Path of Exile: Blight - New Summoner Gems and Master Changes
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In a couple of weeks, the Blight expansion will be going live for Grinding Gear Games' free to play action-RPG Path of Exile. Its new features will include a revamped summoner experience and some changes to the master quest system. And if you'd like to learn more about these features you should check out this announcement on the game's website that lists a number of new summoner skills, and this one that covers the upcoming Master changes.
Here's a quick video that showcases some of the new summoner skill synergies:
More on that:
Summon Carrion Golem
The Carrion Golem is a well-rounded attacker, using a rapid melee attack, a leap slam to get into the thick of combat, and a powerful cooldown-restricted multi-cascade slam. As its passive Golem buff, it grants added physical damage to all non-golem minions, including their attacks and spells. It has a unique feature among golems, gaining more damage for each of your non-golem minions around it, up to 80% more damage.
A single Carrion Golem fits well into established Minion builds as an extra bonus to all of your necromantic minions. It can also be invested in more heavily by taking various sources of additional golems (including a new notable passive) and using multiple golems alongside a swarm of zombies or skeletons.
There are also four new support gems that you can place on minions to change their behaviour and function:
Feeding Frenzy Support
The Feeding Frenzy support gem makes supported minions aggressive, increasing the range that they'll seek out enemies. It also gives hits from the minions a chance to give you the Feeding Frenzy buff, granting more minion damage and increased minion attack, cast and movement speed. While you have the Feeding Frenzy buff, the supported minions deal even more damage.
Meat Shield Support
The Meat Shield support gem makes supported minions defensive, causing them to only attack enemies that get very close to you. It also gives the minions a chance to taunt on hit, reduces the damage they take, and causes them to deal more damage to enemies close to you.
If minions are both Aggressive and Defensive, those effects cancel out, returning the minions to their original behaviour. All other bonuses from the support gems still apply.
Deathmark Support
The Deathmark support gem grants supported minions more damage, and grants you the Deathmark skill. Casting Deathmark on an enemy causes all minions supported by a Deathmark support to prioritise attacking the target, and gives them a further damage multiplier against that enemy. Casting Deathmark on a new enemy removes any existing Deathmark.
You can Deathmark to have precise targeting for specific minions, and the Deathmark targeting will override Aggressive or Defensive behaviour while it is active. The minions will fall back on their regular targeting if no Deathmark is present.
Different combinations of these three support gems let you use different minions for different roles. An example might be using your Zombies with Meat Shield to protect you, your Carrion Golems with Feeding Frenzy to clear groups of enemies, and the Deathmark Support on both of them so you can send all of them in after bosses while you evade the bosses abilities from a distance.
Infernal Legion Support
The Infernal Legion support gem causes supported minions to take a large percent of their maximum life as fire damage over time. They all gain a burning damage aura, dealing fire damage over time to nearby enemies. The effect doesn't stack, but is modified by minion damage increases and other support gems.
This support can be used to deal damage to large groups of enemies, and is available at quite a low level, so is an alternative to Melee Splash for some minion types. It also works well alongside the Minion Instability keystone, letting you use your minions as walking time bombs.
We'll be revealing further minion changes, including the new wand base type, Necromancer ascendancy, and passive tree in the upcoming teasers and news.
And here's how the new Master quests will work:
As with every Path of Exile update, Blight will bring with it a number of quality-of-life improvements. Today we're talking about one of the biggest ones -- changes to how your Master missions are handled in the Atlas.
If you've ever felt like you were missing out by taking a day off from mapping, this change is for you. Currently, Master missions are handed out daily on your Atlas, appearing as a symbol over certain maps. Opening a map with a symbol over it guarantees you'll encounter the associated Master. By running maps, you also have a chance to generate more Master missions in this style, in addition to each map having a small chance to randomly generate with a Master inside of it. Unfortunately, if you aren't actively pursuing those Master missions on your Atlas, or if you didn't log in for a day or more, you were missing out on Master mission opportunities.
In the Blight update, we're solving this issue by allowing your Master missions to accumulate. On the right-hand side of your Atlas, each Master has a little counter that tracks how many of their missions you've accumulated, and on which Map tiers they can be used (e.g. white/yellow/red). Each day you'll automatically earn a number of Master missions, but if you don't use them, they don't go anywhere -- they're still there on your tracker. Likewise, any missions earned while you're mapping are tracked and accumulated on your Atlas.
If you decide you want to run a bunch of maps with Einhar in them, all you need to do is talk to him in your Hideout and select 'Mission'. This brings up the map device UI, and you can simply add and run whichever map you want, including the opportunity to select a Zana mod to use. Some stupid beasts will be waiting for you within the map!
Because we want to make sure players have the opportunity to play what they want when they want, we're moving about half of the random chance for a Master to appear in a map into this Mission accumulation system. In other words, you'll see fewer masters by chance, but will have more opportunities to run missions earned through mapping, and you'll be able to choose when and how you use those missions.
For Master fanatics who were actively pursuing missions at every possible opportunity, you may see a very small reduction to the overall number of Master missions you encounter. For everyone else, it's very likely you'll see more.
These Master missions are account-wide for any characters in the same League. You'll accumulate missions on Standard if you have any valid characters there, as well as in whichever Blight league you decide to play when it launches on September 6 PDT on PC and September 9 on Console.
