Path of Exile: The Awakening Previews, Closed Beta This Month
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Information about Grinding Gear Games' third expansion pack for Path of Exile, The Awakening, has come to us via a flood of text and video previews and this official website that's counting down until the closed beta begins on April 20th.
GameRevolution starts us off:
Duresso's Dream, a setting based around the legendary duelist, twists and turns between hallowed halls with giant living statues and gladiatorial coliseums filled with hounds, warriors, and bull-centaurs. But even that seems pleasant compared to Kaom's Dream, a twisted subterranean world filled with lava, archers, and monsters known as Taniwha which are creatures from Maori mythology (in a nice touch of native New Zealand culture). While the usual interpretation of Taniwha are of protective guardians, the game's Taniwha would love nothing more than to stick their tails out from under the ground and pelt you with spikes that can easily kill you if you stand around in one place for too long. That said, the upside to the challenging fourth act is that it will effectively shorten the time needed to reach the max level, so endgame players will appreciate the difficulty.
While it was pretty much suicide attempting to defeat the bosses of these two areas with an archer build, I tackled them during the demo head-on. The boss in Duresso's Dream could zip around the circular arena, creating ice clones of itself, and then buff its attack power when in danger. I fell about four times before slaying it. In contrast, the final area of Kaom's Dream was an even more claustrophobic circular arena with fireballs that spewed out from multiple directions as an environmental hazard. The boss would occasionally slam down its sword, causing the ground to bleed with fire in a straight line. Getting caught in that dealt nearly half of my poor archer's health. But with a few respawns, I was able to claim the key items from their corpses.
PC Gamer chimes in:
More exciting, maybe, are the changes you'll be able to make to existing characters and the new builds that The Awakening's new items should inspire. Path of Exile is known for its ludicrous skill tree, but instead of simply making that sprawling web of icons more enormous, Grinding Gear are adding new socketable jewels that have interesting effects over a radius within the skill tree see above. They're adding AOE effects within the skill tree, essentially. One jewel they showed me, Eldritch Knowledge, gave +1% increased chaos damage per 10 INT from allocated passives in radius. So if you could find a spot in the tree where you'd already allocated a lot of intelligence bonus-granting skills, you could stack a bunch of chaos damage atop that. Other jewels I saw are more mechanical than stat-driven: Selfless Leadership applies bonuses from passives within the radius to your minions instead of you, and Intuitive Leap grants you the passives within a radius while being able to ignore their requirements.
Grinding Gear's goal is to give players exciting tools and ideas to play with. (We love it when the community comes up with a build that we've never seen before,) producer and lead programmer Jonathan Rogers told me. Partly because the possibilities presented by this new mechanic are so great, however, Grinding Gear will run a beta for The Awakening beginning April 20.
As does Shacknews:
The main objective of the Awakening expansion is to try and prevent the Beast from waking up and causing another cataclysm. Even in its dormant state, however, the Beast has created entirely new areas of exploration. These areas are largely based on characters' dreams, as well as various events recounted in the vast Path of Exile lore. One such area saw a Ranger going into a gladatorial arena, where he was ambushed by hordes Massive Pitbull enemies. Just as with the rest of Path of Exile, encounters can be randomized. In this particular case, the Ranger was ambushed by rarer, more powerful Massive Pitbulls, albeit in smaller numbers, that yielded rarer drops.
One of the main new features of Awakening, however, is quite the game-changer and is the main reason that a beta has become necessary. Not content to boast the biggest skill tree in all of MMORPGs (and pretty much video games, as a whole), Path of Exile is introducing new sockets that will fit items called Jewels. Jewels will allow players to craft entirely new passive skills that will affect that portion of the tree. More than that, Jewels can also have an area of effect across all surrounding gems, allowing for entirely new and never-before-seen possibilities.
GamePedia keeps us reading:
As previously mentioned, two of these new uniques allow for exclusive and powerful build-defining new skills, with others allowing new ways to build or play a character. One of these items is a dagger called The Consuming Dark which converts a percentage of fire damage to chaos damage, and allows your chaos damage to poison. Also teased was a new unique bow which casts socketed minion gems on kill, allowing for a completely new playstyle for summoners.
Maraketh weapons are a new item type added in The Awakening featuring new 2D and 3D art and a rework of rare weapon modifiers to bring them back to preeminence against unique weapons. The new 3D art should allow for greater customisability for players who do not wish to purchase new item skins from the MTX shop and features often asked-for items like oriental inspired weapons. These Maraketh weapons also feature powerful implicit mods such as global critical strike multipliers or an increased Area of Effect radius.
MMORPG.com shares a few details, as well:
Clearly, in order to handle such lethal situations, players will need even more weapons in their arsenals and to that end, the development team is adding a jewel socketing system to the game's already impressive skill tree. Players will in effect, be able to create their own passives through judicious placement of various jewels. Not only does this up the passive combo types exponentially, it allows players to do things like add attributes meant for one weapon, to any weapon (for instance, adding poison dagger attributes to a bow, thus creating a poison bow).
Even better, certain jewels allow their effects to work not just on one part of the skill tree, but within a radius extending beyond it. The benefit of this is that it minimizes (or eliminates) the need to work your way across the skill tree to obtain a certain ability; it will be possible to implement that ability essentially anywhere you like. You'll even be able to give passives to your minion.
MassivelyOP follows close behind:
The Awakening's claim to fame as the largest content addition to the game to date is not limited to just the environment; players will have plenty of new skills to utilize in their builds. Wilson said that the new warcries were implemented because the team (wanted to reward players for getting up close to monsters.) So those who like to wade right into the thick of battle will have extra power at their command that will also benefit the party. For instance, the warcry Abyssal Cry not only slows enemies but causes them to explode upon death, dealing more damage to surrounding mobs in a chain reaction.
Although warcries have been mentioned to players before, devs are surprising players with a new type of minion. Unlike current hordes of zombies or skeletons, only a single elemental golem can be active and fighting by your side at any given time. These golems come in three fighting styles: ice (melee), fire (ranged), and chaos (mix of ranged and melee with ability to bypass energy shields). Golems are even more powerful once they are specialized.
And then there are video previews to check out, courtesy of GameSpot, GameTrailers, and Curse.
