Playing as one of six character classes, players find themselves banished for their past misdeeds to the dark fantasy world of Wraeclast. There, they will encounter hundreds of species of opponents laden with loot and mysterious artifacts as they explore the abandoned continent.

Players will be able to purchase in-game perks, such as extra victory animations, clothing and special effects. To protect the integrity of the game for all players, Grinding Gear Games has decided not to sell abilities or experience points – ensuring a level-playing field for everyone in game.

With an open-ended and flexible skill and item system, randomised items and random dungeons, the game promises three acts of visceral combat gameplay, with additional expansions already planned.

Path of Exile: Crucible comes with a host of brand new features and updates, including the Crucible Challenge League, Atlas Gateways, revamps to the Passive Skill Tree and its Masteries, new Vaal skills, a variety of improvements to the Ruthless game and much more!

Path of Exile: Crucible will launch on April 7 for PC and Mac, and April 12 for PlayStation and Xbox.

Crucible Key Features:

• Crucible Challenge League - Introducing the Crucible Challenge League, a new expansion to Path of Exile that pushes the boundaries of Path of Exile's item system by letting you augment your weapons with their own skill trees. These trees provide bonuses that improve or augment your character's playstyle. Skills in the trees consume experience from Crucible encounters to unlock but can have quite powerful effects. In Crucible encounters, players choose a weapon to improve by channeling it at an ancient forge. As you channel your weapon, molten monsters will combine into larger and more fearsome foes. Pushing your limits is the fastest way to level up your weapon, but doing so increases the risk of failing the challenge. In its exclusive endgame area, The Forge of the Titans, these trees can be combined together to create weapons of unprecedented power.
• Atlas Gateways - A new addition to Path of Exile's Endgame, Atlas Gateways are new nodes that allow instant traversal between two locations in the Atlas Passive Tree, easing the amount of travel points which lets players focus on building the tree that lets them play the content they want.
• Endgame Content Revamp - Breach/Abyss - Two older league mechanics, Breach and Abyss, have been revamped. Both mechanics have had a reduction in clutter and improved gameplay, resulting in a more streamlined experience with highly-focussed rewards.
• Passive Tree and Masteries Rework - Around half of the Masteries have been reworked, with the new Masteries having more interesting effects that will shake up many builds and provide additional options for new ones.
• New Vaal Skills - Nine new Vaal Skills have been added to the game. These are versions of existing skills that improve and augment the original skill, giving players a periodic boost when they need it, whether it's to focus on defeating a boss or mitigating burst damage in an emergency.
• Ascendancy Reworks - The Saboteur and Pathfinder ascendancy classes have been reworked by giving them new and exciting tools that are more impactful and push their themes even further.
• Ruthless Improvements - Several improvements to the Ruthless game mode have been made, including the return of Eternal Orbs and the introduction of a Ruthless-specific set of challenges to complete.

The Crucible Challenge League

In Path of Exile: Crucible, you'll learn about an ancient race of titans who once shaped the primordial surface of Wraeclast. In this league, you will earn the ability to forge their power onto your weapons.

And what form does that power take? In an iconically Path of Exile way, it's the ability to imbue your weapons with their own passive skill trees. These crucible trees can have quite an impact on your character build. For example, in addition to the regular mods on this bow, its crucible tree grants additional physical damage, physical to chaos conversion, the master fletcher notable passive, improved grace effect, and level 10 lesser multiple projectiles. While this is certainly a decent tree to get, it's not even the maximum depth and could be even more optimized for your build.

In order to forge these powerful trees onto your weapons, you'll need to complete Crucible encounters. There's one in each area.

Each encounter takes place at a Crucible Forge. As you approach the Forge, you'll have the choice of which of your equipped weapons you want to focus on. This can include ones on your alternate weapon swap if you want to improve one that you're not currently using.

After selecting a weapon, you channel it at the Crucible Forge to spawn monsters. The longer you channel for, the more dangerous and rewarding the encounter becomes. As you spawn additional monsters, they combine together to create larger and more fearsome foes that grant even more experience for your Crucible passive tree.

