Path of Exile's New League Shakes Up the Metagame by Breaking Simultaneous Player Records and Introducing City Builder Mode

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Path of Exile's New League Shakes Up the Metagame by Breaking Simultaneous Player Records and Introducing City Builder Mode

The mysterious boat league has been deep lore in the Path of Exile community for a decade." With "redacted" forum posts, fishing lore snippets of items removed from the game, and legendary former community manager Bex (we miss you, PoE's newest league, "Settlers of Kargul," it's finally happening.

Path of Exile's 3.25 patch was released last week and is already being hailed as one of the best patches ever. News posted by the Grinding Gear Games team on Sunday of the launch weekend, with a new record peak of 350,000 players, content creators are enthusiastic and I have never seen my friends so excited about a league! I have anecdotal evidence that they have never seen anything like it.

There are several reasons why this league is special. The first is the massive balancing of skills in the game. Namely, it dealt a major blow to some intimidating meta-builds like Detonate Dead and gave a huge buff to melee skills as a whole; melee has long felt like a second-class citizen in this game, so this is a welcome change. We also removed Raider and replaced it with Warden, which focuses on strengthening elemental alignments and utilizing tincture.

The second is the league mechanics themselves; Settles of Kalguur, like many leagues before it, features an almost entirely new game inside the game. This time, instead of a tower defense or roguelike, the game features city builders. Chatting with Johan the King's Hand at the beginning of Act 1, he introduces you to your new home, Kingsmarch. Gain resources by defeating campaign and map events, deploy workers to build new facilities, harvest ore, break down items, and trade for loot on boat trips. Boat trips.

This adds a whole new incentive structure to the game and makes everything just a little bit more fun. Chasing down the right resources to level up your city can be very satisfying, and the rewards are great. Ship trading in the early stages can get you rare items with high status that you can use while leveling up, and as you unlock more buildings later in the game, you can do all kinds of great things.

There are recombinator buildings for gamblers who missed the Sentinel League, incredible weapon enchantments like Nimis built into two-handed swords, and NPCs who will run the map for you and bring in passive income. There is so much hidden in this system that it would be impossible to list it all here.

Another major change in PoE with the league system is the introduction of gold as a currency. Now, I have written in the past about how wonderful it was that Path of Exile did not have a fiat currency to support its economy. With this in mind, I was skeptical about the introduction of Gold, but they did a good job here. Gold cannot be traded with other players and is only there to interact with the league mechanics. Monsters would drop gold, which could be used to level up buildings, reward citizens, or place buy/sell orders on the exchange. Linking the league mechanic to gold in this way pushes players back into mapping and reinforces the core gameplay loop.

The currency exchange itself may be the most significant structural change in 3.25: the Kingsmarch allows players to pay a small amount of gold to place buy and sell orders, immediately turning fossils, essences, orbs of derangement, and anything else imaginable into useful orbs of chaos and Divine can be turned into Divine. You don't have to wait for the dozens of AFK players on the trading site to respond to your remark about a single Indigo oil, you can simply place a quick buy order and get it instantly.

Now, the leaguestart was not entirely without problems. Players of the console version had an unstable launch, mainly due to the fact that they were trying to synchronize it with the PC launch for the first time. Exploits discovered by a truly labyrinthine combination of scarabs and other tools resulted in a massive influx of Divine into the economy. Thankfully, GGG nipped it in the bud quickly, but the initial damage made some, especially the high-end ones, almost impossible to obtain in the early stages.

Another thing that has made players a bit uneasy is the change in overall drop rates: in 3.24, changes were made to the way scarabs and quantities worked in the game, mainly to try to curb the true excesses that players were able to scrape up in the ultra end game The result was that loot was generally not a good thing. As a result, loot drops were generally lower, but we hardly noticed because 3.24 had attractive league mechanics to compensate; without such a system in 3.25, things felt a bit sparser; and the new system was a bit more "sparse.

These minor gripes aside, "Settlers of Kargul" looks to be an all-timer, and we're looking forward to pouring juice into the Molten Strike Juggernaut for the first time since the Delve League, taking down the highest bosses, and mining for old times' sake. The balance changes make it feel like there are endless possibilities, and the loot distances, auras that automatically reapply upon death, and a host of quality of life changes like currency exchange mean the game feels smoother than ever. Logged-in dudes

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