Path of Exile’s new Sentinel update has apparently arrived with a bit of a numerical overtuning by the devs’ own admission. Just a day after the new League launched, a hotfix was deployed to make changes to rare monster life, rare monster damage, and magics. “Okay, we shipped them a little overtuned,” the announcement notes. “In general, we feel that in Path of Exile it’s better to introduce things slightly too challenging than slightly too easy, and so we awaited player feedback and death data to see if it was actually too hard for the average player.”
Later that same day, a second hotfix was deployed that changed Archnemesis modifiers, lowering the possible amount of mods that spawn on monsters to a minimum of one and a maximum of three, where previously it was generally two mods at minimum and up to a maximum of four. Once again, making the encounters challenging is the design goal, but rare monster spawning has opened up such that intense encounters were occurring far too often.
As for the Sentinel league’s launch, it appears that this release drew in about 131K players on Steam: for comparison, that’s just a bit short of February’s Siege of the Atlas release, which saw a record peak of around 158K.
Further adjustments to the Archnemesis mod system are on the docket, with the promise that player feedback is being taken into consideration and that “rough edges” for all of these mods will be “sanded down.” The post further promises to look at item rarity drop rates to ensure they’re suitable for the challenge of modded monsters.
All of these tweaks are part of the work for Grinding Gear Games this week, but in the meantime the above announcement link has a complete list of what each Archnemesis mod does to equip players with information. For more POE action, make sure you tune in to OPTV tonight when MJ will be streaming the game at 8:00 p.m. EDT.
