PoE Mirage League Reveal Packed with Massive Changes – Here’s the Breakdown

With the 3.28 Mirage League reveal finished, there is a massive shakeup coming to all kinds of systems, with a new Ascendancy, an overhauled mapping system, new skills, a whole new class of support gems, and much, much more! The full reveal video is available on the Path of Exile YouTube and Twitch channels, and the preliminary patch notes have been posted on the Forums. In this article, we will go over all the changes as quickly as possible, with a deep dive into individual changes coming later.

3.28 Mirage League

In the Mirage League, players will be assisting an ancient Maraketh Sekhema named Varashta in her quest to free the tortured, imprisoned Djinn being drained of their power by a sect of outcast Faridun necromancers, the Afarud, who have made a pact with Saresh, a powerful necromancer seeking revenge on the Maraketh.

Players will seek and defeat imprisoned Djinn in each zone, before being asked to enter The Astral Realm, a Mirage, to free them from the Afarud permanently. Upon entering The Astral Realm, players will be offered a choice of 3 Wishes, boons that will either increase the loot or power a player can access in the Mirage.

In simple terms, you will find an important monster to kill, then travel into a different version of the current area to find and release the imprisoned Djinn’s soul while killing monsters and claiming your loot.

As with every League, the player will gain access to new and exciting tools to increase the power of their characters. In Mirage, players can Imbue their Level 20 Skill Gems with a random additional Support Gem using Coins, and will also find new Uniques and Boss fights.

The Hot Topic – Ground Loot

While not discussed specifically in the Patch Notes, during the Q&A session with ZiggyD following the live reveal, there was a lengthy discussion about this current complaint from the community. Mark acknowledged that there was clearly an issue and that they had taken steps to improve ground loot in a variety of ways.

For the player, the most important takeaway is that currency drops, particularly valuable currencies, should be at least doubled in 3.28. Many more aspects of this issue need to be explored, and it will be a focus for the team heading towards 3.29, but they have heard the community and are actively working on making the situation better for everyone.

New Skills, New Supports and a New Ascendancy!

Alongside the Mirage League, players will also find a new selection of Skills, themed around a holy warrior dealing damage directly with their weapon and shield, or through new minion Skills. Here are a couple of examples:

• Holy Hammers: Slam the ground ahead of you, calling down a Holy Hammer from above. On hitting an enemy, another Hammer will cascade forward, repeating if further enemies are hit, up to a cap. A Power Charge can be expended to call down additional Hammers to either side of the initial slam.
• Divine Blast: Project a beam of holy light from your shield to a targeted location, causing an implosion of holy energy. This energy then lingers for a short duration, before blasting outwards in a larger and more damaging explosion.

There are also several new Transfigured Gems, available in The Eternal Labyrinth, that modify existing skills in interesting ways, such as:

• Static Strike of Gathering Lightning: Attack with a melee weapon, gaining a Gathering Lightning buff for a duration if you hit an enemy. While you have Gathering Lightning, attacks with this skill will cause chaining beams of lightning, which chain farther the more Gathering Lightning you have.
• Shock Nova of Procession: Casts a ring of Lightning around you, followed by a larger Lightning nova. Each effect hits enemies caught in their area with Lightning Damage. This then repeats, with each repeat offset from the previous in the direction of your target.

To further empower your skills you might choose to use some of the new Support Gems:

• Blessed Call Support: Supports Warcry skills, causing them to create Consecrated Ground. Supported Warcries have lowered Area of Effect and Cooldown Recovery Rate. Cannot support triggered Warcries.
• Hallow: Supports melee attacks you use yourself, causing them to inflict Hallowing Flame on melee hit. Does not modify skills used by minions.

Then later in your journey into the late game, you may find a new class of Support Gem, called Exceptional Supports. These drop from specific bosses, and add transformative new effects opening up all kinds of interesting new builds. While details are currently limited, we know there are over 40 new Exceptional Support Gems being added, here are a couple that they teased:

• Hextoad Support: Supported skills create Cursed Ground, and Trigger Bursting Toad every 0. seconds. Bursting Toad spawns large toads that leap towards enemies before exploding for a large amount of chaos damage
• Eclipse Support: +1 to Level of Supported Skill Gems. +12% to Quality of Supported Skill Gems. 94% Cost and Reservation Multiplier.

And if that isn’t enough new character build potential for you, there is also an entirely new Ascendancy Class available, the Reliquarian. This new Ascendancy class is available for the Scion class and provides powerful, unique effects normally found on specific unique items to be selected with your ascendancy points. Each league moving forward, the Reliquarian will rotate what unique effects are available, so each league will have different, powerful new builds to explore!

