After a long period of preparation, GGG officially announced Path of Exile 3.12, the next league is called Heist. Although the New Zealand COVID-19 pandemic has affected the work of developers, it clearly did not affect their enthusiasm. Heist League brings us a lot of exciting content, including new skills, new loot and new areas to explore.

 

Path of Exile Heist League will task players with traveling to a new area called Rogue Harbor, where they can meet up with a group of rogues and begin planning large scale criminal adventures together. These new heists have different hurdles, like locked doors or traps, that players will be forced to hire rogues with special skills to help them with. The goal of each heist is to make it through the area without setting off alarms or alerting the guards to your presence. If the player manages to make it to the vault without setting off any alarms, the gurds will then be alerted and players will need to quickly decide what item they would like to steal before trying their best to make it out alive.

Rogues

There are many different types of rogues in the update that players will be able to choose from. Each of these rogues have a specific skill set that will be necessary to make it through a heist without setting off an alarm or understanding how to escape successfully. Four of the rogues will be able to provide players with information about each heist location or offer them transportation. Nine will have skills like lockpicking or demolition that can be used to help players get in and out of a heist area successfully. In order to use these thieves effectively players will need both contracts and markers, which are brand new items to Path of Exile: Heist.

These rogues are more than just mindless NPC meatshields. Each rogue has one main skill and up to three sub skills that gain experience each time they are used. You can also outfit them with four types of special equipment to help boost their abilities or add other effects. Possibilities of gear bonuses include skill bonuses and reducing percentage of cut or noise level. This equipment can also be modified akin to player gear using currencies.

Contracts

Contracts are maps that represent each heist location, and each one lets players know what Artifact they will need to steal from the area as well as what types of skills a player's rogues will need to complete the heist efficiently. Just like all items in Path of Exile, Contracts can also be crafted and modified. Players can use all of the normal methods of crafting items in order to change the difficulty of the heist, which will in turn give players access to better rewards that scale with the challenge. Markers are a new form of currency added in Path of Exile: Heist that players will be able to hire rogues with, and can also be used to complete other objectives or as payment in other scenarios. Players will be able to earn both Contracts and Markers by completing heists or killing enemies.

Heist

Once players have obtained a Contract and the necessary amount of Markers to start a heist, players can take the materials to the Wayfinder in Rogue Harbor to try and complete the heist. As we've already stated, the object of each heist is to make it to the main vault room and steal the special Artifact that is being held there, but players also have the option of looting other items from special treasure rooms along the way. Doing so will come at a cost, however, and will raise the alarm as greedy players attempt to line their pockets further. This means all doors open and all guards will try to mob you to prevent you from escaping. If you die before you can escape, you lose everything, so choose wisely.

Blueprints

Working with Contracts and Heists is just the beginning, because they'll train players for Grand Heists. Players can craft Blueprints and use any intel collected from previous Heists to plan for Grand Heists, which contain much bigger prizes. Once you're ready to go on a Grand Heist, you'll hand a Blueprint off to Whakano the Barber, who will then craft the Grand Heist map and use any intel gathered to offer additional information, like enemy locations, escape routes, reward rooms, and more. While Blueprint drops aren't common, one major element of this expansion is the ability to trade for Contracts and Blueprints. If none of this heisting stuff sounds like it's for you, the Contracts and Blueprints can be traded between players for a tidy profit.

Being much larger in scale, Grand Heists will allow players to recruit three Rogues. Every wing in the Grand Heist facility will have its own alert level, so plan carefully. Planning carefully also means pre-planning your escape route to minimize conflict with endless waves of guards once you grab the Artifact. One would imagine that a Grand Heist would mean the prize is greater, right? For Grand Heists, the destination is a Vault, which contains numerous rewards hidden behind glass display cases. Players will only get to keep one of these items and leave the rest behind.

Loot Rewards

Replica Unique Items

Path of Exile has a large number of unique items that are the only ones of their kind. Replica Unique Items are attempted recreations of these items that are slightly different in terms of the modifiers on it. These mean that while they are still very similar to the original, they are more appropriate for different character builds. There are around 100 new replica items, with one example being a Replica Iron Commander bow that uses Strength rather than Dexterity and affects Shrapnel Ballista rather than Siege Ballista.

Experimented Base Type

Another new reward type are Experimented Base Type items. There is one of these for each weapon type, as well as several varieties for jewels. These offer vastly different effects to regular base type items, such as a new type of bow that does very little physical damage but a lot of fire damage. Heist also adds a brand new equipment slot: trinkets. This is the first new equipment slot since the game’s release, and lets players improve their rewards from the Heist content without having to adjust their build. Trinkets are intentionally set so they cannot be crafted by players. Another potential reward type from Grand Heists are Weapon and Body Armour Enchantments. These were originally introduced in the Ascendancy expansion, and are special properties that don’t require a modifier slot, with around fifteen themes in total. The top tier enhancement are incredibly powerful, but also come with drawbacks that need to be worked around. Finally, around 900 new alternate-quality gems can be found from reward rooms in Grand Heists. Alternate-quality gems are similar to regular gems, but increase a different stat as they gain in quality.

 

The new expansion will introduce a new item type in Path of Exile called Trinkets, which will influence drop probability during Heists. These will go in a new equipment slot, which means players can equip Trinkets without compromising their current build. Trinkets can have various effects on drops during Heists, such as upping the percentage of Corrupted drops, increasing the reward quality, or up the chance to find special drops during a job. All of these Trinkets are Corrupted, so players won't be able to craft these. These are special items within this expansion. Alternate-quality Gems will also prove to be a tempting reward during Grand Heists. These will see a different stat increase as they gain quality allowing for multiple build possibilities.

Rework and New Unique

Outside of the heisting component, Path of Exile's latest expansion will look to rework several existing elements of the game. Curses will undergo an overhaul that encourages players to self-cast them by increasing their intensity over time. On top of that, players may notice that many of the existing Curses will have improved visual effects and slightly different attributes. Steel Skills (Shattering Steel and Lancing Steel) are being reworked to utilize both the Impale mechanic and a new Shard mechanic that increases their area-of-effect damage. Look for a few reworked spells, as well as some new ones like Flame Wall, which creates a fiery wall that damages enemies over time, and Void Sphere, which creates a black hole that sucks in nearby enemies and keeps them stuck in place. Look for 25 new Unique Items, like the Corpsewalker Unique Boots, which creates corpses every 0.3 seconds as you move. That one will be handy for corpse builds. Another Unique Item example is the Chains of Emancipation, which inflicts a Temporal Chains curse on you that grants full Rage when broken.

Release Data

Path of Exile: Heist will be coming to PC on September 18, with a console release on September 23.