buy it and play it at some point even if it isn't right at launch. Blizzard expansion launches are pretty safe things, so it'll just be if I have something else I really want to play instead.