Transcript for:
Path of Exile: The Settlers of Kalguur Expansion

Hi, I'm Chris Wilson, from Grinding Gear Games. Welcome to GGG Live. Today, we're going to show you an exclusive reveal of Path of Exile: Settlers of Kalguur, which launches next week on July 26th. Twitch drops are enabled on today's livestream, so make sure you follow the instructions below in order to claim your Corsair Back Attachment. In today's stream we will take you on a deep dive into the new Settlers of Kalguur challenge league. We'll cover the league mechanics, its new and revised crafting systems, a new trade market system for currency, some sweeping balance improvements including two Ascendancy Class changes, Endgame improvements, some further additions to the Campaign and some Quality of Life features. We'll then talk about our Console Native Port releases and the features that come alongside them. Finally we'll show you our new supporter packs, ending with a live Q&A session where ZiggyD will ask Path of Exile's Game Director, Mark, your questions from Twitch chat. After the livestream, we'll drop the full patch notes. I'll hand over to Mark now to introduce the new league! We've really innovated with the content in this league and I’m really excited to see what everyone thinks, so let's just get right into it with the Trailer for Path of Exile: Settlers of Kalguur. Wraeclast is a cursed land. You'd have to be mad to settle here. And yet... Welcome to Kingsmarch! It's not much yet, but with your help, we can erect the greatest city Wraeclast has ever seen! We'll need resources. And savvy planning. Soon we’ll attract settlers, craftsmen, fortunes seekers, Pirates. If we prevail... Our ships will be heavy with gold! We hope to achieve the impossible. We hope to build... A home. In Path of Exile: Settlers of Kalguur, you will encounter some familiar faces from the Expedition League. Dannig, Rog, Tujen and Gwennen are Kalguuran people who are trying to establish trade between Wraeclast and their homeland. They have recruited many curious characters from Wraeclast, including some you may recognise - but are also seeking the help of a powerful Exile, like yourself. You will first encounter Johan, the King's Hand in Lioneye's Watch. He's there recruiting workers, traders, and Exiles. Johan, under the command of the King of Kalguur has been sent here to build a new city called Kingsmarch, which intends to become the hub of commerce between Wraeclast and Kalguur. Soon he will bring you to the planned site for Kingsmarch, which you'll notice has humble beginnings as just a tavern in a field. But with your help, it won't stay like this for long! It takes a lot to build a town. The Kalguurans will ask you to seek out resources that can be used to begin construction. On your adventures you might find minerals such as Crimson Iron, which are veins of Iron that have been overrun with corruption, spawning dangerous foes when you approach. Or perhaps Orichalcum, which you will have to liberate from the demons worshipping it. Petrified Amber attracts mindless Blighted Enemies, while Bismuth has a strong affinity to the elements and causes the area to become unstable. If you’re lucky you might find Verisium, a material as valuable as it is dangerous, and guarded by very powerful foes. Once you defeat these monsters, the deposit will automatically be tagged for mining. But first, we need to get someone to do the hard labour. This is of course a trade expedition and nothing is free. Miners, along with other workers that the Kalguuran’s have hired, must be paid in cold hard Gold. Which you'll notice is now dropping throughout Wraeclast. You will have control about who gets hired into your enterprise. Once you have accumulated some Gold, head to the town and talk to the recruiter, Raulf. He's been busy tracking down hardy folk across Wraeclast who are looking for work. You'll notice each person has their specialties, and a wage cost. It’ll be up to you to hire and fire as you please. Over the course of the league you'll be searching for your perfect employees for each job. Once you have them, you’ll have to keep them paid, safe, and…alive, which we'll get into later. Here we have a prospect who has a specialty in Mining. We'll start with that so we can begin to retrieve some of those resources we were talking about earlier. Let's go find some ore and put our miner to use. Oh, we've found a vein of Orichalcum Ore! It's guarded by dangerous demons, worshipping a strange shrine. The shrine buffs the demons, giving them power, but once you defeat them, you can seize that power for yourself. After that we can tag the ore, and our mining specialist will get to work. Soon we encounter a few more deposits, each with a different dangerous encounter. After you have tagged the mineral veins, your miners will get to work collecting resources in real-time. They might take a while, but will continue whether you are logged in or not. The work can be sped up by hiring more or better miners, and by upgrading the mining station back in Kingsmarch to equip them with advanced pickaxes. Alright, some time has passed and our miners have been able to get the resources back to town. We’ve also managed to collect some more Gold too. We can now upgrade the town and build new structures. There’s