One of the great things about Path of Exile is the huge, incredibly customizable endgame, the Atlas of Worlds. Throw every bit of the main game, past season expansions and more, into a blender and serve it up like some sort of never-ending Content Smoothie. The only problem is that you must first complete PoE’s surprisingly comprehensive story campaign, a feat many players still haven’t accomplished. The upcoming Lake of Kalandra expansion looks set to give players an early look at the endgame action from the get-go.
Launching on August 19 and available for the next three months after that (give or take), the Lake of Kalandra league update adds a new mode that runs parallel to the main story. Building on the story of Kalandra, a former background character with mirror-based magical powers, you’ll assemble Mirrored Tablets as you explore, creating custom side dungeons that reflect bits of the main missions, plus some modifiers that were previously only for the endgame earlier in time-limited extensions.
At regular points in the story, you can access the Mirrored Tablet, a grid of water and land tiles that represent the dungeon map to be generated. Each time you open it, you can place different tile modifiers from any pool. The difficulty of areas depends on how many tiles they are away from the entry point, with appropriately scaled rewards. If you want the biggest fights and the best loot, you need to create a long, winding path from one corner of the grid to the other. Once the tablet is completely filled, you can open a portal to the lake and make your way through your custom dungeon and come home with a ton of rewards and XP.
The side dungeons look like a visually striking mass of hexagonal basalt pillars rising from a mirror-like mystical lake. It’s a bit more abstract than the rest of Path of Exile – a fresh new aesthetic, refreshingly different from the main adventure and later Atlas content. Lake of Kandara will also feature its own plot, and plenty of opportunities to take home bags of loot to make your progress through the rest of Path of Exile even easier. While it’s not the first league to introduce a “build your own dungeon” system, this seems like the most basic.
Each trip to the lake will be deadlier than the last, offering a bigger tablet to fill out, a more difficult series of encounters, and furthering the lake’s own little storyline. You also unlock perks that allow you to further manipulate the tablet, re-roll choices, or even remove unliked options completely from the pool of choices. There are also some fun mirror-themed twists to the high-level rewards on the lake. Players will often receive enchanted jewelry with both strong benefits and curses, as well as a mirrored version with the positives and negatives reversed. There are also opportunities to mirror, warp and min-max your existing rings and amulets in the same way, at the risk of ruining their stats.
Thanks for the memories
Lake content will be available to play all the way into the endgame (and offers a new set of powerful late-game loot, of course), but for fans of the Atlas of Worlds, the big draw is the new Atlas Memories system. These 20 (for now) story-driven sidequests fall as rare items in the Atlas and can be traded or activated for yourself. Each memory takes you on a tour of a side character’s memories, past five partially random encounters with big payoffs. Sounds like this is good for lore hounds and for players who want a little more structured Atlas crawl.
Another interesting part of the Lake of Kalandra update is that no old content will be discontinued, although the previous league, Sentinel, will go into the pile waiting to be processed for later use.
For the past few expansions, Grinding Gear has removed some of the oldest and most shaky competition content from the Atlas. This time around, three leagues that looked a bit old and rickety have instead been heavily renovated. The Beyond, Harvest and Archnemesis leagues look sharper than ever, with their screws tightened and a lick of fresh paint, plus a new encounter with the Ultimatum League boss, the Trialmaster.
The most immediate change in the league is the Archnemesis overhaul. A recent competition in which players can create custom mini-boss battles using an assortment of new perks and powers in exchange for greater rewards. Those modifiers were then carried over to the main game. Grinding Gear expands on this further and changes how rare, powerful monsters function in general. Encounters with these powerful, procedurally generated critters will be less frequent from this competition, but the fights should be longer, harder and more rewarding.
The Archnemesis changes will apply from the start of the game, but will also curb some of the endgame chaos – no longer spawning huge packs of mini bosses, each with a confusing assortment of stat modifiers. Battles should be a little smaller and easier to parse without being significantly simpler. A bunch of new high-level modifiers introduced in this update can also result in some really ridiculous loot drops. During the announcement stream (opens in new tab)Grinding Gear showed some monsters exploding into whole piles of unique items – the rarest gear levels.
Aside from the changes in Archnemesis, the Beyond League content is getting a major makeover. The enemies in these encounters (usually seen during the endgame) swap out their generic bandit enemies for the full set of skeleton monsters and bosses seen in the Scourge competition, making for more varied combat. The Harvest competition is also being further streamlined, allowing players to get into battle faster and allow players to bundle the reward currency that high-intensity gardening offers. Now you don’t have to waste anything until you have an item that you really want to try to upgrade.
Shocking Revelations
The Lake update adds four new skill gems to the loot pools, three of which are electricity themed and designed to work in synergy with each other. The odd duck in the bite The sign of the alchemistthat doesn’t deal direct damage, but targeted enemies that are poisoned or burning will melt into pools of poisonous slime or napalm, dealing damage to more targets over time.
On the electrical side Galvanic field Causes enemies hit by Shocked status to explode into fields of electrical damage over time. lighting control bounce lightning between Shocked targets for extra damage. last, Overload support is a support jewel that makes skills do less initial damage, but increases the intensity and chance of Shock sticking to enemies. It sounds like a fun combo that will make your lightning and lightning very scary.
Since this is a Path of Exile update, there is a series of smaller changes and additions that take far too long to cover in detail here. Probably the most important thing worth noting is that Unique items are less likely to fall, but Grinding Gear has gone over the loot pools and buffered a good number of them, theoretically increasing the chance that when a Unique falls you’ll want to use it sooner rather than later.
Minion summoning characters have also been rebalanced. Minions are now a little less inherently powerful, but a few new item types have minion-raising benefits. Necromancers will have to dress for success, but they will at least look suitably goth when they do it. Also, the Trickster Ascendancy class has been rebalanced, becoming a highly agile yet fragile all-rounder, completely immune to slowing or freezing effects, and able to recharge and replenish their energy shield faster by acting and taking damage walk.
Finally, and less directly linked to this expansion, Grinding Gear has announced a second Path of Exile fan convention next year, where the beta launch date for the much-delayed Path of Exile 2 will be revealed, and we’ll find out more. details come out about the largely forgotten Path of Exile Mobile. Exilecon 2023 will take place next year on July 29-30 in Auckland, New Zealand. Tickets for the event go on sale on August 25th and are available here (opens in new tab).
Path of Exile: Lake of Kalandra launches as a free update on August 19. A new character will be needed to go nude swimming at the lake, while the new Atlas content will be available to all existing characters.
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