Being able to ramp up the difficulty of the encounters is a double-edged sword. While it gives you the opportunity to make rapid progress on your Crucible weapon crafting projects, it comes with significant risk to your character. It's easy to accidentally overwhelm yourself and make an encounter that is too dangerous. Channel carefully, and adapt to what your character is capable of.

When you first find a weapon, it doesn't have a Crucible tree unlocked. Channelling that weapon at Crucible encounters will unlock and reveal its tree, as well as allocate the first skill.

You can only allocate one skill at each tree depth, so you'll need to decide which path through the tree is best for your build.

As you get deeper into a tree, more and more experience is required to unlock skills. The final depths can take quite an investment and can only be found rarely on endgame items, but also have some of the most powerful properties. For example, this wand has two depth five skills to choose from. One of them allows all damage from your Freezing Pulse and Eye of Winter skills to poison, and the other allows various brands to be attached to your Summoned Reaper. There are many such modifiers to skills that will enable very interesting build combinations.

In addition to all types of weapons, shields can also be empowered with their own crucible trees. Here's a relatively simple low level example. It gets a bit crazier as you approach the endgame.

In endgame Crucible encounters, you'll occasionally find Igneus Geodes, currency items that can be cracked open to reveal a Primeval Remnant. This is a map-like item that grants access to The Forge of the Titans, the culmination of your Crucible journey. These Primeval Remnants always generate as rare items. Half of their mods are upsides and half are downsides. The upsides generally increase the rewards of the area or add special crafting options. For example, causing monsters to drop divination cards or magmatic ore, a form of tradeable itemised crucible tree experience. The downsides are quite punitive compared to most endgame maps.

Ideally, you want to find a Primeval Remnant that has really rewarding upsides alongside downsides that you can handle. If you don't think you'll survive a visit to the Forge of the Titans, trade the remnant away to someone else and gamble on cracking open another geode.

If you survive and manage to reach the end of the area, you'll find the aforementioned Forge, which allows you to merge crucible trees on two items together.

The way this process works is that you provide two items of the same class, for example a pair of bows, a pair of shields or a pair of one-hand axes. One of these items will be melted down, and applied to the other, which will keep its regular properties. Their crucible trees will be merged together in an unpredictable way, taking elements of each one.

This is a little reminiscent of how recombinators applied to item mods, taking parts of each Crucible tree and merging them together, as well as randomly upgrading, downgrading or mutating skills on the resultant tree.

While this process can create some really powerful trees if you get skills you wanted from both items, it can also completely wreck your precious trees, so take care choosing which you risk combining. Also like recombinators, there are ways to manipulate the system to improve your odds at getting certain outcomes. For example, any skills that have been allocated are more likely to show up in the resultant Crucible tree.

By default, you can only add Crucible Trees to non-unique items. But it's possible to get a mod on the Forge of the Titans map that allows you to imbue a unique item with a Crucible Tree, which can then be levelled up via regular Crucible encounters.

To combine Crucible Trees on unique items together, you'll want to find a Crystalline Geode and crack it open to reveal the secret higher level version of the Forge of the Titans. I probably shouldn't say too much about it, but it will let you do some interesting things with Crucible Trees.

There's an important thing to note about Crucible Trees on unique weapons. In addition to being much harder to unlock, there's a special rule about how they can be combined. A unique weapon must be combined with another copy of the same unique weapon to merge their trees together. Because this destroys one copy, getting a good Crucible tree on a unique weapon makes it insanely valuable. It may also raise the trade value of unique weapons by quite a lot, as players try to create perfect Crucible Trees on them.

Occasionally, you'll find a Crucible passive skill tree with a special skill that indicates that the item will sell to vendors for a specific item in addition to its regular sale price. These vendor skills usually occur relatively deeply in the tree, so take some effort to allocate but usually don't block skill choices you'd make when levelling the item up for use.