Complete Endgame Overhaul

With the launch of the Mirage League, players will also get to engage with an entirely reworked Atlas system. There are a huge number of changes, and we will likely deep-dive this in a future post to explain exactly how all the changes will interact, but here is a brief breakdown of what to expect if you are a returning player:

• Map Items will no longer be specific to a map. Instead you will drop a “Tier X Map” and be able to use it on literally any map you have discovered on the Atlas, allowing players to target farm their favourite maps infinitely
• Players start in the center of the Atlas, and will progress towards the 4 corners, each housing a specific endgame boss and Voidstone slot.
• Players will now earn more total Atlas Passive Skill Points than before, enabling more juicing on the Atlas Passive Tree.
• Atlas Passives earned from unique maps are now limited to 10, and can be earned on any 10 Unique maps the player chooses.
• Players will find a new item, the Astrolabe, which, when used, will manifest a Shaped Region onto the atlas, juicing up a collection of maps with more encounters or loot based on the Astrolabe used.
• Completing maps in these Shaped Regions will further increase the rewards, and difficulty, of other maps in the region.
• Upon completely clearing a Shaped Region, players will gain access to a Memory Vault, a room filled with loot specific to the quadrant of the Atlas the region was in. These can have very valuable rewards
• Favoured Maps, Chisels (except Maven’s Chisels), Horizon Orbs, Kirac Missions, and many other mapping-related systems have also been changed, streamlining the process of mapping significantly.

Eagon and Originator Influenced maps are also seeing significant changes, with Memory Threads now dropping as tradable currencies, Petal Powers being removed and rolled into the end-of-map reward system, and several very frustrating and difficult modifiers being removed from the pool of mods that can roll on these maps.

Tier 17 maps have been replaced with Nightmare Maps. These new maps will still contain bosses that grant access to Uber Pinnacle content, but have an adjusted mod pool and have been significantly reworked.

There are also a huge number of changes to Scarabs, Divination Cards, Strongboxes and many other systems related to the mapping experience.

Keepers of the Flame Goes Core

The 3.27 Keepers of the Flame League is being rolled into the core Path of Exile experience, with full support from Scarabs and the Atlas Passive Tree. While many features of the League remain, some things have been removed or rebalanced to maintain the integrity of the core game. As with most changes, this probably requires a full post to fully explain all of the nuances of the integration, but here are a few significant changes from the previous league:

• You will first encounter Ailith in Act 6.
• Breach Hives will now be smaller in size, have smaller walls, and those walls can be destroyed by dealing any damage to them, allowing players to clear them out much more quickly.
• Grafts have been removed from the game
• The Genesis Tree will start fully grown, but has had some functionality removed and rebalanced
• Players can now store up to 100,000 Hiveblood at a time by default, and Hiveblood is shared amongst all characters on your account
• Several Breach Keystone Passives have been added to the Atlas Passive Tree including:
  • Dimensional Foothold, which grants Breach encounters in your Maps are always Hives.
  • Enemy at the Gates, which grants Breach encounters in your Maps are always unstable Breaches.

Harbinger Removed (Temporarily)

The Harbinger League has been retired for the moment, with Mark stating during the Q&A session with ZiggyD that “It has to go so it can come back better” and “It will get the justice it deserves”. He went on to say that it was unfortunate, but that ideally, people will be able to get excited for its return in, hopefully, the near future.

Fracturing Orbs, Ancient Orbs and the upgraded Harbinger Unique items will all be available in the core drop pool.

Settlers of Kalguur Changes

A contentious issue amongst many players is the need to engage with the Settlers League mechanics to passively generate large amounts of currency. GGG have heard this feedback, and has made some pretty large changes to this part of the game:

The rewards for shipping Crops and Ores have been swapped, with Ores now providing currency rewards and Crops providing gear rewards. This will mean that players who aren’t choosing to invest in the Settlers League on their Atlas Passive Tree will not find as much Ore, and will earn significantly less passive currency.

Wage costs have also been adjusted, with Farmers costing less, Mappers costing more, and Smelters costing more but processing Ores much faster.

Guardian Buffed, and other Ascendancy Changes

There has been a balance pass on the Ascendancies and Bloodlines, with Guardian receiving the largest number of changes. Other Ascendancies, including Assassin, Saboteur and Warden, received buffs as well. The most notable change is the addition of a new notable available to the Guardian:

• Marshal of Divinity: This Notable grants Inflict Hallowing Flame on Melee Hit, You can inflict +1 Hallowing Flame on Enemies, and Gain 10% of Physical Damage as Extra Lightning Damage for each of your Hallowing Flames that have been removed by an allied hit recently, up to 80%.

Hallowing Flame is a new debuff we have limited details on, but it is applied to enemies and can be consumed by attacks from other entities that didn’t apply the debuff, making it a perfect fit for minion builds or party play. It apparently adds a large amount of extra fire damage, but specific information was not provided.

Even More Changes!

There was also a significant balance pass on end-game Unique items, a slew of Quality of Life changes, a ton of bugfixes, smaller changes to league mechanics, and many other changes that you can find in the full Patch Notes. After we have some more time to fully digest these changes, you can expect follow-up posts drilling down on specific sets of changes and how they will impact you as a player. For now, though, we can say that this League Reveal has been one of the biggest, most impactful reveals we have seen from GGG in a while.

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