Path of Exile: Lake of Kalandra - Upcoming Improvements Detailed
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The Lake of Kalandra expansion for Path of Exile launched last week. And as is often the case with content updates, it led to some new issues and balance-related complaints. As such, we now get this official announcement outlining Grinding Gear Games' plans for the expansion, and this patch addressing some of the community concerns.
So, here's what the developers are working on:
Over the weekend, we launched Path of Exile: Lake of Kalandra. The deployment was very smooth with no major technical issues and only some minor hotfixing required over the weekend. We reached a peak of 250k concurrent players. Today we have been processing feedback from the first two days of the league, and have a number of balance and content adjustments we plan to make to address much of this feedback. This post describes our current plan.
Archnemesis
There's quite a large jump in difficulty from the campaign to early maps as the number of archnemesis mods on monsters rises abruptly. This not only affects their average difficulty, but also how tanky they are. We are going to taper this up more smoothly so that it's a more gradual progression (and is unmodified in red maps). This will result in less difficulty and less life on average for rare monsters below red maps. To prevent life values getting out of hand on special league monsters with archnemesis mods, we will also reduce the life bonus that each Essence grants a rare monster and reduce the bonus life that Red Beasts have. We will also review whether Betrayal content is spawning too many rare monsters.
Harvest
Players have commented that the quantity of Lifeforce (the new harvest crafting currency) yielded by Sacred Grove encounters is too low relative to how much the craft cost. Harvest yield currently scales up (to around ten times higher) by the time you're in high maps with atlas tree specialisation, rewarding you for running higher maps, rolling your maps well and specialising in Harvest. We will rebalance the Lifeforce yield at lower map tiers so that the league is more rewarding early on, without affecting its yield at higher tiers.
Players also notice that occasionally a Harvest encounter can now result in no Lifeforce dropping. This was because, in an effort to reduce the number of clicks after an encounter, the Lifeforce from beasts below Tier 3 had a non-guaranteed chance to drop (but was larger on average than it otherwise would be). This meant that you could occasionally get unlucky and receive none for an encounter. We are raising the chance of Lifeforce dropping so that it's less likely to receive none at all, while striving not to increase the average number of clicks needed by too much.
Lake of Kalandra
We are increasing the rewards from both league and non-league encounters throughout the Lake, particularly at higher map levels and higher difficulties. We will raise the occurrence rate of (regular, not Ethereal) Reflecting Mist so that you get more choices of reflected rare jewellery as a reward for playing harder encounters in the Lake. We're also investigating some Lake of Kalandra QoL like marking which rooms are completed on the Lake Map while you're exploring the Lake.
General Item Drops
Players report that general item drops feel a lot lower in this expansion. There are two changes we made in 3.19. The first is that the rate of encountering rare monsters from certain league content has been reduced, so you are fighting, killing, and receiving rewards from fewer monsters than before. This is partially offset by rare monsters in 3.19 now being more rewarding than they were before (the mods add more item quantity/rarity than before and there's the reward conversion system used for the more dangerous mods).
The second reason is that we removed a massive historic bonus to item quantity and/or rarity that applied to some league-specific monsters. We replaced it with a moderate (2-3x) increase to item quantity, to offset the fact that they often have more life than regular monsters and some cannot drop maps.
There have been no other reward-affecting changes that we are aware of, but we will investigate to see if there are any unanticipated consequences of some other change.
Our intention with these changes is to modify certain league content that was out-of-line with other content so that it has a similar reward profile. These changes are important, but we understand they have reduced overall rewards that players receive.
We are going to compensate elsewhere, but we don't want to just increase the raw number of items that are dropped. Most items are immediately filtered out. We want to increase the number of relevant items that drop.
Firstly, we are going to adjust the system that skews weapon/armour base types towards higher-level ones, so that players find items that are relevant for their level more often. This isn't an increase to overall item drops, it just means that you will find more appropriate rare items more often. Secondly, we are going to apply the same item consolidation approach we did to Act Bosses a few leagues ago to Map Bosses also. They will now drop fewer items, but of substantially better rarity. This will result in you finding more unique items from Map Bosses.
It's worth noting here that a widely-shared clip of a player opening an Arcanist's Strongbox and receiving no items has caused some of the concern about potentially bugged item drops. We believe this was caused by the change where common currency drop less frequently, but in larger stacks, which we made a number of leagues ago. We will fix this specific Arcanist's Strongbox issue.
These changes are not final, but we wanted to communicate our current thoughts immediately rather than wait until patch notes are ready later. The changes will be deployed separately, as they're ready, over the next few days. We will continue to monitor feedback and will investigate more areas for adjustment.
Later this week, we'll launch the Lake of Kalandra expansion on Xbox and PlayStation at Aug 25, 2022 2:00 AM (GMT+2) (This is displayed in your local time).
Yesterday we also launched the Kalandra Mystery Box, a new mystery box without duplicate microtransactions. Check out the contents in the trailer below or get yours here[...]