The presence of these skills presents you with an interesting choice about whether you want to use the item or sell it to a vendor, and whether to spend your Crucible experience revealing new trees to hunt for good skills, levelling up items to use, or levelling up items to sell.

Crucible also features its own unique items you can earn. For example, El'Abin's Visage, a unique helmet, is special in that it's the only armour piece other than shields that can receive crucible passive skill trees. Wearing it allows you to double down on certain properties that are only available through these trees. There are several other unique items exclusive to Crucible for you to discover in this league.

Crucible is a dual combat-crafting league with a focus on encounter difficulty scaling and deep weapon customisation with a power level that we have never seen before. Without a doubt, some of Path of Exile's most powerful weapons will be forged in Crucible. We can't wait to see what you manage to create.

Endgame Improvements: Atlas Gateways

Like all recent Path of Exile expansions, Crucible includes a lot of changes with the goal of improving Path of Exile's endgame.

One area we wanted to address was mobility on the Atlas Passive Tree. Often you'll find yourself in a situation where you want to specialise in leagues that are on entirely different sides of the Atlas Tree. Or maybe you want to focus on the type of Altar that isn't near the leagues you have picked.

To solve this, Path of Exile: Crucible introduces Atlas Gateways. These are nodes that you can allocate on the Atlas Tree that allow instant travel between two locations. There are three pairs of gateways, each allowing travel from the left side of the tree to the right side or vice versa. Each end of the gateway consumes one Atlas Skill Point to allocate, but will potentially save you large amounts of travel points.

Breach Revamp

In this expansion, we're targeting a couple of endgame leagues that have fallen behind other leagues on the Atlas Tree. Let's start with Breach.

In the live version of Path of Exile, there are five tiers of Breachstone. In Path of Exile: Crucible, we're raising the area levels of Breachstones to a much higher baseline level - 81 for elemental ones, 82 for physical and 83 for chaos. Now that the regular Breachstones are much higher level, we have retired Charged, Enriched and Pure breachstones. They will be converted to regular ones.

We have also changed how Flawless Breachstones are acquired. Previously you could only obtain them from Maven Invitations, but we'd prefer access to the hardest Beach content to come from actually playing Breach. Now, there are two ways to get Flawless Breachstones: through Blessings, which are now rarer as a result, and through a skill on the Atlas Tree.

We've also improved the pacing of Breach encounters. Previously, Breaches felt pretty good early on but quickly tapered off in density to the point where you wanted to abandon the breach because it felt like not enough monsters were spawning. Our changes now keep Breaches feeling dense throughout, leaning more on the side of it feeling overwhelming towards the end of the Breach. We have also reduced the duration of Breaches so that there is constant monster pressure and you can get on with your mapping sooner.

There are a whole bunch of other Breach changes that you can read about in the patch notes, such as changes to the Betrayal Research Safehouse, Breach Scarabs, Breachstones from Kirac Missions, the Breach Harvest Crafting Option, the Fragment Stash Tab, Divination Cards, Breach Unique Items, Atlas Passives and so on.

Abyss Revamp

We're also revamping Abyss in a similar way.

Abyssal Depths now always contain an Abyssal Lich. Previously, the prevailing gameplay was to check the loading screen art of an Abyssal Depths to see if it contained a Lich, and bail out if it didn't. Now, the Depths always contains a Lich, removing the need for this step. While the rate of encountering Abyssal Liches is unchanged, Abyssal Depths are rarer than before. However, Abysses now have a chance to spawn a Stygian Spire in place of their reward chest, which will drop all of the jewels and other items you'd normally receive as well as a Stygian Vise.

In addition, you're guaranteed to always get a four-hole Abyss alongside your Abyssal Depths now. Previously Abyssal Depths could only spawn immediately after a single abyssal hole, which prevented you getting full value from the Abyss.