plenty of options, we just need to decide where to start. I think we'll start with the Tavern, the beating heart of Kingsmarch. It can be upgraded instantly to improve the recruiters prospects, and you can find various important NPCs relaxing here. Next, we'll upgrade our Mining Station. You can upgrade this to improve the efficiency of your miners, and allocate our newly hired workers to mining. You will eventually need a smelter, where you can send your Ore to turn into more valuable bars. Then we have the Disenchanter, where you can bring your Magic, Rare or Unique items to be added to a queue to be disenchanted over time. The items will be broken down into Thaumaturgic Dust, a new resource used for crafting and shipping. We’ll get more into that later. And of course, a town needs food. You could invest in Farming, where you can select crops to grow and harvest. But don’t worry, you won’t be manually watering anything. Ah, the wonders of delegation. With all these resources piling up, there will be excess that we can spend. Let’s talk about rewards in Settlers of Kalguur. Eventually you can build a Harbour, and establish shipping routes between a number of different Kalguuran and Karui ports for trade. You’ll be able to pile your acquired resources onto these ships and send them to a port of your choosing, where your traders will haggle for the best deals. Each Port will return specific rewards based on what you send them. They accept all types of resources but will have a preferred type that they'll currently pay more for. And you’ll want to get onto this, because eventually you could be bringing in shipments like this, this, or even this. Today we're going to trade with Kalguur. You'll notice that as we send more resources, this Risk meter creeps up. Much like the dangers on the shores of Wraeclast, there are dangers out at sea: monsters, pirates, environmental hazards... You’ll want to try to keep your shipment safe. You can do this by hiring workers that specialise in shipping. The more of them you add to the ship, the less Risk there will be. Like this gentleman, who's famous for fending off even the most dangerous of pirates. Now let's get that shipment going, and we'll continue exploring Wraeclast while we wait for its return! This is the first Path of Exile league that experiments with true real-time mechanics. You can send out shipments, go and have lunch, and come back to your rewards. Many mechanics in the league work this way, so you’ll always have some ongoing project or outcome to look forward to. When your shipment has returned, or met its demise, you’ll get notified, and at your leisure you can return to the town to collect your rewards. Our ship returned safely, so let's go see what we got! Ooh, they have sent us a Unique Item alongside our rewards, perhaps hoping to secure us as a loyal customer for the future. Aside from shipping, the Kalguurans are big on their technology. They have hired Isla, a familiar face from the Heist League. She is an engineer who the Kalguurans have employed for a very exciting purpose. You’re not the only one who understands how profitable running maps can be. Once at Endgame, Isla can help you build a series of Kalguuran-modified Map Devices. You can then put a queue of Maps into them. If you’ve hired a few skilled Atlas Runners, they will put themselves to work running those maps for you one after another. Look, more delegation! Once again you'll be notified when the rewards are ready to be collected. You can put lots of maps in the queue, so don't feel obliged to go back there all the time. Be careful though, the difficulty of the map impacts the risk of your workers perishing! Try to pick your best workers, or perhaps just ones you just don’t like. Consider the difficulty too, sometimes it's better to just run it yourself. You’ll see there are many benefits to having a whole-ass town at your fingertips. Let’s talk about Crafting services. You should definitely consider building a Runesmithing Table. This is operated by Dannig himself, using powerful Kalguuran blacksmithing arts. He can engrave runic magic onto your weapons using runes. There are many rune-types and combinations to choose from, and you can unlock new crafts that can be applied to your weapons as enchantments. Our design intention here is to take powerful effects you would usually only find on unique items, and put them on normal equipment. Like this modifier, which you might recognise from Doomfletch’s Prism. Dannig can apply it to your Two Hand Maces. There are over one-hundred different special crafting outcomes ranging from ones very easily applied, to very difficult. The Rune-types can be acquired through trade with Kalguur, or defeating powerful bosses. The Kalguuran tech benefits don’t end there. We’re also bringing back a formerly overpowered crowd-favourite: Recombination. Isla is trying to master this, she just needs you to help her with getting resources. This system isn’t as strong as it used to be, but it still allows you to combine two items together, hoping to get the best modifiers of each onto a single item. Between running a town, shipping, and exploring, you’ll be collecting a lot of extra gold. It is now the primary resource for two huge new quality of life features that we are putting