You’ve heard all about Path of Exile 2’s news during Grinding Gear Games’ big development update livestream last night, so now it’s time to dig into Path of Exile’s new league. And dig we will, throughout the entire league! Introducing Necropolis, where you fill a morgue with your conquests, transfer bodies to your special graveyard, and use the essence of those bodies to enhance yourself. I’ve got to say, I have never been too interested in most leagues’ crafting, but after listening to POE Game Director Mark Roberts describe the 3.24 expansion Necropolis, I feel like I have found my niche. My very macabre niche.
Of course there is more to the expansion than just gravecrafting. Yes, that’s a thing! There are new gems, endgame improvements (including new bosses, another tier of maps, and even additional Atlas trees to swap between), and a boatload of new quality of life features.
Besides the new crafting, new skills, and revamped endgame, Path of Exile’s Necropolis has another new distinction: GGG founder Chris Wilson announced that it will be the first time ever that all platforms will receive the update simultaneously. Necropolis will launch next week on March 29th, on PC, Mac, and console. Now there’s no need to remember different dates.
Necropolis, the story
With a name like Necropolis, the league just had to revolve around death in some way. But the way it does has me chuckling and more excited to play it. Basically, in Necropolis, you bury the corpses of what you kill, and then – with the help of Undertaker Arimor’s (not Amore) experiments – you’ll turn them into items to use. Gravecrafting is what has me excited to dig right into this league.
The story behind Necropolis is that Undertaker Arimor is collecting scattered spirits of the Eternal Empire. These spirits have started haunting the monsters in Wraeclast – and this is where players come in. Using the Undertaker’s powerful Lamp of Arimor heirloom, players can see those wrathful spirits haunting the monsters and kill them for the Undertaker to collect. Roberts explained that the lantern is used in each new area, saying,
“When peering through it, you can examine the Spirits haunting that area. The Lantern also allows you to manipulate them, letting you configure which monsters are affected by which mods. It would be wise to take your time with your decisions here, for the Spirits are not forgiving.”
In true POE fashion, players can determine their own difficulty using the lantern. With it, they can put easier spirits on easier and more prevalent mobs or harder spirits on the more difficult mobs encountered less frequently.
“We’ve tried to make sure that by engaging with the Lantern, you are able to intelligently control the difficulty in the Necropolis league,” Roberts told me. He added that more information and extra details about the packs of monsters are also highlighted. This includes types of abilities the monsters use and the damage they deal. Of course, the higher you progress in level areas, the stronger the spirits become. And the more powerful the spirit, the more powerful the reward.
Gravecrafting
The fact that gravecrafting is a thing makes me smile every time I think about it. While not all mobs are a part of this, some special ones are. These are the monsters with unresolved anguish. When you encounter and defeat these, the Undertaker will appear and take these corpses back to the morgue in his Necropolis. You then can visit the morgue and even select bodies to bury. Why bury? Because through Arimore’s soul experiments, you get gear!
To start, corpses have crafting effects on them. You can bury one body or many bodies and create an item from the collection. You can even fill the entire graveyard and use the whole kit and kaboodle to create a single item. Additionally, Roberts told me that if you bury a family together, they will grant a special thing of their family’s lineage to your item. Note: Roberts shared that burying the family together does not mean they have to be interred at the exact same time (though they can); they can be buried as you get them. Just make sure they are adjacent to one another.
This system includes meta-crafting modifiers that can “manipulate your crafting projects in more drastic ways, including increasing potency of all effects or adding a chance to drop an extra item. It also allows players to trade corpses to other players; simply buy a coffin from the Undertaker and stuff the corpse right in. Portable goods!
Another item in the Necropolis League that you can find is called Embers of the Allflame, which drop throughout Wraeclast as itemised packs of monsters. These embers are monster spirits that remain living in a powerful ancient artifact of Wraeclast called the Allflame. Players set these spirits free by placing them in the Lantern of Arimor and defeating them. Roberts described the system as using these collected packs of monsters to replace the packs originally in an area, changing up difficulty and rewards. For deeper details, check out the trailer above.
Endgame enhancements
As far as endgame is concerned, GGG is tweaking the uber variants of bosses, as currently the non-uber variants aren’t worth running. To fix this, GGG is removing the keystones that give access to the uber pinnacle bosses and adding in special fragments that will give access to this content. And where do you find these fragments? In the new tier 17 maps. Roberts told me this new tier of maps “not only gives you access to the Uber Pinnacle content, but also tests your characters in new ways [as] they feature a new set of bosses, uber monsters, and a new tier of modifiers that can roll on the maps.” The update includes five new maps, such as the citadel map with Expedition monsters and the fortress map with mobs from Heist. The maps also nave new unique items.
Scarabs have also been completely reworked. These items now offer multiple versions that can be used to influence maps. For instance, there’s the Ultimatum Scarab of Catalysing that will cause all rewards from that Ultimatum to be Catalysts instead of other rewards, and the Ultimatum Scarab of Bribing that causes an Ultimatum encounter to grant better rewards and its monsters to yield more experience — just to name two. Additionally, scarabs are now all world drops. Here’s Roberts:
“Regarding Master missions — content such as Incursion, Delve, Betrayal, and Bestiary — these too are now accessible with Scarabs, and have more reliable investment options on the Tree. Not only this, you can now get Jun, Einhar, Alva and Niko to appear together in the same map!”
And finally, players will get more flexibility for how they play on the Atlas because starting with Necropolis, players can have multiple copies of the Atlas tree (up to three). Each time players enter a map, they choose which Atlas tree they want to use. These extra trees are unlocked via progressing through the endgame and completing core content.
QOLing
There’s quite a list of quality of life improvements introduced in 3.24, from removing the need to click for every time you apply currency orbs (can hold down for it to keep going) to letting Automation and Call to Arms skills auto-trigger instead of binding them to the mouse. Additionally, Maven invitations no longer drop, and players are eligible to go to her arena once players have witnessed all the bosses required. There’s so much more highlighted in the Necropolis trailer above!
As Roberts put it, “A lot of these changes and QOL changes come from myself and the team playing the game and going, ‘We don’t like this. This is not good. How can we redesign it?’ So a lot of them end up being our favorites because they are all inspired by problems we are having personally when we play the game.”
As for his favorite QOL change is the change that streamlines endgame. “The amount of different systems you had to do for endgame was just tiring –especially at the high endgame,” he explained. “At that level of the game it is just exhausting. And then sometimes you forget a step and your entire map is wasted, and you’ve put a whole bunch of currency and investment into it. And it feels very, very awful.” All those steps are tossed out; now there is just a clear, single system through the scarabs that is easier to understand.
What if your world changed every three months? What would you do differently? Path of Exile does, and MOP’s MJ Guthrie explores and experiences each new incarnation in Wandering Wraeclast. Join us biweekly for a look into each new challenge league and world expansion — and see whether MJ can finally reach the end of one world before it ends!