The Lightless Legion Notable passive has been replaced with a new skill which grants "Stygian Spires in your Maps drop Items with +1 to Item Level". This is intended to allow players to continue to be able to obtain item level 86 Stygian Vises and other base items as a reward for specialising in Abyss. The small passives leading up to this notable passive have also been replaced.

We have also done a balance pass on Abyssal Lich encounters to make them more appropriately difficult relative to the current standard of endgame encounters. Abyss Uniques have had some balance attention also, and the details are in the patch notes.

Overall, these changes should ensure that you can play a wider variety of leagues in the endgame, both through being able to access them more easily and because Breach and Abyss now feel far more modern and competitive with other popular league content.

Passive Tree and Mastery Improvements

A big goal of the Crucible expansion is to provide a lot of new ways to build characters and to breathe new life into older builds. To achieve this, we're doing two things. Firstly, we have created many more interesting options for one of Path of Exile's core build systems - the passive skill tree, by overhauling many of its masteries. Secondly, we have revamped two specific Ascendancy classes.

As we reviewed the masteries on Path of Exile's passive skill tree, we realised that a lot of the choices were rather bland and could be a lot more exciting. We went through the masteries one by one and tried to come up with as many interesting stats as we could, ignoring what was currently there. Once we had a shortlist of high-quality stats, we added in the existing ones that used to be on each mastery and picked the six best. All of the leftover ones have been saved for later or used in other places like unique items. This process was performed on approximately half of the masteries on the tree, initially targeting the ones that needed the attention the most. Previously, some masteries only had four options, so we have tried to increase as many as possible to six options. We also added a couple of new mastery types that we felt were missing.

Let's look at an example: the life mastery choices. You can see some of the interesting new options such as the ability to manipulate your low life and full life thresholds, which allow you to more effectively use the Damage while on Full Life Support Gem and many unique items. Getting a large increase to maximum life when you have no life on your body armour not only works really well with a whole lot of unique items, but also opens up new prefix composition options for rare body armours.

Here you can see the Armour/Energy Shield mastery has more options available than before. The other thing we've focused on with this one is tying the mechanics together better, instead of some being about Armour, and some being about Energy Shield, we've tried to make sure each really emphasizes having both armour and energy shield.

On the leech mastery, we've combined the three increased Life, Mana and Energy Shield recovery stats into one choice that affects all of them. The space we freed up has been used to add some powerful new options, such as a portion of your leech applying instantly.

The spell suppression mastery also has many interesting options. Your chance to suppress spell damage becoming lucky is extremely useful before you've optimised your gear and haven't reached 100% yet. The third option rewards you for stacking more than 100% spell suppression, which previously had few benefits. Now it's something you can plan your itemisation around.

While looking at masteries, we noticed that there were some mechanics that didn't have enough passive tree support, so we decided to add more options and passive skill choices for those mechanics.

We also wanted to grant more access to certain types of masteries in specific parts of the passive skill tree. For example, in order to allow more access to the Attack Mastery, we've added an attack cluster by the Templar, and one between the Ranger and Shadow.

We wanted to create more access to other forms of recovery such as Regen and Recoup, so we've added some new passive skill clusters. Note that there is now a new mastery called Recovery.

We've also added more capacity for investment in certain mechanics that we felt could be improved, such as Link Skills, Stun Mitigation and Marks.

These mastery improvements and passive tree changes are just some of the ones introduced in Path of Exile: Crucible. We look forward to your feedback on the rest when you check out the passive skill tree next week!

Ascendancy Class Improvements

While going through Ascendancy Classes, we identified two that needed work: the Saboteur and the Pathfinder. Both have been significantly changed in Path of Exile: Crucible. These changes reinforce their respective identities while adding some new options to build around.

The Saboteur is definitely the Ascendancy most aligned with traps and mines, but the old version of the Saboteur made it difficult to play anything but traps or mines. The new version has more builds available, including a whole new specialisation: Triggers. There are two notable passives that help with this. "Like Clockwork" grants you the increased Cooldown Recovery rate stat, which is a pretty rare one. This is great for triggered spells as it indirectly increases their damage. This notable also makes your enemies have longer cooldowns, which can be useful in certain boss fights, for example, causing the Maven's memory game to occur less often.

