Keepers of the Flame League — What GGG is Working On

GGG is rolling out several buffs to Ailith and Keepers League encounters to make the mechanic feel more fair for a wider variety of builds.

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Updated: 23hr agoPosted: 23hr ago

The first weekend of Keepers League is over, and GGG is giving players the standard “What We’re Working On” post. This league launch has been one of the smoothest in PoE 1’s history, which is great news for everyone!

Ailith Changes!

Keepers of the Flame League’s primary feature is a rework to Breach. The Collapsing Breaches are a smashing success, but Ailith’s Hive encounters have been a struggle for many players. Defending Ailith is hard — she dies too easily!

GGG’s response is to buff Ailith and the Keepers League mechanic in several ways that will potentially fix most of the complaints players have voiced so far.

Keepers League Buffs Coming Soon

Wave 22 of an Ailith Hive Fortress — Ailith encounters can get very hectic by the final waves!

Here are the changes GGG plans to make to address the issues players are encountering:

Ailith will create skills more frequently during Hive Fortress encounters. Note there is a maximum of 6 skill objects active at a time.
Increased the internal cooldown for which Ailith can be damaged. This cooldown becomes longer the more damage she takes from an individual hit. This should help mitigate Ailith being bursted down in a few seconds.
Failing a Hive or Hive Fortress encounter will now drop all the loot of the monsters you had killed up to that point. However, you will not gain any Graftblood or Wombgifts.
Ranged monsters now have to be closer to Ailith in order to attack her.

How These Changes Will Affect Players

Using Ailith’s skills effectively is critical for defending her, so having them spawn more frequently in Hive Fortresses will make keeping her alive much easier. As it stands, she is quite susceptible to being quickly attacked down by a single Soul Eater-buffed rare monster. On a side note, Soul Eater is worse than ever this league!

The final two changes are also responses to common player complaints. Right now, failing Breach encounters for any reason will remove any chances of loot. This feels really bad! After the change, players will receive a pity reward if they fail to protect Ailith. And lastly, changing the way ranged monsters interact with the mechanic will be a huge boost for melee builds, which have been suffering this league. Hopefully Breach monsters will no longer be sniping Ailith with offscreen fireballs any more.

These changes, which you can read here, are in addition to rolling out seven hotfixes over the past several days. You can read about all of those changes on GGG’s official live update post.