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Path Of Exile: Delirium Wants To Show Players Their Worst Nightmares
The Path of Exile newest League update has been announced as Delirium, an expansion which comes not only with new league mechanics, but also with fundamental changes in how characters can be built. This Delirium League will focus on spawning a misty alternate reality in certain areas of GGG’s ARPG, creating new nightmarish enemies and twisting current enemies into more deadly versions.
Influenced by both the Diablo video game series and Magic: The Gathering, Path of Exile has long been known for its dark fantasy, massive League updates, and infamously convoluted systems. Ever since the game's original PC release in 2013, Path of Exile has presented fans with a wide variety of randomly generated entertainment and a plethora of expansions and updates which constantly improve the game's replayability.
In the latest trailer for Path of Exile: Delirium, a creepy new master is seen instructing players to embrace potential madness in the quest for better loot. Simply put: The mist of Delirium makes all enemies harder, but also increases drop chances. As with other Leagues, new unique items, skills, and crafting materials will be added to the game. Delirium also showcases a much more important change: As visible on the Path of Exile announcement page, the new POE League will introduce Cluster Jewels, a new type of jewel that can open up new passive skill tree paths at the edges of POE’s massive passive skill map. Cluster Jewels can have 280 various random effects and a variety of nodes – they can also be socketed into each other, allowing players to create whole new skill trees to follow, branching off of just one jewel node.
POE calls this the most significant change to its build creation since 2016, when Ascendancy classes were introduced. It could easily allow for alternative takes on very traditional POE builds that were previously stretched across the skill map in order to get important nodes. It’s a great way to keep players around during a competitive 2020 release schedule. Maps in the endgame will also be receiving changes, including improvements to the UI and more concrete methods to spawn endgame bosses. A new item, Delirium Orbs, will now be able to craft maps to spawn the Delirium mists. Similar to the Scarabs added during the Betrayal league, these orbs will make it easier to find specific items in maps as well. Players can also collect materials to unlock a Simulacrum map and fight an as-yet-unknown final league boss.
Path of Exile continues to lead the ARPG market, at least for now. During the press tour, GGG founder Chris Wilson discussed how the game continued to pick up new players in 2019 at the same rate it has for years, and each new league finds the game sitting comfortably near the top of Steam play charts with no notable ARPG competitors. But the future is a different question. Players worry about the game growing too bloated with lingering League content as POE 2’s beta (currently unscheduled, potentially playable at the end of 2020) draws closer. POE 2 is an excellent opportunity to focus content for both games and remove some dead weight. It’s likely that GGG is using the upcoming leagues to test out just how some of these changes will be received. That makes the new jewel paths of Delirium particularly interesting, if they’re intended to stick around – or perhaps even be the foundation of a system for Path of Exile 2.