The Perfect Crime notable passive summons two Triggerbots, which override the location of where a triggered spell is being cast, and instead causes it to trigger twice, once from each of their locations.

The layout for the Saboteur's trap and mine ascendency passives has changed so that there aren't separate four-pointers for traps and mines. Now each one has a two-pointer that is connected to the same shared four-pointer.

We have also completely reworked "Bomb Specialist" to be specifically tied to Area Damage, so it's a slightly more general skill. It both gives you some area damage as well as some defence against incoming area damage against you.

The Pathfinder has been overdue for some attention, especially with recent features such as Concoction skills that she could get the ability to specialise in. We also wanted the flask-themed Ascendancy to have a proactive way of improving life flask usage.

Master Distiller allows you to turn most of your skills into Concoction-like abilities.

Master Surgeon now effectively gives all your Life Flasks the "Enduring" effect, previously only found on mana flasks. Finally, both of the major Flask-themed branches now have some form of flask charge recovery.

There are other improvements to the Pathfinder Ascendancy such as Nature's Reprisal now interacting with Wither to improve all forms of your chaos damage rather than just attack forms of it. Check out the full details in the patch notes that we'll be posting after the livestream.

New Vaal Skills

Path of Exile: Crucible introduces nine new Vaal skills. Last expansion, there was an emphasis on Melee Vaal skills. In Crucible, we're making sure that many other types of builds get new skills to build around. Vaal Skills let us introduce quite powerful effects that we couldn't normally give to a regular skill that can be used constantly. They also implicitly act as a buff to the underlying skill.

Vaal Absolution upgrades one of your Sentinels of Absolution into an apparition of Innocence. You can only have one apparition at once, but just check out these massive AoE skills.

Vaal Arctic Armour instantly encases you in ice, preventing non-instant actions including movement but granting massive damage reduction against hits. After a short duration, it also starts to regenerate your energy shield and mana at a fast rate. Both the damage reduction and regeneration last for a few seconds, or until you have been hit three times. It cannot be manually cancelled. Because this skill is instant, it's a great emergency button against dangerous boss slams. It also makes you count as being frozen, despite Arctic Armour normally making you freeze-immune. Having another way to self-freeze may be of interest to a few mad scientist build creators in the community.

Vaal Lightning Arrow Fires a barrage of piercing projectiles that cause lightning to strike nearby targets whenever they hit an enemy. After a short amount of time or when they collide with terrain, the arrows randomly change direction and continue flying. This occurs a number of times before the arrows expire. Each arrow can hit the same target once per redirect. Because the arrows travel for a set time before redirecting rather than a set distance, projectile speed modifiers affect the distance travelled. High projectile speed lets you clear out huge areas with them, while reducing your projectile speed increases the chances of them hitting the same target multiple times. With very low projectile speed this skill can hit a single target 20 plus times.

Vaal Reap conjures a ring of scythes that deal damage to all enemies in a circular area. The scythes leave behind a pool of blood that deals heavy physical damage over time to enemies standing in it, and for a short duration after they leave it. Vaal Reap instantly grants a large number of the blood charges used by normal Reap on use as well as temporarily higher maximum blood charge capacity, substantially powering up the regular version of the skill.

Path of Exile: Crucible introduces five other Vaal Skills we'll reveal over the next week: Vaal Animate Weapon, Vaal Domination, Vaal Ice Shot, Vaal Rejuvenation Totem and Vaal Firestorm.