to test. Firstly, you can use Gold to respec Passive Points. This is a feature from Path of Exile 2 that we’ve decided just makes sense to port back. The higher level you are, the more expensive it gets. And the next one is absolutely massive: a Currency Trade-Market. The Kalguurans have recruited Faustus, another NPC from the Heist league. He allows you to asynchronously buy and sell currency, and most other stackable items, with other players without the nuisance of price fixers and people who never respond. All you need to do is select what currency you want, say what you have, and your ideal ratio. It works kinda like a real-life stock market. Faustus will make the trade happen for you, so long as there is someone selling on the other end for the same rate or less. You'll be able to go back to blasting monsters while trusty Faustus does the dirty work, notifying you when your currency is ready for collection. All you need to do is pay him a small amount of Gold for his time. Cards on the table - this is an experiment to see if this type of asynchronous trading has a place in future Path of Exile releases. We’re very excited to see how it goes. Now, given Faustus is an expert in Black Market trade and shady deals, he also provides another service: offering Items for Gold. The items will generate with random rarity and on average the modifiers on them are better than normal. This can be a very nice way to get some targeted items during the Campaign. For serious crafters, it can be a great starting point for making those elusive specific endgame items, which perhaps you could take to the Runesmith afterwards. It’s worth noting that you can invite Faustus to your hideout where he will always be available for respeccing, currency exchange, and black market items. As your town grows it will attract more attention, good and bad. Settlers of Kalguur features three endgame bosses that will close in on your operations, wanting a piece of the pie. They might capture and ransom your workers, even your entire ships. You’ll have to make some tough decisions: will you take them on, or pay them off? One example of a boss is Sasan, the Bandit Lord. You won’t stumble across this boss by accident. Instead, this unsavoury character can come into your town at night and take your Atlas Runners hostage, holding them for ransom. What happens next is up to you. Perhaps you’ll refuse to negotiate with bandits, leading to a fight to defeat Sasan and rescue your workers. If you're not up for the heroics, you might simply pay the ransom in Gold. Or… perhaps these workers were especially disappointing, and you’ll just leave them for dead in true Wraeclast fashion. They knew what they were signing up for, right? Of course, the heroics might be worth it for other reasons. These bosses can drop new Unique Items. In sum, Settlers of Kalguur is a very experimental league with new mechanics that will completely change how you play the core game. We’ve been sitting on a lot of these ideas for a while and can’t wait to share them with you. But there’s a lot more to this expansion. Let’s talk about balance. Well, we've finally rebalanced the Gladiator. It's been a long time coming. Like before, there are passive skills that allow you to invest in Bleeding, and Block. We’ve designed new Skills replacing some of the old ones. Like this: War of Attrition, which is very handy for long sustained boss fights. Further alongside the Gladiator theme, this new passive allows you to combine different weapon types while Dual Wielding to get a variety of powerful bonuses. For example, holding a dagger will give you more critical strike chance, while holding a mace gives you more area of effect. Of course, you could just use Varunastra for all weapon type bonuses. And finally, we have a new notable which allows you to invest into the newly added Retaliation skills. These are active skills which require you to meet a certain condition in order to use them. Once you meet that condition, you can unleash devastation on your foes. Here we have Eviscerate, which requires you to have a Shield. Or for those who like to Dual-Wield: Swordstorm, which is great for obliterating bosses. Here we have the Divine Retribution skill, this one has the condition requiring you to Block. You can then unleash a devastating spell causing Lightning bolts to strike the ground in an X-Shape around your target location, doing huge amounts of damage. And of course in true Path of Exile fashion, there are many avenues to invest into these mechanics further on the Passive Tree and a new Support Gem. You are able to increase the lee-way duration after meeting the condition, reduce the cooldowns, or just increase their damage. The world's your oyster. The Gladiator wasn't the only Ascendancy class we've changed. As we develop Path of Exile’s systems we often find ourselves re-using mechanics, increasing their depth, and allowing more avenues to invest into them. As such, the Raider Ascendancy class found itself lacking, with many of its passives commonly available elsewhere. We want our Ascendancy classes to always feel like they're pushing the boundaries, allowing you to change your character in ways that are meaningful and ideally unique. As a result, we've straight up removed the Raider (Rest In