Crucible League (PoE Crucible League 3.21)
What is the Crucible League in PoE
In Path of Exile: Crucible, you’ll learn about the ancient titans who once shaped the primordial surface of Wraeclast. If you’re powerful enough, you will earn the ability to forge their power onto your weapons.
The Path of Exile expansion introduces the Crucible challenge league with the following:
- Improvements to Path of Exile Endgame
- 3 new support skill gems
- 9 new Vaal skill gems
- 10 new unique items
- Atlas Gateways
- Improvements to Breach
- Improvements to Abyss
- Passive Tree Masteries
- Saboteur rework
- Pathfinder rework
When will Crucible 3.21 League Launch?
You will be able to experience the new Path of Exile: Crucible 3.21 on April 7th for PC and Mac, and on April 12th for Xbox and PlayStation.
What is the Crucible League Mechanic?
Crucible Forges are scattered throughout Wraeclast. When you find one, select one of your weapons and channel the power of the ancient titans to spawn a challenging encounter. The longer you channel, the more the molten monsters merge together to form more fearsome foes. You’re in control of the difficulty and reward of these encounters.
Forge your weapon path
The Crucible League mechanic takes your weapons to the next level. Weapons can now be imbued with skill trees of their own. When you find a Crucible encounter on your journey in Wreaclast you will find Crucible forges. Interacting with these forges will let you discover the weapon passive skills tree on them and grant you experience to progress through the skills. You can only allocate one skill from each tier so choose wisely! Some skills can be very valuable currency or unique items when sold to the vendor, but you will have to be lucky to find those!
Face the Forge of the Titans
The Crucible endgame has a dangerous area containing a dark ancient power and is called Forge of the Titans. Here you will have the ability to melt a weapon down or merge a weapon with a Crucible passive tree with another weapon. But be warned that this can have very unpredictable results. It’s RNG on what elements are changed, upgraded or downgraded. Through careful use of the Forge, it’s possible to craft some incredibly powerful skill trees on your weapons.
Atlas passive tree gateways are here!
One of the most quality life improvements, besides other Atlas tree improvements, is the Atlas gateway nodes that allow you to instantly travel to the other side of the Atlas. Three pairs of gateways allow you to travel from the left side of the tree to the right side of the tree or visa versa. The end gateway will consume one Atlas tree point when allocated but using them will now make sure you can play the content you want to play no matter which side of the tree you focus on. This opens up way more league mechanics or end-game mechanics to incorporate into your end-game Atlas.
Breach mechanic rework
The Breach league mechanic is getting an overhaul. The normal Breachstones are now at a high level and will be replacing the Charged, Pure and Enriched Breachstones. Instead, we will only have Flawless Breachstones that can be upgraded with a Blessing or found from an Atlas tree Passive. To accomplish this change the monster pacing and density have been improved for more pressure. The rewards are also consistent now for the whole encounter. In line with the overhaul, they also changed Breach Scarabs, The Betrayal Safehouse, Breachstones from Kirac missions, the Breach Harvest Crafting option, The fragment stash tab, Breach Divinations cards, Breach Unique items and Atlas passives.
Abyss mechanic rework
A huge change to the Abyss league mechanic is that the Abyssal depth now always will have an Abyssal Lich. On top of that Abysses have a chance to spawn a Stygian Spire instead of their reward chest. The chest can contain a Stygian vice belt, Abyss jewels or other items. You’re now guaranteed to always get a four-hole Abyss alongside your Abyssal Depths, rather than just a single hole. Alongside these changes, they also have updated Abyss passives on the Atlas tree, balanced the Abyssal Lich encounter and Abyss uniques and Abyss Scarabs.
Masteries revamp
In the Path of Exile Crucible league, they try to provide new ways to build our characters and improve our favourite ones. They revamped about half of the Masteries on the passive tree with lots of new builds improving masteries to choose from. They also integrated new clusters for Link Skills, Stun Mitigation and Marks and have added a few new Masteries.
Saboteur and Pathfinder Ascendancy changes
GGG has done an overhaul of the Saboteur and Pathfinder Ascendancy. Besides being a trap and mine specialist, Sabotuer can now also specialise in Triggered skills and Cooldown recovery. They now have the means of slowing down the cooldown of enemy skills. The Pathfinder change makes it so the Pathfinder now has the ability to turn many of its skills into Concoction-like abilities that will consume flask charges for additional effects
New Skill gems in Crucible
Path of Exile: Crucible introduces nine new Vaal skills, which augment a wide variety of different builds. We’ve added Vaal Absolution, Vaal Arctic Armour, Vaal Lightning Arrow, Vaal Reap, Vaal Animate Weapon, Vaal Domination, Vaal Ice Shot, Vaal Rejuvenation Totem and Vaal Firestorm.
For more information about the new gems please have a look at the detailed skill gems information page (New skill gem information)
10 New Unique Items in Crucible league
Path of Exile: Crucible also introduces more than ten new unique items, including three that are exclusive to the Crucible Challenge League.
For more information about the new gems please have a look at the detailed unique information page
Ruthless League information.
The Crucible Challenge League also starts with a competitive boss kill event! The first player to kill the Uber Searing Exarch and Uber Eater of Worlds in Ruthless Hardcore Solo Self-found 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. Second and third place finishers will receive a transferable VIP ticket to ExileCon. If you’d like to enter the event, just create a character in Ruthless Hardcore Solo Self-found on launch day!
Challenge yourself in Ruthless
Ruthless is Path of Exile’s game mode designed around extreme item scarcity. It’s challenging because you’re constantly behind the item power curve. We have made small improvements to Ruthless in Path of Exile: Crucible. Firstly, Eternal Orbs are back in Ruthless! These are extremely powerful currency items that allow 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.
If you want to read the full patch notes you can find them here
Be sure to keep an eye on the PoE Vault homepage for the latest news and guide updates as we shift into Path of Exile Crucible 3.21