New Unique Items

This expansion also introduces more than ten new unique items. There are three in particular I'd like to show you today:

1. Blood Price is a unique helmet that has a new effect - reserving enemy maximum life. This does exactly what it implies, causing nearby enemies to start at 92% maximum life. While this increases your clear speed against all enemies, it's especially useful against bosses. The helmet's drawback is that it reduces your maximum life, but provides decent life regeneration and block and stun recovery to counteract this.
2. Tainted Pact is an amulet that causes chaos damage over time to heal you while you're leeching life. While the amulet provides a decent amount of life leech itself, it'll certainly require a few tricks to unlock its full potential.
3. Widowhail is a unique bow that is different from any other bow in Path of Exile. As a weapon, it does basically no base damage and doesn't grant any stats of its own, but it does dramatically increase the power of mods provided by your quiver. Needless to say, this can produce some pretty ridiculous outcomes with good rare or unique quivers.

We'll reveal some of the other new uniques over the coming week!

Ruthless

Ruthless is a game mode that we released alongside the Sanctum expansion late last year. It's designed around extreme item scarcity, and is challenging because you're constantly behind the item power curve. So far it has found a very passionate audience of players who love how rewarding item drops feel in such an austere environment. We have some small improvements to Ruthless in Path of Exile: Crucible.

Firstly, Eternal Orbs are back in Ruthless! These are an extremely powerful currency item that allows you to imprint an item and restore it if you're unhappy with the result of crafting. We disabled these game-wide seven years ago because they were far too powerful when combined with all of the crafting options Path of Exile offered at the time. Ruthless does not have the base game's crafting featureset, and so we are enabling Eternal Orbs to drop in Ruthless, albeit extremely rarely.

Ruthless now has its own set of challenges to complete! Like the ones in early Path of Exile, there are a total of eight, and they're very difficult. We'll post more information in the news about these challenges before release.

Boss Kill Event

Like we've done in the past, we're hosting a boss kill event at the start of the Crucible challenge league! It'll be held in Ruthless Hardcore Solo Self-found, and will require you to kill both the Uber Searing Exarch and the Uber Eater of Worlds, making it by far the hardest event we have ever run. The first place winner will get to work with our design team to add a new unique item to Path of Exile. They'll also receive a transferable Ultra VIP ticket to ExileCon in July. If they aren't able to attend, or already have a ticket, then they are allowed to sell this one as they see fit. Second and third place finishers will receive a transferable VIP ticket to ExileCon that can also be sold at their discretion. If you'd like to enter the event, just create a character in Ruthless Hardcore Solo Self-found on launch day! Best of luck to everyone.

The ExileCon 2023 Livestream

On the weekend of July 29-30 New Zealand time, which is July 28-29 for much of the rest of the world, we're going to be hosting ExileCon 2023 in Auckland, New Zealand. While tickets to the in person event are very hard to get, we will be streaming the entire event for free. At ExileCon, we'll reveal our latest updates on Path of Exile 2, Path of Exile Mobile and the next Path of Exile 1 expansion. Make a note in your calendar, tell your friends, and don't miss it!

The second day of the ExileCon livestream culminates in a competitive race event between some of Path of Exile's best players. In order to select the four competitors, we're going to run qualifier events during the months of April and May. The winner of each event will receive a VIP ExileCon ticket, return flights to Auckland and accommodation, and will compete in the race event live on stage. All four qualifiers and the final event will be run on the 3.21 version of Path of Exile, which has received a fair amount of early game balance work that will change the racing meta quite a lot. You'll be able to read more in the patch notes. Once 3.21 releases next week, you'll be able to solve the new meta, practice hard, compete in the qualifier events, and hopefully win your place on stage in July!

Key Features:

• Download and play for free, but never pay-to-win
• A dark and deep action RPG
• Unlimited character combinations with the game's gigantic skill tree
• Combine skill gems to create unique combat strategies
• Explore a dark and gritty world rendered from a fixed 3D perspective
• Explore randomly generated levels for nearly infinite replayability
• Craft weapons, magic items, and even end-game maps to become more powerful
• Cooperate or compete with thousands of other Exiles in a persistent online world
• Ascend online ladders in every game mode

Path Of Exile is available for PS4, Xbox One and PC.