Peace). and we've added a new class in its place: The Warden. This class is largely inspired by its predecessor from the Affliction League, with a few changes. The Warden now focuses on Elemental Attacks, changing the behaviour of Shock, enhancing Freeze, and replacing Ignite with Scorch. There’s also a skill that allows you to go ballistic with your Elemental Damage periodically. The class also grants Barkskin, which is a skill that can be used to mitigate Physical Damage from Hits. After taking a number of hits it increases your Evasion, making it a great defensive choice. Finally, the last thing the Warden can specialise in is Tinctures. These are an alternative to Flasks from the Affliction league. We’re bringing them back with adjusted mechanics. Tinctures can be placed in your belt, replacing Flasks. You can inherently only have one Tincture active at a time, and it requires a Melee weapon to use. While activated, they grant a powerful buff. They can drop as magic items, or be modified with currency to grant extra bonuses. Here is a Prismatic Tincture, this one increases Elemental Damage by 100% while active. You'll notice it has two extra effects; one is that it applies Manaburn every second. Manaburn is a debuff that builds up while Tinctures are active that causes you to lose mana, losing more mana for each stack. Tinctures also have a cooldown, so once you have disabled one, no other Tincture can be enabled for a time. These changes make Tincture use a more active and interesting choice than it was in Affliction. Both Manaburn and the cooldown can be modified through modifiers on the Tinctures, or on the passive skill tree. Players will want to maximise their Tincture uptime for sure! Here we have a couple other Tinctures. The Poisonberry Tincture is excellent for Poison Builds. The Rosethorn Tincture is the choice for those wanting to deal Critical Strikes. You might be wondering, with the removal of the Raider, where has the Frenzy Charge investment gone? We've added a Frenzy Charge passive Skill to the Deadeye, replacing the Rupture passive skill. On top of Ascendancy classes we have revisited a number of core mechanics, this time taking pains to ensure easy access through the Passive Tree, skill gems, and simple items. We don’t want all the powerful mechanics to be hidden behind layers of complexity. Let's just rapid fire through the key points. If you want more detail later you can read the patch notes, which will be dropped after the livestream. Be sure to let us know what you think. There’s a LOT of changes so be prepared for a bit of a shock to the system, I expect it will take several days for the dust to settle on this one. Firstly, we've made some drastic alterations to Melee skills. Let me just rip this bandaid off: Melee Totem Skill Gems have been removed. We're trying to adopt a philosophy with Melee going forward that unlike other builds, it will be far less oriented around set & forget gameplay. You will deal the damage yourself, and you should be rewarded for doing so. To compensate we have buffed the damage on almost every single Melee Skill. As the majority of this damage growth comes from gem levels, we have also made them cost more mana as they level, but it's still nothing like the mana costs on Spells. Here are some examples of the damage and costs before & after: Heavy Strike has gone from dealing 313% Attack Damage at Gem Level 20, to a massive 552% Attack Damage. It's worth noting it no longer knocks enemies back. And Sweep has gone from dealing 281% Attack Damage, to now dealing 664% Attack Damage at Gem Level 20. These are just two examples, but the majority of melee skills are now dealing approximately 75% more damage at Level 20. Of course, with Melee comes close proximity combat, so you need some good defensive options. New base types with higher defensive values will now drop throughout the endgame. As you reach yellow, red, and purple maps. you can expect to find higher tier base types in each. For example, Vaal Regalia and Hubris Circlet are no longer the best-in-slot items for Energy Shield. There are new basetypes that surpass them. Combined with some quality changes, which we’ll talk about soon, you can now get better items than ever before in these slots. To compensate, we have reduced the amount of Flat Evasion & Armour from the Grace and Determination Auras, but overall you're getting more defences than before. On top of this, we have buffed Life Modifiers on Magic and Rare Equipment. You can now get as high as 189 additional Maximum Life from a single modifier on Body Armours, and more on other slots too. Kaom's Heart has also finally been restored to its former glory and once again grants +1000 to Maximum Life. I mentioned quality. Quality on Weapons and Armours is being changed to apply multiplicatively. In other words, Weapons with full quality will give 20% more Physical Damage, and Armour with full quality will have 20% more local defences. For melee, this will mean a damage increase for almost all builds using Physical Damage Attacks. And it will mean more Evasion, Armour, Energy Shield and Ward for all builds. Endurance Charges no longer grant Elemental Resistances, but instead grant additional Elemental Damage reduction, making it multiplicative with Resistances. You can