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Today, GGG revealed the next expansion for Path of Exile. Sentinel will include both a new challenge league and a significant amount of new end-game content. In addition to that, Sentinel brings some improvements and balance, revamped monster modifiers, and some quality-of-life improvements to both the base game and the league.

 

Meet Your New Allies

Why is this expansion called Path of Exile: Sentinel? It's because of the titular Sentinels, which are ancient constructs that have been discovered throughout Wraeclast. When uncovered, these sentient objects will follow players around, almost behaving like pets. However, the Sentinels don't exactly help in battle. Instead, they amplify enemy power and make them more difficult to deal with. That sounds bad at first, but in exchange, the empowered enemies will drop greater rewards.


There are three classes of Sentinel: Stalker, Pandemonium, and Apex. Stalker Sentinels will follow players for around thirty second and empower any enemies encounter, described as letting players generate their own Breach or Delirium-style encounters. Pandemonium Sentinels generally only fire a single empowerment in a large area of effect chain. Finally, Apex Sentinels can only empower rare or unique enemies with fewer shots but a large impact on challenge and reward. In addition, players can increase the power of the Sentinels through the Sentinel Controller. It acts somewhat like a circuit board, with nodes for each of the three Sentinel classes. Players obtain power units that can be applied to the Sentinel Controller, providing upgrades to the classes those units are connected to with filaments that players can place down as they wish. Some nodes can be very powerful; for example, letting a Sentinel be used more than once per area.


Players will start with a single slot for Stalker Sentinels, eventually unlocking two additional slots. Each Sentinel class can only be deployed once per area, requiring some strategy from players about when to use them, with different Sentinels having different effects and modifiers. While Sentinels cannot be damaged, their internal power depletes each time they are used. The husks of Sentinels that have used up their power can be used to create new Sentinels in a unique crafting system. This crafting system lets player combine two husks with a Power Core, found throughout the league, to generate a new fully-charged Sentinel. The result is unpredictable as players can end up with a result similar to one of the husks or a completely different one, though they are usually more powerful. There are specialised Power Cores, and the most powerful Sentinels will come as the result of this generation process. A similar process, Recombination, will also be available for equipment drops.

The Sentinel league will give players a free Sentinel Locker that lets them readily store Sentinel husks as well as the league's currency items. There will also be unique Sentinels that cannot be combined with others. One example is the Basilisk, a Pandemonium Sentinel that combines its empowerment with a petrification effect on all enemies. Other unique Sentinels are designed to work with specific end-game Atlas content, while Sentinels can be combined with other league content — with a limited number of exceptions — to boost challenge and rewards.

Create Powerful Items

In the Sentinel League, you may find a new type of rare currency: Recombinators. These allow you to apply the Sentinel Assembly process to your actual items, taking any two pieces of equipment from the same item class and combining them together. While the results are unpredictable, this process could merge the best elements of each item, potentially adding an exclusive new modifier, to create something of unprecedented power.

No class balance

For the first time ever, there will be no changes to class balance at all in Path of Exile. Wilson explained to me that this is an experiment: If it goes well, then it might happen occasionally going forward, though definitely not all the time. The idea behind doing no class balancing is that players can take the knowledge they already know about classes and hit the ground running right at Sentinel's launch. Because they already know how the classes will work, there is no need to relearn things. While the team has to wait and see how this method is received, Wilson believes that many regular players will be positive toward this, whereas those who look forward to studying and creating new builds may be less inclined toward it.

Atlas Endgame Improvements

The Path of Exile: Sentinel expansion also improves the endgame introduced in Siege of the Atlas. Sentinel adds 20 more keystone passives to your Atlas tree, such as"Singular Focus” which increases the chances you'll find Favored Maps. There will also be passives set in clusters, which allow you more control over what content you experience. Basically, they'll"prevent content you don't enjoy from appearing randomly, while simultaneously causing other content to spawn at a higher rate,” according to Wilson. The idea is to allow you to focus on what you want to play in your endgame experience.


More powerful bosses now await in PoE's endgame. The seven bosses that rule at the peak of the Atlas have been beefed up with stronger, "uber" variants. You have to access them by using six new keystone passives, and are said to "challenge the absolute best Path of Exile players and suffice to say, they're brutally difficult.”

The new uber bosses are: Venarius, The Maven, The Searing Exarch, Sirius, The Eater of Worlds, The Shaper, The Uber Elder (uber squared)

Uber bosses offer better rewards for their defeat. For example, the Uber Maven will drop a guaranteed Elevated Sextant. Another possible reward is an Awakened Exceptional Support Gem. Obviously, you'll only be able to nab these rewards after a lot of grinding. You gotta be the best around, where nothing's gonna keep you down.

PC and Console Released Data

This new league launches on PC and Mac on May 13th and on Xbox and PlayStation on May 18th of 2022.