Since GGG is determined to make Path of Exile become the best rpg game, every update of the poe can give players a new experience, or Dungeon Delve, or Synthesis Members, or Battle of the Five Armies. Now GGG decided to introduce the Tower Defense element into the PoE.

 

Fighting The Blight

When Blight commences, you’ll meet a new NPC called Sister Cassia. As the story goes, fungal growths have spread throughout Wraeclast, controlling the minds of nearby monsters. Sister Cassia has built a device that can drain the ichor from the growths, but she needs you to defend it from infected horrors while it operates.

You’ll find a blight in each area of Wraeclast, and this encounter plays out like a small tower defence game. The fight starts when you attack one of the blights, as they’ll command infected monsters to defend it. Thankfully, the mind-controlled monsters aren’t the smartest. They’ll blindly follow the tendrils of the growth, only attacking anything that gets in their way. These comprise the “lanes” you’ll be defending, and you’ll need a little extra firepower to take out these sturdy foes.

You can place different types of towers – some slow monsters down, others buff different towers. You can also put them in various locations to maximise their effect against the onrushing, zombified horde. Being able to identify which types of enemies are coming from where, and building towers accordingly, will be key to holding off the waves of enemies.

Blight Oils and Item Enhancements

Of course, there’s new loot to score from destroying the blight that has infected the land. You’ll get rewards for each lane of enemies you defend against, and you’ll earn a new type of items called oils to boot. These oils can be combined in different ways and combined to add new properties to items. Particularly powerful is the ability to have Sister Cassia combine oils in order to anoint rings or amulets. Combining two oils and anointing a ring will grant the ring a tower defense specific property, allowing you to fine tune your tower defense strategy. You might have a ring that grants your towers more fire damage or to shoot additional times, incentivizing you to build towers that synergize with your rings

Ring Enhancements

Sister Cassia can combine two oils to anoint a ring, adding an enchantment that alters the functionality of your towers. As you can have two rings equipped at any given moment, you can specialise your tower defence in two different ways and stack buffs as you see fit.

Amulet Enhancements

Anoint an amulet will grant the player a notable passive skill from the skill tree, without having to spend a skill point. Different combinations of oils will grant different skills, so it will pay to experiment and see which passive skills can be earned and how they will synergize with your build of choice. There will be four Blight unique items that can be anointed as well. When combined with an anointed amulet, that makes for a total of five passive skill points that can be attached via gear, so players will want to keep any eye out. There's also 10 additional unique, build-defining items being added in Blight, like the Triad Grip gloves, which converts damage dealt by minions into different types of elemental damage depending on what color gems are socketed into the item. And if that wasn't enough, dozens of existing unique items are being rebalanced, with six of them receiving significant overhauls.

Blight Archetype Buffs

Even if tower defense isn’t your cup of tea, there’s plenty of other reasons to pay attention to Blight. Coming alongside the new content are reworks of three build archetypes: the Necromancer, the Poison Assassin, and the Mine Saboteur.

Necromancer

One of the main tweaks to this build allows you to control the behaviour of your minions through three support gems. Gems will affect their temperament by making them act aggressively, defensively, or by making them single out a specific target. You’ll also find a new type of golem, called the Carrion Golem, that buffs and is buffed by other minions.

Poison Assassin

One that older Path of Exile fans will remember, Grinding Gear is looking to bring the poison assassin back into the meta with some additions. Five new skills have been added alongside a shiny, new support gem that adds options to the poison assassin archetype. One example of a new ability is the Cobra Lash, which throws out a copy of your weapon that chain hits multiple enemies – it is also guaranteed to poison your foes.

You can also get a new buff from the ascendancy tree called Elusive. The buff provides defence and mobility for a limited time, and after it expires, the buff diminishes gradually rather than stopping instantly.

Mine Saboteur

An ascendancy option for the shadow class, the saboteur, is set for a buff to its mines. The explosives can now be thrown at range, are faster to deploy, detonate in sequence, and will reward you if you manage to blast a long sequence of them.

Master Missions Change

For hardcore Path of Exile players, it might be some of the changes to the game’s endgame systems that are most exciting. No longer will players feel forced to do missions given out by the five Masters immediately upon encountering them. Instead, players will be able to speak to the Masters at a later time and activate the missions on demand. Two Master missions will be added to each player’s total number of available missions each day, so that there’s always some available. 

 

About Old League Content

The Blight expansion also contains some tweaks to leagues of yore. Namely, For the Betrayal and Delve challenge leagues. The tweaks to these are:

  • Betrayal: the final mastermind encounter has changed, and you’ll now get a reward room for every member of the Immortal Syndicate. Previously, it was just the ones in that branch. You’ll also find your syndicate state shared across all your characters in the current league – this way, you can resume your progress if you make a new character.
  • Delve: this league has been rebalanced so players can go deeper into the mines with more ease. There are also 69 fewer depths before you reach the equivalent of endgame maps.

Blight is also introducing some new leagues into the mix. Once the Path of Exile Blight launch date comes about, you’ll also get to play versions of Legion and Synthesis.

  • Legion: encounters have been added to the content pool of several older leagues, such as Incursion and Delve. Grinding Gear Games has also added Legion to the pool of content that randomly spawns in endgame maps, added it to the Scarab system, and put some Legion rewards in the Betrayal content.
  • Synthesis: due to a division of opinion, this league wasn’t added to the core game right away. While the memory-chaining mechanic was deemed complicated, the boss fights remain popular. As such, those boss fights will be available as unique maps in the random selection available from the Zana NPC.

 

Path of Exile: Blight launches on Sept. 6 for PC and Sept. 9 for Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Poecurrencybuy will continue to keep an eye on the latest developments in PoE 3.8 and bring the best quality Blight League content to players