now get 4% per Charge, alongside the existing 4% Physical Damage Reduction. To compensate, we have made some changes to the Juggernaut and various unique items like Eternal Damnation. You can get more Maximum Resistances from the tree, specifically around the Marauder class start. These of course can stack with the new Elemental mitigation from Endurance Charges. On top of this, Jewels can now roll Maximum Elemental Resistances as modifiers. Since we’re making Elemental Mitigation more accessible, we've heavily reduced accessibility to Physical Damage taken as Chaos or Elemental damage. Those stats are still around, but you should not expect to be getting full conversion anymore. All Block passives have been buffed, so you can now more easily achieve Block cap from just the Passive Tree. The keystone Versatile Combatant has been improved to have less of a penalty to maximum Block. A number of life leech passives have been buffed to generally allow for more acquisition of maximum leech rate for Life. Vaal Pact has been reinstated to its former glory for Instant Life Leech, but only for Melee. We've reworked Flesh & Stone. Previously this buff skill granted Maim & Blind, depending on the stance of our character. Now, while in Sand Stance, the skill simply provides damage mitigation, becoming more effective the closer you are to enemies. While in Blood Stance, enemies will take more physical damage the closer you are to them. This skill will now greatly favour Melee or close range gameplay. Given we're doing a Kalguuran League, Ward has also received a bit of attention. There are new uniques that grant Ward, and the base restoration of Ward is now faster. To compensate, Olroth's Resolve has been nerfed, but Ward-loop builds will still be possible. Anyway, that was most of the purely defensive changes, now let's look at some of the offensive and utility based ones. There are more and better ways to deal with mana as an attacker on the southern hemisphere of the passive tree. Wands, Daggers, Sceptres, Claws and Staves now have higher critical strike chance values than ever. Wands can go as high as 10% without modifiers. Sandstorm Visage has been made rarer to compensate, instead of reducing its power. For you wand attackers, wands now have higher attack speed than ever to compensate for their low damage. Wand exclusive Skills such as Power Siphon, Kinetic Bolt and Kinetic Blast now have faster attack times. Impale passives have been revised and in general buffed. The buffs granted by Warcries are now simpler but more significant and more universal to builds. They also now apply to allies by default. Banners have been reworked. Instead of having a reservation cost, they are now free. However they don't grant a permanent buff. Banners now need to be placed for the effect to be active. However, once placed they are far more powerful than before. Additionally there are new ways to prolong the effects, and more ways to invest in them than ever before. Rage has been made more fundamental and discoverable. Rage is now multiplicative Attack Damage, but no longer inherently grants Attack Speed or Movement Speed. It has a new cap and you can find many new passive clusters that allow you to invest into the mechanic. The goal is to make Rage more powerful as a baseline and less gated behind the use of specific Unique Items and Ascendancy Classes. Berserk has been nerfed, just so you're aware. We have changed how Bleed works too. You can now find Aggravated Bleed on the passive tree. When applied, all bleeds on the enemy will deal damage as if the enemy is moving for the remainder of their duration. The skill Ensnaring Arrow no longer interacts with bleed, so no more will you have to apply bleeds and swap to a bow. You can now achieve the same result using Aggravated Bleed passives, without the annoyance. Rupture, from the Deadeye, has been turned into a Support Gem. We've added the new Overexertion Support Gem, which highly favours Slam builds. Now, it’s time to look at a hot topic: Magic Find. In the Settlers of Kalguur expansion we are going to be removing Item Quantity bonuses from all character items. This will not affect existing items in Standard Leagues. Magic find is intended to be another axis on your gear you can scale, once you have achieved the power you want. With Item Quantity being only available on Unique Items, this meant if you wanted to get the most out of it, you had to be playing a very specific build. We still want people to be able to invest into Magic Find, but now only through Item Rarity. This can be obtained on a number of Rare Item slots, and by a much larger number of builds. “What about Ventor's Gamble?” you might ask? Here it is now. This is one of the biggest balance patches we’ve ever done. I can’t promise that existing builds will all be safe. Even we aren’t able to predict all the outcomes here, nor have we even gone into every single change, just the major ones. I don’t know man, balance is hard. But the sheer number of new, viable options is exciting, especially for melee, and we’re determined to drag the game in a better direction. Be sure to check out the patch notes after this, it’s going to be a ruckus. In 3.24 we overhauled the Endgame experience by introducing a new Tier of Maps and reworking Scarabs. We want to continue to improve these systems and introduce more exciting Endgame content every league. 