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After the tremendous Return of the Ancients update to Path of Exile 2, it wouldn’t take much to convince me to play more of it. The action RPG is the best it’s ever been and finally feels ready to come out later this year. So when developer Grinding Gear Games says it’s dropping a new mini-league next week to fill some time before release, you can bet I’ll be there.
On September 4, the first PoE 2 event league, Forbidden Rites, will begin. It’s not like the other major updates we’ve seen with tons of balance changes and a whole new league mechanic. Instead, developer Grinding Gear Games is keeping this one pretty simple with a small twist to the campaign and a big rework to one of the most divisive endgame activities.
Ritual altars will show up during the campaign that spawn waves of monsters and reward you with loot. Some of them will spawn bosses on top of other bosses and will let you pocket a powerful unique item if you can survive the gauntlet. This is actually something that could already happen in the endgame version of the mechanic, so I can vouch for how fun it is to have bosses like the gorilla wielding a stone pillar appear out of thin air to crush you.
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I’m particularly thrilled with what GGG has done to the Trial of Chaos, the only thing in PoE 2 I actively avoided interacting with. Someone once described the Trial of Chaos as a mode where all you do is choose how you want to get kicked in the stomach. You kill monsters across multiple stages and pick deadly modifiers that only exist to make your life hell as you try to survive until the end. Some of the effects are quite nasty, like a 40% reduction to your defenses or bloody tendrils that hold you in place as every monster swarms you. Trust me, it’s a nightmare.
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In the new Trial of Chaos, those modifiers won’t start out as painful as they do now, and they’ll finally offer something in exchange for the agony by giving you a small boost to the quality of loot that drops. These, along with the other improvements to the speed at which doors open and new rounds begin, will hopefully make Trial of Chaos a tolerable—and maybe even fun—way to unlock your ascendancy class, PoE 2’s version of subclasses.
Forbidden Rites will speed up the endgame progression so you can start exploring the endless world map earlier than you would in a normal league. There you’ll find glowing green ravines torn through the earth that will host maps filled with Abyss monsters. And the previous league mechanic, Expedition, will now be a core part of the game if you like setting off explosions in the ground and mowing down whatever comes crawling out.
Sadly, the patch that will hit alongside the new league won’t have the sweeping balance changes GGG had originally planned. Those will come with PoE 2’s full 1.0 release on December 11—which seems like a risky move for a game with so many interlocking systems, but, hey, we’ll see how it goes. That also means there won’t be a whole lot of mystery in the endgame when it comes to the best builds and mapping strategies. If it works in the current patch, it’s going to keep working in the next one, too.
Some people are so bummed about this they’re going to skip the league. I’m just going to use it as an opportunity to try something I’ve never done before. All the new clips of the new duelist class look killer. Maybe it’s time to finally put down the spells and try a melee character for a change so I can see what swords are all about when 1.0 hits.