3.25 is no exception! Let's check out the myriad of changes coming in Settlers of Kalguur. First up, we are changing many Scarabs. We won't go into too much detail here to avoid getting lost in the weeds, but here's a few new ones. Be sure to check out the patch notes after this for more detail. We've also added an additional Map Device Slot, which will be unlocked upon completing your first 10-Way Maven Encounter. This simply allows for more combinations of Scarabs in maps, resulting in more difficulty and more rewards. This is on top of the existing additional slot that can be unlocked by completing your first Tier 17 Map. There are now six Map Device Slots in total. You might have seen our teaser where we revealed that we’ll be adding new special encounters to the Endgame. One such encounter is the Nameless Seer, lurking in Tier 16 and 17 maps. This NPC will give you a selection of unique items, and you can pick one for free. In Tier 16 Maps he now has an additional feature, where you can Scry a Map. This allows you to swap the Divination Card drops of the current map with another map on your Atlas. Just one caveat: you cannot have the same map be in multiple swaps at the same time. If you want to undo your choice, you can use a Scouring Orb on either Map on your Atlas. We've also made some updates to a couple of leagues. Blight has been updated with some Atlas Passive Skill changes, and double-anointed Amulets can now drop in Blight-Ravaged Maps. We've also introduced a new type of Oil that can only drop from Blighted and Blight-Ravaged Maps. Ritual has also been updated. You can now find one new, and many, reworked base types, new unique items, corpses you can use to raise as Spectres, and occasionally a Fragment, granting access to the King in the Mists boss fight from the Affliction League. He will drop a number of unique items that were familiar from the league. But not That Which was Taken, as it is now That Which was Taken away. However he now drops a different modular Jewel that you might recognise from the Necropolis league. In Tier 16 and Tier 17 Maps, you can now encounter the Wildwood, also from the Affliction League. In case you missed it, the Wildwood is a mysterious forest fraught with danger. In this darkness you will find magical Wisps yearning for freedom. Upon releasing them, they will empower the monsters in your map, promising more danger but more rewards. You may also find random Sentinels on the ground near the start of your maps, from the Sentinel League. They work in a similar way to before. They aren’t items, but you can click on them and then they can be activated in that area at any time of your choosing. Upon activation they will buff monsters around you, increasing their difficulty and rewards. And here’s one for those who like to live dangerously. You may occasionally find a Reflective Mist, from the Kalandra league. It has two outcomes. It could drop a Jewellery item with randomly enhanced, or inverted modifier values. Or it can give a Reflecting Mist item which can be used on an existing piece of Jewellery to perform the same action at a time of your choosing. Good luck! There's many other small changes to league content. We’re removing the first fifteen, most boring waves of the Simulacrum and rebalancing its rewards to improve the chances of finding unique Jewels. We're also adding some of the beasts from Einhar's Memory of Harvest Beasts to the core pool. This includes the Black Morrigan. In other news, we've added a set of new Chisel types, which can be applied to your maps to get different bonuses. While the Cartographer's Chisel still increases Item Quantity, there are new ones that now increase Rarity, Pack Size, increased chance for Currency Items, Divination Cards and Scarabs. It's also worth mentioning that Chisels now apply 20% quality per chisel to White Maps, 10% to Yellow Maps, and 5% to Red Maps and higher. Unique Maps still require the full 20 Chisels. Also, only one type of chisel can be applied to a Map at a time. During 3.24, we made a change to Tier 17 maps that allowed them to be rerolled with Chaos Orbs. We are now expanding the currency types that can be used on them to also include currencies like Chisels and Vaal Orbs. Ultimately, the only restriction Tier 17 maps now have is that Explicit Modifiers cannot be removed from them. We have also revised the difficulty of these maps as they didn't quite hit the mark. The monsters in them now have substantially less life and deal less damage, meaning Tier 17 Maps now better fit into the progression between Pinnacle and Uber Pinnacle content. Lastly, we've adjusted the drop rate of Valdo's Puzzle Boxes. Previously, we were adapting its drop rate based on the possible outcomes selected by supporters. So many supporters really wanted Magebloods, so the box was hardly dropping. Thus we have drastically increased the drop rate of the Box, but reduced the probability of getting chase Unique Items from it like Mageblood. Overall we have taken care not to reduce the number of Magebloods total in the economy. We just figured it was better to have more tickets for fun, rather than barely seeing any boxes in a league. We’ve been hard at work improving the Path of Exile experience on consoles. With Native Ports for the Xbox Series consoles already being released, and PS5 on the near horizon, the game now takes full advantage of the console hardware. Loading times have been reduced even further, pop-in has been reduced, and textures won't start unloading in heavy scenes. Furthermore, overall visual fidelity has been improved for all new generation consoles. Path of Exile now uses the highest available resolution textures and water effects. We’ve installed a new upscaling algorithm that improves the crispness of dynamic resolution, with an additional anti-aliasing pass on top of that. With these upgrades, we also support variable refresh rate TVs and Monitors on PS5 and on all Xbox consoles. In the options, players can now choose which aspect of visual fidelity they want to focus on: resolution, image quality or target frame rate. In 3.24 we added some new encounters and secrets to the Campaign. In Settlers of Kalguur we're adding even more! We’re not going to spoil them all here, but keep an eye out for anything unfamiliar on your adventures. Who knows what you’ll find? I mean, I know. But still. There's an underground bunker underneath the Refinery, guarded by powerful robots? I wonder what’s been hidden away here? How do I unlock this mysterious door? What riches must lay inside! Blighted growths have appeared in the Gardens and Sewers of Sarn. A vault containing riches can be found in the Reliquary. As you might have seen in our teasers, there’s a slew of Quality of Life features we’ve been working on. Here's a quick summary. You no longer need to interact with Waypoints to unlock them. You can just walk by and they'll activate automatically. When using Keyboard & Mouse, you'll be able to pick up items from further away. We're adding Static Life bars to some bosses. Not all bosses will have them just yet, but we'll be adding more over time. You can now see which Divination Cards drop in each Map by hovering over them on your Atlas. When you die, you can now resurrect without having to re-activate all your reservation effects, like Auras and Heralds. You can start Harvest encounters with just a single action. The amount of Quality provided by currency items like Whetstones is now based on item level, rather than Item Rarity. Those currencies now apply 20% quality to very low level items, with that amount reducing as the item level increases. Next up, we're going to be talking about our new league support packs. Today, we're launching two new series of support packs. The Paladin and Penance packs. Each tier contains the pack’s full face value in points, alongside several exclusive microtransactions. These packs are only available for the duration of The Settlers of Kalguur league, and will leave the store forever when it ends. As always, the microtransactions in these packs are purely cosmetic and do not affect your character's power or progression in any way. The Paladin series of Supporter Packs contains six exclusive microtransactions. Adorn your weapon or shield with the Paladin Weapon effect. Make a show of leveling up with the Harpy Flyover Level Up Effect. Equipping the Divine Paladin Armour Set will periodically cause slain enemies to be consecrated and laid to rest. This set also comes with a matching Back Attachment. Both the Helmet and Back Attachment have options to display the radiant glow. Or not. You pick. The Divine Judgment Finisher effect locks onto unique enemies before obliterating them with a laser from the heavens. May your critical hits resonate across Wraeclast with the Clerics Bell Back Attachment. Invite your friends to spend a day at the races in the Vastiri Racecourse Hideout. Add rhoas to the track to race them against each other. Or you can just spectate from the sidelines. The Penance Pack series also has six exclusive microtransactions. With the Penance Back Attachment equipped, A repentant soul is chained to your back and lashed with lightning. Ouch. Place none other than the Trialmaster in your hideout, and have him comment on your chaos- “Ah, a classic.” “But far fairer now than in ancient times.” And Vaal crafting attempts- “Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Your luck is over, fool.” He even keeps a record of how many Chaos and Vaal Orbs you've used in your hideout during the league, or across all leagues. Blood stains your armor the more life you lose when wearing the Acolytes Penance Armor Set. The Zealot’s Madness Portal Effect fragments as you near it. The Cauldron Map Device boils maps, fragments, and scarabs placed into it, keeping a tally of how many have been thrown into the pot in the current league, or across all leagues. The Exiled Squire Pets follow in your footsteps, hyping you up for battles- “No sweat for you, boss!” Providing pessimistic commentary- “The cycle repeats...” Or voicing their disdain for you to bring you down a peg. “About time you kick the bucket.” These packs are now available for purchase on both PC and Console and will remain so during Path of Exile: Settlers of Kalguur. Meanwhile, the Solar and Eldritch packs leave the store forever at the launch of Settlers of Kalguur league, so now's your last chance to purchase them. Thank you so much for your ongoing support.